Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

                        THE DEFINITIVE JUDGMENT ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

             

I have read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and a great number of his short stories over the last four months, as well as examining other people’s writings about him  -  and I have diligently reported to you about it all. But now we come to the moment of truth - a reasonable judgement on all Fitzgerald’s work. It is not my business to examine his life, which has been done often enough, but certainly his growing alcoholism and the condition of his wife had a great influence on how he wrote. My suggestion is that alcohol not only slowed him down but eventually made it very difficult for him to write – those long gaps between writing The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night; and then another long gap before he got on with the unfinished The Last Tycoon. The busy young man of the early- and mid-1920s was a worn out man by 1940. But that’s enough of the biography and I’m not here concerned about which characters in his novels were based on which real people, even if many academics have spent much of their lives trying to work out who was whom. I’m concerned with what Fitzgerald actually wrote.

            Of his short-stories, I have read many of them but far from all of them. Those I would grade as his best stories are May Day, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Last of the Belles and Crazy Sunday, and inevitably they are often anthologised, especially The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, which is, when all is said and done, basically a simple fantasy-adventure story. But Fitzgerald often churned out pot-boiler stories to bring the money in. Read all of his story-collection Tales of the Jazz Age and, along side some of his best stories, there are sophomoric stories that come across as clumsy college humour. On the other hand, the Basil and Josephine Stories are much better than Fitzgerald himself thought they were  - they are not just about adolescents, but about young people growing up into young adulthood.

            But what of the novels? As I interpret it, Fitzgerald’s novels began with much vigour but ultimately faded into pretentious melodrama. His first novel This Side of Paradise (1920) is a stylistic mess, bumping carelessly from one episode to another, and often using over-blown imagery as had been used by other authors in the early 20^th century. But its very episodic nature and over-blown lush descriptions made it an immediate bestseller and set Fitzgerald up as the most popular American author of the early 1920s. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) was also a big bestseller, but this time Fitzgerald drew back a little from the lush descriptions and he had a more coherent plot, making it far more readable than his first novel. That was the high tide of Fitzgerald’s popularity. When we get to The Great Gatsby (1925) we find Fitzgerald paring back the redundant descriptions and producing a novel that was leaner and shorter than his first two novels… and even though The Great Gatsby is now regarded as his masterpiece, at the time of its publication, it didn’t sell well. So far, so vigorous. But then we come to the arid years and the melodrama. Tender is the Night (1934) is over-long, pretentious, dull and again often falling back on the worst tropes that he had used in his earliest work. Perhaps because it is in part about psychiatry, some American pundits have taken it to be a serious book, even a masterpiece. It is no such thing. It is a dull traipse through Fitzgerald’s own insecurities and an account of his mentally-damaged wife, whom he exploited; all boosted by the glamour of France, Paris, the Riviera etc. As for the unfinished The Last Tycoon (published posthumously) it has often been suggested that it “could have been” a masterpiece, but we’ll never know because it was far from finished when Fitzgerald died – apparently he had written about half the length of what he intended to write. It is clear he had written at best a rough draft which he would have polished had he lived. However the notes he left behind show that he was going to write a real melodrama – a gangster story forsooth.

Believe it or not, though, it is not Fitzgerald’s style that most alienates me from much of his work. I have two major dissents.

First, and perhaps less important, there is the narrow perspective he gives of society. Okay, it is not obligatory for authors to delve into all social classes, and I’m not looking for some sort of literary socialist panorama. But Fitzgerald is mainly fixated upon parvenus, people who have money, people who want to have money and the flashy wealthy who, in some cases, have gangster connections. Rare exceptions where we meet the American proletariat are found in the short story May Day and the characters of George Wilson and his wife Myrtle in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s characters in the 1920s are rich enough to booze, party, live off other people’s money, travel, have affairs; then later (Tender is the Night ) take up [expensive] psychiatry, lounge on the Riviera and gaze at their navels between having affairs… and of course in his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon he lands his characters in Hollywood. The hedonistic partying and boozing of the American 1920s was a reality - spurred on by defiance at Prohibition – but Fitzgerald seemed never to grow out of it. Even once the Depression rolled in, he hardly connected with it in his writing.

The more irksome thing alienating me, however, is Fitzgerald’s essentially adolescent attitude - bordering on the puerile - towards women. In This Side of Paradise, his protagonist is a college boy who falls in love with two or three young woman but gets nowhere with them. Of course he adores them and mentally puts them on a pedestal; and of course he is saturated with romantic poetry, especially John Keats. Now Keats was undoubtedly a great poet, but he is most loved by adolescents [ I admit to having been one – look up on this blog my take on Keats’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil] . That style of imagining women was appropriate for Fitzgerald’s callow young character, based on himself. But at a certain point one grows out of such romanticism. Fitzgerald almost breaks with such idealisation in The Beautiful and Damned which is mainly about a married couple [a thinly disguised version of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda] entangled with alcohol. But in The Great Gatsby, we have the protagonist Gatsby trying to re-connect with the image he had of a woman [Daisy] from years previously. Ultimately he learns that his idealised woman was an illusion… but the tone is still essentially romantic. The woman is eventually unattainable. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver defies real ethics and marries a woman who is psychologically damaged - again the unattainable woman, because the marriage finally doesn’t work. In the unfinished The Last Tycoon, the protagonist Monroe Stahr is stricken by Kathleen Moore because she is so like his deceased wife – again an attempt to catch the unattainable past in the form of the unattainable woman. This love-of-my-life romanticism either blocks out credible women or relegates credible women to smaller roles.

What is left? I could easily say that Fitzgerald’s novels are of their age, fixed at heart in the hedonistic part of the American 1920s – but then the fact is that all older novels are “of their age”. Even so, the mores of the 1920s are very different from the mores of today. If ever I were tempted to read any of Fitzgerald’s works again, I would read a few of his short-stories, The Great Gatsby and just possibly The Beautiful and Damned, which has at least has some sort of narrative coherence for all its faults . As for Fitzgerald’s other novels, I would pass them by or throw them out. In this way I would have exorcised them.

 

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART FIVE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

 

                                               F. Scott Fitzgerald in his last years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the best part of nine years toiling over his last completed novel Tender is the Night. It was eventually published in 1934. The 1930s were not a good time for Fitzgerald. It was harder for him to make money by dashing off short stories for popular magazines, he had to pay hefty bills to cover his wife Zelda’s care in psychiatric hospitals and he was, more than ever, mired in alcoholism. He bit the bullet and went to Hollywood, signing on as a writer which meant writing and re-writing film scenarios, and polishing up other writers’ dialogue, for more than one studio. Within a few years he understood fully how the Hollywood studio system worked.  This was the subject of his last, and incomplete, novel The Last Tycoon. Surprisingly, this time he wrote relatively quickly. Although he had discussed his proposed novel with friends for a couple of years, he began writing the novel in late 1939, but he died in December 1940 when he was only 44. The novel was far from finished. There were 17 "episodes" which had more-or-less been completed but had not yet been turned into chapters -  but Fitzgerald had scribbled notes planning a total of 31 "episodes". However, Fitzgerald left behind many notes on how the rest of the story was supposed to develop, and people he knew were able to recall what he told them about the shape the novel would take. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend the novelist and critic Edmund Wilson prepared the unfinished novel for publication, turning the 17 "episodes" into six chapters… and at the end of it, Wilson appended a number of pages giving an outline of how the novel was meant to develop and end. The Last Tycoon was published in that form in 1941 (in a kind of omnibus together with The Great Gatsby and some of Fitzgerald’s short stories). Years later, in 1993, the Fitzgerald scholar Matthew  J. Bruccoli criticsed a number of things about Wilson's version and produced a different edition of the unfinished novel, calling it The Love of the Last Tycoon - A Western, which had apparently been the name Fitzgerald had intended. [The "Western" referred to the West Coast - California - where the story took place.] But the name The Last Tycoon has stuck and Edmund Wilson's version is the one that is still widely read. [I consulted Bruccoli's Cambridge edition of the novel while preparing this review.]

