In any case, it is an astonishingly cruel, funny, moving, compelling, and evil sort of book, with perhaps the most ice-cold finish I've ever encountered in literature. It is the perfect novel to read while in the twilight of one's twenties (as is yours truly) -- during that brief window of life when it seems a tragedy of romantic proportions to be a "man of thirty-three," still more so to be one who looks like he might be "a man of forty" (horrors!), like our protagonist, and when one seems -- despite all one's half-hearted and quickly abandoned efforts, to always be living just about at the limit of one's income.
Now, I don't want to meet the person who feels they "identify" per se with our hero and heroine, Anthony Patch and Gloria Patch, née Gilbert -- who are modeled on the author and wife (this is, after all, the book that started in earnest the whole "glorious self-destruction of the Fitzgeralds" mythos -- the Legend of Zelda, if you will) and are consistently and determinedly awful throughout. But they are delightful company, in their own way; their sins and idiocies belong to all of us -- and since they are so nearly punished for them, they even become downright sympathetic at times.
Here's the plot as it eventually unfolds: unexpectedly disinherited (spoilers) by their rich and temperance-crusading grandfather, after he crashes in on an obscene party, Anthony and Gloria are forced to contemplate the unimaginable recourse of having either to survive on the middling income of a trust fund or maybe even -- if they desire luxury beyond this means-- to work for a living.
Instead of confronting either of these terrors, however, they decide to pursue an utterly meritless legal challenge to the grandfather's will through three layers of court proceedings, until finally (spoilers) they prevail due to a reversal of popular sentiments against "reformers" during the age of prohibition -- thereby robbing the rightful heir (a trusted employee of the grandfather's) of his deserts, as well as a variety of charitable causes of their bequests in order to pocket thirty million for themselves and sail to Italy.
Seeing the tale entirely from their perspective, however, Gloria and Anthony do throughout all of these non-problems seem genuinely pitiable and tragic. Anthony is just so convincing as someone truly at a loss without a fortune sufficient to sustain a life of perpetual indolence. His total inability to summon any kind of commitment to work, as well as the couple's incapacity to live within their income, is all too plausible. By the time we reach this point in the novel, we understand his point perfectly when he demands of a friend: "Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's life will be endurable?"
His moral and psychological collapse in the face of the dwindling of his leisure class status and the impossible necessity of work is the perfect narrative portrayal of Samuel Butler's observation in The Way of All Flesh: "Loss of money indeed is not only the worst pain in itself, but it is the parent of all others. Let a man have been brought up to a moderate competence [...]; then let his money be suddenly taken from him, and how long is his health likely to survive the change in all his little ways which loss of money will entail? How long again is the esteem and sympathy of friends likely to survive ruin?" It is as if someone decided to take that paragraph of Butler's and expand it into a novel. Maybe that's exactly what Fitzgerald did. Early on in the book, after all, Butler is revealed to be one of our hero's favorite writers.
Another passage that puts one in mind of Gloria and Anthony is one of Hazlitt's. He describes in an essay a type of character for whom: "a slight evil, a distant danger, will not move them; and a more imminent one only makes them turn away from it in greater precipitation and alarm. The more desperate their affairs grow, the more averse they are to look into them; and the greater the effort required to retrieve them, the more incapable they are of it. At first, they will not do anything; and afterwards, it is too late."
Fitzgerald's novel is a profoundly amusing -- in a nasty, punkish, twenty-something sort of way -- study of precisely this young and dilatory character type -- the utter procrastinator, the person for whom dreams have more reality than experience, for whom action can always be deferred to the future, because on some level she or he does not want to bring their imaginings into the realm of the concrete, fearing that this may deprive them of all appeal.
