Discussing "The Beautiful And Damned" By F. Scott Fitzgerald

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "The Beautiful And Damned," which was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1922.
 
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Chapters

• 0:00 F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life
• 4:03 "The Beautiful And Damned" Alongside Fitzgerald's Other Novels
• 6:19 Fitzgerald And His Wife Zelda's Lives As Cautionary Tale
• 10:13 Selfishness, Hedonism, And Futility
• 16:34 Humans As Communal Animals
• 21:17 Civilization Gradually Refined And Elevated By Collective Work
• 25:16 Calmness And Investigation

Transcript

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. So I have to assume that was intentional and that he was named after the poet who wrote the poem called The Star-Spangled Banner that would later become the American National Anthem. Fitzgerald attended Princeton, but he dropped out in 1917 to join the Army amid World War I. He was stationed in Alabama for a while and then moved to Long Island, and then the war ended. So as far as I can tell, he never saw any combat and never went over to Europe. But his time in the Army would be significant for his life because it was there that he met Zelda Sayre, who was a Southern belle from a wealthy family whom Fitzgerald would later marry. She first rejected him because he didn't have enough money, but then his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became very popular, and so then she married him. That first novel was in 1920. His second novel was The Beautiful and Damned in 1922, which we'll be looking today. His third was The Great Gatsby in 1925, for which he is best known, and his last novel was Tender is the Night in 1934. Unfortunately, by the early 30s, it seems that Zelda's mental health was declining pretty significantly. And sometimes when you look at old accounts of women having this or that schizophrenia, or sometimes in the past they called it hysteria or some kind of upset, it may be because the woman was legitimately distressed about something significant that had happened and this medical diagnosis got put on it. But with Zelda, and I haven't looked into this a lot, but it seems that there was something significant going on. In April of 1932, Fitzgerald and Zelda went to lunch with H.L. Mencken, Henry Louis Mencken, at some of whose writings we've looked on this podcast. And Mencken later wrote in his diary that Zelda, quote, went insane in Paris a year or so ago and is still plainly more or less off her base, end quote. And a year later, he said it would have been obvious to anyone that she was, quote, only half sane, end quote. And Mencken apparently regretted that Fitzgerald was not able to spend more time writing novels because he had to write stories for magazines in order to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment. They had also had a daughter in 1921, who then by 1932 would have been about 11. And if you notice the timing there in the early thirties, the Great Depression is pretty much in full swing. And you have at least two things going on. One is that people probably have less money to spend on novels. And two, if they want to read a novel, Fitzgerald's books do focus a lot on the wealth and maybe decadence of the 1920s. So that might not be the first type of book that somebody would have turned to in the early thirties. So his book sales are declining, his wife needs expensive psychiatric care, and he's also paying for a school for his daughter. And so he goes out to Hollywood hoping to make some money there in order to pay for all this. And despite his earning a lot of money, he still was really only barely able to cover these costs. And it didn't really result in anything for which he's remembered creatively. He was also unfortunately alcoholic for a long time. And H.L. Mencken wrote in his diary in June, 1934, that quote, the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance. His wife, Zelda, who has been insane for years, is now confined at the Shepherd Pratt Hospital, and he is living in Park Avenue with his little daughter, Scotty, end quote. He was eventually able to get sober, apparently in part by drinking a lot of soda and eating a lot of sweets, but he died in 1940 in Los Angeles at the age of 44. And the book that we're going to be talking about today is The Beautiful and Damned, which is from 1922. It's the second novel, as I mentioned, he and Zelda got married in 1920. So it's a year and a half or two years into their marriage. And the two main characters, Anthony and Gloria, are apparently based on Fitzgerald himself and Zelda in the early years of their marriage. And just briefly, I also read This Side of Paradise, and I started Tender is the Night. I'm about halfway through it. So Fitzgerald has these four novels, and the most famous one by far is The Great Gatsby. And I read that in high school. I haven't reread it recently, so maybe I would like it more now. But if I had to rank them without reading them again, I think I would put The Beautiful and Damned and This Side of Paradise over The Great Gatsby. But again, I haven't read The Great Gatsby in probably 20 years, so I most likely didn't really understand it the first time. And if I had read either of these two when I was16 I probably wouldn't have found them very interesting. Though that might be less true for this side of paradise. That might be perfect for young people. There's something kind of happy and idealistic about it. The Beautiful and Damned is definitely a little bit more grim and you probably wouldn't get much out of it without a little more life experience. So I understand why they don't assign it to high schoolers. But I was pleased to find that F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a kind of one-hit wonder who wrote The Great Gatsby and then everything else is sort of weak. He was trying hard to listen for and record something and you can definitely get glimpses of it in his writing. And both for the timing of his novels 1920, 22, 25, and 34, but also the content, the stuff that he was dealing