                                    The unfinished novel as it was first presented to the public.
 

I’ll skip one of my laborious synopses, which by now are probably making you grit your teeth, and I will explain the bare basics of what The Last Tycoon is about. Monroe Stahr is the chief producer of a Hollywood studio, in charge of supervising and editing film scripts, judging the work of actors, accepting or not accepting talent, watching the rushes [the day’s filmed work] and deciding whether they will or not be used in the finished film. He is regarded as some sort of genius, especially as he is a relatively young man.  The boss of the studio is Pat Brady, an authoritarian man mainly interested in the bottom line. Gradually, in the novel as it now stands, tensions grow between Monroe Stahr and Pat Brady concerning industrial matters and how much they should let labour unions get involved in their studio. Pat Brady is also concerned that, for the reputation of the studio, Monroe Stahr sometimes produces “prestige” films that don’t make a profit. So there’s one major strand in the novel. But equally important is Monroe Stahr’s love-life… or attempted love life. Though Stahr is well into his thirties, Brady’s daughter Cecilia Brady, who is little more than a teenager, has a crush on Stahr and sometimes pesters him. Stahr is of course polite to her and admires her wit, but he is not attracted to her. He still pines for his deceased wife, the film star Minna Davis. Then, by chance, he sees a young woman who is the splitting of his late wife. She is Kathleen Moore, Irish-born, English raised. He is at once obsessed with her. He follows her. He woos her. He seduces her. He sees her as the love of his life. But there is a catch. She has cohabited with other men before, and she is committed to marrying somebody else.

And at once you can see the familiar trope that appears in most of Fitzgerald’s novels. Romantic man pines for unattainable woman – like all the young women in This Side of Paradise; like the damaged Carole in Tender is the Night; and most obviously like Daisy in The Great Gatsby.  Monroe Stahr wants to bring back someone [his wife] from the past, just as Gatsby wants to bring Daisy back from the past. It never works.

[ For the record, and stepping outside the uncompleted novel as it is, I note that Fitzgerald’s surviving notes, as curated by Edmund Wilson and Mathew J. Bruccoli, suggest that the rest of the novel was going to have Monroe Stahr resuming his affair with Kathleen Moore even though she is recently married. Pat Brady finds ways to blackmail Monroe Stahr and even hires mobsters to kill him. Hearing about this Stahr hires his own mobsters to kill Brady first. But then Stahr feels remorse and wants to call off his thugs. Unfortunately Stahr dies in a plane crash before he can send the word. So both Brady and Stahr die… and Fitzgerald intended to write a last chapter in which Hollywood stages, hypocritically, a grand funeral for Stahr with speakers saying what a wonderful man Stahr was, even though many of them hated his guts. Stahr was “the last tycoon” because he was that last producer to supervise nearly every craft in a movie studio. After he was gone, films were concocted by committees… at least that is the novel’s perspective. ]

 

                                                            Irving Thalberg in his prime

One very obvious thing about The Last Tycoon as we have it is that it is in part a roman a clef. Many characters are based on real people, and this was understood immediately by sophisticated readers when the novel was first published. Monroe Stahr was very obviously based on Irving Thalberg, the producer of many films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M.G.M.). He was sometimes called “the boy wonder” because he took on major positions in the studio in the early 1920s when he was only 21. He died in 1936 age 37, three years before Fitzgerald  wrote his novel. In the novel, once or twice Monroe Stahr is called “the boy wonder”. Similarly Pat Brady was based on the domineering boss of M.G.M. Louis B. Mayer. It is interesting that Fitzgerald gave this character an Irish name when Mayer, like Thalberg, was Jewish, as indeed were most of Hollywood’s executives. But Pat Brady could be seen as an amalgam of Mayer and Mayer's second-in-command, the Irish Eddie Mannix, who was notorious as M.G.M's "fixer" who was able to bribe police when he was covering up some scandal related to the studio. Some minor figures at M.G.M. were also used by Fitzgerald who knew his way around the studio. The English playwright Boxley seems based on Aldous Huxley and very occasionally there are, in passing, references to real people like the actress Claudette Colbert and the playwright Sidney Howard. It also seems certain that Kathleen Moore, coming from England, was inspired by the English gossip-columnist Sheilah Graham, who was Fitzgerald’s mistress in his last years.

Another clear thing is that even the chapters or "episodes" Fitzgerald completed are really still in draft form. Most obviously the novel begins with Cecilia Brady as the first-person narrator for all of Chapter 1. But Fitzgerald ignores her as a narrator for much of the novel which is presented in the third-person. Then there is an awkward moment in Chapter 5 where we are suddenly told “This is Cecilia taking up the narrative in person.” This is even more awkward than the narration of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, where he sometimes clearly hasn’t witnessed events he reports. I’m sure that Fitzgerald would have re-written this if he had lived to complete the novel.  As the truncated novel stands, too, there are often [in the Wilson version] over-long chapters, especially Chapter 5, which tries to cram in too much information.

  What do I take away from the novel as it is? First, it gives a very vivid and believable image of the old Hollywood studio system. It is especially in Chapters 3 and 4 that we see the ways Stahr proves his skill and finesse in dealing with people on the payroll. Under the stress of having to turn out one completed film every ten days, he has to show the hired English writer Boxley how to write a film script as opposed to the stage-plays that Boxley is used to writing; he has to give good cheer to an old vaudevillian who is way past his comic days; he has to calm down a neurotic leading man who fears that he has become impotent; he gets a director and script-writers to completely re-write and re-shoot a film that is nearly finished; and he is always aware of how he must stay in the bounds of the Hays Code (the self-censoring code for movie studios). This is all in one day, including the hours he spends reading and revising scenarios and scripts. Then he takes off one director from a project and brings in a new one; he advises electricians on how sets should be lighted; he has to sooth a husband-and-wife writing couple who are outraged that other writers are also working on the same story that they thought was uniquely theirs; and he boosts the ego of a film-star who was falsely reported as losing his sight. There is the jocular side of things, especially in Chapter 5 where Cecilia Brady believes she’s in love with Stahr, but consciously banters with a scriptwriter all the clichés about love that appear in the movies. And of course there is also the seedy side of the Hollywood of yore. Young Cecilia Brady bursts into her father’s office only to find that he is making use of a naked woman he has called in. Elsewhere there is mention of the casting couch. Harvey Weinstein did not invent the sexual harassment of women in the movie industry. There is also the sinister side of Hollywood. Racketeers look for their cut, and in Chapter 6 we have Monroe Stahr having to deal with Brimmer, a Communist union man who wants to have all the studio’s writers made part of a union, anathema to the whole studio system.

