The Beautiful and Damned: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The novel opens with the narrator’s description of Anthony Patch in 1913, at age 25. Anthony is of the mind that irony, “the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a kind of intellectual ‘There!’” is the new Holy Ghost. He alternates between thinking of himself as an oil slick on the water of the world and an exceptional member of society.

At moments when he feels exceptional, Anthony acts agreeable and finds himself the center of attention. He imagines as a matter of course that he will achieve something distinguished and immortalizing without trying, because although he thinks of honor and courage as illusions, he nevertheless believes that he embodies these qualities effortlessly.

The narrator reflects that Anthony enjoys an elevated social status not because he is descended from nobility but because his paternal grandfather, Adam J. Patch, made a fortune on Wall Street after returning home from the Civil War. For many years, Adam Patch spent his energy trying to rid society of alcohol, art, and other seemingly hedonistic preoccupations.

At the time the story starts, Adam Patch spends less time on social projects and more time dwelling on his dead wife and son and, to an even greater extent, Anthony. Adam’s son (Anthony’s father) was a successful writer who became depressive following the death of his wife (Anthony’s mother). At eleven, Anthony watched his father die in a hotel room in Italy. Anthony’s care was thereafter left to his grandfather.

Anthony grew up terrified of death because of his parents’ and grandmother’s early demises. He habitually used books and his stamp collection as means of escape from his anxiety. Anthony’s anxiety led to isolation from his peers. His private tutor convinced him that attending Harvard would help him make valuable connections, but he spent his time there drinking and collecting expensive dandy’s clothing that he would wear at home while looking out his window at the passing world. Anthony found that his isolation made him an attractively mysterious figure to his classmates, who placed him on a pedestal.

Anthony graduated in 1909 at age twenty, and spent the following three years dallying around Rome with Harvard acquaintances, including Maury Noble, enjoying art, music, poetry, and sexual exploits. In 1912, Anthony moved home because his grandfather fell ill. He decided to rent an apartment and put off moving permanently abroad until after Adam Patch’s death.

Anthony now lives in the most desirable apartment in his building. He thinks of his home as a rung on a giant ladder running from Washington Square to Central Park. The “heart and core of the apartment” are Anthony’s bedroom and bathroom. Anthony especially loves his bathtub, complete with a bookholder, and thinks of his bathroom as his “pride.” His bathroom rug “seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from the tub.” A servant named Bounds works somewhat begrudgingly for Anthony and two of his neighbors, releasing Anthony from most of his domestic chores.

Anthony visits his broker at least one morning a week. Doing so makes him feel financially responsible and on the brink of millions, even though he habitually spends almost all of his income, which consists entirely of interest on his mother’s inheritance and the occasional Christmas check from his grandfather.

The narrator reflects that a year ago, immediately after moving into his apartment, Anthony called his grandfather and was disappointed to discover that he was still alive. He went to visit him and met Edward Shuttleworth, the reformed drinker and gambler who now works as Adam Patch’s secretary. Shuttleworth refused to leave the room as Adam Patch confronted his grandson about “doing something” with his life. Anthony interpreted this to mean that he needed to think about the legacy he would leave upon his own death. Despite the old man’s physical deterioration, his and Shuttleworth’s combined presence cowed Anthony into agreeing to write a history of the Middle Ages before taking his leave. Now, in October 1913, Anthony has lists of chapter titles and sources, but he has written nothing.

The narrator sets the scene: It is a fall afternoon, and Anthony is reading Erewhon by his apartment window. He sets the book aside to take a bath before meeting his friends Maury Noble and Dick Caramel for dinner at the Ritz. He admires his body in the mirror. Relaxing in the tub, Anthony reflects that while he and Maury go to the theater after dinner, Dick will probably go home to work on his book. Anthony is glad that he has no plans to work on his own book.

While dressing meticulously after his bath, Anthony notices a woman through the window across the alley. He is totally captivated by her because, he realizes, she is far away. The illusion shatters when she stands and he sees that she is “fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished.”

Once Anthony makes his way to the Ritz, he finds only Maury. Maury, the narrator notes, was considered by classmates at Harvard as even more unique and brilliant than Anthony. Anthony considers Maury his best friend and is unusually at ease around him.

In a passage that Fitzgerald formats like a scene in a play, Anthony and Maury discuss Dick’s absence and his devotion to the novel he is writing, The Demon Lover. They exchange resentful comments about his talent. When Anthony speculates that eventually Dick will burn out and fail as a writer, Maury tries to redirect conversation. Anthony only stops his bitter comments when Dick finally shows up.

Dick has a bulging paunch and a bulging forehead. He is beginning to go bald. Dick shakes hands with Maury and Anthony and makes light fun of them for drinking and womanizing while he is hard at work. Anthony and Maury meanwhile tease him for overinflating the importance of his work. Art is only meaningful, Maury states, in that it tries to make life less meaningless. The philosophical conversation is cut short by the arrival of the soup, which ends the dramatic scene.

After dinner, Maury and Anthony go to a play. Anthony notices above all the varied clothing ensembles of the audience members and the “artificial lake of laughter” in the theatre. Maury goes dancing after the play, leaving Anthony to walk home alone. On the way, his senses are overloaded by the sights, sounds, and smells of the city. His mood fluctuates rapidly in response to his surroundings. Back in his apartment, he smokes a cigarette and reflects that in New York, he is never alone but always lonely. He enjoys living in his apartment, which keeps him safe from the threat of life outside.

In another passage formatted as a dramatic scene, Fitzgerald describes Beauty as a character who is reborn every century. She sits in an outdoor waiting room to receive her next assignment, and “the beauty of her body was the beauty of her soul.” She personifies the unified image of beauty for which philosophers have long been searching.

The narrator, “I,” professes to recount a fragment of conversation between Beauty and a disembodied voice on the wind. The voice tells Beauty that for the next fifteen years, she is to go to a new land where the wisest leaders believe in Santa Claus and even ugly women control men who are supposed to be strong and wealthy.

Beauty is shocked and disturbed. How will she fare in a world that gives power to unattractive women? The voice tells her that it will be more difficult for her than usual, but that as always, her visit on earth will be “the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.”

The voice says that while Beauty was initially to be incarnated as a movie star, that decision has been revised so that she will be a society girl, which is a sort of “bogus aristocrat.” She will be paid, as usual, in love, and she in turn will love being called a jazz-baby. The narrator ends the scene by stating that it has all taken place seven years before Anthony’s cigarette alone in his apartment.