with. I think it's reasonable to anchor him to the 1920s in America and say that he was trying to get at something about that period that he was living in that certainly has application also to 2020s America. He was getting at a modern problem or a set of modern problems, parts of which are also bigger even than just the past century. If Cervantes had been able to read The Beautiful and Damned, parts of it would not have made any sense to him, but other parts would have, I think. And I always like to go over the biography of the writer briefly because it's very valuable to root the writing in the time and place that the writer was living in and see some of those connections and what he might have been thinking about and how he was reacting to his time and place. But with F. Scott Fitzgerald, that seems especially important for a number of reasons. One being that the 1920s in America were this particular period that was right after World War I, this historically unprecedented, horrifying nightmare, and right before the Great Depression and everything that was going to come in the 1930s and afterward. But in between, for a particular demographic, there was this period of wealth and it almost sometimes seems like a delirium of partying that was indifferent or even oblivious to the problems that other people were having and the rumbling that was going on underneath the surface that was going to erupt later. And Fitzgerald wasn't from a wealthy background. He was from a middle-class background. But with the success of his first book and his marriage to Zelda, he got himself into this upper-class world. But the second reason why Fitzgerald's biography is particularly important, I think, for his writing is that in Fitzgerald and Zelda, we have an anecdote about what the destination of that path might be. Fitzgerald becomes alcoholic, ends up doing hack work in Hollywood, then has a heart attack and dies at 44, and Zelda ends up in a psychiatric hospital diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now, it's of course not that simple for a number of reasons. For example, Fitzgerald, if he had been more dishonorable and just bailed on his wife when she got sick, he wouldn't have had the financial burden that he had, or he could have somehow pushed it onto somebody else. Presumably, her family had some money. I don't know if they were helping also. So, he stuck by her even when it was very difficult, and that's to his credit. And on the one hand, it would probably be unfair to turn Zelda's life into a moralistic tale and say, don't party too much or you'll get schizophrenia. But I do want to challenge what I've seen as the most common modern interpretation of these kinds of things that I see, and not that this is any credential really, but I have a grandparent who toward the end of her life was diagnosed with schizophrenia. And it was in the last few years of her life, and she led a relatively happy life up to that point. But without getting into her biography, there were aspects of her lifestyle and of the way that she thought, the way she interacted with the world around her that some people might say foreshadowed that later diagnosis, but you could also say that it may have contributed to it. And when you read old books, you'll sometimes see a character say, oh, don't worry so much. You're going to make yourself sick. And the initial modern reaction is that worrying doesn't make you sick. Germs make you sick. Viruses make you sick. Now, of course, doctors will tell you that stress of any kind weakens the immune system a little bit because the body moves resources around in order to deal with what it thinks is a short-term threat and then deal with the longer-term threat of disease later. And then chronic stress can weaken your immune system a lot. So, maybe doctors would say, yeah, there's actually something very solid in that folk wisdom in the 19th century novel that you're reading. And this is not to say that we only make ourselves sick with our minds or something like that, but neuroplasticity, the mind or the brain, the physical brain changing shape based on how it's used, not instantly, but gradually over time, is as far as I understand it, a pretty much established thing in neuroscience.But maybe Zelda Fitzgerald would have been schizophrenic, even if she had stayed with her family out in Montgomery, Alabama, or maybe something about her lifestyle contributed to her sickness. Because in The Beautiful and Damned, one of the things that you notice is that both of these two characters, Anthony and Gloria, are both pretty selfish and also pleasure-seeking, as well as hung up on the futility of life in different ways. We see a lot more of Anthony's inner world than Gloria's, but it comes out in Gloria as well. And they don't ever imagine that there might be a connection between those things. And this is a lesson that I think applies directly to life in the 2020s. It's worth taking a second to think about where memes are coming from in modern life. If we were living in the Frankish kingdom in the 6th century, and we were going to try to account for where the memes in the world were coming from to us, where are the ideas about the world coming from? What is pumping them out? We might say a lot of it is coming from the church. You have the clergy telling you stuff every week. If it's not a physical building, there's still religion as an influence in the society. Then there's probably market day where you go into the market and you sell your stuff and you buy stuff that you need. Then you have your friends and your family who have some of their own ideas about life that they've gotten from their own experience, but they're also influenced by these other things. Maybe you have troubadours who come through and will recite a poem about some epic hero while they accompany themselves on the loot. That's probably not a comprehensive list, but if we were going to do a pie chart of where a person in the 6th century's memes are coming from those are some of the major sources. Now, something that's pretty much not on that list is what in the modern parlance is called advertising. The