But what of the parallel love story? Some of it is handled quite delicately, when Kathleen Moore repeatedly pushes Stahr away as he makes his advances. But she gradually succumbs and this sometimes happens in the old romantic moonlit scenes that Fitzgerald too often used in his earlier novels – at the half-built beachside house he has built for himself. This is all very romantic, but it rather fudges the fact that Kathleen is, as the novel stands, committed to somebody else and it is hard to see why she remains so long with Stahr.

Taken as a whole, The Last Tycoon reads well and has less of the grandiose style that Fitzgerald too often used – lush description, purple prose, things that some sentimental American readers take for great writing. This time, the prose is mainly pared back, to the point and realistic – apart from the sticky romantic moments..

IF this novel had been completed and revised by Fitzgerald, it could have been a masterpiece alongside The Great Gatsby. Unfortunately it wasn’t and it isn’t.

Cinematic footnote: On Youtube I was able to watch in full the 1976 film version of The Last Tycoon, which I first saw years ago. It was written by Harold Pinter, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring a young and perky Robert de Niro as Monroe Stahr. Much of the cast was made up of old-timers from old Hollywood – Robert Mitchum as Pat Brady, Ray Milland as his main member of the board, Tony Curtis as a neurotic actor etc. etc. Kathleen Moore was played by a very pretty but not very persuasive actress, Ingrid Boulting, whose film career didn’t go far. On the whole, it was faithful to the novel, but it bombed for two reasons. First, the two-hour-long film stuck with the incomplete novel’s ending, leaving audiences up in the air. Second, like the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby, it moved at a snail’s pace as if the film-makers believed they had to deal reverently with a classic book. There were further complaints that, in an otherwise coloured film, the black-and-white films that Monroe Stahr is shown watching in his screening room looked nothing like the way real 1930s films looked. Apparently in 2017 there was a TV serial of The Last Tycoon, but it seems to have sensationalised and moved far away from Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART FOUR, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

                                             F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s

When I was half-way through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last completed novel Tender is the Night, I decided that the novel was upside-down and should have been reorganised. As with his second novel The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald divided Tender is the Night into three separate “Books”, but they were not presented in chronological order. The first “Book” introduces many characters whose relationships are not made clear. In the second “Book” we are given a long flashback to earlier years and only then do we discover who is related to whom and why one character behaves in an unbalanced way. Surely “Book” Two should have opened the novel? I am, of course, not the first reader to think this. Fitzgerald laboured long and hard over this novel. He began writing it in 1925, shortly after he’d had published The Great Gatsby, but he did not complete Tender is the Night until nine years later. (His growing alcoholism and his wife’s mental problems slowed him down.)  Tender is the Night was first published in 1934 in serial form, and then in book form. Some critics complained, as I have, that it was presented in the wrong order. Fitzgerald was stung by this criticism and undertook to re-arrange the order of the three “Books”; and some years later it was published in this re-arranged form. But this version was soon rejected. Tender is the Night is now universally published in its original, more authentic, version. And that is the version I have read.

                                      First cover design for "Tender is the Night", 1934
 

To short-circuit my synopsis, Tender is the Night is essentially about a psychiatrist, Dick Diver, married to one of his patients, Nicole (nee Warren), and how their marriage gradually falls apart.

Book One is set on the Riviera where, in the mid-1920s, wealthy American ex-patriates lounge, laze and share gossip. Dick Diver and Nicole are wealthy. The Divers sometimes throw lavish parties in their palatial Villa Diana and it is very chic to be invited. Indeed, as he is first  presented, Dick is a little like Jay Gatsby, the genial rich host but with a certain mystery about him. We are told “… to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience; people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in it effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world….” (Book 1, Chapter 6) We are also told that the Divers are intellectual people, but like to keep up with the latest trends, which would then have been hot jazz, dancing, travelling, swimming and gossiping: “Although the Divers were honestly apathetic to organised fashion, they were nevertheless too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat – Dick’s parties were all concerned with excitements, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.” (Book 1, Chapter 18) There are many diversions, much talk about travel, and some odd sightseeing, as when Dick Diver’s friend Abe North takes them to view former battlegrounds. The [First] World War was still a very painful recent memory and Abe says many cutting things about the futility of the war. (Book 1, Chapter 13)

Two things interrupt the apparent idyll of lazing and enjoying the sun. Nicole has some sort of breakdown – not specifically described. There is nasty gossip about her and, with an absurd idea of defending her honour, the soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban challenges one of the gossipers to a duel… which ends in farce. Nevertheless Tom Barban is obviously a great admirer of Nicole, virtually in love with her.

The other disruption comes when Rosemary Hoyt, an 18-year-old film star, turns up on the Riviera – with her protective, twice married, mother Mrs. Speers. Rosemary is beautiful. Given her age, she is of course partly naïve and partly scheming, but she moves from admiring the mature man Dick Diver to falling in love with him. Rosemary persuades her mother, Dick, Nicole, Abe North and his wife Mary to come on an excursion to Paris. The film studio she works for is based there. They bury themselves in fashionable parties and restaurants, but Rosemary also gets them to watch the film in which she starred. The film is called Daddy’s Girl. Without saying so, Dick has a queasy reaction to the film, much as he already has a crush on Rosemary. He notes in one sequence of the film “happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality.”  (Book 1, Chapter 16). This reaction is one of those moments which makes sense only when we get into Book 2. Rosemary so idolises Dick that she says she’s going to arrange a screen-test for him – but he turns the offer down. He tells Rosemary that he loves her, but he still loves Nicole as well. Nevertheless, he finds himself wandering around Paris on his own looking out for Rosemary. Rosemary calls upon him when a dead Negro is found in her room in a Parisian hotel. To remove any whiff of scandal, which could destroy Rosemary’s career, Dick helps to remove the corpse and leave it in a hallway. This bonds them more closely. [Incidentally, this is one of those moments when Dick – or more properly Fitzgerald – displays the casual racism that was then the norm. He says to a distraught Rosemary “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this – it’s only some nigger scrap.” (Book 1, Chapter 25)]

You will notice that Nicole Diver does not take a major part in the more memorable moments of Book 1 – but that seems to have been Fitzgerald’s strategy in holding back Nicole’s troubling situation so that it comes as more of a shock in Book 2.

