THE STRANGER

The Beautiful and Damned

A good portion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned is set at the Plaza Hotel– precisely where most of these photos were shot. The novel is based in New York City in the 1920s, written about a frivolous and decadent couple who are under the false impression that they will inherit a gigantic fortune. I’ve included some random excerpts from the novel. If you haven’t read it already and like what you see, you should pick up a copy from the bookstore. It really is worth a read. The reviewers put it best: “Haunting and keenly observed, The Beautiful and Damned provides a vivid portrait of a lost world and the rootless and materialistic generation that inhabited it.”

Michael (L): Zegna pants, Uniqlo shirt, Sisley blazer, Pop Killer sunglasses, Prada shoes
Michelle (R): Ralph Lauren blouse, H&M necklace, Intermix skirt, Louis Vuitton handbag, Zigi shoes

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ – and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”

.”As the winter passed with the march of the returning troops along Fifth Avenue they became more and more aware that since Anthony’s return their relations had entirely changed. After that reflowering of tenderness and passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed, from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what they knew at last was gone.”

“I want it to smell of magnolias instead
of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee’s
boots crunched on. There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no
poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books,
houses–bound for dust–mortal–”

“After slipping on a negligee and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were the tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying the assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers – this force intangible as air, more definite than death.”