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the most rational people in the book (quoted in Kazin, p. 83).
    Perhaps the most interesting criticism came from Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who wrote a review of the novel for the New York Tribune. Zelda criticized the book for its “literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition,” and asserted that the author had perhaps lifted a few of the passages: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 161). Zelda was right. For a writer everything is fair game, and from the beginning Fitzgerald used Zelda as a valuable source, often incorporating her sayings, mannerisms, and in this instance even adapting pieces of her writing into his work. Fitzgerald insisted, however, that there was only a surface resemblance between his wife and Gloria, later telling his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, known as Scottie, “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother” (quoted in A Life in Letters, p. 453). Indeed while Gloria and Zelda do share many characteristics—they are both beautiful, willful, domestic failures—Zeida was a much more complex and inherently lyrical person than the rather one-dimensional Gloria.
    Never one to waste material, Fitzgerald also wove many of the circumstantial facts of his married life with Zelda into the novel: They had a Japanese butler named Tana; they rented a house out in Connecticut; Fitzgerald had served in the army but was discharged before he could be shipped to the war, etc. But more than the superficial elements, Fitzgerald invested Anthony and Gloria with his and Zelda’s central weakness: their inability to alter or stop their self-destructive behavior. As Fitzgerald himself wrote, “I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other” (A Life in Letters, p. 189).
    Just before The Beautiful and Damned was published, Zelda had given birth to Scottie, their only child. One might think that a child would have forced Zelda and Scott to alter their lifestyle, but instead their outlandish behavior intensified. At parties, if he was bored Fitzgerald would flip over ashtrays or hack off his tie with a knife. One evening he even threatened to kill Zelda and her friend, chasing them around the kitchen with a knife until someone held him down. Always a flirt, Zelda began to court men in front of her husband to irritate him. They both went on two- or three-day drinking sprees, and their neighbors sometimes found Fitzgerald passed out on his front lawn. Like Gloria and Anthony, Scott and Zelda made attempts to reform; they moved to Great Neck to contain their costs and vowed to live the quiet life. When they continued to party, they took other measures to try to contain the damage. They posted notes around their house that stated, “Visitors are requested to not break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by host or hostess” (Turnbull, p. 136). They continued to live well beyond their means, despite the fact that Fitzgerald was earning $30,000 or more a year. He coped with their negative cash flow by periodically taking advances from his short-story agent, Harold Ober, and then sequestering himself in a room with pots of coffee for several weeks until he emerged with several short stories. Although Fitzgerald wrote some first-rate short stories, in general he felt that this commercial work was an artistic compromise that degraded his talent and distracted him from writing novels.
    Even more upsetting to Fitzgerald than the commercial compromises was his financial situation. He was continually in debt. Like Anthony and Gloria, he quickly gave up on the idea of controlling his