Status Updates From The Beautiful and Damned

Imagine my surprise when Fitzgerald placed the emphasis on the “Damned” of the title. It’s a hollow victory for Anthony, and a morbid one for Gloria. I wasn’t exactly expecting just how we got there, though there was an inkling in the dropped plot thread.

Also props to Fitzgerald when his drunken antihero throws a racial slur at his one-time rival and Bloeckmann beats the SHIT out of him

Boy was I wrong about Anthony and the army. The dude had glimpses of wanting to do things to “make something of” himself but he keeps doing nothing, throwing parties, and dwindling their income. When his year of army is juxtaposed with Gloria’s faithfulness he feels utterly repellent and barely worthy of pathos, and I am totally with her when she harangues him.

“Through the dark light of the enclosed train-sheds their glances stretched across a hysterical area, foul with yellow sobbing and the smells of poor women. They must have pondered what they had done to one another, and each must have accused himself of drawing this somber pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely. At the last they were too far away for either to see the other’s tears.”

Anthony and Gloria falling in love and getting married is only a small portion of the story. Fitzgerald at this point gets into the crux of two people finding out how to live with each other, with squabbles and fights and sweetness. Some of the fights are petty, and some of them betray a masculine menace that Anthony embodies when he is tired of deferring to the mercurial Gloria’s whims (and also drunk).

A lot of this book is profoundly psychological insights into Anthony’s thought process in wooing women and being completely taken aback by Gloria’s refusal to adhere to the pathways in which he has tread. At this point the diary that Gloria reads through is one of my favorite sections, but of course it is liberally selected from (and without permission) the one Zelda actually kept…

ngl, in my head this had always been “The Beautiful and THE Damned”. I am less partial to Anthony’s character as we don’t get the depth of background that exists in This Side of Paradise, but both characters were dominated by a loathing of the “ugly”. I do recognize that this again autobiographical novel is based on his courtship and marriage to Zelda, so it’s interesting here as well.