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
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9830] [This file was first posted on October 22, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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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 severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of