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Homage to Barbara Cartland

Jenny Diski, 18 August 1994

... 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 ...

Astride a White Horse

Declan Kiberd: Bridget Clearly, 6 January 2000

The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story 
by Angela Bourke.
Pimlico, 240 pp., £10, August 1999, 0 7126 6590 0
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... 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 ...

Manly Love

John Bayley, 28 January 1993

Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night 
by Philip Callow.
Allison and Busby, 394 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 85031 908 0
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The Double Life of Stephen Crane 
by Christopher Benfey.
Deutsch, 294 pp., £17.99, February 1993, 0 233 98820 3
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... 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 ...

All your walkmans fizz in tune

Adam Mars-Jones: Eimear McBride, 8 August 2013

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing 
by Eimear McBride.
Galley Beggar, 203 pp., £11, June 2013, 978 0 9571853 2 6
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... 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 ...

We offered them their chance

Michael Wood: Henry James and the Great War, 2 June 2005

The Ivory Tower 
by Henry James.
NYRB, 266 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 59017 078 4
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... 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 ...

A Dangerously Liquid World

John Sutherland: Alcoholics Anonymous, 30 November 2000

Bill W. and Mr Wilson: The Legend and Life of AA’s Co-Founder 
by Matthew Raphael.
Massachusetts, 206 pp., £18.50, June 2000, 1 55849 245 3
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... 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 ...

None of it is your material

Madeleine Schwartz: What Zelda Did, 18 April 2019

Save Me the Waltz 
by Zelda Fitzgerald.
Handheld Press, 268 pp., £12.99, January 2019, 978 1 9998280 4 2
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... 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 ...

Here in Canada

D.A.N. Jones, 21 March 1985

The Engineer of Human Souls 
by Josef Skvorecky, translated by Paul Wilson.
Chatto, 571 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 9780701129316
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The Governess 
by Patricia Angadi.
Gollancz, 181 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 575 03485 8
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The Anderson Question 
by Bel Mooney.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 9780241114568
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The Centre of the Universe is 18 Baedekerstrasse 
by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Hamish Hamilton, 199 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 0 241 11492 6
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... 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 ...

Textual Intercourse

Claude Rawson, 6 February 1986

The Name of Action: Critical Essays 
by John Fraser.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, December 1984, 0 521 25876 6
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... 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 ...

Hug me till you drug me

Alex Harvey: Aldous Huxley, 5 May 2016

After Many a Summer 
by Aldous Huxley.
Vintage, 314 pp., £8.99, September 2015, 978 1 78487 035 5
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Time Must Have a Stop 
by Aldous Huxley.
Vintage, 305 pp., £9.99, September 2015, 978 1 78487 034 8
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The Genius and the Goddess 
by Aldous Huxley.
Vintage, 127 pp., £8.99, September 2015, 978 1 78487 036 2
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... 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 ...

Mr Trendy Sicko

James Wolcott, 23 May 2019

White 
by Brett Easton Ellis.
Picador, 261 pp., £16.99, May 2019, 978 1 5290 1239 2
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... 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 ...

No snarling

Fatema Ahmed: P.G. Wodehouse, 3 November 2005

Wodehouse 
by Joseph Connolly.
Haus, 192 pp., £9.99, September 2004, 1 904341 68 3
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Wodehouse: A Life 
by Robert McCrum.
Penguin, 542 pp., £8.99, September 2005, 0 14 100048 1
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... 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 ...

Living the Life

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 October 2016

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency 
by James Andrew Miller.
Custom House, 703 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 0 06 244137 9
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... 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 ...

Hagiography

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 3 March 1983

Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three 
by David Plante.
Gollancz, 173 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 0 575 03189 1
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... 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 ...

Culture and Sincerity

Graham Hough, 6 May 1982

... 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 ...

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