Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other's hearts.

The Beautiful and Damned  by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Originally published in 1922

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The Beautiful and Damned, or TBAD, as I've nicknamed it, is about lots of things, according to the back of my copy, and the interwebs, and basically everyone who's anyone. I can only tell you what I think it's about, which doesn't necessarily align with all of those other people.

It chronicles a bachelor, Anthony Patch, as he dabbles in doing absolutely nothing, and eventually stumbles into his partner-in-nothing-doing, Gloria Gilbert, who happens to be the cousin of his good friend Richard (Dick) Caramel. Anthony and Dick have one more friend in their little coterie, Maury Noble. I think they all went to Harvard together? Some Ivy League school that apparently prepared Maury and Dick to be relatively useful members of society but not Anthony.

The middle of the book is basically a bacchanal. Anthony and Gloria and friends go out dancing, drinking, eating, in the low-low budget city of New York (lolz) and fritter away every dime they have. Anthony is operating under the assumption that his grandfather, a big society reformer, will be leaving him his gazillions of dollars. However, one night, Anthony's grandfather surprises him when he and Gloria and co. are having a party, and guess who's a BIG TIME PROHIBITIONIST? That's right, good old grandpappy.

By this point, Anthony and Gloria are married (their courtship and relationship is a veritable volcanic rollercoaster that just never stops plummeting from nadir to apex, but I guess we're "happy for them" about getting hitched?) and SOOPRIZE, Mr. Grandfather Patch says "No more money for you!" Anthony and Gloria try to sweettalk their way back into his good graces, but then he kicks the bucket, and they're left holding the bag. (Am I mixing metaphors? Probably. Do I care? Not a whit.)

So the good old penniless pair (and by penniless I mean they can't afford that fur coat Gloria really wants) proceeds to launch a long lawsuit to try to get the grandfather's money anyway. During the course of the lawsuit, Anthony gets drafted into WWI, Gloria breathes easier with Anthony gone, Anthony has an affair with some local lady near his camp named Dot, Anthony drinks way too much, Gloria drinks way too much, and then the war ends and Poof! Anthony and Gloria are reunited and everything is FINE FINE FINE for a minute and then it is NOT. Anthony is totally losing it drinking way too much and being generally a useless waste of space, Gloria tries to get into the movies but she's too old (GASP! WHERE HAS HER BEAUTY GONE?) and then because they totally deserve it, just when Anthony has completely cracked mentally and started working on his boyhood stamp collection again, Anthony and Gloria win the lawsuit and become gazillionaires and sail off into the horizon happily/unhappily/who-even-knows-at-this-point? ever after.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Blell Blello, errybody! How's everyone's new year going? Anyone else love the Tiny Chef as much as I do? 

Moving right along, then. I really didn't like this book. In grandma's memory, I won't say I hated it, but I did Strongly dislike it. I suppose it was supposed to be satirical and all, and the interwebs were all oh didn't he do such a great job of calling attention to the 'devil-may-care' nature of the jazz age and their materialism, and YET. I couldn't help feeling the somewhat autobiographical nature of this book. Whether that's true or not, I felt F. Scott in Anthony, and I HATED Anthony. There. I didn't say I hated the book, but I did hate him. 

As usual with books I disliked but read for this blob, there were still many things that I did enjoy, and quite a few exquisite turns of phrase. I will be a die-hard Gatsby fan for ever, which you likely know if you read my blob entry about it, so I don't think the specter of F. Scott will haunt me if I admit that this one simply was. not. for. me.

Here are some of the bits I found remarkable, dear blobbists. 

January, the Monday of the months
At one point, they refer to January as the Monday of the months, and while this is true in a literal sense (it comes first of the months, as Monday comes first in the days of the week) it is also delightfully true in a deeper sense. January, like Monday, can be exTremely blah. Obviously we can't extend this analogy all the way through the year or we'd run out of days of the week, but I agree with this particular pairing.

