The Beautiful and the Damned | Page 8

merely critical
mind and all that.
ANTHONY: Oh, yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to fall for a million
silly enthusiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism and therefore
has to adopt the garments of the cynic he'd be--he'd be credulous as a
college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh, yes. He thinks he's not,
because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? just
swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technic, and
characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily as the last.
MAURY:(Still considering his own last observation) I remember.
ANTHONY: It's true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art--
MAURY: Let's order. He'll be--
ANTHONY: Sure. Let's order. I told him--
MAURY: Here he comes. Look--he's going to bump that waiter. (He
lifts his finger as a signal--lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly
claw.) Here y'are, Caramel.
A NEW VOICE: (Fiercely) Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock
Patch. How is old Adam's grandson? Débutantes still after you, eh?
In person RICHARD CARAMEL is short and fair--he is to be bald at

thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes--one of them startlingly clear, the
other opaque as a muddy pool--and a bulging brow like a funny-paper
baby. He bulges in other places--his paunch bulges, prophetically, his
words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat
pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared
collection of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps--on
these he takes his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched
yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand.
When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and
MAURY. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with
people whom they have seen an hour before.
ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel. Glad you're here. We needed a comic
relief.
MAURY: You're late. Been racing the postman down the block? We've
been clawing over your character.
DICK: (Fixing ANTHONY eagerly with the bright eye) What'd you
say? Tell me and I'll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of
Part One this afternoon.
MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.
DICK: I don't doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour
talking about liquor.
ANTHONY: We never pass out, my beardless boy.
MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we're lit.
ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty
distinction.
DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being "tanks"!
Trouble is you're both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old
English Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have

a good time. Oh, no, that isn't done at all.
ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I'll bet.
DICK: Going to the theatre?
MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep
thinking over of life's problems. The thing is tersely called "The
Woman." I presume that she will "pay."
ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let's go to the Follies again.
MAURY: I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. (To DICK:) The first
time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When
we came back we entered the wrong theatre.
ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we
thought were in our seats.
DICK: (As though talking to himself) I think--that when I've done
another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I'll do a
musical comedy.
MAURY: I know--with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to.
And all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a
meaningless world.
DICK: (Pompously) Art isn't meaningless.
MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grand stand
peopled with ghosts.
MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.
ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a
meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is

purposeless.
DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a
poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that
sophistic rot?
ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.
MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected
thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of
morals--Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of
conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who
seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral
freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone