THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE WORKS OF
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Zelda Fitzgerald’s proposed dust jacket for The Beautiful andDamned.
Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University Libraries.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

* * *

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Edited by

JAMES L. W. WEST Ⅲ

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© 2007 Eleanor Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., and Charles Byrne, Trustees
under agreement dated 3 July 1975, created by Frances Scott Firzgerald Smith.
Introduction and notes © 2008 James L. W. West III.
This edition © 2008 Cambridge University Press

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2008

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

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ISBN 978-0-521-88366-5 hardback

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their continuing support, I thank Eleanor Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., and Chris Byrne, Trustees of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate. Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates, Inc., has been most helpful with permissions and copyright matters.

Illustrations are reproduced from originals in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. I wish particularly to thank Don Skemer, AnnaLee Pauls, and Margaret Sherry Rich of the library for their cheerful and expert assistance.

For supporting the Fitzgerald Edition I am most grateful to Susan Welch, Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, Ray  Lombra, Associate Dean for Research, and Robert L. Caserio, Head of the Department of English, at Pennsylvania State University. I thank also my energetic and able research assistants, past and present: LaVerne Kennevan Maginnis, Chris Weinmann, Audrey Barner, Jeanne Alexander, and Gregg Baptista—with special thanks to Gregg for his work on the chronology of The Beautiful and Damned.

J.L.W.W. III

ILLUSTRATIONS

(Beginning on p. 413.)

Frontispiece. Zelda Fitzgerald’s proposed dust jacket for the novel.

CHRONOLOGY OF COMPOSITION

INTRODUCTION

The Beautiful and Damned, published in 1922, was a pivotal book in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career. It was his second novel, falling between This Side of Paradise (1920), a popular and commercial success, and The Great Gatsby (1925), his masterpiece. The Beautiful and Damned shows Fitzgerald in transition between the crowded novel of saturation typical of H. G. Wells and Compton Mackenzie and the disciplined novel of selection done in the manner of Joseph Conrad and Henry James. It is a novel of its times—a probing satire of the Jazz Age, of which Fitzgerald was the self-appointed laureate. It is also a meditation on the necessity for a vocation in life, a calling that will give purpose to one’s hours and days. Parts of the book are hortatory, warning against the dangers of idleness and self-absorption and the perils of alcoholism. Fitzgerald began writing the novel in imitation of This Side of Paradise, attempting to mimic the techniques and themes of his exuberant first novel. Approximately halfway through, however, he shifted to a more tightly controlled style and, in the last few chapters, gave a glimpse of the verbal mastery he would demonstrate in The Great Gatsby.

1. COMPOSITION

In July 1920, four months after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote the words “Beginning novel” in his personal ledger.¹ In a 12 August letter to his publisher, Charles Scribner Ⅱ, he revealed his title and gave an account of the narrative that he had under way:

My new novel, called “The Flight of the Rocket,” concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33d years (1913–1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book + I hope won’t dissapoint the critics who liked my first one. I hope it’ll be in your hands by November 1st.²

   A complete holograph of the novel survives in Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton University Library.⁴ It is a composite document, mostly handwritten but with some typescript sheets interleaved, apparently after the novel was published. Fitzgerald composed in pencil on unlined leaves of inexpensive paper measuring approximately 8½ × 11 inches. During a typical stint he would produce twenty-five or thirty leaves; occasionally he was capable of longer bursts. His practice was to send packets of fifty leaves or so to the typist and to continue composing in longhand. Fitzgerald could not type; his handwritten directions to the typist, a Miss Oehler, are found throughout the manuscript.

   This manuscript was superseded by various typescript drafts which Fitzgerald revised in February and March. During these months he showed the novel to a friend from his undergraduate years at Princeton University—the critic Edmund Wilson. In February, Fitzgerald wrote to Wilson and offered humorous suggestions about the kinds of comments he might make:

The kind of critisism I’d like more than anything else—if you find you have the time, would be; par example

