THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF LIFE

The story, much of which would make good material for Eugene O'Neill at his bitterest, tells of the moral disintegration of Anthony Patch, and his wife Gloria. Anthony is our old friend Amory Blaine, now made for the sake of variety a Harvard man. Whether or not it is because of a change of Alma Mater, he is a little more consistently worthless than his Princeton prototype but otherwise he is the same. A good part of the novel is devoted to analyzing his character but for all this it seems to us that if Mr. Fitzgerald had described him in the first place as incurably lazy and entirely lacking in moral force he would have saved a great deal of time. The author seems to take pleasure in refining upon the subtleties of Anthony Patch; perhaps it is because he knows the character so well. The trouble is that he knows him too well. For Anthony Patch, or alias Amory Blaine, is not one individual nor an example of one type but a condensation of all the vapors of unrest and uncertainty which, since the war, have so completely bewildered and befogged "the younger generation", Mr. Fitzgerald has a profound understanding of this phase of our day and is well qualified to write about it but after a time his refinements become almost identical with a rather morbid sort of introspection and the character he is drawing, like Werther or William Lovell, loses the right to be considered as a creation of literature and becomes merely an instrument by which he can elaborate subjectively on his emotional and intellectual experiences.

Given a man of twenty-six with no other principle in his life than the negative one of not conforming, mentally or morally, to any accepted tradition which the world attempts to impose on him, with a mind clear enough to detect the flaws in any existing theories of life but incapable of any constructive thinking, put him in a situation where he has nothing to occupy him, and he is pretty likely to be unhappy. Treat him with large doses of Samuel Butler and other anti-Victoreans of the "naughty nineties" and he is quite as likely to convince himself of "The Meaninglessness of Life". A belief in The Meaninglessness of Life is helpful in clearing the mind of outworn traditions but when it becomes the solo guide of life the chances are that it will be an easy excuse for not striving against Inertia and for self indulgence.

This is the situation of Anthony Patch and, as it is to be expected his story is one of a rapid descent from a position in which he keeps within most of the bounds of convention through lack of daring or leisure to transgress to a position in which, with a very unconvincing attitude of insouciance, he has given up every pretense of being more than a beast.

"No Matter" is the title of the last chapter; the reader is tempted to apply the phrase to the book. If life is utterly without meaning, if all action is absurd, why bother to talk about it? The answer is that the author does not necessarily believe this himself. He leaves us to assume that, although he has found no clue to life, he allows us, and occasionally himself to hope that there may nevertheless be some answer to the riddle.

"The Beautiful and Damned" would be a pretty dismal story to read but the author fortunately rises above his story. No matter how distorted his viewpoint he has that one essential quality--readability. You may become disgusted with his opinions but, in most cases, you will read to the end. In the first place he has a style which, however, careless it may be, moves, and in the second place he is by no means without a sense of humor. It may be a meaningless world but it has amusing aspects and Fitzgerald has a keen eye for them. Sometimes there is high comedy and sometimes farce but it is always entertaining.

It is only when he is too evidently endeavoring to strike the tragic note that he falls a little--or even approaches absurdity. Since his first novel, Mr. Fitzgerald has joined the ranks of the "HaHa" school of ironists. He has made every effort, sometimes it seems through a natural perversity, to mock every one of the aspirations of his characters. Gloria desires above all to be thought clean and in the end she becomes unclean. The writer, Richard Carmel, does not intend to prostitute his art and finally he takes to writing best-sellers. Compared to the Fates of Mr. Fitzgerald, those conceived by Thomas Hardy are a trio of well-intentioned, kindly old ladies taking afternoon tea.

When the reviewers were engaged in discussing the merits and defects of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a writer, after the publication of his first novel, it was the conventional thing to predict a great future for him and to hope that in his next work he would produce a really great novel. One of the things he must do to accomplish this, he was frequently advised, was to build his novel on a firmer foundation than the sands of a too clever cynicism. Although they carefully refrained from so expressing themselves, one gathered the impression that these reviewers were advising him to do what in an another day would have been called "writing with a purpose."

Fitzgerald seems to have taken this advice seriously. For all its divergences and extraneous detail one can detect in this "The Beautiful and Damned" what looks suspiciously like a purpose. The author would probably not like to be accused of "teaching a lesson" but, whether intentionally or not he has so written his story that to many of his readers it will carry a very definite moral. Indeed "The Beautiful and Damned", if condensed a little, would make a very effective tract for a prohibition organization.

It will be a hard boiled individual who will reach for a drink after reading "The Beautiful and Damned" at one sitting. The consumption of liquor in quarts per page is so tremendous that the reader sooner or later begins to sense the stale liquor smell and the motorman's glove taste of the morning after. Mr. Fitzgerald, to repeat, may have no such intention but he has succeeded in demonstrating pretty effectively that the pursuit of pleasure as the end of life may be at the beginning pretty delightful but is likely to prove less so as the highballs succeed one another.