Book Two begins with a major flashback to 1917. Dick Diver, a doctor of medicine, has studied psychiatry in Zurich, during the war, under the illustrious Doctor Dohmler. As a psychiatrist, he has met the very troubled patient Nicole Warren. In practical matters, she is often supported by her [perfectly sane] sister Baby Warren. What was the matter with Nicole? It was Doctor Dohmler who first diagnosed Nicole’s problem. Her father Devereux Warren had first brought her to the clinic, claiming that she had suddenly ceased to be the happy young woman she used to be and she is severely erratic in her behaviour. After much interrogation of the father, he admits that he had sexually abused her when she was a child. This is what at last makes understandable Dick Diver’s comment on the film as having "a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality”. Doctor Dohmler concludes that this incest has pushed Nicole into schizophrenia… and Dick Diver becomes her therapist. Nicole Warren, when under therapy, writes frequently to Dick Diver, and in one letter she expresses the truth about herself when she writes “I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion. I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest. Here they lie in their bath tubs and sing Play in Your Own Backyard as if I had my backyard to play in or any hope which I can find by looking either backward or forward.” (Book 2, Chapter 2) She is aware of her irrational moods.

Yet, while caring for Nicole, Dick also has his own ambitions and articulates his own self-analysis “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” (Book 2, Chapter 4) He also wants money and status. His colleague Franz Gregorovius is also focused on money.

It is clear that Dick becomes more and more attracted to Nicole, and Franz connects Dick with Doctor Dohmler to work out the ethics of getting mentally too close to a psychiatric patient  - but despite all the cautions, Dick admits that he is in love with Nicole. Nicole has her artistic aspirations. Speaking to Dick she says “I hope you don’t think that I am only interested in ragtime. I practise every day  - the last few months I’ve been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times – music and drawing… I’d like to draw you just the way you are now.” (Book 2, Chapter 7)

Nicole’s wealthy family scrutinise him and think he is acceptable. Fitzgerald now moves forward a number of years. Dick and Nicole are married. We get (Book 2, Chapter 10) a fragmented account of how they travel around Europe on long, luxurious holidays. And Dick (Book 2, Chapter 12) reaches a moment when he understands how much he depends on his wife’s family for money, regardless of how well he is working as a psychiatrist. Is he venal? Has he married for money without admitting it to himself? His colleague Franz Gregorovius is certainly a materialist who tries to entice Dick into getting money from his wife’s family to set up their own clinic. Dick is now almost flippant in the way he addresses his patients when doing his rounds. (Book 2, Chapter 14)… and by this stage, the novel has brought us up to where we were at the end of Book 1.

Dick and Nicole now have two young children, charmlessly called Lanier and Topsy, but Nicole is still having her extreme moments. Once she drives the family car so dangerously that it is clear she is trying to kill herself and the rest of the family on board. The driver’s wheel has to be wrenched from her to prevent catastrophe. Dick is gradually more alienated from her, his mood being made more sombre when he has to go to America for his father’s funeral. Five years have gone by since he last met the film actress Rosemary. He meets her again and attempts to re-ignite their old flame. They even sleep together and do the deed. But Rosemary by now has been around and had other lovers, and clearly their brief love won’t last. Disillusioned, (Book 2, Chapter 22) Dick goes on a wild drunken bender in Rome, gets into a fight with a taxi-driver, is jailed and beaten by the police. He has to be rescued and bailed out by Nicole’s practical sister Baby Warren.

Book Three. Dick goes back to his psychiatric practice and again hears Fritz tell him how they could set up their own clinic to attract wealthy Americans. [And, in another thing which would not now be sanctioned, Dick is part of an attempt to  “cure” a young man of his homosexuality]. Nicole’s father appears to be on the brink of death, and sends a message begging to be able to talk to Nicole, presumably to ask her forgiveness for the incest that ruined her life… but he changes his mind and disappears back to the U.S.A. Things change radically for Dick after an altercation he has with an Australian client who complains that the sanatorium reeks of alcohol… and Dick has to admit that he’s well on the way to being an alcoholic. So, for a good price, he sells his practice and off he and his family go to the Riviera. And he drinks. And he and Nicole squabble and fight with a host for not bathing their children in clean water. They try to act in a romantic way with the moon shining - but the chivalrous Tom Barban comes back into their orbit and Nicole is drawn to him. More annoying for Nicole, Rosemary turns up again on the  Riviera beach, and Dick feels he has to show-off for her with water games and balancing acts even though his affair with Rosemary is obviously over. Nicole is further disgusted with Dick. But where can she turn? She is desperate at the thought that she is losing her looks [like Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned] “She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I’ll do – in fact I’ll do as well as anyone I know.” (Book 3, Chapter 8). Now she welcomes a liaison with Tom Barban. She sleeps with him. The deal is struck. She realises that she no longer needs Dick, she is no longer his patient, and she declares her freedom from Dick as  “… suddenly, in the space of two minutes, she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.” (Book 3, Chapter 9)

Thus the novel [interrupted by an irrelevant comical tale of Dick bailing some women out of jail] fizzles out in its contorted end. Dick and Nicole divorce and part amicably. She marries Tom Barban. He goes back to the U.S.A. and becomes a small-town doctor. He no longer has access to much money. He hasn’t made the great splash in the world he hoped to make. But he seems contented. Finis.

Many Americans see this novel as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, just as Fitzgerald himself did. I dissent. Though better than his first novel, it is not as coherent (in the sense of meaningfully hanging together) as the leaner, more polished The Great Gatsby, which will continue to be the author’s most-read novel. There are too many irrelevant side-issues. When I finished reading Tender is the Night, I remembered that Thackeray subtitled his Vanity Fair as “A Novel Without a Hero”. I would suggest that Tender is the Night is also a novel without a hero. Dick Diver might have had some idealism and might have been a good therapist in relieving some of Nicole’s neurosis, but he allowed her to fall into what is now called “idealised transference”, that is, letting his patient believe that he was her saviour and thus putting her in an inferior and dependant position. This did not make for a good or stable marriage – along with Dick’s cheating on her with Rosemary. There are also the dodgy ethics of marrying somebody who is already psychologically damaged. Further, there is a very strong undercurrent of opportunism in Dick’s behaviour with regard to money. And yet perhaps this was exactly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s point. Dick Diver overreached himself in trying to make an international name for himself in psycoanalysis. He wasn’t suited for such a role. Medicine in small-town America was probably where he was most suited, and that is where he ended. As for Nicole, there is in her a wide streak of narcissism although it can be forgiven what with her mental state. So no heroes here.

Stepping  back from the text itself, there is also the backstory of the novel. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was, after many therapeutic explorations, diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1930. Reference books [yes, I have dipped into many of them] tell me that some critics now claim Zelda was not schizophrenic but suffered a severe variety of bipolarism. Possibly this is true, but it does not alter the fact that her behaviour was often extreme and irrational. Her condition could also not have been helped by the three illegal abortions she had when married to Fitzgerald. Be that as it may, Zelda was a mentally-damaged woman and spent nearly all the rest of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Like Dick Diver, Fitzgerald continued to be an alcoholic, sinking further and further into drink and dying at the early age of 44. Obviously the two main characters of Tender is the Night are versions of Scott and Zelda. While Fitzgerald was toiling away at writing Tender is the Night, Zelda wrote a novel of her own called Save Me the Waltz, which managed to get published, in a very short print-run, before her husband’s book came out. Like her husband’s book, it gave as characters versions of her husband and herself. Fitzgerald was greatly annoyed. I can’t help feeling that Dick’s eventual divorce from Nicole was Fitzgerald’s wish-fulfilment version of getting free from Zelda… but he did pay her hospital bills and did visit her often.