P. 10x I find this page rotten

P. 10c Confused!⁵

   Wilson was correct: Fitzgerald had drawn heavily on his marriage to Zelda Sayre in writing The Beautiful and Damned. Gloria herself is modeled on Zelda; Fitzgerald took Gloria’s looks, her insouciance, and much of her unconventional behavior from his own wife. He appropriated some passages from Zelda’s diary and letters for his novel, and he transferred Zelda’s aspirations to be a movie actress to Gloria.⁷ Fitzgerald based two other characters on his friends. Dick Caramel resembles Edmund Wilson in appearance; Maury Noble is patterned after the drama critic George Jean Nathan, who co-edited The Smart Set with H. L. Mencken. Fitzgerald also took some of the settings for his novel from his own life. He and Zelda had lived in an apartment on West 59th Street in New York City from the fall of 1920 to the spring of 1921; Anthony and Gloria live in a similarly located apartment on 52nd Street in the novel. The grey bungalow in which the Patches live in The Beautiful and Damned is a rendering of the grey bungalow rented by the Fitzgeralds in Westport, Connecticut, from May to September 1920. The real-life Japanese houseboy Tana, who worked for the Fitzgeralds in Westport, becomes a character of the same name in the novel. The Beautiful and Damned is not a roman à clef, but it has characteristics of the form.⁸

In March 1921, Fitzgerald and Zelda traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, her home town. Fitzgerald took along a complete typescript of The Beautiful and Damned and continued to revise; while in Montgomery he found himself dissatisfied with the final chapter and decided to rewrite it completely. By April he had finished the task and, on the 22nd of the month, sent Part Ⅰ of the novel to his literary agent, Harold Ober, who was offering the serial rights to Metropolitan Magazine.⁹ Ober made the sale for $7,000. With the first payment from the magazine in hand, the Fitzgeralds departed for Europe on the liner Aquitania on 3 May. While there (in  England, France, and Italy) Fitzgerald kept in touch by letter and cable with Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners, but did no further work on the novel.

2. SERIALIZATION

By late summer the Fitzgeralds had returned and were reading the first installment of The Beautiful and Damned in Metropolitan. Fitzgerald was unhappy with the text: Carl Hovey, the editor of the magazine, had abbreviated the early chapters, cutting descriptive passages and philosophical asides and concentrating almost entirely on action and plot.¹⁰ Damage was done to characterization: much of Anthony’s dissolute behavior was removed, for example, and Gloria, though still beautiful and unconventional, has little sexual allure in the serial. Much of the satire was blunted, and the criticisms of religiosity in the sections dealing with Anthony’s grandfather, the reformer Adam Patch, were lost.

   This pattern of cutting and bleaching was carried through by Hovey and his staff from the first installment, published in September 1921, through the final installment, which appeared in March 1922. Fitzgerald made no formal protest; he understood that such treatment was to be expected from a large-circulation middlebrow magazine. The St. Paul journalist Thomas Boyd interviewed him in March and asked about the cuts. Fitzgerald responded, “Well . . . they bought the rights to do anything they liked with it when they

Front cover of the September 1921 issue of
Metropolitan Magazine, containing the first installment of
The Beautiful and Damned.
Princeton University Libraries.

3. PROOFING AND REVISION

In October, Fitzgerald turned his attention from the butchered serial text, which he could not control, to the book version, which he could. The Beautiful and Damned had been typeset at the Scribners printing plant in late September; by early October, Perkins was sending galley proofs to the author. Fitzgerald reworked the text extensively in galleys, cutting and revising many passages and inserting new text. “Its a changed book from the serialized version as I’ve almost rewritten parts of it since I came home this summer,” Fitzgerald told Ober on 29 November (As Ever, Scott Fitz—, p. 31).

   At this point in the proofing of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald and Perkins had a disagreement. At issue was a passage in Book Two of the novel, an extended speech by the character Maury Noble in which he argues that the Bible was a fabrication by “all the men of mind and genius in the world” (257). Perkins explained his objections to the passage in a 6 December 1921 letter to Fitzgerald:

   I think almost every change you have made in “The Beautiful and Damned” has been a good one except that passage about the Bible. I made a comment on the proof on that point, and I cannot add much to it. I think I know exactly what you mean to express, but I don’t think it will go. Even when people are altogether wrong, you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity. . . . What Maurey says is quite consistent with his character but this will seem to have been your point of view and I don’t think it would be that.

   (Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 45)

   Though Fitzgerald must have been aware of these concerns, he resisted Perkins’ request that Maury’s speech be softened. On 10 December he wrote the editor a long letter defending his rights as an author. In the letter Fitzgerald cited several writers who had been critical in print of religion—Voltaire, Samuel Butler, Anatole France, George Moore, G. B. Shaw, James Branch Cabell, and Mark Twain. Fitzgerald was fresh from a reading of Van Wyck Brooks’ The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), a book in which Brooks had criticized Twain for toning down his manuscripts at the request of his wife, Olivia, and of his editor at Harpers, William Dean Howells. “If it was an incident which I felt had no particular literary merit I should defer to your judgement without question,” wrote Fitzgerald, “but that passage belongs beautifully to that scene and is exactly what was needed to make it more than a beautiful setting for ideas that fail to appear.” Fitzgerald closed the letter to Perkins with this request: “Please write me frankly as I have you—and tell me if you are speaking for yourself, for the Scribner Co. or for the public. I am rather upset about the whole thing” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 46–47).

