Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  She nodded.

  “Yes. I want to. Dick said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park—and look, the room’s all full of sunshine.”

  Anthony glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the bed.

  “God, I’m nervous!” he exclaimed.

  “Please don’t sit there,” she said quickly.

  “Why not?”

  “You smell of whiskey. I can’t stand it.”

  He got up absent-mindedly and left the room. A little later she called to him and he went out and brought her some potato salad and cold chicken from the delicatessen.

  At two o’clock Richard Caramel’s car arrived at the door and, when he phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her to the curb.

  She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. “Don’t be simple,” Dick replied disparagingly. “It’s nothing.”

  But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing. Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offenses. But he had never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made just prior to her wedding, seven years before. She had said that she did not intend to read his book.

  Richard Caramel remembered this—he had remembered it well for seven years.

  “What time will I expect you back?” asked Anthony.

  “We won’t come back,” she answered, “we’ll meet you down there at four.”

  “All right,” he muttered, “I’ll meet you.”

  Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed notice urging “the boys” in condescendingly colloquial language to pay the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the waste-basket and sat down with his elbows on the window-sill, looking down blindly into the sunny street.

  Italy—if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy.3 The word had become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk again in the Piazza di Spogna at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly—when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it—the romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain, and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.

  But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude. All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually—perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway.

  Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror, contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their crisscross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby figure whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He was thirty-three—he looked forty. Well, things would be different.

  The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though he had been dealt a blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer door. It was Dot.

  The Encounter

  He retreated before her into the living-room, comprehending only a word here and there in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was decently and shabbily dressed—a somehow pitiable little hat adorned with pink and blue flowers covered and hid her dark hair. He gathered from her words that several days before she had seen an item in the paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his address from the clerk of the Appellate Division. She had called up the apartment and had been told that Anthony was out by a woman to whom she had refused to give her name.

  In the living-room he stood by the door regarding her with a sort of stupefied horror as she rattled on.... His predominant sensation was that all the civilization and convention around him was curiously unreal.... She was in a milliner’s shop on Sixth Avenue, she said. It was a lonesome life. She had been sick for a long while after he left for Camp Mills; her mother had come down and taken her home again to Carolina.... She had come to New York with the idea of finding Anthony.

  She was appallingly in earnest. Her violet eyes were red with tears; her soft intonation was ragged with little gasping sobs.

  That was all. She had never changed. She wanted him now, and if she couldn’t have him she must die....

  “You’ll have to get out,” he said at length, speaking with tortuous intensity. “Haven’t I enough to worry me now without you coming here? My God ! You’ll have to get out!”

  Sobbing, she sat down in a chair.

  “I love you,” she cried; “I don’t care what you say to me! I love you.”

  “I don’t care!” he almost shrieked; “get out—oh, get out! Haven’t you done me harm enough? Haven’t—you—done—enough?”

  “Hit me!” she implored him—wildly, stupidly. “Oh, hit me, and I’ll kiss the hand you hit me with!”

  His voice rose until it was pitched almost at a scream. “I’ll kill you!” he cried. “If you don’t get out I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”

  There was madness in his eyes now, but, unintimidated, Dot rose and took a step toward him.

  “Anthony! Anthony!—”

  He made a little clicking sound with his teeth and drew back as though to spring at her—then, changing his purpose, he looked wildly about him on the floor and wall.

  “I’ll kill you!” he was muttering in short, broken gasps. “I’ll kill you!” He seemed to bite at the word as though to force it into materialization. Alarmed at last she made no further movement forward, but meeting his frantic eyes took a step back toward the door. Anthony began to race here and there on his side of the room, still giving out his single cursing cry. Then he found what he had been seeking—a stiff oaken chair that stood beside the table. Uttering a harsh, broken shout, he seized it, swung it above his head and let it go with all his raging strength straight at the white, frightened face across the room ... Then a thick, impenetrable darkness came down upon him and blotted out thought, rage, and madness together—with almost a tangible snapping sound the face of the world changed before his eyes....

