The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (best time to read books txt) 📕
Description
Anthony Patch, the grandson of a wealthy businessman, spends his youth in idle relaxation expecting to inherit his grandfather’s fortune. But when he meets Gloria, a vibrant young flapper, the two feel an irresistible attraction and quickly get married despite their clashing personalities.
The two embark on a lifestyle of Jazz Age living: hard partying, profligate spending, and generally living the high life. But Anthony’s prohibitionist grandfather soon finds out and disowns Anthony, sending their lifestyle crashing down from its former heights to intolerable indignity.
Like Fitzgerald’s previous novel, This Side of Paradise, and his next novel, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned documents the life of the idle rich in America’s Jazz Age. Both Anthony and Gloria’s characters explore the problem of what one is left to do when one has no other purpose in life. Because Anthony’s expecting a large inheritance, his ambition is muzzled and he feels no need to embark on a career or participate in the betterment of society. Gloria’s main purpose in life was to find a husband; once she’s done that, what’s left except spending money and partying?
The relationship between Anthony and Gloria is the explosive propellant that drives the plot. The two are clearly a poor match for each other. While Anthony is an aimless aesthete who expects to inherit wealth and power, Gloria is a self-absorbed socialite mostly banking on her undisputed beauty. Their mutual selfishness leads to constant conflict, and eventually, to mutual dislike. But despite that, the two remain together, locked in to their self-absorption, lack of ambition, and obsession with the past, as Anthony descends into alcoholism and Gloria into desperate middle age.
Anthony and Gloria are fairly transparent fictionalizations of Fitzgerald himself and his wife Zelda. Their relationship was famously tumultuous, and parallels Anthony and Gloria’s highs and lows. Fitzgerald himself was born to upper-middle-class wealth and led a aimless youth before turning to the army and to writing; in his later years, he considered himself nothing more than a middling success and turned to writing for Hollywood before totally embracing the alcoholism he had courted since his college days, and that would finally kill him. Zelda, for her part, was a socialite and the canonical “flapper.” Beautiful and bubbly, she enabled the legendarily hard-partying lifestyle that fueled their bitter fights. Her mercurial disposition later led her to being committed to an asylum for schizophrenia. Even the cover illustration of the book’s first edition features a couple meant to resemble Fitzgerald and Zelda.
Today, The Beautiful and Damned is not just a glittering record of Jazz Age excess, it’s a nuanced character study of how expectation can ruin ambition, and how relationships aren’t always easy to endure—or to dissolve.
Read free book «The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (best time to read books txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Read book online «The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (best time to read books txt) 📕». Author - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anthony was playing with an ancient tennis ball, and he bounced it carefully on the floor several times before he answered with a soupçon of acidity:
“You’re a little idiot, Geraldine.”
She smiled provokingly.
“Oh, I am, am I? Want to bet?”
“That’d be silly too.”
“Oh, it would, would it? Well, I’ll just bet you’ll marry somebody inside of a year.”
Anthony bounced the tennis ball very hard. This was one of his handsome days, she thought; a sort of intensity had displaced the melancholy in his dark eyes.
“Geraldine,” he said, at length, “in the first place I have no one I want to marry; in the second place I haven’t enough money to support two people; in the third place I am entirely opposed to marriage for people of my type; in the fourth place I have a strong distaste for even the abstract consideration of it.”
But Geraldine only narrowed her eyes knowingly, made her clicking sound, and said she must be going. It was late.
“Call me up soon,” she reminded him as he kissed her goodbye, “you haven’t for three weeks, you know.”
“I will,” he promised fervently.
He shut the door and coming back into the room stood for a moment lost in thought with the tennis ball still clasped in his hand. There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully—assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
He thought with emotion—aloud, ejaculative, for he was hurt and confused.
“No idea of getting married, by God!”
Of a sudden he hurled the tennis ball violently across the room, where it barely missed the lamp, and, rebounding here and there for a moment, lay still upon the floor.
Signlight and Moonlight
For her dinner Gloria had taken a table in the Cascades at the Biltmore, and when the men met in the hall outside a little after eight, “that person Bloeckman” was the target of six masculine eyes. He was a stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-five, with an expressive face under smooth sandy hair—and, no doubt, in most business gatherings his personality would have been considered ingratiating. He sauntered up to the three younger men, who stood in a group smoking as they waited for their hostess, and introduced himself with a little too evident assurance—nevertheless it is to be doubted whether he received the intended impression of faint and ironic chill: there was no hint of understanding in his manner.
“You related to Adam J. Patch?” he inquired of Anthony, emitting two slender strings of smoke from nostrils overwide.
Anthony admitted it with the ghost of a smile.
“He’s a fine man,” pronounced Bloeckman profoundly. “He’s a fine example of an American.”
“Yes,” agreed Anthony, “he certainly is.”
—I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.
Bloeckman squinted at his watch.
“Time these girls were showing up …”
—Anthony waited breathlessly; it came—
“… but then,” with a widening smile, “you know how women are.”
The three young men nodded; Bloeckman looked casually about him, his eyes resting critically on the ceiling and then passing lower. His expression combined that of a Middle Western farmer appraising his wheat crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed—the public manner of all good Americans. As he finished his survey he turned back quickly to the reticent trio, determined to strike to their very heart and core.
“You college men? … Harvard, eh. I see the Princeton boys beat you fellows in hockey.”
Unfortunate man. He had drawn another blank. They had been three years out and heeded only the big football games. Whether, after the failure of this sally, Mr. Bloeckman would have perceived himself to be in a cynical atmosphere is problematical, for—
Gloria arrived. Muriel arrived. Rachael arrived. After a hurried “Hello, people!” uttered by Gloria and echoed by the other two, the three swept by into the dressing room.
A moment later Muriel appeared in a state of elaborate undress and crept toward them. She was in her element: her ebony hair was slicked straight back on her head; her eyes were artificially darkened; she reeked of insistent perfume. She was got up to the best of her ability as a siren, more popularly a “vamp”—a picker up and thrower away of men, an unscrupulous and fundamentally unmoved toyer with affections. Something in the exhaustiveness of her attempt fascinated Maury at first sight—a woman with wide hips affecting a panther-like litheness! As they waited the extra three minutes for Gloria, and, by polite assumption, for Rachael, he was unable to take his eyes from her. She would turn her head away, lowering her eyelashes and biting her nether lip in an amazing exhibition of coyness. She would rest her hands on her hips and sway from side to side in tune to the music, saying:
“Did you ever hear such perfect ragtime? I just can’t make my shoulders behave when I hear that.”
Mr. Bloeckman clapped his hands gallantly.
“You ought to be on the stage.”
“I’d like to be!” cried Muriel; “will you back me?”
“I sure will.”
With becoming modesty Muriel ceased her motions and turned to Maury, asking what he had “seen” this year. He interpreted this as referring to the dramatic world, and they had a gay and exhilarating exchange of titles, after this manner:
Muriel Have you seen Peg o’ My Heart? Maury No, I haven’t. Muriel Eagerly. It’s wonderful! You want to see it. Maury Have you seen Omar, the Tentmaker? Muriel No, but I hear it’s wonderful. I’m very anxious to see it. Have you seen Fair and Warmer? Maury Hopefully. Yes. Muriel I don’t think it’s very good. It’s trashy. Maury Faintly. Yes, that’s true. Muriel But I went to Within the Law last night and
Comments (0)