The Beautiful and Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald

published 1922

[clothes descriptions from throughout the book]

Under her fur coat her dress was Alice-Blue, with white lace crinkled stiffly about her throat…

Her fur-trimmed suit was grey –‘because with grey you have to wear a lot of paint,’ she explained – and a small toque sat rakishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in jaunty glory. 

Her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt, was amazingly supple and slender.










comments: I think I have spent most of my life thinking this book was called The Beautiful and THE Damned, and now am trying to decide if that difference in title would make the book different.


Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of my top 10 ever novels, and I have read just about everything FSF wrote – much of it when I was probably much too young to make the most of it. There are posts featuring him all over the blog – I was really surprised to see that I have never blogged on the enjoyable if strange Tender is the Night (there’s a scene with someone in a bathing suit and pearls that I’ve always fancied). This one has flashes of genius, but is altogether too miserable to be anyone’s favourite, I should think. I know, Great Gatsby – published three years later – is a tragedy, but it is a Greek tragedy, it is a perfect and complete work of art, a monument of American lives and American fiction. This one is just a dreary and predictable dive into misery. It’s 20 years since I last read it, and it hasn’t got any better.

The book starts in 1913, where the scenes above are set. Anthony Patch is the heir (presumed) to a great fortune – all he has to do is keep his grandfather sweet, and dilettante his way through life. He falls in love with the beautiful Gloria, and then 

UNSURPRISING SPOILER


Everything starts to go wrong in an entirely predictable way, and FSF takes his time telling this (apparently somewhat autobiographical) story, which travels past the First World War up to around the time it was written.

It has some odd experimental moments, goes off on tangents with characters’ own creative writing, and sections written like a playscript.

It is too ‘clever’, too knowing. But you can see in flashes what a great writer Fitzgerald can be. I liked the grandfather complaining about the Middle Ages –

‘Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except that they’re over now.’

And there is a splendid discussion about what characters in current novels are called, a subject that always fascinates me:

‘At present all the piquant literary characters are named Peter or Barbara.’

‘Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of heroines and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on to the next generation of shop-girls –‘

‘Displacing Ella and Stella-‘

‘-And Pearl and Jewel, and Earl and Elmer and Minnie.’

[so obviously not British books they are talking about.]

Kate Moss, supermodel and a fashion favourite, had a Beautiful and Damned-themed party for her 30th birthday.

The exquisite lady in black and white is by Adolph de Meyer. The woman dancing in a hobble skirt comes from Daniel Milford-Cottam’s book on Edwardian fashion and was used for our blogpost on the subject. Daniel is a long-standing friend of the blog and an expert in clothes, fashion, costume, and his books are highly recommended. Both pics for the early part of the book.

The other pictures are from a film promotion magazine of the 1920s, taking us into the Jazz Age. The Silver Sheet was pushing a film of 1924 called Those Who Dance. This one here is having a much better time than anyone in this book.