#gloria patch

Gloria: Everything I do is in accordance with my ideas: to use every minute of these years, when I'm young, having the best time I possibly can.

Anthony: How about after that?

The Beautiful and Damned: let's talk endings  Warning: contains a lot of spoilers; quotes final paragraphs.

Having read The Great Gatsby for the first time ever a few weeks ago, I've been exploring Fitzgerald's other work. Just yesterday I finished reading The Beautiful and Damned, and I was completely overwhelmed by its powerful ending.

Quick plot refresher:

Our protagonist is Jazz-age professional layabout/future heir Anthony Patch. Raised by his rich, reformer grandfather, he lives in constant expectancy of dear grampa's demise and the subsequent inheritance of 30 million dollars (around 1918: the rough equivalent of 450 million dollars in 2012, see online inflation calculator). He meets, falls in love with and then triumphantly marries Miss Gloria Gilbert, whose star qualities are being beautiful and unflinchingly self-centered. Not really having an actual occupation or goal in life, they spiral out of control, living far above their means. When Anthony's cashcow grandfather crashes one of their alcohol-fueled parties, his reformer's revenge is disinheriting them. As an exhausting legal battle ensues, so does the First World War. Anthony is drafted to go to a training camp in the South, while Gloria remains in New York. Surprisingly, only one of them has an affair.  After the war, their relationship continues to get worse. Anthony develops a serious drinking problem (during Prohibition, no less!) and Gloria panicks at reaching thirty without becoming a famous movie star overnight.  In the final chapter, Gloria goes to the final appeal of their court case contesting Adam Patch's will alone, while Anthony stays home drunk. Then his war mistress stops by to beg him to take her back and he hits her with an oak chair. Maybe. When Gloria comes home, there is no Dot in the apartment, nor any sign of chair-related assault, but a cheap perfume does linger. Was Dot ever there? Did Anthony really hit her with the chair? Is she a complex metaphor? 

ONWARD. 

Gloria informs Anthony that the appeals court has reversed the previous decision and Anthony (and she) are now rich. Gloriously rich. The episode with Dot/Dot-hallucination has finally cracked Anthony's mind, though, and he has reverted to a child-like state.

The final pages of the novel see us on a cruise ship, where passengers gossip idly about Anthony, gone simple, and Gloria, who finally has her metaphor hilariously expensive coat. 

Allow me to quote for you the closing paragraphs:

Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life - and he had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a week before they sailed? Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself. "I showed them," he was saying. "It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!"

Now, there are several elements to this ending that could have gone differently, but I believe that the way Fitzgerald went was the most powerful one.

The ending sees:

- Anthony and Gloria still together, still presumably unhappy and at last indifferent towards one another.

- Anthony rich.

- their social life presumably restored by grace of wealth, if not actual merit.

All of those hinge upon the court's decision to award Anthony "his" millions. This was an appeal's case - a last chance - and it could easily have gone the other way. However, I believe this one was the most powerful choice, narrative-wise.

Anthony (and to a lesser and more passive extent, Gloria) has spent the entire story, spanning almost a decade of their marriage, trying to avoid having to do anything. He was raised in the belief that he would be effortlessly and shamelessly rich, and there was a certain stubborn inertia in his inability and unwillingness to let go of the idea. 

Sure, he tried a few things, half-assedly, and there was some talk of his becoming a war correspondent, but when push came to shove, Anthony was only too happy to go back to an empty life of partying and spending.

Had the appeal's court finally denied Anthony the money, he would have had to move on. The court case was his excuse not to do anything about his situation, not to "give in" to his friends' "pushing him towards mediocrity". 

Now that he has inherited his millions, it is much too late to be happy in their marriage, and it is perfectly clear neither Anthony nor Gloria will come to anything. 

"...i can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, dearest, i can't see or hear or feel or think. being apart - whatever has happened or will happen to us - is like begging for mercy from a storm...it's like growing old. i want to kiss you so - in the back of your neck...because i love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you've got to feel how much i do, how inanimate i am when you are gone...

if you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me - how absurd this sounds - i'd still want you, i'd still love you. i know, my darling."

- gloria to anthony, in the beautiful and damned