23.1.09

The Beautiful and Damned

I've been spending many a rainy, foggy afternoon lately reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. It is Fitzgerald's second novel, and it is fantastic; however, to read it is to fall in love with the characters and then watch them disintegrate before your eyes. They are young and happy, they fall in love, and then they are subjected to the horrors of life and time as their youth, beauty, money, and dreams evaporate. If it were not by Fitzgerald, and perhaps about Fitzgerald, I'd call it a reform novel of the prohibitionist era. But the reader concludes the tale of drinking, decadence, and depravity with no handy axioms on the drunkard's demise. Instead, the protagonists get exactly what they want, but time and tragedy have irreparably tarnished their long-sought treasure. They go through hell and back, but they emerge from the trials all the worse for wear. Far from tragic heroes, Anthony and Gloria are pitiable creatures who happen to be at the center of the story.

Here are a few passages I really enjoyed:
(This one is from early in the novel, when Anthony is just beginning to fall in love with Gloria. [One could fill volumes with speculation over whether Gloria ever falls in love with Anthony, or simply marries him because he properly worships her.])
After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason. He was in love--he cried it passionately to himself. The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.


(Fitzgerald keeps building our hopes for the lovers in passages such as this one, a description of their engagement.)
Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes--not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.


(Fitzgerald's focus in this and most of his other novels is on the American leisure class: wealthy young men who consider themselves somewhat above taking an occupation, and instead spend their days seeking novelty, amusement, beauty, and sensation. Anthony and his closest friends are members of this "class" at the beginning of the novel, but they eventually choose to do something with their time while Anthony waits, without ever really knowing for what he is waiting. The following passage is from the musing of Anthony's friend Maury, on the subject of his education in literature.)

"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do
with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition...


(The following also comes from Maury's rambling speech on society's institutions; this time, he tells a wry anecdote on the origin of religion.)

"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:
"'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.
"'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.'
"So the men did, and they died.
"But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible."

(Source for all above quotes: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/8batd10.txt)

15.1.09

82

I started reading Hocus Pocus as we were flying home for the holidays. I like to read Vonnegut on planes because his writing leaves me with a compassionate, if exasperated, outlook towards the walls of humanity surrounding me. I finished it just this afternoon, as I was sitting on my kitchen counter. Why the counter? The sheer pleasure I get from acting abnormally around my neighbors notwithstanding, there's a huge set of windows over the counter that look onto the vineyard in our back yard, and it really is the best seat in the house in the late afternoon, as the sun is setting over the mountains in its obscene technicolor glory. It's been like an early summer out here for the past few days, too. So: stunning view, balmy weather, satirical humanism--a truly winning combination.

I like Vonnegut's narrator's description of the Freethinkers, a group I'm sure Vonnegut associated himself with philosophically:
I have looked up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Willis, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community. (185)


Since Vonnegut's narrator is former "war hero," such optimism is frequently countered throughout the novel by morbid images of some of the worst atrocities in human history--say, concentration camps and atom bombs, to name a few. Vonnegut's narrator constantly daydreams about the infinite possibilities of what the world could be like, and of the ultimate purpose of human existence, and concludes, "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe" (324).

8.1.09

Belated wishes for a happy winer solstice from snowy California

 
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My wish is granted

As noted numerous times during the brief existence of this blog, I am a fan of the writings of Ken Kesey. I also mentioned that I'd like a copy of his absolutely psychedelic-looking jail journal. Well, since I married a wonderful man who not only tolerates but actually encourages my interest in such *ahem* non-traditional literature, I now own a copy of Kesey's Jail Journal in all its glossy, illustrated glory. Please forgive my holiday posting negligence and prepare for some lovely tidbits from my new book!