Books Acquired:
The Watch Below, James White

Books Offloaded:
Under Pressure, Frank Herbert

Progress Made:
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Black Count, Tom Reiss

Books Finished:
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Imagine my delight when, just days after lamenting that “my favorite free box, at the Coffee Break in Sunny Brae, is no more, replaced by a vintage gas pump,” I went over there and saw this:

Miracle of miracles, some positive change in these dark times! Also, this week the good people of Wisconsin told That Other Fucking Guy to go screw, electing liberal Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court. Normally this is not something we’d get excited about, but it is reason for celebration. Never mind the 99 things that went wrong this week; let’s focus on the things that went right.

OK, on with the report.

Normally periodical reading doesn’t count here, but I want some credit for the time I put into “Heisenberg’s Eyes,” a lengthy two-part Frank Herbert story that appeared in the June and August 1966 issues of Galaxy magazine. I was never a Dune guy, but “Heisenberg” was entertaining enough to prompt me to buy a copy of a 1956 Herbert submarine thriller called Under Pressure — which I started and immediately decided was militaristic claptrap; into the gas pump it went. Thus ended my brief bromance with Frank Herbert.

About the middle of the month I again picked up The Beautiful and Damned, which I had abandoned when it hit a lull halfway through. With a little Momentum — provided by one of the many false springs we experienced this month — I was able to get through the boring part and it picked up speed again as it neared the end.

The ending was not a happy one — the novel is not called The Beautiful and Blessed — but it wasn’t the utter tragedy the book’s arc seems to be pointing toward. Which is good, as I related a lot to the protagonist, maybe a little too much.

Anthony Patch is the grandson of a rich and powerful man, a trust-fund baby who spends most of his time sitting around waiting for his inheritance. Having decided there is no work worth doing, he struggles to fill his days; much alcohol is consumed in the course of the book.

The intuitively idle, the inertia-inclined, the inevitably intoxicated… these are my people, and I think that F. Scott was one of us. (TIL that his given name was “Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.”) And yet in a 44-year-long life, about half of it seemingly spent in a drunken stupor, he managed to produce a raft of novels, stories, and essays, some of which we’re still reading today.

Here’s FSF’s description of the day Anthony is scheduled to meet the woman who will become his wife:

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shameless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

“The gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches” — now there’s a phrase to conjure with.

There’s no doubt about it, he man could write. I am now going to transcribe a lengthy passage from The Beautiful and Damned, hoping — as Hunter Thompson did when he used to type out FSF novels in their entirely — that something will rub off. You are in no way obligated to read it, but if you do, you will get a good flavor of the book. Peace out.

His companions numbered now a curious dozen. Several of them he had met at a place called “Sammy’s,” on Forty-Third Street, where, if one knocked on the door and were favorably passed on from behind a grating, one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whiskey. It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running through a large “yeast” fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison’s notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him. He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one — his imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.

Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversations with him through many afternoons of summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about Socialism — the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the existence of a personal deity — something about one time when he had been in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. The only time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the foods, the liquor, and the women he preferred.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street — and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks, He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art — and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be confused — they changed phrases from month to month as they changed neckties.

Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each day — in Sammy’s with these men, in the apartment over a book, some book he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable woman. She was not the Gloria of old, certainly — the Gloria who, had she been sick, would have preferred to inflict misery upon every one around her rather than confess that she needed sympathy or assistance. She was not above whining now; she was not above being sorry for herself. Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty. When Anthony was drunk he taunted her about this. When he was sober he was polite to her, on occasions even tender; he seemed to show for short hours a trace of that old quality of understanding too well to blame — that quality which was the best of him and had worked swiftly and ceaselessly toward his ruin.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration and tears.

The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident, some gesture of Gloria’s would take his fancy — but the grey veils had come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older these thing faded — after that there was wine.

There was a kindliness about intoxication — there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building — its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal — again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars….

….The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness — the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.