Abstract
In his letter to Frances Newman in February, 1921, Fitzgerald admitted that when he had begun This Side of Paradise his “literary taste was so unformed that Youth’s Encounter was still [his]... ‘perfect book.’“1 This remark reveals that Fitzgerald himself believed rather early that he had “outgrown” the immaturity of such literary opinions. Edmund Wilson has suggested somewhat precisely the cause and nature of the change in Fitzgerald’s attitude toward the novel between This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922)2: “Since writing ‘This Side of Paradise’ — on the inspiration of Wells and Mackenzie — Fitzgerald has become acquainted with another school of fiction: the ironical-pessimistic.” This new “genre” in general favor, asserts Wilson, is “the kind which makes much of the tragedy and the meaninglessness of life. Hitherto, [Fitzgerald] had supposed that the thing to do was to discover a meaning in life; but he now set bravely about to produce a distressing tragedy which should be, also, 100 per cent meaningless.”3 Wilson might have added that this “school of fiction,” if it was a school, had as its chief spokesmen H. L. Mencken, and that it was probably through Mencken that Fitzgerald was introduced to the new “genre.”
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References
Newman, op. cit., p. 41.
The Beautiful and Damned was serialized in The Metropolitan Magazine from September, 1921, to March, 1922. Fitzgerald was still revising his novel, however, after it began appearing as a serial. On November 25, 1921, he wrote to Edmund Wilson (The Crack-Up, p. 256): “I have almost completely rewritten my book.”
Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., pp. 23–24.
Fitzgerald, “The Baltimore Anti-Christ,” The Bookman, LIII (March, 1921), 81.
Thomas A. Boyd, “Scott Fitzgerald Speaks at Home,” St. Paul Daily News, December 4, 1921.
Thomas A. Boyd, “Literary Libels: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald,” St. Paul Daily News, March 5, 1922.
H. L. Mencken. Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), p. 41.
Ibid., pp. 39–41.
Fitzgerald, “How to Waste Material,” The Bookman, LXIII (May, 1926), 263.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., pp. 25–29.
Fitzgerald, “Three Soldiers,” St. Paul Daily News, September 25, 1921. Not only Mencken’s ideas but also the Menckenesque style here is striking.
Fitzgerald, “Poor Old Marriage,” The Bookman, LIV (November, 1921), 253.
Ibid., p. 254.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 256.
Wells, “The Contemporary Novel,” op. cit., pp. 862–63.
Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Tears’ War (New York: Corici, Friede Publishers, 1930), pp. 43–44.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, pp. 254–57.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), pp. viii–xi.
Ibid., pp. ix–x.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., pp. 61–62.
Ibid., p. viii.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 260.
Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age, p. 151.
Ibid., pp. 183–86.
Henry Seidel Canby, “The Flapper’s Tragedy,” The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, II (March 4, 1922), 463.
“A Dance of the Midges,” The Literary Digest, LXXIV (July 15, 1922), 53.
Louise Maunsell Field, “The Beautiful and Damned,” The New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1922, p. 16.
Burton Rascoe, “Novels from the Younger Men,” The Bookman, LV (May, 1922), 305.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 258.
Thomas A. Boyd, “Literary Libels: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald,” op. cit.
Ibid.
Quotations from The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922) are located in the text by page number in parentheses.
Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., p. 24.
Woodward Boyd, “The Fitzgerald Legend,” St. Paul Daily News, December 10, 1922.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and Damned,” The Metropolitan Magazine, LV (March, 1922), 113.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 256.
Fitzgerald, “The Baltimore Anti-Christ,” op. cit., p. 80.
Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, pp. 65–78.
Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., p. 24.
H. W. Boynton, “Flashlight and Flame,” The Independent and the Weekly Review, CVIII (April 22, 1922), 397.
Carl Van Doren, “The Roving Critic,” The Nation, CXIV (March 15, 1922), 318.
Paul Rosenfeld, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., p. 321.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 258.
Oscar Cargill, in Intellectual America (p. 349), said that “the advancement of the story by the inclusion of passages from Gloria’s diary in The Beautiful and Damned... [was] suggested by the work of Joyce.” Joyce used the diary- device at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Fitzgerald was probably familiar with the novel. But Fitzgerald had another possible source for the diary. Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in her review of The Beautiful and Damned (“Friend Husband’s Latest,” New York Tribune, April 2, 1922, p. 11) said, “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.”
Vivian Shaw, “This Side of Innocence,” The Dial, LXXII (April, 1922), 421.
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Miller, J.E. (1957). The Beautiful and Damned. In: The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald. International Scholars Forum. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6621-0_2
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