closest you would come is that if you go to the market and the guy's going, oh, come and buy this thing. That's the closest thing that you have to advertising really. But in our time, this is a very significant source of our impressions about the world. And I don't say ideas because they're often not even fully formed ideas. If you see a cool looking guy wearing sunglasses and wearing a certain kind of shoes, that's not an axiom on which you build a worldview, but it affects you somehow. If you see it a hundred times, it's like sticking your thumb into a piece of clay. It makes an impression. And if you think of all the advertising you see every day and you take the aggregate of that over years and decades, you're talking about a very serious influence on you and your personality. And it's hard to know what you would be if that were just entirely gone. If since your childhood, none of that had ever happened, what person would you be? What would your ideas about the world be? How would you be different from who you are now? It's very difficult to know, but I think it's a very interesting question. But so this advertising is a very powerful force that's shaping people's minds. It's a very strong meme engine that didn't exist. 75 years ago, it hardly existed at all. And I don't really want to venture on when it started because that's a historical question and we'd have to look at the emergence of newspapers and how advertising progressed. But it's enough to say that it's relatively new and very influential. And what it's trying to do is to get you to buy something. And that buying is usually with money, but it's not only with money. It might be to get you to buy into an idea or to support one or another cause, which is only a metaphorical buying, but it's certainly related. But since the goal of that advertising is to get you to take a certain kind of action, it seems almost inevitable that the message that it's going to give you is something about you or something about individuals. It's gonna give a little story of one kind or another about a person. And you are going to want to be the kind of person that they present as favorable in one way or another. And all of this makes us very self-oriented. It makes us think about ourselves a lot. So we have this big, powerful meme engine that is focused on getting you to think about yourself in a certain way. But in getting you to do that, the side effect is that it's getting you to think about yourself. It sort of gets you to think about the community sometimes, but that's kind of secondary. So today, like these characters in The Beautiful and Damned, I think we are very selfish. We are very self-oriented. But there are two things that go with that. And I can't decide which one I think comes first. One is a sort of futility that maybe we'll look at a couple spots. Runs throughout The Beautiful and Damned. A view of life and work as being futile because you're just one little person and you're gonna die someday and nobody's gonna remember you. And so everything is meaningless. And it also leads to a kind of hedonism. Now, I'm not sure if the hedonism comes from imagining that the contents of your own mind are congruent with the boundaries of the universe. And so whatever is going on in your own mind is all that matters. And so if you're feelinghappy and experiencing pleasure, then everything is good. And if you're feeling bad, then everything is bad. It could be that. It could be that the selfishness leads directly to the hedonism, but it could also be that the selfishness leads to the futility. We are as individuals limited in a lot of ways. We are mortal. We have as much influence as we have on the world around us, not more or less. And that feeling of futility leads to a desire to escape that feeling, to forget it. And pleasure can be one way to do that temporarily, but it has diminishing returns. So something that the 1920s and the 2020s and maybe all of history shares is this triangle, however the points exactly connect to each other, of selfishness, hedonism, and futility. And it might be that that futility gets you to grasp it in Fitzgerald's case, alcohol. And in Zelda's case, I don't know. I don't want to make a claim about her life because I don't know anything about how she became sick, but it's easy to imagine how a kind of spiritual restlessness sustained over years and a decade could start to manifest itself physically in the brain, in how the wires are connected. If you're constantly trying to fill some hole that's unfillable or it can't be filled in the way that you're trying to fill it, over time, that could fester from a kind of general existential anxiety into schizophrenia under certain circumstances. And again, I'm not saying that's definitely what happened with Zelda, but if it didn't happen with her, it could have happened with someone else under similar circumstances. And all of this is not to say, naughty, naughty, you don't think so much about yourself. Go volunteer at the soup kitchen and everything will be fine. I mean, if you want to volunteer at the soup kitchen, obviously do that, but less than a moralistic finger wagging, this is more of a claim about how I think humans are. And so, if you act in accordance with how humans are, the human organism is more healthy and that generally shows itself subjectively in a sense of calm and quiet. And if you go against this way that humans are, then it will create all kinds of disharmony and problems, both individually and in the society. And maybe the shortest way to say that is to say that humans are a communal animal or being. We don't exist in isolation. We exist in groups. We are social, not in that we love to talk to people all the time. You can be introverted, but you are still social in that you exist in relation to other people. And without those relations, good and bad, you would be a different person from the one you are today. And I, like a lot of guys, went through a Nietzsche phase in my 20s. It wasn't too bad, but over the course of a year, I read a whole bunch of Nietzsche and I was really into it. And I still think that Nietzsche is