  Gloria and Dick came in at five and called his name. There was no answer—they went into the living-room and found a chair with its back smashed lying in the doorway, and they noticed that all about the room there was a sort of disorder—the rugs had slid, the pictures and bric-à-brac were upset upon the centre-table. The air was sickly sweet with cheap perfume.

  They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and when they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back.

  “Anthony!” cried Gloria tensely, “we’ve won! They reversed the decision!”

  “Don’t come in,” he murmured wanly, “you’ll muss them. I’m sorting, and I know you’ll step in them. Everything always gets mussed.”

  “What are you doing?” demanded Dick in astonishment. “Going back to childhood? Don’t you realize you’ve won the suit? They’ve reversed the decision of the lower courts. You’re worth thirty millions!”

  Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.

  “Shut the door when you go out.” He spoke like a pert child.

  With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him—

  “Anthony!” she cried, “what is it? What’s the matter? Why didn’t you come—why, what is it?”


  “See here,” said Anthony softly, “you two get out—now, both of you. Or else I’ll tell my grandfather.”

  He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain—Italy....

  Together with the Sparrows

  That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records the subtlest verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria. And doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed the deck quickly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow.

  “That’s him,” he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheel-chair near the rail. “That’s Anthony Patch. First time he’s been on deck.”

  “Oh—that’s him?”

  “Yes. He’s been a little crazy, they say, ever since he got his money, four or five months ago. You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the religious fellow, the one that didn’t get the money, he locked himself up in a room in a hotel and shot himself—”

  “Oh, he did—”

  “But I guess Anthony Patch don’t care much. He got his thirty million. And he’s got his private physician along in case he doesn’t feel just right about it. Has she been on deck?” he asked.

  The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously.

  “She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian-sable coat that must have cost a small fortune.” She frowned and then added decisively: “I can’t stand her, you know. She seems sort of—sort of dyed and unclean, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look about them whether they are or not.”

  “Sure, I know,” agreed the man with the plaid cap. “She’s not bad-looking, though.” He paused. “Wonder what he’s thinking about—his money, I guess, or maybe he’s got remorse about that fellow Shuttleworth.”

  “Probably....”

  But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money, for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material vainglory, nor of Edward Shuttleworth, for it is best to look on the sunny side of these things. No—he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to ruthless misery, his very craving for romance had been punished, his friends had deserted him—even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone—facing it all.

  Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life—and he had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a week before they sailed?

  Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself.

  “I showed them,” he was saying. “It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and I came through!”4

  ENDNOTES

  Book One

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 8) Now Adam J. Patch ... left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment: Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, was a Maryland native and thus witnessed the Civil War from the Southern side; he helped row Confederate spies across a river when he was just nine years old. Scott loved to listen to his father’s tales of the war and the “Old South.”

  2 (p. 10) Harvard was the thing; it would “open doors,” it would be a tremendous tonic.... So he went to Harvard: Fitzgerald attended another Ivy League school, Princeton University, and chronicled his experience there in his first semi-autobiographical book, This Side of Paradise.

  3 (p. 13) 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”: All four women were theater actresses in the 1910s and 1920s who also starred in films. Billie Burke (1885-1970), who wed theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld (1869-1932) and played Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the film The Wizard of Oz, is the most notable of the group.

  4 (p. 14) Every Christmas he sent him a five-hundred-dollar bond: Early in his career Fitzgerald purchased a thousand-dollar bond as an investment. As it turned out it was the first, the last, and the worst financial investment Fitzgerald made. The bond dropped astronomically in value and grew to be a running joke between him and Zelda. Once he left it on the subway by accident and someone returned it to him. Scott repeatedly tried to cash it without success, and finally tore it up.

