Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned. In both senses of that apostrophe.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

An essay on F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned in Geoff Dyer's new collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (and, let's be honest, the quiet persistence of the Fuck Yeah Fitzgerald tumblr) led me to that novel last week. I tend to think of myself as someone who is regularly reading Fitzgerald, but the encounter with this novel made me realize that I usually engage with only a small portion of his work: The Great Gatsby, perpetually re-read and never exhausted; and his lingering mess, The Crack-Up and the notebooks. Each is in its own way perfection: the only flaw in Gatsby is a slight overheatedness, for which the jeweled sentences and the gentle complicity of Nick Carraway more than make up, while the minor matters in The Crack-Up and the notebooks are perfect in their small compass of imperfection, full of striking fragments and unforgettable lines unmoored from unfinished stories.

To read The Beautiful and Damned is to re-encounter the imperfect Fitzgerald, the Fitzgerald who was learning his craft, his generation, and his own self all at the same time. Dyer puts it well:

For more than a hundred pages, The Beautiful and Damned does not represent any kind of advance on This Side of Paradise. Isolated moments of insight cannot disguise its stylistic and structural flimsiness. The reader's heart sinks when, after less than twenty pages, Fitzgerald abandons novelistic prose and inserts one of the little playlets that should have been edited out of his first novel.* . . . Unleashed as soon as Gloria sets foot in the book, Fitzgerald's tendency to effulgence is, at first, ironically refracted through Anthony's consciousness: "Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea." Shortly afterward it takes on the tone of Fitzgerald's own lyrical yearning. A cab "moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean"; Gloria "turned up her face to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage." Fitzgerald never entirely grew out of this kind of thing--he would have been a lesser writer if he had--but he did learn to control it, to ground the lushest imagery in the actual and immediate.

There's so much more purple prose from the early going that Dyer could have cited. Want more gossamer? Here:

There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.

Yet even as those sentences set the eyes rolling, others show signs of Fitgerald's mature lyricisim--and, as Dyer writes, a grounding in the immediate. Take this, from the page following the gossamer feather:

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Just when the prose starts to feel too puffed up, Fitzgerald brings on the newsboys to deflate it; then, almost unnoticed, he inverts our notions of night and day, dark and light, hot and cold, giving the power and the glory, fading out, to the night and leaving the day the hangover-wracked imposition that his characters feel it to be.

The novel does, as Dyer notes, pick up considerably a ways in, and its tale of the disintegration of, respectively, Anthony, Gloria, and their marriage, has all the brutality, but none of the didacticism, of a temperance tract like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Light party scenes--of the recognizably 1920s sort that Waugh and Powell treated comically and Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson treated seriously, ending up with a sort of Fitzgerald-lite--give way to scene after scene of unalloyed disssipation. The overriding impression is of people who have been entirely unfitted, by education, upbringing, and culture, for the daily round of life, and of the powerful lure of failure--and, as Dyer puts it, "the capacity of failure to generate some kind of hideous enlightenment." By the end of the novel, its imperfections are forgotten, and all that's left is the coppery taste of destruction, pain, and emptiness portrayed with brutal precision.

The pleasures of youthful friendship

Scenes from two very different novels echoed each other in my reading this week and seemed worth sharing. First, from a fantasy novel rocketlass liked very much but that I ultimately decided wasn't for me, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind:

Thus it was that three students made their slightly erratic way back to the University. See them as they go, weaving only slightly. It is quiet, and when the belling tower strikes the late hour, it doesn't break the silence so much as it underpins it. The crickets, too, respect the silence. Their calls are like careful stitches in its fabric, almost too small to be seen.

The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamonds in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey. The University and Imre are the heats of understanding and art, the strongest of the four corners of civilization. Here on the road between the two there is nothing but old trees and long grass bending to the wind. The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifyingly beautiful.

The three boys, one dark, one light, and one--for lack of a better word--fiery, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.

And then, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned:

Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home.

His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury--who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.

The settled life of adulthood brings compensations that would have been barely comprehensible to our younger selves, but it's undeniable that something is lost along the way.