Perhaps you know people of this sort or have some of it in you yourself. In any case, the novel contains one of the greatest and funniest and most heart-wrenchingly accurate literary descriptions of procrastination ever penned -- rivaled only by Poe's in "The Imp of the Perverse." Says Gloria in one scene, mocking Anthony's (ir)resolution to finally get some work done on his history of the Middle Ages that he is forever "outlining" and never actually writing:
"Work!" she scoffed. "Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work—that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and 'Gloria, don't sing!' and 'Please keep that damn Tana away from me,' and 'Let me read you my opening sentence,' and 'I won't be through for a long time, Gloria, so don't stay up for me,' and a tremendous consumption of tea or coffee. And that's all. In just about an hour I hear the old pencil stop scratching and look over. You've got out a book and you're 'looking up' something. Then you're reading. Then yawns—then bed and a great tossing about because you're all full of caffeine and can't sleep. Two weeks later the whole performance over again."Fitzgerald's way of presenting these all-too-familiar types of over-pampered ne'er-do-wells has all the heavy-handed and mean-spirited satire that one might expect from a book written by a man of 25 swelled with early success and affecting a Byronic misanthropy, but it does still hit its target. When Fitzgerald writes of "life, limping after imagination's ten-league boots," one wishes to hug this book to one's chest in happy recognition. Yes, that is youth. Yes, that is the curse of every person our age.
(That is also the other area where Fitzgerald's annoyingly precocious genius is on display -- his command of the uproariously apt observation. Example: Gloria's mother's describes her chosen crack-pot religion "Bilphism" (which seems to be a satirical concoction that is one-half Theosophy, and the rest compounded of Christian Science and Rudolf Steiner) as, not a religion, but "the science of all religions." Fitzgerald dead-pans in his narration, "There was something in the arrangement of words which grasped her mind so definitely that the statement became superior to any obligation to define itself.")
Anthony and Gloria are lovable, then, for all that they are loatheable. When Gloria refuses day after day to fulfill the single manual task assigned to her -- placing her soiled laundry in the laundry bag -- we love her for it; we like her even more when -- after Anthony's meltdown -- she reveals herself to have been after all the stronger personality, and shows capacities for endurance and adaptation we didn't expect.
Until, that is, she and Anthony at last get what they want. Two children of privilege, they once again evade all consequences for their actions, run off with their obscene fortune, and glory in it. Anthony crows in the final scene over the fact that "they tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth" and failed. Our sympathies are immediately reversed. Our pity for our heroes evaporates. We discover that if this is a tragedy at all -- after having followed Anthony and Gloria all this time -- it is merely that immemorial one of the "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." It makes for a profoundly impactful finish to the novel -- even if the predominant emotion in this heady cocktail is disgust.
***
To turn to the promised errata and marginalia, however, I'm afraid we have learned from this experience that a novel can make it through innumerable editions and even into the cloth confines of an indubitable Barnes and Noble Classic while still trailing a few copy-errors on its pages, like so many forgotten strands of tinsel. Using the pagination of the edition noted above:
p. 87 "Jenny of the Orient Ballet." Here the error is not Fitzgerald's, but the notes in the Library of Congress edition of his collected works -- they state that this may be a reference to "Lady Randolph (Jennie) Churchill, who after visiting Asia in 1894 wanted to stage a ballet featuring Asian dancers in London," but a Google search reveals that -- in the context of being listed alongside various literary femmes fatales -- it is more likely a reference to a character in Compton Mackenzie's 1912 novel Carnival.
p. 128 "Hotel Lacfadio." I suppose it's possible there could be such a place, but it seems more likely to be a typo for Lafcadio.
p. 166 "If you have if [sic] I'll probably be glad."
p. 259 This one again is no fault of the author's, but of his editors. To a passage about an Irishman who shares Anthony's quarters during his brief stint in the infantry, the annotator of this edition appends a bizarre footnote saying Fitzgerald must have meant to refer to "the 'Sicilian' who appears on pages 255 and 267." Hardly! Just before that, on p. 254, there is a description of an "Irishman" (see the description of the fellow who says "G'by, liberty," etc.) Another example of editors over-correcting while missing the real errors, or -- as, Florence King memorably puts it, "showing initiative in all the wrong places."
p. 266 Here is a reference to la belle dame sans merci, and our editor informs us that Keats was Fitzgerald's favorite poet (Anthony also has an original letter of Keats' in his possession.) Just noting here that there is an earlier, slightly subtler reference in the text to Keats' poem: Maury, on p. 207, calls Gloria "the beautiful and merciless lady."
p. 297 "followed her out into the hail [sic.]" There has been no mention of solid precipitation up to this point. I do believe that was supposed to be "hall."
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