The Beautiful and Damned: Deceptive Distance

Note: This post contains spoilers for The Beautiful and Damned!

The two Fitzgerald books I’ve read are in no way easy reads, and I’m not going to claim I understand the entirety of Fitzgerald’s writing. Nevertheless, let me try to present one particular thing that stood out to me: distance. Distance thematically permeated the life of Fitzgerald’s couples - Anthony and Gloria from The Beautiful and Damned; Gatsby and Daisy from The Great Gatsby. This time, I’ll discuss my understanding of the former pair. 

(I’ll discuss the latter pair in another post, if I ever get down to writing it :) )

In Anthony and Gloria’s relationship, distance triggers an initial period of passionate love - that is, during their courtship and early marriage. This is largely because of what distance did to them. Distance (rather deceptively) bestows beauty and desirability.

Beauty
We become acquainted with distance’s ability to render beauty at the very beginning of the story.

His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley….It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful….

He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices…

The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth he returned to the bathroom and reparted his hair.  

Book 1, Chapter 1, Afternoon

Anthony, looking out of his window, for a moment deems an unappealing lady beautiful thanks to the distance between them. Distance, then, is able to bestow beauty on people or objects that in actuality we may find plain. It made Anthony think the woman was beautiful, and interestingly it made him believe she was a “girl”. It is only after he fully sees her as she is that she is mentioned as a “woman”. In Anthony’s eyes distance had de-aged her. So perhaps we can even say that distance obscures deficiencies and replaces it with beauty.

Desirability

Similarly, distance can make something desirable. Anthony himself identifies this during a moment in Book 3.

“...And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it--but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone--" 

Book 3, Chapter 1, Defeat

Anthony observes that when we are not in possession of something - when we are at a distance from it - we find the thing desirable. So we seek to own it; to close that distance. But now that the object is in our very hands, its appeal evaporates.

Is this not indicative that it’s not actually the object we truly want? In Anthony’s words, the object is inconsequential. It is that glitter, that desirability given by distance that captivates us. So distance is able to give desirability to things that we don’t actually desire for itself.

We might question whether it is distance or beauty that produces desirability. Maybe distance produces beauty, and then that beauty produces desirability. We naturally want beautiful things, don’t we? But whichever is true, the idea here is that distance, beauty, and desirability are closely related.

Anthony and Gloria's Relationship

As Anthony Patch is our main character, we find numerous passages describing Anthony indeed finding Gloria beautiful and desirable. Moreover, Gloria is objectively beautiful. She is literally beauty personified (Book 1, Chapter 1, A Flash-back in Paradise). If distance can make an unappealing woman beautiful, and an inconsequential object desirable, how much more would it make Gloria!

"Where are you from?" inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered him thoughtless.

Book 1, Chapter 2, Turbulence

Her cheeks were brilliant, her eyes sparkled—she had never seemed so lovely, so exquisitely to be desired. 

Book 1, Chapter 3, Black Magic

We also have this interesting description of their moments together:

Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes… 

Book 2, Chapter 1, Heyday

I’m not exactly sure as to what “poignant” means in this passage. The main sense dictionaries offer is something along the lines of: to be emotionally impactful, especially evoking sadness or regret. But people also seem to use and understand “poignant” to mean important or impactful minus the sadness. This website, for example, understands the line above to refer to their sweetest moments.

Regardless of what “poignant” actually means, I think it’s safe to understand the passage to mean that Anthony and Gloria’s significant moments happen when distance is involved. That distance is created by “some artificial barrier”.

Turbulence...

So Anthony and Gloria, bewitched by the power of distance, spend their early days together entangled in a passionate relationship. Unfortunately, this passion progressively wanes. Their relationship worsens and eventually reaches a point where the two find themselves capable of despising the other.

What causes this dramatic decline in their relationship? What went wrong? We shall explore this question in the upcoming part 2, for I do not want to make this post too long :) . See you there!