The Beautiful and Damned

I finally finished The Beautiful and Damned by Fitzgerald the other day.  I was drinking an Abita on the patio at my work during a break.  And though my first attempt at reading this book was quite unsuccessful, my second left me peculiarly and intensely invested in Anthony, Gloria, and the tragedy of their lives.

Today I sat on the patio of a coffeeshop on Prytania and Washington, across the intersection from Lafayette Cemetery.

Small birds gathered around me upon my arrival, as they seem to do outside of every coffee shop in New Orleans.  I can only imagine it's due to an unusually large number of crumb-throwing old people.  There's one man in particular who comes to mind.  I've never been to CC's on Magazine St. without seeing him.  He exits the coffee shop with a biscuit, which he crumbles and throws all over the courtyard.  I have seen him hit customers before.  Then the birds descend like locusts, and all present must temporarily quit what they're doing and watch the flourish.  I rather enjoy when he does this.

Anyways, I had no food at the coffee shop on Prytania and Washington, so the birds quickly quit me.  But before they left, I experienced something very strange... something that almost never happens to me. A memory, unnoticed and dusty after years under some blanket in my brain, revealed itself and sent flashes of something intense through my entire body.  I don't think I had ever experienced this before...  and I'm not sure how to describe the sensation.  It was as though I'd discovered an ancestor of supreme importance and greatness, someone previously undiscovered and unknown to me and yet seamlessly connected with me; this memory and I were finally together, and it pleased me so much.  Here's the memory:

In third grade my mother and I picked out a pair of finches from Petco.  My teacher that year, Mrs. Carroll, was very pet-friendly, and loved the idea of adding more animals to our environment...  though I've forgotten every other type of animal we had.  I loved the finches immediately upon meeting them.  I watched them and talked to them the night before I was to bring them into class.  And though I can't deny I loved imagining all of the attention these animals would bring me from my peers, I can truly say that I felt an attachment to them.  Perhaps I didn't quite recognize the extent of my affection.

They were our class pets for some time, though I don't know exactly how long.  We'd named them Romeo and Juliet, and Mrs. Carroll loved them as much as we did.  And then one evening as the winter was approaching, Mrs. Carroll turned the heat off in the room for the weekend, and it became too cold for the birds.

We had just recently discovered that Romeo and Juliet had produced a few eggs in their little cone shaped nest.  It was a cocoon shaped nest with a little hole for them to get in and out.  If you peeked in, you could just see the eggs at the bottom, underneath both of them.  We came into class on Monday to find them dead, huddled together on top of their eggs that never hatched.  I remember the image of them in their nest, dead, together, on top of dead eggs...  and I remember it piercing me.  I didn't quite know what to feel (or what I did feel) but it was bad, it was awful...  at first I wanted to blame Mrs. Carroll.  Then my anger shifted more towards an unfamiliar discomfort.  I wouldn't call it dismay, not grief, not mourning... it hovered somewhere around all three, and more.  And it was the first time in my life I'd felt so sad over such a thing.  I remember laying in front of the heater of my room-as I often did back then-feeling the burning skin on my hands and my face and the hot carpet beneath my head...


Here's a passage from The Beautiful and Damned that brought me a similar sort of pain the other day:

"I was adept at fooling the deity.  I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me.  I believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast.  Then I went to school.  For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing.  These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever.'
"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 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...
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.  The fibre of my mind coarsened and my ears grew miserably keen.  Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.
"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some time.  It had its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one.  With me?  No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility.  It is never quite passion that does the business, it is the dress that passion wears.  I became bored--that was all.  Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive for all my acts.  Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown.
"I was grown up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion.  Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts.  But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on.  I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression--but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light.  I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism--and behold!  Jones was still in my way.  I did not think--I was a battleground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.
"I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness.  Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life--and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.
"But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough.  Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting.  It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.  So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete.  But it was too late.  Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest.  I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death..."



This is Maury, who is, by giving this passage, "unburden[ing] [himself] of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies."


This passage truly rocked me.  By the end of it, I noticed that I'd been so enthralled that I'd given the voice some divine authority over me; this all-knowing man was telling me, Kevin, what it's like.  What it's like to be me, now, post-college, far away, confused, struggling.  And then, I closed the book for a second.  And I looked around me at some folks buried in their business...  and then I looked down at my drink.

And I smiled hopefully, with enthusiastic optimism.  I grinned to myself, and enjoyed a feeling like that split-second you first step into a hot shower in the morning.  For he was telling me what "it's like".  And I most definitely listened to him.  Those feelings, those discouraged and self-pitying feelings...  they exist in me strongly enough for one to make a useless argument about the justification, the purpose, the "truth" of fiction.

But they are not alone.  The story found it's most likely point of entry into my psychology and into my blood and my heart, and I welcomed it.

But those feelings fade as they did immediately after my first read.  The smile upon my face, though bred just seconds after the darkness of Maury's monologue, brought to me those feelings from the weeks following Romeo and Juliet's deaths.  Weeks filled with joy, with hope, with renewed curiosity. And then back to the memories of Romeo and Juliet...  feelings of renewed discomfort, loneliness, dismay...

Maybe it is the case that fiction facilitates or emulates a process of retrospectively considering a natural cycle of emotions that we all endure / enjoy / despise / require.  A cycle without which we'd be lost in the chaos of our own feelings; they would not be contrasted with one another upon reflection, they would flow in and out of our bodies and minds, chaotic emotional tides combatted by flailing consciousnesses.  Whatever it is that fiction enables in us, it is essential.  I don't know why it feels so fucking good to wallow in F. Scott Fitzgerald's substantially depressed muck, but I know that it does.  Really, really good.