Читать книгу The Beautiful and Damned - Френсис Скотт Фицджеральд, Френсис Скотт Кэй Фицджеральд - Страница 5
ОглавлениеFitzgerald’s books provide a curious window into a world that has been and gone. A world where elements of US society had drowned themselves in a moral and ethical sump. His novels are a warning about what can happen when people become decadent and dishonourable, and appeal because the reader enjoys voyeuristically peering in to view the lives of those who are ridiculed as being exotic, foolish and beguiled, and is grateful not to be a part of it.
There is a moral judgement involved in the process of reading such stories and Fitzgerald’s work can be compared to that of the British author Thomas Hardy, who takes the same view that people tend to get what they deserve in life and that the real victims are those who get caught up, either by accident or by attraction. There is a definite register of contempt penned by both of these authors, as if to suggest that they have chosen to point the spotlight at those for whom they have little time in real life.
As its title suggests, The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is about the superficiality of café society in New York during the Jazz Age. This was the period when jazz music became hugely popular, when the smart set enjoyed living to excess in the heady days before the Great Depression. Fitzgerald observed that these people were often attractive and glamorous in appearance, but flawed and shallow in personality. He isn’t simply writing a condemnation of fey types, however, as the novel is essentially autobiographical, about himself and his wife Zelda.
In fact, Fitzgerald is clever enough to illustrate that this apparent superficiality is underscored by profound character complexity. The overt superficiality veils a covert diversity of hang-ups, anxieties, desires, needs, neuroses, passions, emotions, ambitions and failings. In short, the novel is a dissection of human nature, which is fundamentally the same in any social group, no matter what the outward impression.
Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s view is a rather unsympathetic one. He regards this social set as destined for personal disaster, because they are too subjectively obsessed to be objective about life. As a result, they lack the ability to save themselves from their indulgences, both internal and external. Ultimately Fitzgerald is saying that they lack the ingredients to keep themselves grounded, leaving their priorities in disarray. Their failure to reflect and maintain perspective on life means they inevitably lack the wisdom to make the right decisions and consequently they head for a fall.
It is this insight and analysis that makes Fitzgerald a great writer – he is just as interested in the human condition as he is in telling an entertaining story. The Beautiful and Damned is really a self-morality play, as the consequences it presents are self-impacting. The sub-society he describes is self-contained, like fermenting yeast in a demijohn, destined to destroy itself with the products of its own metabolism.
Later Works
There can be few novels as divisive as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in terms of people’s opinion of its literary worth. It registered disappointing sales upon its publication in 1925 which led to Fitzgerald slipping into obscurity despite his having established a reasonable reputation with his earlier books. Following his death, in 1940, the book was included on a list of titles to be provided free to US service men and women fighting in World War Two. This meant that 150,000 copies began circulating through the armed forces until the book became familiar to overseas Americans. As a result it had inadvertently worked its way into the American psyche and won favour where otherwise it would have been forgotten.
The story itself is essentially about the moral decay that ensued in America during the 1920s. Although other countries had class divisions, the US had the equivalent of an upper class in the form of patricians or members of long-established wealthy families. These New World aristocrats lorded themselves above other people and spent much of their lives partying their way through the Jazz Age. In addition, 1920 had seen the prohibition of alcohol, with the result that organized criminals had seen a way to make good money by bootlegging, or illegally selling liquor. When both of these groups came together they formed a social order of dilettantism – people who assumed and cultivated pretensions of sophistication. The story of The Great Gatsby spirals into tragedy as the book progresses with a succession of events – manslaughter, murder and then suicide – tragedy that seems all the more horrific after the spirited and frothy excesses that have come before.
In stark contrast to The Great Gatsby came Fitzgerald’s final novel Tender is the Night (1934), which is autobiographical at its heart. At the time of writing the book Fitzgerald’s wife was being treated for schizophrenia and the author holed-up in a house near the hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. There he wrestled with the book and indulged his alcoholism, from which he had suffered for most of his adult life. The story is about a couple who become involved because he is a psychoanalyst and she his patient. She is wealthy and fragile of mind, while he is poor and strong of mind. However, the tables are eventually turned as he becomes dependent on the demon drink and his behaviour sends him on a downward spiral, while she finds someone else and divorces him for a better life.
There are evidently themes in the book that run a close parallel with the real lives of the Fitzgeralds, so it seems that the author used the work as a way of unloading his darkest thoughts. It wasn’t so much a catharsis as a confessional, for Fitzgerald was laying his human flaws and desires bare for all to see, admitting that he had a drink problem and that his wife was his crutch. He was also known to have financial problems due to his frivolities and extravagancies and had turned to other women to satisfy his emotional and carnal desires. Much of his relationship with his wife had been spent as an amateur psychoanalyst, helping her to deal with her diminishing sanity.
Just six years after Tender is the Night was published, Fitzgerald was dead. His self-abuse had caught up with him at the age of only 44 years old, with a massive cardiac arrest. It seems that his last book was also a prophecy of his impending demise from alcohol. It was only a matter of time before his mortal being abandoned his immortal ambition. Fitzgerald the legendary writer has now outlived Fitzgerald the man several times over.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Fitzgerald was friends with arguably the greatest American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway encouraged Fitzgerald to pursue his prose with artistic integrity, but grew frustrated with Fitzgerald’s tendency towards making his literature commercial. However, most of Fitzgerald’s novels did not perform that well, so a large part of his income came from magazine work, writing short stories which, by their very nature, had to conform to editorial requirements. Nine years after The Great Gatsby, he had struggled to complete his final novel, Tender is the Night. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald the book was received with disappointment and the decline of his writing career continued unabated. In the latter half of the 1930s he found work developing movie scripts and carried out further commercial writing. By the time of his death his literary career had died, too.
In hindsight Fitzgerald’s work is regarded variously, but The Great Gatsby has become the quintessential American classic. Some feel that Fitzgerald’s talent would have been better focused on his novel writing, but fiscal matters always dictated that he continue with his commercial work. However, Hemingway may have been a heavyweight writer but he was certainly not a contented man. For him the praise he garnered for each new book was a fix. When he ran out of ideas he suffered severe depression and ultimately took his own life with a shotgun. Fitzgerald battled on in a workmanlike manner even when plaudits were a distant memory.