   Perkins responded quickly and emphatically. “Don’t ever defer to my judgment,” he wrote. “You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed, if it were possible to have made you; for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself. I should hate to play . . . the W. D. Howells to your Mark Twain.” Perkins explained that he had no objection to the substance of the passage but was put off by its flippancy. “I hope this gets over to you,” he added. “If I saw you for ten minutes I know you would understand and would agree with me” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 47).

   Fitzgerald was persuaded by Perkins’ letter and wrote back a few days later to apologize. He revised the offending words, changing three instances of “godalmighty” to “Deity,” cutting the word “bawdy,” revising the phrase “simile for silly” to “byword for laughter,” and making other revisions. The altered version appears in the Scribners edition of The Beautiful and Damned, but to satisfy himself Fitzgerald published the passage in unemended form in the February 1922 issue of H. L. Mencken’s magazine The Smart Set, under the title “The Far-Seeing Skeptics.” Both texts are available in this edition—the emended version in Book Two of the novel (pages 216–17 of the Cambridge text) and the magazine text in the Appendix.

4. THE ENDING

Fitzgerald had difficulty with the ending of The Beautiful and Damned. Three versions survive: one from the manuscript, a second in the serialized text, and a third in the published book. The ending in manuscript is an echo of the early sub-chapter “A Flash-back in Paradise,” in which Gloria’s quasi-divine origins are revealed:

   That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of many generations of sparrows doubtless recorded the subtlest verbal inflection made upon such a ship as the Imperator. And unquestionably the allseeing Eyes must have been present at a certain place in Paradise something over a year before—when Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, came back from earth into a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars greeted her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft welcoming flurry in her hair. Sighing, she began a conversation with a voice that was in the white wind.

“Back again,” the voice whispered

   That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of many generations of sparrows seems to us to be content with the moral judgments of man upon fellow man. If there is a subtler and yet more nebulous ethic somewhere in the mind, one might believe that beneath the sordid dress and near the bruised heart of this transaction there was a motive which was not weak but only futile and sad. In the search for happiness, which search is the greatest and possibly the only crime of which we in our petty misery are capable, these two people were marked as guilty chiefly by the freshness and fullness of their desire. Their disillusion was always a comparative thing—they had sought glamor and color through their respective worlds with steadfast loyalty—sought it and it alone in kisses and in wine, sought it with the same ingenuousness in the wanton moonlight as under the cold sun of inviolate chastity. Their fault was not that they had doubted but that they had believed.

   . . . The story ends here.

5. PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION

The Beautiful and Damned was formally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on 4 March 1922 at $2.00 a copy. In anticipation of a large sale, Scribners had executed a first printing of 20,600 copies in January; demand for the book was heavy enough to justify a  second printing of 19,750 in March and a third printing of 10,000 in April.¹³ No plate changes were introduced into the text for either of these printings. Remaindered gatherings, and possibly some newly manufactured ones, were bound up and sold by the reprint house of A. L. Burt in 1924. Screen rights went to Warner Brothers and provided Fitzgerald with a windfall of $2,500. Newspaper “second serials,” which offered chunks of the novel on the back pages of the New York Daily News and the Washington Herald, brought in small reprint fees ($250 from each newspaper) but, more importantly, put the text of The Beautiful and Damned into the hands of thousands of readers who likely would never have purchased the clothbound edition.¹⁴

