“As the Fashion in Books Shifted”: The Beautiful and Damned as Arc-Light Fiction

Those who acknowledge any relationship between Hollywood film and F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction generally confine themselves to claiming either that Hollywood's demands and seductions interfered with Fitzgerald's already strained efforts to write "serious" fiction or that Hollywood studios have mostly botched their adaptations of his work.¹ However, The Beautiful and Damned (1922) shows that the relationship between film and Fitzgerald's fiction is more complicated and more important than generally acknowledged both for his work and, more broadly, for fiction written during the cultural ascendancy of Hollywood film. Although in recent decades scholars have generally seen The Beautiful and Damned as a tonally incoherent, failed novel and therefore have given it relatively little attention, I would argue that its very tonal incoherence actually makes it worth studying.² Once one understands film's previously unacknowledged but crucial role in provoking and conditioning that incoherence, one can recognize the unappreciated extent to which Hollywood film shaped Fitzgerald's "serious" fiction beginning quite early in his career. Indeed, as a hyper-precise representational medium, as a purveyor of American fantasies, as a codified array of formal devices, and as a growing cultural power, Hollywood film not only structures the thematic and diegetic registers of The Beautiful and Damned but also significantly shapes its literary techniques.

Though this article focuses on The Beautiful and Damned, film's influence both on Fitzgerald's technique and on the habits of vision shaping his technique have much broader implications for the study of American fiction. If indeed film did open up new techniques for Fitzgerald well before he ever worked in Hollywood—and if (as in The Beautiful and Damned) film did so without his even noticing or at least without his being able to treat the influence as an opportunity rather than a problem—then it becomes both sensible and productive to pursue the possibility that film contributed substantially to the formal and phenomenological shifts discernible in American "literary" fiction written in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence and rapid consolidation of the feature film (say, 1917 onward). We may well discover that we should understand film not merely as a cultural threat to literary fiction or even as a set of techniques that forward-looking authors might have adapted to their own purposes but also, more fundamentally, as an especially influential crystallization of new habits of vision and cognition made not only available but in fact inevitable by the changing cultural and technological landscape of early twentieth-century America.³

In particular, such a reappraisal of film's influence suggests the value of understanding American fictional modernism in terms of the phenomenological shifts both promoted and evidenced by the developing American (particularly Hollywood) cinema. Admittedly, whether Fitzgerald is a modernist is a vexed question. His avowed literary priorities, his public persona, and the mass appeal of so much of his work would certainly seem to place him outside the literary high American modernism of, say, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, or William Faulkner. It is therefore tempting to finesse the question by bestowing upon him a more particular label, perhaps "Jazz-Age writer." However, Fitzgerald's work, especially his early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned, clearly demonstrates his interest in the formal strategies characteristic of literary modernism, and it seems important to stress that at least some of those strategies emerged from American mass culture (here, Hollywood film) at least as much as they emerged in opposition to it.

Many scholars and general readers alike see Hollywood as having influenced Fitzgerald's fiction primarily by distracting him from writing more of it and by cheapening what he did manage to produce, and that mistaken impression seems to come from understanding Fitzgerald as the uneasy marriage of what John Dos Passos called in 1945 "two divergent halves."⁴ In this view, Fitzgerald's better half struggled to produce "serious" fiction (mostly his novels), while his lesser half profited handsomely by pumping out ephemeral short stories and bad film scripts.^5...