The Beautiful and Damned
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1922. 12mo, pp. viii +449. $2,00.
GRADUATING from Harvard in the Class of 1909, Anthony Patch goes to New York and assumes a position there as heir-presumptive to the millions of his grandfather, Adam Patch, a senile apostle of the ‘uplift.’ Eleven years of drifting and wasting follow; a modern marriage, insecurely founded on an immensity of kissing, breaks down into faithlessness and boredom, and finally Patch, followed at no great distance by his wife, lurches downhill from occasional drunkenness to habitual and bewildered sottishness. Two final pages, in which a kind of ironic ‘happy ending’ lies concealed, are to be found, but they do not convince; the tail refuses to wag the dog.
In spite of the synopsis, however, the book is not a tragedy of character, for Mr. Fitzgerald is not a creator of character. Who remembers a name or even a real individuality among the jeunesse dorée of This Side of Paradise? The Anthony of the present volume is a type; carefully studied and carefully observed, to he sure, but a type, nevertheless, and not a person; Gloria, his wife, though more individualized than Anthony, is likewise a type of the kind of being into which civilization is making some women; Muriel Kane is a type rendered with the care, accuracy, and mechanism with which a phonograph record reproduces a voice; Mrs, Gilbert is a Western type, Bloeckman a metropolitan. Certain personages are mere clichés—Anthony’s uplifter grandfather, for instance.
And the story—what is it but an account, half ironic, half photographic, of a sordid race downhill? Yet the book is alive, very much alive.
Wherein, then, lies its secret vitality? It dwells, one imagines, in the shrewd, complete, and quite unequaled picture it renders of the life of the day and the manners and customs of a class. The topic of the hour, its favorite slang phrase, the kind of human being in which the moment dwells incarnate, all are to be found here at their best and freshest. And what a crew they are —these young men without the slightest sense of social obligation, these young women who live for their own enjoyment of their own beauty, these loafers, drunkards, climbers, and rich wastrels of a great metropolis! Now it is the rich. wandering, unattached, hotel-dwelling girl whom Mr. Fitzgerald depicts; now the type of young, alert, well-dressed Jew who has made his way into a certain social world (a remarkable study this); now the flapper type as it exists among the populace. And not only are these types keenly chosen, skillfully described, and endowed with the minute’s most appropriate language, but also are they housed in the world of daily experience, the world of the movie, the electric sign, the smell of taxicabs, the sport suit, the jazz orchestra, and the prohibition evader. One wearies of the egotistic Gloria and becomes disgusted with the swineries of Anthony; but the picture and the good talk carry the reader brilliantly through to the end.
Those who expected great things from the promise of the first novel will probably be disappointed. The present endeavor marks no advance in either method or philosophy of life. But the picture of the time is there; a really amazing picture. It represents no mean achievement.
HENRY BESTON.