The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (summer beach reads .txt) đ
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
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ââWhy, when I was just two years older than you,â he rasped with a cunning chuckle, âI sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse.â
Anthony started with embarrassment.
âWell, good-by,â added his grandfather suddenly, âyouâll miss your train.â
Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him âneither youth nor digestionâ but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his sonâs wedding that he should have remembered.
Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spot-light. âThe Demon Loverâ had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society.
The book hesitated and then suddenly âwent.â Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that âGypsyâ Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens.
The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the timeâhe wanted to know if one had heard âthe latestâ; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it, or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to moody depression.
So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dickâs great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read âThe Demon Lover,â and didnât intend to until every one stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring inâfirst a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-ïżœ-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten poor relations.
Maury gave them an elaborate âdrinking set,â which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick was more conventionalâa tea set from Tiffanyâs. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weepâindeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances of Gloriaâs Farmover days, and with rather pathetic trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric, melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning âI little thought whenââ or âIâm sure I wish you all the happinessââ or even âWhen you get this I shall be on my way toââ
The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It was a concession of Adam Patchâsâa check for five thousand dollars.
To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.
âLook, Anthony!â
âDarn nice, isnât it!â
No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it, and, if so, just how much surprised.
Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as âsecond-best clockâ or âsilver to use every day,â and embarrassing Anthony and Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery. She was pleased by old Adamâs gift and thereafter had it that he was a very ancient soul, âas much as anything else.â As Adam Patch never quite decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as âthat old woman, the mother,â as though she were a character in a comedy he had seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.
Five days!âA dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at Tarrytown. Four days!âA special train was chartered to convey the guests to and from New York. Three days!â-
THE DIARYShe was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind and opening a table drawer brought out a little black bookâa âLine-a-dayâ diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial âI am going to keep a diary for my children.â Yet as she thumbed over the pages the eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first timeâin 1908, when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yaleâshe had been flattered because âTouch downâ Michaud had ârushedâ her all evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been so proud of and the orchestra playing âYama-yama, My Yama Manâ and âJungle-Town.â So long ago!âthe names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons, âCurlyâ McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, âFish-eyeâ Fry (whom she had liked for being so ugly), Carter Kirbyâhe had sent her a present; so had Tudor Baird;âMarty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick, whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if she wouldnât kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What a list!
⊠And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for these men and these moonlights and for the âthrillsâ she had hadâand the kisses. The pastâher past, oh, what a joy! She had been exuberantly happy.
Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of the past four months. She read the last few carefully.
âApril 1st.âI know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny how one forgets the other nights at Rockyearâwith Kenneth Cowan when I loved him so!
âApril 3rd.âAfter two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has millions, Iâve decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men. Thereâs nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about âloveââhow banal! With how many men have I talked about love?
âApril 11th.âPatch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. Iâm gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.
âApril 20th.âSpent the day with Anthony. Maybe Iâll marry him some time. I kind of like his ideasâhe stimulates all the originality in me. Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive. I liked him to-night: heâs so considerate. He knew I didnât want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.
âApril 21st.âWoke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phoneâso I broke a date for him. To-day I feel Iâd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck. Heâs coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starchedâ-â
She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.
The next entry occurred a few days later:
âApril 24th.âI want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often âhusbandsâ and I must marry a lover.
âThere are four general types of husbands.
â(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
â(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman âshallow,â a sort of peacock with arrested development.
â(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought righteous.
â(4) And Anthonyâa temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony.
âWhat grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It canât, shanât be the settingâitâs going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to oneâs unwanted children. What a fateâto grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapersâŠ. Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wingsâ-
âSuch children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.
âJune 7th.âMoral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me? Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How opportune
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