As I like to do sometimes, I shall now give you a few quick snapshots of some of the characters. We'll start with the worst, shall we? 

Anthony (cat-kicker, layabout, money-grubber, sometime soldier, adulterer)
All of these things are true. Just in case you thought I was making any of them up. I already despised him when he admitted that not only did he think about kicking cats, but he had actually kicked one, and then he told Gloria about it like it was something to brag about. At which point I wanted to burn his name off of every page. (But I did not. For the sake of this blob.) Here are some Anthony-isms:

• I do nothing. I do nothing, for there's nothing I can do that's worth doing. I would be more into the whole existential nihilistic argument if he ever really TRIED to do something. He works at a job for a hot minute and then he gets so depressed he has to quit. I understand mental health is real and let's all get the help we need but you can't work for a week because you just have to drink and go to parties and "think about writing a history of the medieval era"? OKAY, Anthony.

• This is life! Who cares for the morrow? I do! I like the morrow! It brings the non-Monday months!

Geraldine (a girl Anthony dates before Gloria), to Anthony: "You have something to drink every day and you're only twenty-five. Haven't you any ambition? Think what you'll be at forty?"
 Anthony: I sincerely trust that I won't live that long."

I love that Geraldine is like, um, sweetie, are you at all concerned about your behavior? And he's like, Oh Oh it's FINE because I will most likely die young. Is it fine tho? Is it?

When Anthony realizes that while he has been carrying on a YEAR LONG AFFAIR his wife might actually have been doing something not so dissimilar: The thought terrified him with its possibility - it was chiefly because he had been so sure of her personal integrity that he had considered her so sparingly during the year.  Ah, yes. I believe my margin notes say "HELLO HYPOCRITE"

Gloria (siren, debutante, egomaniac)
Anthony, to Gloria: "Aren't you interested in anything except yourself?"
Gloria: "Not much."

That about sums her up. 

Geraldine (sometime lover of Anthony, often dim but never dull)

• Cra-a-azy!' she murmured pleasantly, using the clumsy rope-ladder with which she bridged all gaps and climbed after her mental superiors. Subconsciously she felt that it eliminated distances and brought the person whose imagination had eluded her back within range. Okay, I don't like that this is used to sort of slut-shame Geraldine and her relative intelligence, but I do think this is a beautifully constructed image. I also liked imagining her saying, "Cra-a-azy!" over and over. 

Anthony and Gloria's relationship (tumultuous roller coaster/train wreck you can't stop watching)

Ah yes. Apparently informed by F. Scott's relationship with Zelda (for which I have MANY FOLLOW UP QUESTIONS), characterized by such lines as: 

• He was not so much in love with her as he was mad for her. And do we feel like that's a good thing, then?

• He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving. Perfect. So Anthony thought - KEEPER! LOCK THIS GIRL DOWN!

• Love lingered - by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad. Okay, I can't hate on every part of their relationship. There were some good moments in there once in a while.

• When the discomfort under which they were living was remarked upon by a third party, it gave them the impetus to face this hostile world together. So great - they can mostly barely tolerate each other, but when someone else enters the scene, it's Us vs. the World. Super classy. Great look, guys.

• As always, they were sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong times.

• Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her. Good, good, good. Super healthy. Sounds very healthy.

I was not displeased. I was not unconscious of the insult. I do not Not like double negatives.
F. Scott seemed to be a big fan of the qualifying negative, or however you classify this, but I started using it jokingly with my friend Mar while I was reading. "I would not find it uncomfortable to pass some time on the sofa." "What's the temperature? I believe it is not uncool!" Here's an example, used to describe Mr. Grandfather Patch (whose real first name I have now forgotten):

In private life he's seldom unnecessarily disagreeable. See! If he's disagreeable, it's with cause, and then, only sporadically! Do you not feel unconfused about what he actually was like in private life? I know I do.

Referents and Reverberations
This is a section where I like to draw connections between this book and other books, whether they have come before (referent) or after (reverberation). 