very important and he's very enjoyable to read if nothing else, but he is a true philosopher and you have to be able to answer the questions that he poses if you don't agree with him. But one of the problems with this sort of intense individualism that Nietzsche proposes is that unless you were raised by wolves, unless you were dropped off in the forest and then figured out how to live entirely in isolation without anybody else, without your parents, without your friends, without the teachers that you've had, then you are connected to the society by all of these relations. And so, you can ignore that and you can say, no, I'm just a heroic individual and I go forth and do whatever I do based on my own impulses. But that's going to create an imbalance in justice in that you benefited from the society in some way and now you are forgetting the ways in which you benefited. And then Nietzsche might say, well, that's slave morality to worry about who helped you in the past. And by doing that, you're just worrying about the crowd coming to get you if you don't. It's more aristocratic to be indifferent to that kind of thing. And I guess maybe, but the problem is that I personally am interested in the ongoing project of civilization and that is a collective project. And that doesn't mean that people can't do individual artistic work, but this kind of radical individualism that you are at the bottom foundationally, spiritually separated from everybody else seems to me to be neither true nor useful, the former being more important. And because I'll take any excuse to read John Donne, no matter how flimsy, let's quickly read For Whom the Bell Tolls because it's applicable here. Quote, No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of thine own or of thine friends were. Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. End quote. And again, this is not at all to say that no one should ever break off from the collective creatively.or intellectually or artistically or politically. The crowd is often dumb and wrong and it's easy to manipulate. And it seems to me that a lot of the best work of the mind goes on individually. Even if you have 400 capable scientists working on some complicated physics thing, I think that most of the time they're not doing it in a conference room. They're going off and doing stuff and then they're bringing it together and showing each other and talking about it. It's just to say that if you are F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922 or whoever you are in 2024 and your time appears in any way to be divided between thinking about yourself, feeling that a lot of things are futile and also seeking pleasure, it might be because these things are connected. And also that that level of self-orientation is a weird modern perversion. It is something that is stoked by advertising and other things to benefit people who are not you. And it might be that the more natural way to live is a bit more communal and that doesn't mean to go off and join a cult or something, but to give a wider portion or to open up a portion if you don't have it of the pie chart of your time and attention, not only to your friends and your family, but to your community, hopefully to an offline community, to other people with whom you identify for one reason or another. And there's a lot of talk about green time, not screen time that get away from the devices and go out in the world and get out in nature and get around actual people because that will make you feel better. And that's only a part of what I'm saying. And it's probably the less important part because saying, because that will make you feel better is still self-oriented. It's still hedonistic in its own muted way. It's oriented around pleasure seeking. And of course it's good if being out in nature and around other people makes you feel good. But even if it's something healthier, doing something because it feels good does not answer the memento mori. It doesn't answer the problem of death, but a more community oriented outlook does, especially a community oriented outlook that stretches into the past and the future. In the beautiful and the damned at one point, two characters have an exchange and the context doesn't really matter here. One says, quote, you're crazy by your own statement, I should have attained some experience by trying. And the other says, trying what? Cried Mari fiercely, trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild despairing urge toward truth, sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life, staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate definitely and for all time the knowable from the unknowable, trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas, struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube, end quote. And all of the stuff that that character describes, trying to figure out truth, trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable, trying and maybe failing to recreate in art something beautiful that you saw in life, or working in science for decades in order to establish one specific thing that's only relatively true, all of this from the individual perspective sounds futile. And by the way, I think it's clear I'm saying futile F-U-T-I-L-E, obviously not futile F-E-U-D-A-L. Most scientists work very hard for a long time, and if they're lucky, they get to be the guy who established something very specific that most people outside the field don't even understand. And if you're an artist and you're trying your whole life to make something perfect, there's some quote of Verdi when he wrote Falstaff, he was like 80 years old, he was world famous by that time, and it was his last opera. And it's a comedy that ends with a 10-part fugue of people saying everything in the world is a jest, but he laughs well who laughs last. And I tried to find it, but I couldn't. But somewhere I read that he said about that opera that I tried one last time to make something perfect or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it was. This was years ago. And that's Verdi, one of the great musicians of history. But all he could