This week’s classic is written by one of my favourite classical American writers: F Scott Fitzgerald (If you haven’t read The Great Gatsby yet then please go ahead and order it now. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie was good but Fitzgerald’s prose is magical and captures the imagination way beyond that). The Beautiful and Damned was Fitzgerald’s second book published in 1922, two years after This Side of Paradise — his best-selling book. The events of the story take place in 1920’s New York and focus on the couple Anthony and Gloria Patch. The book is divided into three chapters titled “books”. Each book is divided into three parts that covers the Patch’s lives: how they met and fell in love, their marriage and their eventual ruin.
What made the book interesting is the fact that both characters are shallow, aimless with a high streak of irrationality and self-absorbance. Anthony is jobless who lives on the dream of inheriting his grandfather’s large fortune and builds a whole life on it. Later, his volatile and weak character leads him into becoming an alcoholic. Gloria on the other hand is a woman with a single talent: being beautiful. She enjoys the attention it gains her and keeps dreaming of becoming an actress yet never works towards achieving it. The couple are fans of drinking, parties and living a life that they can’t afford which eventually takes a toll on their relationship. Other important characters in the book are Anthony’s close friends: Maury and Caramel. Maury is the man that Anthony always envied and Caramel is Gloria’s cousin, the writer who Adam always deprecated yet could never become. Anthony’s grandfather makes an appearance in different chapters, a conservative philanthropist who doesn’t get along with Anthony and disapproves of his lifestyle and lack of ambition.
The book describes the upper society of New York during the Jazz Age and highlights important pivotal moments in American history: WWI and the Prohibition era — when alcohol was banned. As a reader, one of the things that I found interesting was the emphasis that the writer had on women’s beauty. Reading the book almost hundred years from its first publication to find out that the focus hasn’t really shifted but intensified — from different makeup products to cosmetic surgeries as natural beauty is not considered fashionable anymore — somehow made me feel dispirited.
The relationship between Gloria and Anthony is hard to understand at times: how they hold together and function as a couple when they have nothing in common. There are times when you sympathise with both characters despite their annoying personalities and glimpse how different yet similar, they are. Generally speaking, the plot is gripping and how it ends is quite a surprise.
Many critics claim that the book is based on Fitzgerald’s marriage to his wife Zelda. Like Anthony and Gloria, the couple were known for their wild behaviour in public and fights that were induced by drunkenness. Although an American journalist called them once: “the prince and princess of their generation” yet their lives ended tragically. Francis struggled with alcoholism and died in 1940 at the age of 44, while Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 27 and admitted into different psychiatric hospitals since. Sadly, seven years after Scott’s death — at the age of 47 —she died in a fire. The couple’s fascinating life is depicted in a novel called Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. I leave you here with three book recommendations that would take you back to the Jazz Age and dazzle you.
(Rasha al Raisi is a certified skills trainer and the author of: The World According to Bahja. rashabooks@yahoo.com)
Rasha al Raisi
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