The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

Anthony thought of Dick’s recent output, which had been appearing in a well-known monthly. It was concerned chiefly with the preposterous actions of a class of sawdust effigies who, one was assured, were New York society people, and it turned, as a rule, upon questions of the heroine’s technical purity, with mock-sociological overtones about the “mad antics of the four hundred.”

“But your stories⁠—” exclaimed Anthony aloud, almost involuntarily.

“Oh, that’s different,” Dick asserted astoundingly. “I have a reputation, you see, so I’m expected to deal with strong themes.”

Anthony gave an interior start, realizing with this remark how much Richard Caramel had fallen off. Did he actually think that these amazing latter productions were as good as his first novel?

Anthony went back to the apartment and set to work. He found that the business of optimism was no mean task. After half a dozen futile starts he went to the public library and for a week investigated the files of a popular magazine. Then, better equipped, he accomplished his first story, “The Dictaphone of Fate.” It was founded upon one of his few remaining impressions of that six weeks in Wall Street the year before. It purported to be the sunny tale of an office boy who, quite by accident, hummed a wonderful melody into the dictaphone. The cylinder was discovered by the boss’s brother, a well-known producer of musical comedy⁠—and then immediately lost. The body of the story was concerned with the pursuit of the missing cylinder and the eventual marriage of the noble office boy (now a successful composer) to Miss Rooney, the virtuous stenographer, who was half Joan of Arc and half Florence Nightingale.

He had gathered that this was what the magazines wanted. He offered, in his protagonists, the customary denizens of the pink-and-blue literary world, immersing them in a saccharine plot that would offend not a single stomach in Marietta. He had it typed in double space⁠—this last as advised by a booklet, “Success as a Writer Made Easy,” by R. Meggs Widdlestien, which assured the ambitious plumber of the futility of perspiration, since after a six-lesson course he could make at least a thousand dollars a month.

After reading it to a bored Gloria and coaxing from her the immemorial remark that it was “better than a lot of stuff that gets published,” he satirically affixed the nom de plume of “Gilles de Sade,” enclosed the proper return envelope, and sent it off.

Following the gigantic labor of conception he decided to wait until he heard from the first story before beginning another. Dick had told him that he might get as much as two hundred dollars. If by any chance it did happen to be unsuited, the editor’s letter would, no doubt, give him an idea of what changes should be made.

“It is, without question, the most abominable piece of writing in existence,” said Anthony.

The editor quite conceivably agreed with him. He returned the manuscript with a rejection slip. Anthony sent it off elsewhere and began another story. The second one was called “The Little Open Doors”; it was written in three days. It concerned the occult: an estranged couple were brought together by a medium in a vaudeville show.

There were six altogether, six wretched and pitiable efforts to “write down” by a man who had never before made a consistent effort to write at all. Not one of them contained a spark of vitality, and their total yield of grace and felicity was less than that of an average newspaper column. During their circulation they collected, all told, thirty-one rejection slips, headstones for the packages that he would find lying like dead bodies at his door.

In mid-January Gloria’s father died, and they went again to Kansas City⁠—a miserable trip, for Gloria brooded interminably, not upon her father’s death, but on her mother’s. Russel Gilbert’s affairs having been cleared up they came into possession of about three thousand dollars, and a great amount of furniture. This was in storage, for he had spent his last days in a small hotel. It was due to his death that Anthony made a new discovery concerning Gloria. On the journey East she disclosed herself, astonishingly, as a Bilphist.

“Why, Gloria,” he cried, “you don’t mean to tell me you believe that stuff.”

“Well,” she said defiantly, “why not?”

“Because it’s⁠—it’s fantastic. You know that in every sense of the word you’re an agnostic. You’d laugh at any orthodox form of Christianity⁠—and then you come out with the statement that you believe in some silly rule of reincarnation.”

“What if I do? I’ve heard you and Maury, and everyone else for whose intellect I have the slightest respect, agree that life as it appears is utterly meaningless. But it’s always seemed to me that if I were unconsciously learning something here it might not be so meaningless.”

“You’re not learning anything⁠—you’re just getting tired. And if you must have a faith to soften things, take up one that appeals to the reason of someone beside a lot of hysterical women. A person like you oughtn’t to accept anything unless it’s decently demonstrable.”

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”

“Well, if you’ve got a decent mind the second has got to be qualified by the first. Any simple soul can delude himself with mental garbage.”

“I don’t care,” she held out stoutly, “and, what’s more, I’m not propounding any doctrine.”

The argument faded off, but reoccurred to Anthony several times thereafter. It was disturbing to find this old belief, evidently assimilated from her mother, inserting itself again under its immemorial disguise as an innate idea.

They reached New York in March after an expensive and ill-advised week spent in Hot Springs, and Anthony resumed his abortive attempts at fiction. As it became plainer to both of them that escape did not lie in the way of popular literature, there was a further slipping of their mutual confidence and courage. A complicated struggle went on incessantly between them. All efforts to keep down expenses died away from sheer inertia,