The Beautiful and Damned

Anthony Patch

Anthony moves through Manhattan drawing social security from the fortune of his grandfather Adam J. Patch, a Wall Street millionaire turned moral reformer who named him after Anthony Comstock. He fancies himself exceptional and well-adjusted, yet keeps wondering whether he is without honor and slightly mad, a thinness glistening on the world like oil on a clean pond. His courtship of Gloria Gilbert and his refusal to work while waiting for an inheritance set the marriage on its fatal early course.

Gloria Gilbert

Gloria arrives in the East with a mother who has watched young men walk her library like caged tigers, phoning, writing, threatening South America, and never lasting. She strikes to kill without deliberate cruelty, cool and unmoved amid returned presents and broken engagements, and tells Anthony they are twins because they are both clean like streams and winds. Her insistence that she wants to stand on a street corner like a sandwich man announcing her love sets the terms of a marriage that will demand more of the world than the world will give.

Maury Noble

Maury presides over Anthony's drawing room with a bottle and a theory, greeting the social-service worker Paramore with a glow of suspicion as though the man had announced himself an amateur pickpocket. He could rescue Anthony from a forgotten name and prefers to look on in malicious enjoyment instead. His epigrams about electrocuting the ignorant and dirty give the circle its cynical music, and his willingness to watch rather than help marks the moral temperature of the world Anthony and Gloria inhabit.

Richard Caramel

Dick Caramel abandons the Alien Young Men's Rescue Association and a Sun reporting job after filing a column about a parade that snow postponed, then throws himself into writing The Demon Lover. He pours his hopes and indecisions into anyone who will listen, from Anthony and Maury to a Harlem subway ticket-collector, and sits by the hour with Mrs. Gilbert trading Bilphism for literature. His book, drawn from the circle around him, makes him the group's uneasy mirror of what ambition looks like when it succeeds.

Muriel Kane

Muriel moves through the Patches' apartment with obliging levity, greeting strangers as Fred and trading gossip about who is in her prime. When Anthony storms out drunk and Gloria sits composed in the lamplight, Muriel is the one who cries, asks whether this has happened much, and hears the answer that they just go on. Her sincere distress and her inability to stay, since she has a man and it is already seven-thirty, frame Gloria's isolation in a new dress bought imprudently for fifty dollars.

Joseph Bloeckman

Bloeckman meets Gloria at Delmonico's, tolerates her invidious nickname, and proposes within a month, offering everything from an Italian villa to a career on the screen. She laughs in his face and he laughs too, but he does not give up, following along beside her as she walks the fence, ready to catch her. When she tells him of her engagement he paces the carpet with narrowed eyes, and Anthony, understanding that Gloria's indifference is her strongest appeal, forgets him entirely, which is exactly the kind of mistake the novel will not let stand.