The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

First published: 1922

Type of plot: Romantic satire

Time of work: 1913-1921

Locale: New York City and environs, and the vicinity of a military training camp in South Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Anthony Patch, the protagonist, a young man with great expectations of wealth
• Gloria Gilbert Patch, a beautiful young woman from the Midwest who marries Anthony
• Adam Patch, an aging millionaire and philanthropist, Anthony’s grandfather
• Richard Caramel, Gloria’s cousin and Anthony’s best friend, a successful novelist
• Maury Noble, Anthony’s friend
• Dorothy Raycroft, Anthony’s mistress during World War I

The Novel

Originally called “The Flight of the Rocket,” The Beautiful and Damned is the story of Anthony Patch’s life between his twenty-fifth and thirty-third years. The novel follows the progression of his intense love for the dazzlingly beautiful Gloria Gilbert. It traces their attachment through their courtship and marriage, through their apparently endless round of parties and gaiety, to their eventual financial difficulties, and finally to their triumphant achievement of Anthony’s “great expectations.” The victory comes too late, however, and the conclusion is more bitter than sweet.

As the novel opens, Anthony Patch, handsome, intelligent, and moderately well educated, wants only to live a life of luxury. When he inherits his grandfather’s many millions, he will be able to do exactly that. Until then, he has enough money to continue to live comfortably although without any particular goal. Someday, he tells his family and friends, he may write, but in actuality he lacks both the discipline and the ambition of his friend Richard Caramel.

When Anthony meets the incredibly beautiful Gloria Gilbert, his life changes. He pursues her, eventually marries her, and believes that he has everything that he needs to be happy—except his grandfather’s money. The years that follow, however, gradually take Anthony and Gloria from blissful romantic happiness to alcoholic boredom. The novel becomes the story of how a lack of purpose and discipline can undermine everything else in life.

Fitzgerald saw The Beautiful and Damned as the story of a man with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist, but with no creative inspiration. While this outline suggests that Fitzgerald himself had a rather romantic idea of what makes an artist, the pertinence of the novel’s diagnosis is not confined to the artist manque. Anthony’s weaknesses are those of a rootless generation writ large. He has no focus to his life beyond Gloria’s beauty and his grandfather’s millions. Similarly, Gloria sees herself as a beautiful flower that needs only to be displayed to full advantage. The void at the center of their lives is soon filled with liquor.

Anthony and Gloria buy a car, rent a summer home, give endless parties, all the while living beyond Anthony’s income. Soon, they are dipping into their capital in order to pay their bills. As they become more desperate financially, they quarrel more and more frequently. When Adam Patch surprises them during a wild party at their summer home, he disinherits Anthony. When the old man dies, he leaves his millions to his secretary. To recover the fortune, Anthony begins a suit that drags on for years.

The world of illusion in which both Gloria and Anthony have been living is emphasized when Anthony is drafted in World War I and is sent to the South for training. Gloria has always been told that she is beautiful enough for a career in films, but now, when she finally tries to do it to earn a little money, she discovers that—at twenty-nine—she is too old. With despair, she realizes that her beauty is fading.

Anthony’s friends, Richard Caramel and Maury Noble, have made successes in literature and business, but when Anthony returns to New York after the war, he discovers that his financial situation is worse than he thought. He and Gloria barely have enough to survive, and that money is running out. They become desperate to win the lawsuit. Finally, they do win, but it is too late. Anthony has been broken, both mentally and physically.

The Characters

Anthony Patch was intended by Fitzgerald to be a tragic character, but Anthony does not have enough substance for his fate to be tragic. At times, Fitzgerald treats Anthony satirically, as if Anthony is not to be taken seriously. Yet the moments of poignancy—especially in the love affair of Anthony and Gloria—undermine any satirical intent. At the end, the reader has confused feelings about Anthony, pitying him but believing that, after all, he brought about his own destruction.

Gloria Gilbert Patch is, in some ways, more sympathetic than Anthony. Gloria believes above all in the rights and privileges of her beauty. She believes in this with a passion that is lacking in Anthony’s supposed belief in his own undemonstrated intellectual and moral superiority. When she is forced, brutally, to recognize that her beauty is fading, she accepts it with a dignity of sorts. She is not crushed, as Anthony finally is.

Richard Caramel, who enjoys the kind of early literary success that Fitzgerald himself experienced, is too heedless to realize that he is compromising his talent as he churns out one popular book after another. He is incapable of recognizing that the success which he has achieved through compromise is not worth having. The character is, in some ways, a warning from Fitzgerald to himself, of what he feared he might become.

Maury Noble, supposedly based on the contemporary wit George Jean Nathan, is cynical enough to compromise with full awareness of what he is doing, although he knows the worthlessness of what he thereby achieves. His wit and philosophy are shallow, and Fitzgerald devotes all too much space to his orations. Yet his success, along with that of Caramel, forms a counterpoint to Anthony’s decline and fall.

Dorothy Raycroft, the nineteen-year-old South Carolina girl whom Anthony makes his mistress while he is stationed at the army camp, is sharply distinct from the other characters. Warmhearted, realistic, and sensible, she accepts her life with the ingrained stoicism of those who have no illusions. It is easy to see how Anthony becomes involved with her, although she possesses none of Gloria’s beauty or glamour.

Critical Context

Coming only two years after Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned was a much more literary and thought-out book. Yet although it was in most respects a superior and more controlled performance, it was far short of the advance in craftsmanship and in maturity of perception that Fitzgerald would demonstrate only three years later in The Great Gatsby (1925). Although The Beautiful and Damned was not as popular with the readers or with the critics as was Fitzgerald’s first novel, the novelty of its subject matter helped its sales and consolidated his position as the spokesman of the Jazz Age.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. A short but important collection of critical essays, this book provides an introductory overview of Fitzgerald scholarship, plus readings from a variety of perspectives on his fiction.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. New Essays on “The Great Gatsby.” Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985. This short but important collection includes an introductory overview of scholarship, plus interpretive essays on Fitzgerald’s best-known novel.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. In this outstanding biography, a major Fitzgerald scholar argues that Fitzgerald’s divided spirit, not his lifestyle, distracted him from writing. Claims that Fitzgerald both loved and hated the privileged class that was the subject of his fiction.

Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Twayne, 1963. A clearly written critical biography, this book traces Fitzgerald’s development from youth through a “Final Assessment,” which surveys scholarship on his texts.

Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. Part of the Literary Lives series. Concise rather than thorough, but with some interesting details.

Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Part 1 discusses Fitzgerald’s major stories and story collections; part 2 studies his critical opinions; part 3 includes selections from Fitzgerald critics. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Lee, A. Robert, ed. Scott Fitzgerald: The Promises of Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Includes essays on Fitzgerald’s major novels, his Saturday Evening Post stories, his treatment of women characters, and his understanding of ethics and history.