20
PARTISAN REVIEW
25th and 33rd years (1913-1921). He is one of those many with the
tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspira–
tion. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals
of dissipation is told in the story." This description points up sharply
the share which Fitzgerald's feelings about himself and Zelda played
in
The Beautiful and Damned.
If
you were carried away by the
glamour of Gloria you could even say, as Grace Moore did, that
"[Zelda] and Scott always seemed to me straight out of
The Beautiful
and Damned."
There was some encouragement for this view, of course, especial–
ly in Zelda's amusing but highly personal review of the book.
To begin with-she wrote-everyone must buy this book for the
following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the
cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street,
and also if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a
complete circlet, and also if loads of people buy it my husband needs a
new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for
the last three years.
A little later she remarks: "It seems to me that on one page I recog–
nize a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared
shortly after my marriage, and also scrC;lps of letters which, though
considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitz–
gerald-I believe that is how he spells his name-seems to believe that
plagiarism begins at home." The suggestion that the book is personal
exposure was also encouraged by Hill's generalized but clearly recog–
nizable portrait of the Fitzgeralds on the dust-wrapper. Fitzgerald was
distressed by this wrapper, not, characteristically, because it exploited
their private lives, but because he did not like the portrait of himself.
He wrote Perkins one of his comically enraged letters about it: "The
more I think of the picture on the jacket the more I fail to understand
[Hill's] drawing that man. The girl is excellent of course-it looks
somewhat like Zelda but the man, I suspect, is a sort of debauched edi–
tion of me. . . . " He went on to observe that though Anthony in
the book is "just under six feet ... here he looks about Gloria's height
with ugly short legs" and that though Anthony is dark-haired, "This
bar-tender on the cover is light-haired." This rage is of course partly
motivated by the fact that Fitzgerald had always wanted to be dark–
haired and had always been sensitive about his inadequate five feet