As always in Fitzgerald’s novels, research tells me that many (probably most) of his characters and events were drawn from real life – the Fitzgeralds themselves to some degree of course, but Dick and Nicole in the beach-and-Riviera moments were also based on two wealthy Americans Gerald and Sarah Murphy. The minor film-star Lois Moran, with whom Fitzgerald had a brief affair, was the model for Rosemary Hoyt. Baby Warren, who offers Nicole sane advice, was based on Zelda's older sister. The soldier-of-fortune Tom Barban who falls for Nicole was at least partly based on a French aviator who was taken with Zelda years earlier than when the novel was written. Having Nicole attempting to crash a car and kill the occupants was based on the same thing that Zelda attempted. And it was Fitzgerald himself who, in a drunken stupor, got into a brawl and was thrown into an Italian jail.

FOOTNOTES

Puerile footnote: Why give the main character a name like Dick Diver which I’m sure, even in the early 1930s, would have been the butt of many crude and obscene jokes?

Informative Footnote: Yes, Fitzgerald was essentially a romantic (albeit a somewhat jaded one) and did take the title Tender is the Night from the very romantic poet John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. But please remember that a few lines later in the poem, Keats declares “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs / But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet…” In other words the poet says we are lost in darkness and manoeuvring in a difficult universe… just as the mentally-inflicted are lost. The novel’s title does not really suggest a dreamy, romantic tale.

Annoyed footnote. Speaking of dreamy, romantic mush, in order to see how Tender is the Night was treated by the movies, I sat down at my computer and found on Youtube the 1962 film version with Jason Robards as Dick Diver, a reasonably good actor, and the stone-faced Jennifer Jones as Nicole. Oh the things I do for you, dear readers! The film deeply bowdlerised the novel, missed out most of the more sordid details, ditched half the plot and basically turned the whole tale into a rather dull soap opera. How unimaginatively it was presented, with most sequences taking place in large rooms or balconies with people conversing. And there was Bernard Herrmann’s sound track, suggesting a sugary romance. Complete soporific tripe. Also on Youtube I found a one-hour-long black-and-white TV version of the novel, made in the 1950s. Dreadful. As always, to know Tender is the Night, you have to read the book.

                                          Flyer for an excrutiatingly bad film.

 

 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.    

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART THREE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

            Continuing my analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, I plunge into the Fitzgerald novel that is now regarded as a classic.

 

                                      F.Scott Fitzgerald in the mid 1920s

            Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is far and away F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, regarded as his masterpiece and – in all probability – now read more often than all his other novels put together, especially as it is often required reading in high-schools and university courses in American literature. Curiously, when it was first published it gained applause from many critics but sold poorly. It took a couple of decades before it was accepted as an essential text.  So far, it has four times been turned into movies (most of them pretty dreadful) and a number of times dramatized for television. It is often regarded as the novel of the American “Roaring Twenties”, but it is not the wallow in hedonism that it is often taken to be by those who have only seen movie versions and not read the novel itself. Quite the opposite. It is essentially a dour and depressing story. It is also notably quite different in style from Fitzgerald’s first two novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. It is pared back, indulges in less romantic description, and is relatively short, being less than half the length of The Beautiful and Damned. It is also written in the first-person by a narrator who is not witness to some of the plot’s crucial events, allowing us to entertain the idea of an “unreliable narrator”.

            I’ll struggle to produce a very compressed synopsis. The first-person narrator Nick Carraway, small-time trader in bonds, happens to occupy a modest bungalow on fashionable Long Island, next-door to the mansion of the mysterious and apparently very rich Jay Gatsby. Gatsby often throws lavish parties for hangers-on who flock in from New York. The parties are described in detail and Gatsby is feted. How Gatsby earned his millions is not clear and is the subject of much speculation and gossip. Gatsby learns that Nick Carraway is a distant cousin of Daisy, the young woman he says he loved but lost years earlier. Gatsby cultivates Nick, wanting to woo Daisy back to him. As it happens, Daisy is married to a brutish man, Tom Buchanan, who frequently cheats on Daisy and has various mistresses, one being Myrtle Wilson, the very working-class wife of working-class George Wilson, a mechanic who runs a dilapidated garage and who hopes to make money by deals with Buchanan. Wilson is at first apparently too naïve to understand  that Tom Buchanan is cuckolding him. Gatsby gets his rendezvous with Daisy in Nick Carraway’s house and their love is almost re-kindled, although Daisy (who has an infant child) has her misgivings. Gatsby also dazzles Daisy by showing her all his wealth in his mansion and estate. But Tom Buchanan gets wind of their trysts. Despite his own infidelities, Tom is very possessive of Daisy. He is also prone to violence. There is one episode, early in the novel, in which he breaks Myrtle Wilson’s nose when she dares to mention Daisy’s name. There is now a struggle between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. In a major row each claims to be the only one who really loves Daisy, with Daisy almost helpless between the two of them. Tom Buchanan has done research and is able to reveal the shady deals, bootlegging [this being the age of Prohibition]  and consorting with gangsters that have made Gatsby rich. Gatsby did not come from a refined home. The outcome is much shouting in an environment of booze and anger. Tom Buchanan tells Daisy contemptuously to take Gatsby home. It is night. Daisy drives recklessly. By chance, Myrtle Wilson has just had a major row with her husband George Wilson and she has run out of their home onto the road at the very moment Gatsby’s car comes speeding along. Myrtle is knocked down and killed. It is assumed that Jay Gatsby was the driver and in effect Gatsby shields Daisy. Daisy and Tom rapidly leave the area, believing Gatsby will take the blame. There are no more parties at Gatsby’s mansion. His fashionable hangers-on no longer come his way as he is now under suspicion.  Convinced of Gatsby’s guilt, George Wilson, angry and homicidal, takes things into his own hands. He stalks onto Gatsby’s property and shoots Gatsby dead as Gatsby is floating in his swimming pool. Then Wilson, having lost everything, shoots and kills himself. It is left to Nick Carraway, in the closing chapter, to put the pieces in place. He meets Gatsby’s father whose name is Gatz.  Gatsby’s given name was James Gatz. Old Mr Gatz is proud of a notebook in which his son “Gatsby” , as a youth, had made up ways to improve himself and become more acceptable to high society. In effect Gatsby had created his persona and the tales he told about himself were fabrications just as his love for Daisy was a fantasy.

 

The original dust-jacket of "The Great Gadsby" combined the mournful eyes of Daisy with the optometrist's huge billboard eyes that watch over us.