• The Demon Lover - In a hilarious plot twist, Richard (Dick) Caramel, Anthony's buddy, is a blossoming writer in the beginning of the book. This in and of itself is not hilarious (I am a budding writer meself) but what is hilarious is the title of his book, especially considering the other book I was carrying in my purse on this trip. Mr. Caramel was working on (and later in the book publishes) The Demon Lover. I was also carrying the third in a series of supernatural romance/erotica called The Angel Stone. The first book in this series was called...... The Demon Lover. And is all about a woman who is sleeping with a succubus that's sort of tied to her house/non-corporeal/it's very complicated. But given the hoity-toity nature of Anthony's crowd, I found the incongruity of the shared titling to be absolutely delightful.

• The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) - While TBAD reminded me quite a bit of TSAR, I liked TSAR so much, which is perhaps odd in retrospect. Maybe I didn't hate them as much because they were gallivanting in Europe, and it seemed like at some point they were all going to go do something real with their lives? Who knows. At any rate, this passage from TBAD about Anthony's friend Maury: 

The telephone girl had received the most positive instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home.

Reminded me of this passage from TSAR, about Jake's concierge at his Paris apartment: 

She kept an eye on the people of the pesage, and she took great pride in telling me which of my guests were well brought up, which were of good family, who were sportsmen...The only trouble was that people who did not fall into any of those three categories were very liable to be told there was no one home, chez Barnes.  One of my friends, an extremely underfed-looking painter, who was obviously to Madame Duzinell neither well brought up, of good family, nor a sportsman, wrote me a letter asking if I could get him a pass to get by the concierge so he could come up and see me occasionally in the evenings. LOLOLOLOLZ. I love the idea of having a person to screen your visitors/callers, especially when you're not a VIP, you're just a random everyday person.

• Swann's Way, from À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) - This description of Anthony's days: 

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should.

Reminded me of this line from Proust:   

And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal.  To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor-cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Problematic Notes
A new section, which I'm adding. I like to think of it as notes like in a wine tasting. Bitter or sharp memories or moments, which might not ruin the entire overall flavor, or which might ruin the whole damn thing. 

This book came with notes of...
- Racism - so much. 
- Misogyny - so so SO much.
- Classism - even in a world where this was self-mocking, SO much.
- Ableism - tons of haughty intelligentsia comments and in-groups and slut-shaming or dumb-shaming of women who they just 'passed the time with'. Again, even in a satirical sense, too much for my taste. 

Lines I Liked

• The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows - the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. Such a great line. Possibly my favorite. 

• Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways. This made me think of Maury as a fluffy bear, which I quite enjoyed.

• Let myself go a thousand times and I'm always me.

• You and I are clean like streams and winds.

Words I Did Not Know (But do know Now)
Alice-blue - a pale tint of azure favored by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, which sparked a fashion sensation in the United States

bilphist - coined by F. Scott Fitzgerald, referring to a religious believer concerned with the reincarnation of the human soul (it makes sense that I did not know this since he made it up, though I'm not sure how I was supposed to garner this meaning.)

isinglass - a kind of gelatin obtained from fish, especially sturgeon, and used in making jellies, glue, etc., and for clarifying ale

maxixe - a Brazilian dance for couples, resembling the polka and the local tango

parturition - the action of giving birth to young; childbirth

recondite - (of a subject or knowledge) little known; abstruse

Well blob readers, I'll leave you with two final thoughts before I head off to The Peace of the Cosmos, or something like that. 

First, here is a new tag line I'm going to use the next time someone tries to interrupt me: 

Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies. Bet you'll listen to me now!

And second, a simply spectacular clapback from one of the women Anthony used to date. He is trying to get her to commiserate with how terrible his life is, and she is simply having none of it: 

You can't park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work.

With that, I shall bid you adieu. Off we go to work and to finish the Monday of the months. In the mean time, keep safe, keep faith, and good night!