Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page A

out of print.
    Fitzgerald had begun to resurrect himself shortly before his death, and his literary reputation was resurrected shortly after it. It began with the publication of The Last Tycoon, edited by his friend Edmund Wilson. While unfinished, it was widely acknowledged as a masterful work. Then his other novels were reissued, the critics began to reevaluate, and Fitzgerald joined his friend and sometimes nemesis Ernest Hemingway as one of the classic American writers of the twentieth century.
    Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (The Crack-Up, p. 39). For a short time Fitzgerald lost his ability to hope, to maintain a dream to sustain him. He became a man submerged in his own despair, with no sense of self or ability to change. But Fitzgerald found a way to emerge from his depression, to heal his heart and rediscover a dream. With this renewal he proved that while he may have ruined himself with his spiral into dissipation, he was not condemned to the doomed decline of his fictional character Anthony Patch. With his heartbreaking vulnerability, his capacity for love, and his commitment to hold fast to dreams, Fitzgerald at the end of his life brings to mind another of his characters, Jay Gatsby:
    If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift of hope, a romantic readiness (The Great Gatsby, p. 2).
    Pagan Harleman studied literature at Columbia College, then traveled extensively in the Middle East and West Africa before receiving an MFA from New York University’s graduate film program. While at NYU she made several award-winning shorts and received the Dean’s Fellowship, the Steven Tisch Fellowship, and a Director’s Craft Award.

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

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