A brief synopsis like this is, of course, very misleading. It is a mere skeleton of plot, lacking nuance; and I have missed out a number of characters. There is the gangster and fixer with whom Gatsby consorts, Meyer Wolfsheim, who is clearly Jewish. Fitzgerald has sometimes been criticized for producing a character who comes close to being an antisemitic caricature. Brutish Tom Buchanan’s language is often filled with contempt for blacks. He is essentially what would now be called a white supremacist. More important is Jordan Baker, a golf-playing woman and friend of Daisy, who more-or-less becomes a pal of Nick Carraway and who fills in some of the details about Daisy that Nick would otherwise have not known about. In effect, she is a second narrator. Academics have worked out that nearly every character in this novel is based on people Fitzgerald knew or knew about, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.

There are some problems with the style of narration. Nick Carraway’s opening – and much-quoted – words set the novel’s main agenda at once. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he said, ‘ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had’ ” (Chapter 1) This immediately suggests that there are different social classes and there are have-nots, some of whom want to make their way into the wealthier classes, as does James Gatz, alias Jay Gatsby.

But Nick is very pliable  - why does he so conveniently go along with Tom Buchanan to meet Tom’s mistress? And why does he virtually act as pimp in bringing Gatsby and Daisy together in his own house? Could it be that it is simply convenient for Fitzgerald’s plot to have these events? More to the point, Nick simply does not witness some of the important things that happen in the novel.

Fitzgerald delicately removes Nick from the crucial scene (Chapter 5) where Gatsby and Daisy have their first rendezvous (in Nick’s bungalow). Nick Carraway simply has to guess or speculate about Daisy’s impact on Gatsby when they are having their first tete-a-tete after so many years. According to Nick Carraway: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.” (Chapter 5) In effect, Nick Carraway is telling us that Jay Gatsby is really deluding himself with the idea that Daisy was the great love of his life. Later, Gatsby almost fanatically clings to his dream even when it is clear that Daisy is not quite the young woman he briefly knew years previously. Nick tries to warn him by saying “I wouldn’t ask too much of her… You can’t repeat the past.” To which Gatsby responds  “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here is the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.” (Chapter 6)

A major point where Nick Carraway simply speculates about what he does not know is when he imagines how Gatsby must have felt, floating in his swimming pool, just before he was killed as Wilson crept up on him. Gatsby had been waiting for a phone call, and Nick speculates: “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world , material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees.”  (Chapter 8) Once again, Nick is telling us what he – and we – want to believe. That Gatsby was deluded about his great love.

Not that Nick is necessarily wrong. As I understand the novel, Daisy is a naïve and somewhat immature woman. Of course we sympathise with her because she has such a brute and philanderer for a husband, but she is far from being the golden girl that Jay Gatsby once thought she was. She is very impressionable, as when Gatsby shows her around his mansion and “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’ ” (Chapter 5) She is enchanted by Gatsby’s wealth and has childish impulses. She is hedonistic. When they are sweating in a heat wave on Long Island, she is the first to suggest that they should go into the city (New York) to liven things up. That is the type of vacuous life she really wants. Of course she loves her child, but when Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are quarrelling over which loves her more, she feebly says she loves them both. And although it isn’t necessarily her fault, she (and Tom Buchanan) disappear as soon as Gatsby is in major trouble. Gatsby wants a prize from the past, but she doesn’t really fit the bill. 

All of which feeds into one of the main ideas in the novel – that you can’t go back to the past, even if Nick Carraway’s concluding words are “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This could be taken to mean that, no matter how little we like it, the past will still have a great influence on us and how we have been formed. Or – and I think more credibly – it could be taken to mean that the past is a dream, but only that. Memory distorts reality. It is interesting to know that Fitzgerald knew and had read Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes which is in great part about an attempt to find somewhere that has been lost and can never be retrieved.  A decade after The Great Gatsby was published, the verbose Thomas Wolf was planning his You Can’t Go Home Again, which presents the same idea. And dare I mention the 1930s classic French film Un Carnet de Bal? An older woman idealises a ball she went to when she was a teenager – only to find, years later, that the ballroom she remembered was little more than a small local hall of no distinction. Fitzgerald is playing with an idea that has often been dramatized because it is essentially true. Daisy is the lost ideal that can never be retrieved because in many ways she never really existed.

The other dominant idea is the reality that people can only attempt to be other than what they really are. Gatsby has a self-made identity. His habit of addressing male friends as “old sport” is an attempt to make himself sound like a college man. He spins a tale to Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker  saying: “I’ll tell you God’s truth… I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition… My family all died and I came into a good deal of money… I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.” He goes on to spin tales of his heroism in the war (Chapter 4). What is interesting here is that Nick and Jordan don’t for one moment believe what he says, because he is a very bad liar. When Nick asks him what part of the Middle West he came from, Gatsby says “San Francisco”, showing he has a distorted understanding of American geography. He claims Venice as one of the capitals in Europe. His remark that he is “trying to forget” seems planted to make him a man of mystery, like something out of a bad novelette.  Nick Carraway sums up Gatsby’s claims by thinking “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” And yet Nick and Jordan Baker still find him a puzzle – something more than just a liar or fantasist.

All this seems appropriate to a society – the United States – in which it is common for people who have struck it rich to present themselves as other than they are… or who are forced to present themselves as other than they are. I think of film stars who used to be given, by their studios or agents, more acceptable names than the names they were originally had (Marion Morrison becomes John Wayne. Jules Garfinkle becomes John Garfield;  Doris Kappelhoff becomes Doris Day etc. etc.); and whose publicists used to make totally fictitious biographies about them.

There is another aspect of The Great Gatsby which is more specific to the era and country in which it was written. When he is ruminating in the last chapter, after Gatsby is dead and his mansion is deserted, Nick Carraway says “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” (Chapter 9) In this case, when he says “Westerners” he means people from the Mid-West, which is where Fitzgerald came from. In the 1920s, Mid-Westerners were regarded as small towners or farmers, less sophisticated than the educated and cosmopolitan New Yorkers or Ivy Leaguers in the East. This is no longer the case, but it meant that Mid-Westerners had to learn how to be respectable to Easterners... which is how bootlegger Gatsby tries to present himself.

For what it’s worth, I am aware of the symbolism that Fitzgerald sometimes deploys. Best known is the image of Gatsby standing on his lawn at night, and looking across the bay at the green light on the pier where Daisy's and Tom's yacht is moored. The green light becomes an image of the Daisy that Gatsby wistfully imagines, and who is now out of reach or unattainable. Then there is the “Valley of Ashes”, meaning the rubbish dump near where George Wilson and his wife live, symbol of an industrialised world and the privations of a working class who are, possibly, capable of overturning the lives of the well-to-do. And near Wilson’s garage, there is a huge billboard, left by a long-gone optometrist, depicting a huge pair of spectacles. It is almost like a wrathful God looking down on feeble mortals who will be judged… as they are in this novel.

Much more could be said about The Great Gatsby, but this is how I interpret it. It is not the story of a love lost, despite the way it has been distorted in the movies. It is the story of a delusion lost. Nor is it a celebration of America’s “Roaring Twenties” and its partying, hedonism and boozing, much as these things have been highlighted in the movies. Remember, the novel was published in 1925, when the party was still in full swing if ever it was – four years before the Depression hit and the cultural landscape changed radically. F. Scott Fitzgerald was ahead of the pack in exposing the wealthy-class of the 1920s as a sham that was built on fraudulence, some criminality, and false identities. All that roared was untruthfulness.

