The Beautiful and the Damned

The Beautiful and Damned
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Title: The Beautiful and Damned
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

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THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
1922

Novels
THE LAST TYCOON (Unfinished) With a foreword by Edmund
Wilson and notes by the author
TENDER IS THE NIGHT
THE GREAT GATSBY
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
Stories

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES With an introduction by Arnold
Gingrich
TAPS AT REVEILLE
SIX TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE AND OTHER STORIES With an
introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan
FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS With an introduction by Arthur
Mizener
THE STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD A selection of 28 stories,
with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley
Stories and Essays
AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR With an introduction and notes by
Arthur Mizener
THE FITZGERALD READER: A Selection Edited and with an
introduction by Arthur Mizener

The victor belongs to the spoils. --ANTHONY PATCH

TO SHANE LESLIE, GEORGE JEAN NATHAN AND MAXWELL
PERKINS
IN APPRECIATION OF MUCH LITERARY HELP AND
ENCOURAGEMENT

CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
I. ANTHONY PATCH

II. PORTRAIT OF A SIREN
III. THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES
BOOK TWO
I. THE RADIANT HOUR
II. SYMPOSIUM
III. THE BROKEN LUTE
BOOK THREE
I. A MATTER OF CIVILIZATION
II. A MATTER OF AESTHETICS
III. NO MATTER!

BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
ANTHONY PATCH
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already
gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at
least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the
ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet at
the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious
stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not
without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness
glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these
occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks
himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated,
well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than

any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very
attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he
considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing
that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the
dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between
death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be
Anthony Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic
personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within
outward--a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet
had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON
Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the
grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line
over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and
Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded
sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.
Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as "Cross Patch," left his
father's farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York
cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into
Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he
gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.
This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was
then that he determined, after a