The Characters
Anthony Patch was intended by Fitzgerald to be a tragic character, but Anthony does not have enough substance for his fate to be tragic. At times, Fitzgerald treats Anthony satirically, as if Anthony is not to be taken seriously. Yet the moments of poignancy—especially in the love affair of Anthony and Gloria—undermine any satirical intent. At the end, the reader has confused feelings about Anthony, pitying him but believing that, after all, he brought about his own destruction.
Gloria Gilbert Patch is, in some ways, more sympathetic than Anthony. Gloria believes above all in the rights and privileges of her beauty. She believes in this with a passion that is lacking in Anthony’s supposed belief in his own undemonstrated intellectual and moral superiority. When she is forced, brutally, to recognize that her beauty is fading, she accepts it with a dignity of sorts. She is not crushed, as Anthony finally is.
Richard Caramel, who enjoys the kind of early literary success that Fitzgerald himself experienced, is too heedless to realize that he is compromising his talent as he churns out one popular book after another. He is incapable of recognizing that the success which he has achieved through compromise is not worth having. The character is, in some ways, a warning from Fitzgerald to himself, of what he feared he might become.
Maury Noble, supposedly based on the contemporary wit George Jean Nathan, is cynical enough to compromise with full awareness of what he is doing, although he knows the worthlessness of what he thereby achieves. His wit and philosophy are shallow, and Fitzgerald devotes all too much space to his orations. Yet his success, along with that of Caramel, forms a counterpoint to Anthony’s decline and fall.
Dorothy Raycroft, the nineteen-year-old South Carolina girl whom Anthony makes his mistress while he is stationed at the army camp, is sharply distinct from the other characters. Warmhearted, realistic, and sensible, she accepts her life with the ingrained stoicism of those who have no illusions. It is easy to see how Anthony becomes involved with her, although she possesses none of Gloria’s beauty or glamour.
Characters Discussed
Anthony Patch
Anthony Patch, a playboy and dilettante. Most of the novel is narrated from the point of view of this good-looking, intelligent, and fundamentally decent man and concerns his moral deterioration between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three. He stands to inherit the lion’s share of his grandfather’s estate, worth about $75 million. This inheritance has a debilitating effect on Anthony because it stifles any motive to do anything for himself, although he continues to entertain notions of writing about history. His parents died when he was a child, as did his paternal grandmother, who was rearing him in their stead. These tragedies left him with a chronic paranoid anxiety and help to explain why he is passive, immature, and lacking the aggressiveness to carve out a career for himself. With nothing serious to occupy his mind, he takes to drinking and becomes a hopeless alcoholic.
Gloria Gilbert Patch
Gloria Gilbert Patch, Anthony’s wife, three years his junior. Just as Anthony has never had to develop any strength of character because of his grandfather’s riches, Gloria has never had to develop any strength of character because of her remarkable beauty. She is spoiled, selfish, and narcissistic. She believes that her beauty conveys a certain nobility upon her, so that she does not have to do anything; she merely has to be. Gloria is the worst possible wife for Anthony because she is as feckless and incompetent as he. She is Fitzgerald’s...
(This entire section contains 672 words.)
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model of a flapper: She is one of the first socialites to bob her hair and wear daring fashions. When her beauty begins to fade with age and dissipation, she becomes a lost soul.
Adam Patch
Adam Patch, a millionaire and philanthropist, Anthony’s grandfather. In his prime, Patch was a ruthless businessman, but in his old age, with death staring him in the face, he suddenly develops a conscience and begins trying to reform the world. He advocates hard work and sobriety, virtues that his grandson completely lacks. When Anthony learns upon the old man’s death that he has been disinherited for his wild conduct, he and Gloria are thrown into desperate straits. Anthony continues squandering the meager capital he inherited from his mother and becomes involved in a seemingly endless lawsuit to overturn his grandfather’s will.
Richard Caramel
Richard Caramel, Gloria’s cousin and Anthony’s best friend, a successful novelist. Pudgy and unattractive but talented and warmhearted, Caramel graduated from Harvard with his head full of ideals about “service to humanity.” His first novel was a sincere work of art, but he gradually became corrupted by literary fame and the need to keep making money. His later works are potboilers, but he does not recognize them as such.
Maury Noble
Maury Noble, another of Anthony’s friends from Harvard days. This handsome, brilliant young man might have made important contributions to some branch of human thought but he can find no meaning in a mechanistic universe. He goes into business and becomes hardened and cynical while growing prosperous. He is another illustration of Fitzgerald’s thesis that the blind forces of nature have countless ways of corroding innocence and beauty.
Joseph Bloeckman
Joseph Bloeckman, a Jewish motion picture producer. He is in love with Gloria but loses her to Anthony, who appears to have more to offer in terms of wealth and social prestige. Bloeckman serves as a foil to Anthony: Through his brains and ambition, he acquires money, power, and even the upper-class polish that he initially lacked. His success in spite of disadvantages highlights Anthony’s weakness of character.
Dorothy Raycroft
Dorothy Raycroft, Anthony’s mistress during World War I. Anthony is sent to training camp in South Carolina, where he meets this pretty, unsophisticated country girl of nineteen. After the war ends, she follows him to New York and causes him to have a nervous breakdown by demanding his love when he is in the final stages of his character disintegration and has nothing left to give anyone.
Characters / Techniques
Besides Anthony, Gloria, and the elderly Adam Patch, who was an early friend of Anthony's, the main characters in The Beautiful and Damned include Maury Noble and Richard Caramel. Maury is cleverly depicted as having a feline appearance and behavior, while Richard plays a significant role in the story. These two men serve primarily as contrasts to Anthony. Initially, both are close companions to him and frequent party-goers. However, Richard soon becomes serious about his writing career, achieves success, and eventually drifts away from Anthony. Maury, on the other hand, continues to idle for a time but later begins working and earns substantial amounts of money. Throughout this period, except for a brief stint in the army, Anthony remains largely unproductive.
Gloria, recognized as one of Fitzgerald's portrayals of the quintessential flapper, gradually loses her beauty due to irregular hours, excessive drinking, and inactivity, eventually becoming a bitter and disappointed woman. Naturally, their marriage, which was built on the anticipation of wealth, deteriorates, especially after Adam discovers the couple hosting a wild, drunken party and disinherits his grandson. Nonetheless, the force that keeps them together, apart from their legal battle for a portion of the inheritance, is mere inertia. They argue frequently but lack the energy to separate.
By the end of the story, after a lengthy delay, they win the court case and are seen on an ocean liner, appearing old, exhausted, and depleted. Much ambiguity surrounds the meaning of Anthony's final words in the text: "'I showed them,' he was saying. 'It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through.'" If Anthony is referring solely to the court case, his statement is hollow. If the author implies that Anthony's life has been a purposeless struggle, the irony is complete. After all, Anthony has been refused a loan by Maury, severely beaten by Gloria's former suitor Joseph Bloeckman (whom he had mocked for years), and endured numerous humiliations.
The novel's techniques have garnered significant critical attention, ranging from the dramatic segments formatted like a script to the inserted items such as the dialogue between the essence of Beauty and a Heavenly Voice about where Beauty should next reside—ultimately on Gloria, as the plot reveals. The text is well-organized and progresses clearly, divided into three books, nine chapters, and numerous subsections with often witty and sarcastic titles that facilitate smooth transitions between plot developments.
The narrative perspective is primarily third person, with frequent shifts into the minds of Anthony and Gloria. The subsections often alternate between their perspectives, yet this technique does not compromise the plot's clarity. The storyline follows a mostly linear progression, with clear time markers indicating transitions between different periods in the plot. Consequently, a diligent reader can easily track the protagonists' nearly tragic and undeniably pathetic downfall. The novel strongly implies that if character determines fate, then life should not be taken lightly but lived with seriousness.
Critics had mixed opinions about the novel, but respected reviewers of the time, such as Edmund Wilson, saw significant value in it. Some even considered it an improvement over This Side of Paradise (1920).