Footnote: About those “mostly dreadful” four film adaptations that have been made of The Great Gatsby which I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review…. The first film version of The Great Gatsby was made in 1926, one year after the novel came out. It was based on a play version. It is now a lost film, no prints of it surviving, so one cannot pass judgement on it though, given that it was a silent movie, it is hard to believe that it could have carried much of Fitzgerald’s meaning. The second version was made in 1949 when Fitzgerald’s work had come back into popularity. It was a travesty, using just a slither of the novel’s plot and basically turning it into a gangster movie starring, as Gatsby, Alan Ladd, who was at that stage identified with gangster movies (This Gun for Hire etc.). There were a number of television versions, but the next major film version was the 1974 film, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy. In fairness, it followed Fitzgerald’s novel more closely than any other film version did, but it was plagued by its slow pace as if the producers were all too aware that they were handling a classic and therefore handled with care. It is tedious to watch. Worse, it really does present Gatsby’s and Daisy’s relationship as a romantic love affair, rather than the novel’s sense of a delusion. As for the 2013 version, sorry, I can’t be bothered going into it. Another travesty, it more-or-less followed the novel’s narrative, but changed radically the characterisation of some major people in the narrative, and it focusest on partying and lavish sets backed by music nowhere near the music of the 1920s – an attempt to grab a youth audience. Tripe. Conclusion? Obviously, if you want to know The Great Gatsby, read the book.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART TWO, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

                                   F.Scott Fitzgerald - The young established author in 1921
 

Continuing my survey of the novels and short-stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald’s second novel The Beautiful and Damned is not as idealistic, muddled and romantic as This Side of Paradise and is in many ways a more mature book. It also has a robust and almost straightforward narrative, unlike the fragmented  This Side of Paradise. There is a greater awareness that youth has its limits, in spite of there still being a yearning for careless (or carefree) youth and the dread of growing old. Taking advice once again from Edmund Wilson and his editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald worked hard at revising and re-revising The Beautiful and Damned, trying to purge himself of the lush, romantic prose he had often deployed in This Side of Paradise. In this, he was not entirely successful. The Beautiful and Damned was first presented to the world in serial form in the (now long-since defunct) Metropolitan Magazine between late 1921 and early 1922, and only then published in book form in mid-1922. Once again, Fitzgerald divided his novel into “Books”, with each “Book” divided into chapters. It’s also worth noting that most of the novel takes place before the 1920s. We follow the life of the protagonist Anthony Patch from the age of 25 [when he has finished studying at Harvard] to the age of 33 – that is, from the years 1913 to 1921.

The title The Beautiful and Damned at first seemed to me to be a cheaply sensationalist title – the type of thing that would be attached to a B movie. But as I read my way through this longish novel (about 400 pages) I gradually understood its meaning. The “beautiful” are those who think they can float through life supping on aesthetic experience, enjoying the moment and imagining that life will always be easy, especially if somebody else is footing their bill. They rejoice in their youth. But they are “damned” because youth is ephemeral – it passes, adult responsibility falls on them, and they are no longer youngsters, no longer the brightest and wittiest… and yet there is still that unfulfillable yearning for flaming youth.

The first cover illustration of the novel once again used Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald as models... sort of...
 

Here is my simplified synopsis:

Book One is almost completely set in New York. Fresh from college [Harvard] and renting a very luxurious apartment, Anthony Patch lives off the money regularly sent to him by his multi-millionaire grandfather Adam J. Patch. Old Adam is intensely Protestant, a moral reformer, a promoter of Prohibition who expects and assumes his grandson Anthony is living the same sort clean moral life he himself endorses. Anthony is also aware that he will inherit a fortune when his grandfather dies. But Anthony is a hedonist, a party-goer and a wastrel. Seeing himself as an aesthete, he believes he has a superior appreciation of the arts and he will one day prove himself, probably in the arts… but not yet. He has his moments of doubt, but still talks big with college friends such as Maury Noble, who sees himself as a sort of philosopher; and Richard Caramel, who is set on writing a novel. More alluring of course are women and Anthony tries to find one. First there is Josephine, but she becomes a pal rather than someone to love. Then the beautiful Gloria Gilbert comes into his life. She is young, fashionable, often unsuccessfully wooed by other men, insouciant, careless, self-absorbed, often silly, emotional - in short a flapper of the age. Gloria is fully aware that men are attracted to her. Anthony Patch’s courtship of her is, credibly and painfully, drawn out. He is envious of the other beaux who follow after her. He is aware of her apparent impassiveness and her loud annoyance at anything that will disturb her hedonistic ways. Yet gradually they are drawn together.

Book Two. And so Anthony consults his sceptical grandfather, Adam J. Patch, who tells him that he should by now be thinking of work – getting a profession and earning his way in the world. Adam nevertheless endorses Anthony’s getting married and still funds him.  Anthony marries Gloria. They are in conjugal ecstasy… for a while. With the money they have at their disposal they idle about and travel. They think of going to Europe, but by now the World War is in progress [though the United States are not yet involved]. Instead they dawdle off to California and the West Coast and they swim and tan and idle… and they get bored… and they dawdle back to New York and they begin to quarrel. Should they have a baby? Gloria isn’t up for it. Gloria wants to go down South and visit her family but Anthony doesn’t like the food they serve down South and isn’t sure he likes her family. And, between moments of carnal passion, they have their first really violent quarrel. They think they can enjoy life more if they live somewhere out of the city, so they buy a grey house in a rural area north of New York. In matters of importance, Anthony and Gloria are chronically lazy. When Anthony is offered a job in finance, he lasts for one week. When Anthony is dissatisfied with his Japanese servant Tana, he is too lazy to fire him. There is much tension when other men make passes at Gloria, for her beauty is legend, and in one very vivid section Gloria runs away after she has been frightened and humiliated by one such pass. We would now call it sexual harassment. For all her faults, and for all her flightiness, she nevertheless remains loyal to Anthony. And they drink and they party and hope for the best and they party and drink and assume their workless lives will go on forever. It is magic. It is romantic. At which point catastrophe hits. While Anthony and Gloria are hosting a wild and boozy party in their rural grey house, grandfather Adam J. Patch unexpectedly drops in, is disgusted with Anthony’s drunken behaviour, and stalks away cancelling the payments that have so far supported Anthony. He also cuts Anthony out of his will. When grandfather dies, Anthony begins the long and expensive legal business of contesting the will.  Meanwhile, he has to earn money for the first time as he and Gloria have to shift into a less salubrious apartment in a more slummy part of New York. He tries writing trash for popular magazines, but he doesn’t have the talent to succeed. But at this stage (in 1917) the United States joins the Allies in fighting the war in Europe and Anthony is drafted into the infantry… after having failed to join the officer corps.

