I’m a little disappointed with the notes to the LOA edition of The Beautiful and Damned. We get no help with “a seidel of beer” (p. 516) (nothing more complicated than a drinking glass, but still); most of the song lyrics are glossed, but not “Out in—the shimmee sanitarium…” (p. 784). And, most significantly, nothing on Bilphist and Bilphism (pp. 475 and passim), apparently a brand of spiritualism of Fitzgerald’s own invention.
However, a trip to the dictionary was worth it for this sentence. The Patches have come down in the world:
Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. (“No Matter!”, p. 760)
Brummagem, a Menckenesque “cheap and showy; meretricious.” Umbrageousness here doesn’t mean what you think, but rather the property of “affording shade”. Coleridge has “A chestnut spread its umbrage wide.”
