book review: the beautiful and the damned by f. scott fitzgerald

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan, also known by his pen names of Asad and Ghalib, was one of the most prominent poets of the Mughal empire. In one of his poems, he dissects the convoluted processes and conditions of human love:

In life, she is laid back, in love enigmatic. What if she plays cool, she is aching for you. For many years now, I have polished this heart. I will get its value when she puts a price on it. I know you like to rub salt in my wounds.
This cauterizes me: what does it do for you?

This excerpt speaks to the act of love as a transformative, character-building endeavor that revolves around the submissive nature of trust. During a time when religion was at the forefront of culture, Ghalib pioneered the discussion of humanity — in particular, the intersection between humanic propensities and love.
This exploration into the cross-section between love and humanity is evident in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age-centric novel The Beautiful and Damned, albeit by demonstrating the situation where trust is absent. Fitzgerald delicately depicts the faulty love affair between Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert while creating characters that undermine the values of loyalty, devotion, generosity, honor, affection, and courage. By weaving the themes of preservation of beauty, reincarnation, and materialistic obsession together with the aforementioned characters and others such as Joseph Bloeckman Richard Caramel, and Maury Noble, Fitzgerald masterfully creates a particularly relevant commentary about mental, physical, and moral disintegration.
The novel truly begins with Anthony Patch’s obsession with beauty,

While it seemed to him that the average débutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl (Gloria) who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.

Tales of a bewitching woman, who had conquered the hearts of a legion of men ultimately reach Anthony’s ears, and amidst his career’s inertia, he begins his pursuit. The contrast between his lack of mental curiosity towards his career and his desire to encapture the attention of a beauty depicts the pretentious, moral decay of socialites born into wealthy families. From Anthony’s characterization, the audience is able to glean Fitzgerald’s pseudo-realistic depiction of the Jazz Age; with overt exaggeration of human nature, Fitzgerald’s writing invigorates his characters with expansive human flaws, which show almost inhuman representations of the characters’ actions and desires. For example, the long conversations between Anthony and his friends Dick Caramel and Maury Noble prove to be monotonous and unnatural.

Fitzgerald’s true exploration regarding the qualities of love lies in the omission of happiness in Anthony and Gloria’s marriage and the subtle tragedy that befalls the characters. As Anthony continues to wait for the death of his multimillionaire grandfather, the married couple moves into the rented gray house, where they entertained their friends with jubilant weekend parties,

There was the odor of tobacco always-both of them smoked incessantly... Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust... people became sick in Gloria's bathroom; people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette."

While Fitzgerald emphasizes the questionable decision to host elaborate parties without a consistent flux of income, he, more importantly, suggests that Anthony and Gloria’s marriage is woven together by their desire to bask in the spotlight — and thus, unsustainable. Anthony “felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.” With Anthony being compelled to Gloria for her beauty and Gloria pursuing the unrealistic preservation of beauty, their tempestuous relationship soon unravels into distrust and catastrophe.
By showcasing the destructive combination of mental decay (Anthony) and the effects of physical decay (Gloria), Fitzgerald presents a niche representation of love that lacks real application, leaving us with the following questions: can greed coexist with love? Does beauty exist? This narrative about the haunting confinements of love complicates our preconceived definitions of beauty and human desire, begging the audience to intimately dissect the notion of love for themselves.