Book Three. The third part of the novel is very different in tone from the first two parts. It is more matter-of-fact, more concerned with material events, than Parts One and Two. There are fewer of the intensely analytical passages charting the different moods of Anthony and Gloria. With the United States now involved in the World War, the army enlists Anthony and he is taken to a camp down South. For a while he acts as a well-behaved soldier and he is promoted to sergeant. There is even a possibility that he might be officer material. But he is more interested in women. He begins flirting with a clearly working-class woman called Dorothy Raycroft who apparently has had many lovers. (She is most often called “Dot”, which rather cruelly suggests how unimportant she was to all the men who loved-her-and-left-her.) Flirtation turns into an affair. [Okay, the novel was published in 1922, so there are no explicit scenes of sexual engagement, but that is clearly meant.] Dot thinks Anthony is her one true love. But Anthony falls foul of the army when he goes A.W.O.L. after a boozy engagement and breaks curfew. He is broken back to the ranks and later, for other misdemeanours, he spends some time in the lock-up. The army moves up to New York, expecting to be transported to the war in Europe. But it is late 1918, the armistice had been signed and the war is over. Anthony is discharged from the army and is at last reunited with Gloria, who has written him few letters and has also had to ward off some wolves. She has taken things hard in their diminished circumstances. They depend on what little money they have by selling bonds. She drinks more. He drinks more. In fact, with Prohibition having become law (in 1919), there is more desperate drinking in society than ever. They are well on the way to being alcoholics, especially as much of the hooch they drink comes from unreliable bootleggers. Fitzgerald inserts some raw satire when Anthony  tries to train as a travelling salesman, attempting to sell booklets on how to get rich. It is pure, nonsensical boosterism, not helped by the inebriated state Anthony is in when he tries to sell his worthless wares. Former Harvard pals shun him. Now 29 years old Gloria, still hoping they can raise more money, still believing she is as beautiful as she was when she was twenty, decides she might make it in the movies [then still silent]. She is given a screen test… but she is told that she is too old for any leading part and might at best gain a small walk-on part. She is devastated. She weeps. Where have her youth and beauty gone? Anthony and Gloria sink lower and lower, drunker and drunker, ravaged by alcohol, more and more degraded. At which point you may think that Fitzgerald has written a perfectly conventional morality story – thoughtless, hedonistic youth destroyed by its own idleness.  But, literally in the last three pages of the novel, Fitzgerald turns the unexpected knife. Grandfather’s will has been overturned. Anthony has inherited millions after all. Is this a happy ending? No. Because, worn out by his boozing debauchery, Anthony can no longer enjoy the things he once enjoyed. He has created nothing and does not have the will to create anything. He has reverted to a sort of permanent childishness, poring over his old stamp collections… 

              Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert were clearly based on Scott and Zelda
 

            And of course, dear reader, I have stripped The Beautiful and Damned of much of its texture by giving you a very simplified synopsis, ignoring Fitzgerald’s distinctive style and even ignoring some of the characters who play important roles. Perhaps I will amend things a little by quoting some of the things in the novel that stood out to me. In summing up a character, Fitzgerald paints the picture of a wealthy young man’s ideal, money-dominated life, thus: “Behind Maury Noble’s attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure – and then to become immensely rich as quickly as possible.”  (Book One, Chapter 2)

            Despite his attempts to live the easy life of a wealthy aesthete, even from early in the novel Anthony Patch has the uneasy sense that his life is really pointless, thus: “Back in his apartment the greyness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly…. Anthony Patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle…” (Book One, Chapter 2)

Though he is deeply in love with Gloria, Anthony is very soon aware of Gloria’s narcissism and hedonism, as when he takes her to a dance: “Would she sit on her right or on her left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture; she took all things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.” (Book One, Chapter 2)  Later, Anthony asks her “Aren’t you interested in anything except yourself?” To which she replies curtly “Not much.” (Book One, Chapter 3) When they are about to agree to marry “Peace was restored – the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on the stage, each playing to an audience of two; the passion of their pretence created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression – yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.”  (Book Two, Chapter 1) Later, showing her flightiness “Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness.”  (Book Two, Chapter 1)

Long before disaster strikes him, Anthony intuits that his way of life cannot last forever: “He had been futile in longing to drift and dream;  no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.” (Book Two, Chapter 2) Then there is Gloria’s howl when she for the first time realises, after she has had a screen test, that she is 29 and her beauty is fading. She looks in a mirror and “ ‘Oh, my pretty face,’ she whispered passionately grieving, ‘Oh my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?’ ” (Book Three, Chapter 2)

It has to be noted that there is much unlikely dialogue in this novel with elevated language out of character and sounding like words spoken in a melodrama. In Book Two, Chapter 1 Gloria is angry about Anthony’s love for old things, antiques etc. and she launches into a long tirade when they visit the preserved home of Robert E. Lee, giving an articulate argument about the irrelevance of the past. In Book Two, Chapter 2, after they have had a quarrel, she says “It seemed last night… that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone. I knew that what was left of me would always love you but never in quite the same way.” This is really Fitzgerald’s diagnosis of Gloria’s situation, not something that Gloria herself would have said. In the same chapter Maury Noble gives a whole lecture about his experience and how he has learnt that life teaches you nothing. Again, this reads like a gratuitous tirade inserted by Fitzgerald to illustrate the blasé mood of young, affluent people of the time. He was often criticised for the way, in The Beautiful and Damned, that he often intruded in his narrative to make admonitory points about his characters.

One trouble in reading Fitzgerald is to assume that most of his work is disguised autobiography. It is easy to play this game as, in later years, Fitzgerald admitted that Anthony and Gloria were really versions of Fitzgerald himself and his wife Zelda Sayre. Zelda was a “belle” from the South, to which she sometimes wished to return, and Fitzgerald was drafted into the army and sent South, as in the novel. But the novel is not entirely autobiographical, even if academics have diligently attempted to identify which of Anthony’s college friend was based on which of Fitzgerald’s college friends. Besides which, unlike Anthony Patch, Fitzgerald went to Princeton, not to Harvard. More to the point, in 1922, when The Beautiful and Damned was published, Fitzgerald and Zelda were beginning to go down the slippery slope of alcoholism – their worst years came later. In the novel, the ambitious author Richard Caramel has a hit in his early twenties with a sensational novel The Demon Lover… but after this success Caramel is lured into writing profitable trash for magazines and film scenarios. This appears to be Fitzgerald mocking himself. He too had a hit in his early twenties (This Side of Paradise) and he too wrote profitably for magazines. But it was only much later, in the 1930s, that he became a Hollywood scenario hack.

So much for the plot and the context of the novel. But what does it add up to? As I read it, I find an author criticising the obsession with youth and the fear of ageing, regret for the past that has gone and the loss of youthful beauty. In spite of this, Fitzgerald was essentially a Romantic. It is telling that his favourite poet was John Keats, a great poet for sure but loved most fervently by adolescents who want to preserve the idea of an ideal, childlike beauty and simplicity, where there are no worldly challenges and complications. But romantic idealist though he was, Fitzgerald understood that this was a dream that could not be sustained. Age comes. Beauty fades and hard reality kicks in. Anthony and Gloria live in a long daydream, and when reality strikes they fall apart .