Thursday, June 14, 2007
Panera, Beauty, and Fitzgerald.
Posted by Zach in News

I recently overheard an older man talking to his wife in Panera Bread. He watched a girl empty her meal remnants into a trash receptacle. The girl was fair-haired with pale skin and rosy cheeks. She wore a knitted newsboy cap—I imagine it as a type that it is fashionable in Asheville or someplace. Apart from her army pants and Chuck Taylor’s, she could have easily been one of those beautiful Icelandic girls that gather turnips beneath threatening skies and the first stiff winds that signal a storm. Inevitably, girls like that make their way onto the cover of a National Geographic coffee table book. That might be beside the point. Anyway, the old man sort of chuckled as the girl left the restaurant. His wife scrunched her eyebrows, and he shook his head and half pointed his finger to where the girl stood. His wife said, “Was she cute?” “Yes, she was cute alright, but she looked like Little Orphan Annie.” The statement in itself was a cut, but he said it in such an affectionate way that I couldn’t help but be moved. It was clearly an elderly couple’s bafflement at exotic fashion but appreciation of Beauty.

I think that this experience sort of crystallizes the idea that beauty transcends fashion, and it’s always sort of gross to me, when fashion is used as a substitute for beauty—as though makeup and manicures can imprison it.

So even though these people were from an era that found her style foreign (I’m not sure that I didn’t find her style foreign myself), beauty is still beauty.

Fitzgerald explores this thought in his novel The Beautiful and Damned. It was published in 1922, and in my opinion, the following excerpt is the highlight of the book. The thrust seems to be that Beauty is a spirit that can possess an age or person, which is different from saying that an age or person can posses Beauty.

A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE

Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one—the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again. Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the white wind, a conversation that took may hours and of which I can give only a fragment here.

BEAUTY: (Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward upon herself) Whither shall I journey now?

THE VOICE: To a new country—a land you have never seen before.

BEAUTY: (Petulantly) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations. How long a stay this time?

THE VOICE: Fifteen years.

BEAUTY: And what’s the name of the place?

THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth—a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men—

BEAUTY: (In astonishment) What?

THE VOICE: (Very much depressed) Yes, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying “Do this!” and “Do that!” and all the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as “Mrs. So-and-so” or as “the wife.”

BEAUTY: But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm—but to fat women? To bony women? To women with scrawny cheeks?

THE VOICE: Even so….

BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?

THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it’s not advisable. You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a “susiety gurl.”

BEAUTY: What’s that?
(There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be interpreted as THE VOICE scratching its head.)
THE VOICE: (At length) It’s a sort of bogus aristocrat.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?

THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

BEAUTY: (Placidly) It all sounds so vulgar.
THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY: (In a whisper) Will I be paid?

THE VOICE: Yes, as usual—in love.

BEAUTY: (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?

THE VOICE: (Soberly) You will love it….

(…All this took place seven years before ANTHONY sat by the front windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne’s.)

2 Responses to “Panera, Beauty, and Fitzgerald.”

h* comments:
Friday, June 15th, 2007

i am baffled by your 2nd paragraph. some gals use fashion to enhance their inner beauty. boys often don’t notice us if we don’t try. those deemed “naturally beautiful” probably try more than you give them credit for. i take all the help (lip smackers, mascara, & the occasional new pair of shoes) i can find.
perhaps your error lies in your assumption of “imprisonment.” i believe, like the young woman at panera, that no trend could hide her inherent beauty. but an individual born without it can probably benefit from some of the hints oscar de la renta can share with her.

Zach comments:
Friday, June 15th, 2007

You may be right.

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