This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald’s ‘Beautiful and Damned’ Published)

March 4, 1922—Scribners officially published the sophomore novel of perhaps its most promising author, 26-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned was not as successful as the writer’s bildungsroman of two years earlier, This Side of Paradise. It was, in essence, a caterpillar on the way (but not quite there) to becoming a butterfly.

H.L. Mencken, in The Smart Set, praised the writer whose short stories he and co-editor George Jean Nathan had published previously, noting that the new work contained “fine observation” and “penetrating detail.” But not everyone was enthralled.

Fitzgerald’s fellow Princetonian Edmund Wilson--famously dubbed his “artistic conscience” by the novelist himself--had some harsh things to say about the waste of his gifts, noting that he’d been given “imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.”

The critic Thomas Flanagan, an accomplished novelist himself (The Year of the French), summed up Fitzgerald’s limitations--and the partial breakthrough he made at this point in his career--in a 2000 retrospective of his great predecessor’s career printed in The New York Review of Books:

“Perhaps Wilson had not placed proper value upon his friend’s uncanny ability to evoke atmospheres, moods, emotional energies. Fitzgerald would never be an intellectual in the sense that Wilson already was, but he was beginning to learn that one uniquely novelistic gift which Wilson never quite mastered, the ability to translate ideas into art. It is at work, if falteringly and at times embarrassingly, in The Beautiful and Damned.”

In a way, The Beautiful and Damned occupies the same place in Fitzgerald’s fiction that Mardi does in Herman Melville’s. At this point, attempting to break out of the mold that their initial success had created, both novelists had not quite mastered the voice and depth of the mature masterpieces that would follow in a couple of years (Melville’s Moby Dick, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby).

The novel’s themes--the American Dream, the corrupting power of wealth, psychological degeneration, alcoholism--would assume central places in the three other novels that would occupy the remaining 18 years of Fitzgerald’s truncated life: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and the uncompleted The Last Tycoon.

In fact, the collapse of the fortunes and marriage of Fitzgerald’s protagonist and the latter’s wife, Anthony and Gloria Patch, prefigured his own, as if the novelist were trying to warn himself of the dangers that lurked down the road if he did not begin to live responsibly, soberly and within his means.

With The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald began to mine, for literary purposes, his obsession: his relationship with wife Zelda. So overwhelming was this preoccupation that, even if he started out writing about someone else, he ended up  turning the work into an examination of himself and his wife. It’s as if he couldn’t imagine the life of someone else without partially entering into it himself.

Andre Le Vot’s 1983 biography of Fitzgerald--still one of the most perceptive in the constantly growing cottage industry of works about the novelist--noted that the writer initially planned to center The Beautiful and Damned on George Jean Nathan. But the Nathan story, though surviving in the character of Anthony’s good friend, the cynical Maury Noble, took a back seat to Scott and Zelda as expressed through the fate of Anthony and Gloria. Similarly, the genesis of Fitzgerald’s classics, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, originated as studies of other people before turning, inevitably, to himself and Zelda.

Given Fitzgerald’s fascination with film, it’s not surprising that The Beautiful and Damned has been adapted for screen. It was first turned into a silent film (now believed lost) directed by William Seiter, then nearly another century passed before another director took a crack at it. This time it was an Australian, Richard Wolstencroft, who altered the time and place to a milieu with which he was more familiar: contemporary Melbourne, Australia--undercutting Fitzgerald’s intention to offer up an allegorical treatment of the America of his time.

The novel also gave its title--but nothing else--to a musical based on the life of Scott and Zelda that opened in London. Information on the original cast recording can be found here.