A Cautionary Tale

Thus says a character is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. (Gotta love Fitzgerald having a character complain about Fitzgerald’s previous novel.)

Shoddy realism. That is not something the characters in this novel only want to avoid in their books. They also want to avoid it in their actual lives. Given the choice between a life mired in shoddy realism or a life imbued with romanticism, which would you prefer? It’s a pointless thing to contemplate, of course. You are stuck with realism, shoddy realism at that, in your life.

You are stuck with realism, but are the characters in this novel? They are Beautiful. As you know, the Beautiful are not like you and I. They have more Beauty. They lead Beautiful lives surrounded by Beautiful things and Beautiful people. And by the way, they are also Damned. (Note there is no “the” before “Damned” in the title.)

What’s the problem?

Anthony and Gloria, the Beautiful and Damned of the title, have it all. They have youth and beauty and money. The world sits before them, its wares on display and all for the having. They can do anything they want. Anything at all. What do they want to do? Ah, there’s the rub. Going to parties and getting drunk then moving to the country and getting drunk then moving back to the city and getting drunk, year after year after year after…well, it gets a bit old.

But, this is not a repetitive and dull book. I had the occasion to talk about it with a few former and current students. Every one of them found it terrifying. Why? Loathe as they were to admit it, they all recognized themselves in Anthony and Gloria. Graduating from an elite liberal arts college, full of the energy and beauty of youth, dreaming of a life where they can do what they will, they are faced with all the promise of being the Beautiful. Who could want anything more than my current and former students have?

Starting off the novel with a wonderful image of their future selves, seeing people living that perfect life to the fullest and getting exactly what they want, it is easy to remember only the first two words of the title and imagine this is going to be a story of glittering success. The descent starts slowly enough, but as it gains momentum, you became a bit alarmed. Anthony and Gloria are not alarmed, however; they just keep going on, leading their beautiful lives which are becoming less and less beautiful by the moment. By the end of the novel, Anthony and Gloria are still living in their world of dreams, and it is only the Reader who realizes the Dream is a Nightmare.

How did this happen?

“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success.”

Anthony says that, and he is exactly right. The problem was that Anthony did indeed have everything he wanted. He didn’t have to work for a thing; all of life was just handed to him. And, as a result, Anthony never developed that one thing which is indispensable to leading a life worth living: Good Character. It is not enough to have wealth and beauty. You also need a work ethic, a moral code, the willingness to sacrifice today to reap benefits tomorrow, a vocation, a higher purpose. Without these things, all the wealth and invitations to the right parties and the new toys are meaningless nothings. Without these things you can be the beautiful, but then you are also the damned.

It is not that Anthony and Gloria are unaware of the need for building character. In a rather amusing moment, when Anthony mentions that he has done some work and Gloria scoffs, Anthony points to an essay he wrote, exclaiming, “And what’s more Gloria, you know I sat up till five o-clock in the morning finishing it.”

If you didn’t laugh at that line, it is because you are a recent graduate of an elite liberal arts college. These colleges accept the Beautiful: the smart or wealthy or talented or (the gold mine) all three. We run them through a “rigorous course of study.” That “rigor” requires the students to occasionally stay up until 5 o-clock in the morning to do an assignment. Not finish an assignment—do the assignment. It’s not that the students do not work; they do stay up those nights before an exam. What most of them never do, however, is engage in concentrated effort on a single project over a sustained period of time. There are students who do senior theses and there are classes requiring substantive research papers and other classes with large high-stakes exams. But, it is a relatively easy matter to navigate the modern college and avoid all those things that require developing a work ethic which will enable the person to work for long stretches day after day on a difficult project. Don’t blame the students. It is the faculty who have switched away from the “high stakes assessment strategies” to the more “student-friendly” grading.

As a result, the students, both the ones who did work hard in college and the ones who did not, no longer view the world as a cruel and hard place where to succeed you must work very hard. They are truly like Anthony and Gloria. That is why this novel is so terrifying to them.

Dick: (pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
Maury: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

There is the point of The Beautiful and Damned. The book itself is a meaningless romp watching some characters make a whole bunch of really bad decisions. What makes the book worth reading is that maybe, just maybe, it will remind you that life is more than getting the things you want. A Good Life is a Life with Meaning. What is the meaning of your life? What is your chief end? Answer that and you have a chance of escaping the fate of having your life be described by the title of this book.