Damned Beautiful

It's strange to think that Fitzgerald was only twenty-five when he wrote his second novel. Both Anthony and Gloria are passed thirty when they finally crack-up with the weight of a decade of abusing alcohol behind them and in their early twenties they are still relatively secure in their complacent sense that life owes them all the good things it can offer. But Fitzgerald seems to foresee his doom (in terms of the fate of Anthony, his surrogate) in precise, sometimes excruciating detail even as a comparatively young man. In fact, he sees it so clearly and with such moral certainty that it's very difficult to sympathise with the central characters. Yes, you feel sorry for them but you don't really inhabit them. You're outside them always, aware of just how unpleasant they are, and how stupid. I was wrong yesterday to mention a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God effect. This is more like watching some particular asinine folk on a dreadful reality tv show and feeling superior in the knowledge you couldn't be quite that idiotic. I think Fitzgerald convinces the reader that the world around the doomed pair might see them as representing some sort of glamour, but it's not credible that the reader might fall for this delusion. I spent quite a bit of the first third of the novel hoping (ungallantly) that someone might kick Gloria, and at least some of the last third rather happy (uncharitably) that the pair were getting what they deserved. I think Fitzgerald wants the reader to feel this way, but I think he also wants you to feel other ways and I'm not so sure I was able to.

As an honest study of what alcohol is capable of doing to those prone to addiction thereto the novel is a brilliant success. But I don't think it makes any larger statement about life in general and its world in particular. We have to wait for Gatsby for that. How did Fitzgerald do it? - turning from the writing of good, at times very good, books to greatness? Three things may have helped: he was sober when writing Gatsby; he finally got away from autobiographical central characters, approaching his experiences slantwise, as it were; and he learned to leave things out.

Oh, and he stopped writing sentences like: Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward the river, near which he could see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. And on my count that's the third time he uses brummagem in the novel. Surely he must have had more than a few at that point.