THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
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THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
The Beautiful and Damned follows the young Anthony Patch and his stunning wife Gloria Gilbert as they wait for the money they are set to inherit from Anthony’s grandfather. While their marriage buckles under the weight of their shared vices—a penchant for spending frivolously and drinking liberally, at all hours—for the two seasoned partygoers, it stops being fun long before they realize (which of course is why it's fun to read).
But the novel is poignant, too. Fitzgerald's sophomore novel of gilded indulgences is a sobering reality check that beauty and money may not be enough. We readers are confronted with the substantive needs of the soul beyond aesthetics and pleasure as the protagonists ask the terrifying question, “Is this it?” Not for nothing, we also witness one of the finest American literary minds interrogate his own marriage (this book is both Scott and Zelda, and very transparently so).
The Fitzgerald’s tumultuous relationship was characterized by excesses. The couple met in 1918 at a country club dance in Alabama when Zelda was 18 years old. Their 22-year romance would not only become the subject of Fitzgerald’s writing, but of the public’s attention and curiosity (satisfied by countless biographies and movies). Dear Scott, Dear Zelda is a collection of more than 300 letters they exchanged. Their epistolary love story is one of longing and ardor, heartbreak and betrayal. “We ruined ourselves,” Fitzgerald wrote. “I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”
Like the Fitzgerald’s, the Patch’s endure fights and the general torment of two unhappy people comfortable in their unhappiness. The book asks us many things about the nature of reality and self-delusion, and relationships. What does it mean to survive a marriage? What does it mean to really know the person you love? What can knowing the very worst of someone do for a meaningful connection—the depth of it, the texture of it? And how does loving, albeit imperfectly, redefine loving itself?
“[W]e haven’t been happy just once,” Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda in her sanitarium, “we’ve been happy a thousand times. . . . Forget the past . . . and turn about and swim back home to me.”
Written by So Textual
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