   Reviews of The Beautiful and Damned were mixed. Fitzgerald was praised for his powers of observation and description, but many critics complained about moralizing and didacticism. Nearly every reviewer found Anthony and Gloria to be unattractive. Only a few reviews were as positive as Harry Hansen’s in the Chicago Daily News: he judged The Beautiful and Damned to be “a whale of a book” and predicted that Fitzgerald would become “one of the major novelists of our own time” (15 March 1922: 12). H. L. Mencken praised The Beautiful and Damned in an omnibus review in the Smart Set: “There are a hundred signs in it of serious purpose and unquestionable skill,” he wrote. “Fitzgerald ceases to be a Wunderkind, and begins to come into his own” (April 1922: 141). Most of the reviews in New York newspapers and journals were mixed or negative. Henry Seidel Canby, in the Literary Review of the New York Post, called the novel “an irresponsible social document” and “a pathetic story” (4 March 1922: 463). Writing in the New York Globe, N. P. Dawson praised Fitzgerald for his “nat-ural talent”—great enough, Dawson thought, to excuse the “defects and extravagances” of this novel (4 March 1922: 10). John Peale Bishop, who had been friendly with Fitzgerald at Princeton, offered qualified praise in a long review for the New York Herald: the novel “represents both in plan and execution an advance on This Side of Paradise,” he wrote. “If, stylistically speaking, it is not so well written, neither is it so carelessly written (5 March 1922: sec. 8, p. 1). And Fanny Butcher, an influential reviewer at the Chicago Sunday Tribune, thought that The Beautiful and Damned had “all the technical faults” of This Side of Paradise but lacked its “inherent reality” (5 March 1922: part 8, p. 15).¹⁵

6. THE BRITISH EDITION

The Beautiful and Damned appeared in Great Britain on 28 September 1922 under the imprint of W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., the same firm that had published the British editions of Fitzgerald’s previous two books—This Side of Paradise and the short-story collection Flappers and Philosophers. The novel did reasonably well for Collins: it was reprinted twice and sold some 899 copies at home and 335 on the export market.¹⁶ The type for the Collins edition was freshly set—the only resetting of The Beautiful and Damned to appear during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. This would have given him an opportunity to revise the text if he had wished to. A collation of the Scribners first printing against the Collins first printing has brought to light these four cuts, keyed here to the Cambridge text. 24.27–25.3 ANTHONY . . . MAURY: 27.10–28 DICK . . . intelligences. 30.7–32.6 A FLASH-BACK . . . Anne’s.) 214.32–36 In this . . . prosperity.

The collation has also uncovered fourteen substantive variants. The authority for the cuts is unknown; the substantive changes, with one exception, look to be the work of a Collins copy-editor. The exception occurs at 152.5, where the words “tall steeple” from the  Scribners text read “hilarious steeple” in the Collins edition—perhaps an authorial variant, though there is no document extant to confirm that possibility. The cuts might have been ordered by Fitzgerald in a lost communication (the Collins archives no longer survive), but these cuts might just as easily have been made by the British editors to speed along the narrative and to remove the improbable subsection “A Flash-back in Paradise,” in which Gloria’s celestial origins, as an incarnation of Beauty, are told. The final cut, on p. 214, was almost surely made by the British publisher to remove an offensive comment by Maury Noble.

In the absence of any mention of these changes either in the Scribners archives or in Fitzgerald’s correspondence, it has been judged best not to incorporate them into the Cambridge text. An unpublished letter in the Scribners archive at Princeton from Perkins to Fitzgerald, dated 26 October 1921, indicates that Scribners sent page proofs to Collins to serve as setting copy—not the first printing, which had not yet been manufactured. Thus the “hilarious steeple” variant might represent an earlier form of the text, not a later one. It would have been against customary practice for Fitzgerald to receive proofs for the Collins edition; no mention of such proofs is made in his correspondence with Scribners or in other letters. It is therefore unlikely that he made these changes in proofs.

   As with most British resettings of American texts during the 1920s, the accidentals were restyled by the British publisher. Words ending in -or and -ize were altered to -our and -ise forms; “Hello” became “Hallo,” “curb” became “kerb,” and “check” became “cheque.” A great many compound words from the Scribners edition were hyphenated in the Collins text, and punctuation was rendered in the British fashion. None of these changes is adopted for the Cambridge text. All cuts and substantive changes in the Collins text, together with a representative selection of accidental variants, have been included in a separate table in the apparatus.

7. EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

The extant witnesses for the text of The Beautiful and Damned are the manuscript at Princeton, the serialized version from  Metropolitan Magazine, the Scribners first American edition of March 1922, and the Collins first British edition of September 1922. Fitzgerald preserved copies of This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night into which he marked post-publication textual emendations, but no such copy of The Beautiful and Damned is known to survive. The three impressions from the Scribners first-edition plates are textually identical; Fitzgerald appears to have ordered no plate alterations, as he did for both This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.¹⁷ No corrections lists compiled by Fitzgerald are known to survive; his correspondence with Perkins after publication does not contain requests for plate changes.