say that he was doing was trying to make something perfect. Or even if you're a philosopher trying to tease out the knowable from the unknowable once and for all. All of these are tasks that, done individually, seem hopeless. But in the communal sense, they are worthwhile in that they contribute to the millimetric growth or improvement or development or refinement of civilization at its best, or they can be an effort toward that. But that's only possible if you view yourself as part of a group, as part of a community, as part of some kind of collective. And also, if you have that feeling that you are working for something that's not just you and your mortal coil, then you have a much higher tolerance for suffering because you have a reason for suffering. And if you don't, then you're always chasing after this elusive and undefined pleasure, which you sometimes call happiness. At one point, Gloria says to Anthony,Quote, I don't care about truth. I want some happiness and he says well If you've got a decent mind the second has got to be qualified by the first any simple soul can delude himself with mental garbage I don't care. She held out stoutly and what's more? I'm not propounding any doctrine and quote and I think it makes people more fragile in general But it maybe only shows itself as they get a little bit older something that appears a few times in the book is how Anthony As he turns 29 and 30 he changes a little at one point Fitzgerald writes quote this autumn as his 29th year began He was inclined to close his mind to many things to avoid prying deeply into motive and first causes and mostly to long Passionately for security from the world and from himself and quote and so as he turns 29 He is closing his mind and is less interested in investigation and more interested in Security and there's another related line that I'm going to read and then we'll talk about it a little later Fitzgerald writes quote Anthony patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure of Curiosity and had become an individual of bias and prejudice with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed And quote so those two lines are saying something related about how at a certain age Especially in your 20s. Well, maybe I shouldn't speak for everybody I know that in my 20s I was interested in a certain kind of adventure that involved being on planes a lot that in my 30s I'm not as interested in I find I have calmed down in a certain way and there are certainly External reasons for that you get married you buy a house you have kids all of which are wonderful things By the way, those are often referred to disparagingly, but I think they're all very good But they do affect your outlook and how you manage your life Now the place where I would disagree with Fitzgerald is that he seems to in these two lines and in other places in the book be connecting this kind of calm to a fading intellectual curiosity a waning Exploratory impulse the idea is that this kind of calm somehow excludes or precludes adventurous thought rather than being a Prerequisite for it in its most effective sense Which is what I have come to think that it is that when you're running around in your 20s And maybe some of you listening are in your 20s You certainly can think carefully about things but there are more obstructions to it or at least for me I feel that I'm better able to think carefully now than I was in my 20s and there may be a number of reasons for That one is definitely the novelty of things when you are still learning a lot of things for the first time Not that you don't learn in your 30s and 40s when you go out into the world and you have access to Everything for the first time it can be overwhelming and it takes a long time to just get used to all of that You learn that there is such a thing as Korean cinema if you've never heard of it before and that in history There are weird question marks like the Tunguska event and Because a lot of it is new and it takes time to just be exposed to all of it I think you are at least I was more vulnerable to Messaging coming in with something new and saying oh you ought to come over here and care about this thing And then that distracts you for a while because you've never heard of it before and it seems interesting but so probably a lot of people do Harden intellectually as they get older and there is another dynamic where as you have more Invested in a certain idea or a certain worldview if you've spent 10 years thinking a certain thing It is obviously much harder to let go of that idea than it would be if you'd only started thinking it three months ago but I don't think it has to be that way and I don't think it is that way in every individual case because the Other side of it is that it seems clear that the only way to do dispassionate detached skeptical diligent thorough patient analysis and investigation of anything is by starting from a place of calm steadiness So longing to be emotionally undisturbed Might be the perfect way to begin doing that not a sign that your ability to do that has ended or is ending But I guess I will leave it there as always There's a lot more that I wanted to get to or could have talked about but this is a very nice short book if you enjoyed the great Gatsby you could definitely read this and This side of paradise as I said, I haven't finished tender is the night yet So I can't say anything definitive about that one. But so far it's pretty good I'll just close by pointing out how this Writer who was named after the poet who wrote the star-spangled banner the American National Anthem came to write things reflective of or even a kind of desolate anthem for the destination of American individualist ideology not that it is not an ideal to be Individually strong and capable and be able to stand on your own feet and support yourself and your family But that extended to an unnatural extreme the principle of individualism as we've talked about might get you tangled up in some of these difficulties which are a major problem in American culture and society today, I would argue. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.