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“... and round. I did not do the tango, it was rather ... complicated.’ It sounds almost tragic, very Scott Fitzgerald, until you remember the woman on the stairs with the five children and the sad sack of groceries. Perhaps all that going round and round prevented her from going forward and she came to an emotional end of paragraph. She has known ...”

“... are held with some mental reservation – which may itself be a form of sophistication. After all, Scott Fitzgerald defined a first-rate intelligence as the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the head without losing the capacity to function. Perhaps it was because the onset of modernity came at such catastrophic speed to Tipperary that people like ...”

“... ever sceptical Henry James – were fascinated by Crane’s besoin de la fatalité, his air, which Scott Fitzgerald was to hit off so well in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim and Gatsby are doomed by the plot they invent for themselves: Crane’s own tale was ironically haunted by just ...”

“... discuss the heavens and the earth and the film stars we’d do with a chance.’ Then there’s Scott Fitzgerald: ‘know that I must drop the F. Think American twenties just divine and I’d be Zelda if I could. Think suffering’s worth it. To be mad a fine exciting thing to be for those short times in those mad years. Wearing pearls and drink ...”

“... catch in the fact but that pervaded his expanses of cheek as poured wine pervades water’. If Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, hears the sound of money in a woman’s voice, James can hear ‘something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff’. An extraordinary conversation takes place ...”

“... led to AA’s cult of heroic abstention) celebrated in the work of such contemporaries as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Raphael sees Wilson – the moving hand behind the ‘Big Book’ (which came out in 1939) – as primarily a writer: an illuminating approach. He also touches on the co-founder’s ‘character defects’ (as AA likes ...”

“... Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald. Recent years have treated her husband unkindly, or maybe truthfully, exposing more drinking and more affairs, but decades after Zelda’s death in a North Carolina asylum, her cult is teeming with new acolytes. Christina Ricci just played her in an ...”

“... of the chapters, influencing its tone and content. They are Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad – and H.P. Lovecraft. The last-named crops up almost as a joke when Smiricky’s girlfriend buys some farcical ‘sex-aids’ at a ‘Lovecraft’ shop: he tells her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he ...”

“... with women (‘Desdemona, before anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable ...”

“... never found time to read it, but had given it to his secretary, ‘who told him it stinks’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald was employed on one of the many rewrites). Huxley summed up his feelings about the movie business in a letter to his brother, Julian. Producers had the ‘minds of chimpanzees, agitated and infinitely distractable’. As a prospective ...”

“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became ...”

“... tendency to cut the unfamiliar or unpleasant down to size is evident in many of his letters. Of Scott Fitzgerald, he wrote in November 1923 to his stepdaughter: ‘I believe those stories . . . about his drinking are exaggerated. He seems quite normal and is a very nice chap indeed . . . The only thing is that he goes into New York with a scrubby ...”

“... with the wives answering the phones. Then: world domination. Welcome to the inside track on what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the orgastic future’. In Britain, soap operas tend to be about poor people, and the drama of American capitalism can seem both obnoxious and ridiculous, yet the rise of CAA is a wonderful story of greed and genius. What is a good ...”

“... loved her. ‘The most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her,’ Scott Fitzgerald once remarked of his wife, ‘has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness of Zelda.’ Perhaps there is something unfailingly attractive about pretty women whose self-absorption makes them unable to cope with anything. ‘It ...”

“... His estimate of Hawthorne is surely excessive; he shows almost a touch of Schwarmerei towards Scott Fitzgerald; and his essay on W.D. Howells is cordially appreciative – willing to show how Howells’s real but modest literary merits are supplemented and enlarged by his status as representative of a particular phase of American social ...”