No formal copy-text has been declared for this edition of The Beautiful and Damned. This practice is congruent with that of previous volumes in the series; for the theoretical underpinning to this approach, see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Editing without a Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography, 47 (1994): 1–22.¹⁸ The text that most nearly reflects Fitzgerald’s intentions for his novel is the Scribners first edition. The surviving manuscript constitutes a separate version, unsuitable as a base text. (This manuscript, however, has been useful in establishing the accidental texture of the Cambridge text.) The Metropolitan serial, abbreviated and sanitized, represents an intermediate stage of the text over which Fitzgerald had little control. The Collins text contains some intriguing variants but cannot be regarded as a final, revised form of the text approved by Fitzgerald. The Scribners first edition therefore serves as the base text; corrections and emendations in that text are recorded in the apparatus.

8. CHRONOLOGY:

Fitzgerald managed the chronology of The Beautiful and Damned almost without error. The major action of the novel, incorporating several flashbacks, covers more than thirty years. Anthony is born is 1888, Gloria in 1891; Anthony enrolls at Harvard in 1905 and graduates in 1909, shortly before he turns twenty-one. He is introduced to Gloria in November 1913, proposes to her in April 1914, and marries her in June of that year. He enters the army in October 1917 and is discharged in November 1918. Prohibition comes in July 1919 but does not slow Anthony’s drinking in 1920 and 1921. The verdict on Adam Patch’s disputed will is rendered in March 1922; Anthony suffers a mental breakdown in that same month—the month in which The Beautiful and Damned was published by Scribners, a fictional contrivance by Fitzgerald. In the summer of 1922, Anthony and Gloria embark on the Berengeria, a luxury liner, and the novel ends.

   In his only significant lapse Fitzgerald has assigned three different birthdays to Gloria.¹⁹ On p. 164 of the Cambridge text we learn that she “would be twenty-four in August.” On p. 231 we are told that “Gloria would be twenty-six in May.” And near the end of the novel, once on p. 323 and twice on p. 325, we read that she would be “twenty-nine in February.” It might be argued that Gloria is a creature of fantasy, not a real woman. In the early sub-chapter “A Flash-Back in Paradise,” we are told that Beauty is “born anew every hundred years” (p. 30), and that Beauty will be incarnate in Gloria for fifteen years—from her fifteenth birthday to her thirtieth. It might be argued that Fitzgerald gave Gloria three different birthdays to suggest an otherworldly status for her, but this seems improbable. It is more likely that Fitzgerald simply forgot the month of her birth as he moved along with the composition of the novel.

Attempts to straighten out Gloria’s birthday by emendation have failed. Pegging her birthday to one of the three possible months—February, for example—requires tinkering with the text beyond  normal editorial practice. Fitzgerald uses Gloria’s advancing age in a suggestive way throughout the novel; it changes our sense of her development if the months and the numbers are altered. On p. 164, he writes: “But Gloria—she would be twenty-four in August and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to thirty!” Something is disturbed if the editor emends “twenty-four” to “twenty-five,” then changes “August” to “February” and “Six” to “Five.” Furthermore, the passage falls in a scene that takes place in the spring of 1915. As Fitzgerald originally wrote it, Gloria sees her birthday approaching in a few months, in August. If her birthday is moved to February by emendation, then she has only recently turned twenty-four in the scene, and her next birthday is nine or ten months away, too far in the future to be of concern to her yet. For these reasons, no emendations have been made in the chronology of the novel.

9. REGULARIZATIONS:

Like most writers, Fitzgerald was inconsistent in orthography, punctuation, and word division. His most common word divisions and spellings have been established by reference to his surviving holographs; these forms (“good-bye,” for example, and “anybody”) have been regularized in this edition. Fitzgerald leaned toward American spellings and conventions of pointing, but he did prefer some British spellings—“glamour,” “biasses,” and “theatre,” for example, and “grey,” an adjective that appears frequently in The Beautiful and Damned. These British spellings have been allowed to stand in the text. Scribners used a quasi-British house style that employed such forms as “to-day,” “to-morrow,” “text-book,” “centre,” “favour,” “criticise,” and “near-by”—none of them characteristic of Fitzgerald’s usage. In these cases the Cambridge text has been regularized to the American forms that Fitzgerald preferred.

   Fitzgerald used italics for the names of ocean liners, for some words in languages other than English, and for emphasis. Usually he enclosed the titles of books and the names of magazines or  newspapers in double quotation marks. This practice has been followed in this volume, as it has been in previous volumes of the series. Numbers of cross-streets in New York City are given in  Arabic numerals; numbers of avenues are spelled out. “Mother” and “Father” as proper names are capitalized. Names of seasons are in lower-case; years are in Arabic numerals. Question marks and exclamation points following italicized words are italicized.