  5 (p. 20) ”The Demon Lover”: After publishing his first novel, Fitzgerald wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he was working on a new book tentatively titled ”The Demon Lover.” Fitzgerald scrapped that novel but decided to give the title to the novel being written by his fictional character, Dick Caramel.

  6 (p. 23) I’ll do a musical comedy: As a college student Fitzgerald wrote several musical comedies for the Princeton theatrical group called the Triangle Club.

  CHAPTER II

  1 (p. 38) Behind Maury Noble’s attractive indolence... lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose: Fitzgerald loosely based Maury Noble on his friend George Nathan (1882-1958). The book was also dedicated in part to Nathan, who was one of the editors of The Smart Set, a highbrow literary review that published some of Fitzgerald’s shorter fiction.

  CHAPTER III

  1 (p. 67) At sixteen she began going to dances at preparatory schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys, boys, boys: This is a fitting description as well of Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who was surrounded by boys and beaus from a young age and quickly became one of the most popular and famous belles in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

  Book Two

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 109) “We’re twins. ”Ecstatic thought! “Mother says”—she hesitated uncertainly—“mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and—and in love before they’re born”: People often noted that Scott and Zelda had an almost mystical connection.

  2 (p. 112) Delmonico’s: One of Fitzgerald’s first and best short stories, “May Day,” contrasts the anti-socialist riots that took place around May Day with the Yale University dance held at Delmonico‘s, a famed New York restaurant.

  3 (p. 122) After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS is large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed: Apparently these diary passages bear a remarkable resemblance to Zelda Fitzgerald’s diary, a fact she noted in a review she wrote on The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune.

  4 (p. 146) They signed a lease that night: While Fitzgerald was writing The Beautiful and Damned, he and Zelda rented a house in Westport, Connecticut.

  5 (p. 154) “Just before the novel appeared I’d been trying, without success, to sell some short stories”: Fitzgerald had attempted to sell short stories to all of the popular magazines when he first moved to New York but sold only one piece for thirty-five dollars. After his first book, This Side of Paradise, was published Fitzgerald was able to sell short stories to the top magazines for anywhere from $300 to $1,000 each.

  CHAPTER II

  1 (p. 158) The icy-hearted Scandinavian... gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable “Tana”: Fitzgerald and Zelda also employed a Japanese servant named Tana. Their friends George Nathan (1882-1958) and H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), co-editors of The Smart Set, played many of the same jokes on him that Dick and Maury play on T
ana in the novel, such as sending him letters with phony calligraphy, referring to him as Tannenbaum, and pretending that he was a German secret agent.

  2 (p. 209) “We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind... so that people will read our book and ponder it’”: Fitzgerald’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, originally objected to this section, believing that the treatment of the Bible was too sacrilegious for most readers. Fitzgerald insisted that he should have the artistic freedom to express his ideas, however contentious, and the passage remained.

  3 (p. 245) During their circulation they collected, all told, thirty one rejection slips: When Fitzgerald was first trying to start his writing career in New York he received 122 rejection slips that he posted around his apartment.

  Book Three

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 259) He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired captain, who fixed him menacingly with brown pop-eyes. “Come to attention!”: When Fitzgerald was stationed in Kansas, he was punished for failing to salute a general while taking his regiment out for a march.

  2 (p. 266) Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his heart: The French phrase is the title of a poem by Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), Fitzgerald’s idol. Fitzgerald said that, compared to Keats’s work, “all other poetry seems to be only whistling and humming” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 89; see “For Further Reading”). One of Fitzgerald’s provisional titles for The Beautiful and Damned was The Woman Without Mercy, a loose translation of the title of Keats’s poem.

  3 (p. 286) Anthony slipped between two freight-cars.... he knew that the military police were often sent through the cars to ask for passes: At the very end of World War II, when his regiment was sent to Washington from New York, Fitzgerald missed the train because he was AWOL. He mysteriously met the train in Washington, D.C., with some booze and two girls, bragging that he had requisitioned another train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station by pretending that he had a message for the President.