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THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED F. SCOTT FITZGERALD 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 that insidious mildew which eventually forms on
all but the few gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the
age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed
against the enormous hypothetical enemy unrighteousness a campaign
which went on through fifteen years during which he displayed himself a
rabid monomaniac an unqualified nuisance and an intolerable bore. The
year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had
grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a
great deal on the Civil War somewhat on his dead wife and son almost
infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.
Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty
Alicia Withers who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an
impeccable entre into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and
rather spunkily she had borne him a son and as if completely
devitalized by the magnificence of this performance she had thenceforth
effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy
Adam Ulysses Patch became an inveterate joiner of clubs connoisseur of
good form and driver of tandems--at the astonishing age of twenty-six
he began his memoirs under the title "New York Society as I Have Seen
It." On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among
publishers but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose
and overpoweringly dull it never obtained even a private printing.
This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was
Henrietta Lebrune the Boston "Society Contralto" and the single child
of the union was at the request of his grandfather christened Anthony
Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard the Comstock dropped out of his
name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.
Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together--so
often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the
impersonality of furniture but every one who came into his bedroom
regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties spare and
handsome standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the
suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown
curls dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at
five the year of his mother's death.
His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical.
She was a lady who sang sang sang in the music room of their house on
Washington Square--sometimes with guests scattered all about her the
men with their arms folded balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas
the women with their hands in their laps occasionally making little
whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing
cries after each song--and often she sang to Anthony alone in Italian
or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be
the speech of the Southern negro.
His recollections of the gallant Ulysses the first man in America to
roll the lapels of his coat were much more vivid. After Henrietta
Lebrune Patch had "joined another choir" as her widower huskily
remarked from time to time father and son lived up at grampa's in
Tarrytown and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled
pleasant thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was
continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and
excursions to Atlantic City "oh some time soon now"; but none of them
ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they
went abroad to England and Switzerland and there in the best hotel in
Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud
for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to
America wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him
through the rest of his life.
PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO
At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his
parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly
until for the first time since her marriage her person held for one
day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony
life was a struggle against death that waited at every corner. It was
as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the
habit of reading in bed--it soothed him. He read until he was tired and
often fell asleep with the lights still on.
His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection;
enormous as nearly exhaustive as a boy's could be--his grandfather
considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept
up a correspondence with a half dozen "Stamp and Coin" companies and it
was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages
of glittering approval sheets--there was a mysterious fascination in
transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His
stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on
any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his
allowance every month and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on
their variety and many-colored splendor.
At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself an inarticulate
boy thoroughly un-American and politely bewildered by his
contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a
private tutor who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would
"open doors" it would be a tremendous tonic it would give him
innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to
Harvard--there was no other logical thing to be done with him.
Oblivious to the social system he lived for a while alone and unsought
in a high room in Beck Hall--a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy
sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the
foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile
first editions of Swinburne Meredith and Hardy and a yellowed
illegible autograph letter of Keats's finding later that he had been
amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy amassed a rather
pathetic collection of silk pajamas brocaded dressing-gowns and
neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade
before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his
window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor
breathless and immediate in which it seemed he was never to have
a part.
Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position
in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic
figure a scholar a recluse a tower of erudition. This amused him but
secretly pleased him--he began going out at first a little and then a
great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank--quietly and in the proper
tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young
he might have "done extremely well." In 1909 when he graduated he was
only twenty years old.
Then abroad again--to Rome this time where he dallied with architecture
and painting in turn took up the violin and wrote some ghastly Italian
sonnets supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the
joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard
intimates that he was in Rome and those of them who were abroad that
year looked him up and discovered with him on many moonlight
excursions much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or
indeed than the republic. Maury Noble from Philadelphia for instance
remained two months and together they realized the peculiar charm of
Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a
civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his
grandfather's called on him and had he so desired he might have been
_persona grata_ with the diplomatic set--indeed he found that his
inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality but that long
adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to
his conduct.
He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather's
sudden illnesses and after an excessively tiresome talk with the
perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his
grandfather's death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a
prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all
appearances settled down.
In 1913 Anthony Patch's adjustment of himself to the universe was in
process of consummation. Physically he had improved since his
undergraduate days--he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened
and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year.
He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span--his friends
declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too
sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined
to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness but his blue eyes were
charming whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an
expression of melancholy humor.
One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the
Aryan ideal he was yet here and there considered handsome--moreover
he was very clean in appearance and in reality with that especial
cleanness borrowed from beauty.
THE REPROACHLESS APARTMENT
Fifth and Sixth Avenues it seemed to Anthony were the uprights of a
gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park.
Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably
gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of
treacherous rungs and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he
found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps
to the sidewalk.
After that he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block
pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses--and then in a jiffy he was
under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely
satisfactory. Here after all life began. Here he slept breakfasted
read and entertained.
The house itself was of murky material built in the late nineties; in
response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had
been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four
apartments Anthony's on the second floor was the most desirable.
The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that
loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it
escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped
stiffness stuffiness bareness and decadence. It smelt neither of
smoke nor of incense--it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep
lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it
like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly
concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold;
this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an
orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield
was burned to a murky black.
Passing through the dining-room which as Anthony took only breakfast
at home was merely a magnificent potentiality and down a comparatively
long hall one came to the heart and core of the apartment--Anthony's
bedroom and bath.
Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the
great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic
rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom
in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom was gay
bright extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around
the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the
day: Julia Sanderson as "The Sunshine Girl" Ina Claire as "The Quaker
Girl" Billie Burke as "The Mind-the-Paint Girl" and Hazel Dawn as "The
Pink Lady." Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print
representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and
formidable sun--this claimed Anthony symbolized the cold shower.
The bathtub equipped with an ingenious bookholder was low and large.
Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and
with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a
carpet--instead a rich rug like the one in his bedroom a miracle of
softness that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from
the tub....
All in all a room to conjure with--it was easy to see that Anthony
dressed there arranged his immaculate hair there in fact did
everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride this bathroom. He
felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing
the tub so that lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water he
might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on
her beauty.
NOR DOES HE SPIN
The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly
almost theatrically appropriate name of Bounds whose technic was
marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely
Anthony's Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied but he
was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From
eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony's. He arrived
with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of
Anthony's blanket and spoke a few terse words--Anthony never remembered
clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then
he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room made the bed and
after asking with some hostility if there was anything else withdrew.
In the mornings at least once a week Anthony went to see his broker.
His income was slightly under seven thousand a year the interest on
money inherited from his mother. His grandfather who had never allowed
his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance judged that this
sum was sufficient for young Anthony's needs. Every Christmas he sent
him a five-hundred-dollar bond which Anthony usually sold if possible
as he was always a little not very hard up.
The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of
the safety of eight per cent investments and Anthony always enjoyed
them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to
the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that
he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these
hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in
contemplating his grandfather's money--even more for the latter
appeared vaguely a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch's own
moral righteousness while this money down-town seemed rather to have
been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous
feats of will; in addition it seemed more definitely and
explicitly--money.
Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income he considered it to
be enough. Some golden day of course he would have many millions;
meanwhile he possessed a _raison d'etre_ in the theoretical creation of
essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the
conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.
He had hoped to find his grandfather dead but had learned by
telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well
again--the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to
Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an
elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and
wire fences guarding the estate--this said the public was because it
was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way one of the
first men they'd assassinate would be old Cross Patch.
Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a
glass-walled sun parlor where he was glancing through the morning
papers for the second time. His secretary Edward Shuttleworth--who
before his regeneration had been gambler saloon-keeper and general
reprobate--ushered Anthony into the room exhibiting his redeemer and
benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.
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