Tender is the Night Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Published: 1933 Categorie(s): Fiction, Literary, Biographical Source: http://gutenberg.net.au книга выложена группой vk.com/create_your_english About Fitzgerald: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American Jazz Age author of novels and short stories He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers Fitzgerald was of the self-styled "Lost Generation," Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age Also available on Feedbooks for Fitzgerald: • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922) • The Great Gatsby (1925) • The Great Gatsby (1925) • This Side of Paradise (1920) • The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) • "I Didn't Get Over" (1936) • The Rich Boy (1926) • Jacob's Ladder (1927) • "The Sensible Thing" (1924) • Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920) Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70 Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, not use this file for commercial purposes книга выложена группой vk.com/create_your_english Already with thee! tender is the night… … But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways —Ode to a Nightingale книга выложена группой vk.com/create_your_english Part Chapter On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse's Hotel The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way However, one's eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said: "Something tells me we're not going to like this place." "I want to go home anyhow," the girl answered They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact—moreover, just any direction would not They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations "We'll stay three days and then go home I'll wire right away for steamer tickets." At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated—it was too bright to see Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little fourbeat crawl out to the raft The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out "I say—they have sharks out behind the raft." He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl "Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan." "Heavens!" exclaimed Rosemary "They come in for the refuse from the flotte." Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth—the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as "that North guy" had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful Her eyes met Rosemary's but did not see her Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary "You are a ripping swimmer." She demurred "Jolly good My name is Campion Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you." Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting Reluctantly she got up and went over to them "Mrs Abrams—Mrs McKisco—Mr McKisco—Mr Dumphry— "We know who you are," spoke up the woman in evening dress "You're Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you're perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you're not back in America making another marvellous moving picture." They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name She was one of those elderly "good sports" preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation "We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day," she continued cheerily, "because your skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn't know whether you'd mind." Chapter "We thought maybe you were in the plot," said Mrs McKisco She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity "We don't know who's in the plot and who isn't One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character—practically the assistant hero." "The plot?" inquired Rosemary, half understanding "Is there a plot?" "My dear, we don't know," said Mrs Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman's chuckle "We're not in it We're the gallery." Mr Dumphry, a tow-headed effeminate young man, remarked: "Mama Abrams is a plot in herself," and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying: "Now, Royal, don't be too ghastly for words." Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach Her mother's modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things Mr McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not find the topic of the "plot" amusing He had been staring at the sea—now after a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively: "Been here long?" "Only a day." "Oh." Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the others "Going to stay all summer?" asked Mrs McKisco, innocently "If you you can watch the plot unfold." 10 Chapter 11 Dick and Nicole were accustomed to go together to the barber, and have haircuts and shampoos in adjoining rooms From Dick's side Nicole could hear the snip of shears, the count of changes, the Voilàs and Pardons The day after his return they went down to be shorn and washed in the perfumed breeze of the fans In front of the Carleton Hotel, its windows as stubbornly blank to the summer as so many cellar doors, a car passed them and Tommy Barban was in it Nicole's momentary glimpse of his expression, taciturn and thoughtful and, in the second of seeing her, wide-eyed and alert, disturbed her She wanted to be going where he was going The hour with the hair-dresser seemed one of the wasteful intervals that composed her life, another little prison The coiffeuse in her white uniform, faintly sweating lip-rouge and cologne reminded her of many nurses In the next room Dick dozed under an apron and a lather of soap The mirror in front of Nicole reflected the passage between the men's side and the women's, and Nicole started up at the sight of Tommy entering and wheeling sharply into the men's shop She knew with a flush of joy that there was going to be some sort of showdown She heard fragments of its beginning "Hello, I want to see you." "… serious." "… serious." "… perfectly agreeable." In a minute Dick came into Nicole's booth, his expression emerging annoyed from behind the towel of his hastily rinsed face "Your friend has worked himself up into a state He wants to see us together, so I agreed to have it over with Come along!" "But my hair—it's half cut." "Nevermind—come along!" Resentfully she had the staring coiffeuse remove the towels Feeling messy and unadorned she followed Dick from the hotel Outside Tommy bent over her hand 301 "We'll go to the Café des Alliées," said Dick "Wherever we can be alone," Tommy agreed Under the arching trees, central in summer, Dick asked: "Will you take anything, Nicole?" "A citron pressé." "For me a demi," said Tommy "The Blackenwite with siphon," said Dick "Il n'y a plus de Blackenwite Nous n'avons que le Johnny Walkair." "Ca va." "She's—not—wired for sound but on the quiet you ought to try it—" "Your wife does not love you," said Tommy suddenly "She loves me." The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression There can be little communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect, and consists of how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection "Wait a minute," Dick said "Donnez moi du gin et du siphon." "Bien, Monsieur." "All right, go on, Tommy." "It's very plain to me that your marriage to Nicole has run its course She is through I've waited five years for that to be so." "What does Nicole say?" They both looked at her "I've gotten very fond of Tommy, Dick." He nodded "You don't care for me any more," she continued "It's all just habit Things were never the same after Rosemary." Unattracted to this angle, Tommy broke in sharply with: "You don't understand Nicole You treat her always like a patient because she was once sick." They were suddenly interrupted by an insistent American, of sinister aspect, vending copies of The Herald and of The Times fresh from New York "Got everything here, Buddies," he announced "Been here long?" "Cessez cela! Allez Ouste!" Tommy cried and then to Dick, "Now no woman would stand such—" 302 "Buddies," interrupted the American again "You think I'm wasting my time—but lots of others don't." He brought a gray clipping from his purse—and Dick recognized it as he saw it It cartooned millions of Americans pouring from liners with bags of gold "You think I'm not going to get part of that? Well, I am I'm just over from Nice for the Tour de France." As Tommy got him off with a fierce "allez-vous-en," Dick identified him as the man who had once hailed him in the Rue de Saints Anges, five years before "When does the Tour de France get here?" he called after him "Any minute now, Buddy." He departed at last with a cheery wave and Tommy returned to Dick "Elle doit avoir plus avec moi qu'avec vous." "Speak English! What you mean 'doit avoir'?" "'Doit avoir?' Would have more happiness with me." "You'd be new to each other But Nicole and I have had much happiness together, Tommy." "L'amour de famille," Tommy said, scoffing "If you and Nicole married won't that be 'l'amour de famille'?" The increasing commotion made him break off; presently it came to a serpentine head on the promenade and a group, presently a crowd, of people sprung from hidden siestas, lined the curbstone Boys sprinted past on bicycles, automobiles jammed with elaborate betasselled sportsmen slid up the street, high horns tooted to announce the approach of the race, and unsuspected cooks in undershirts appeared at restaurant doors as around a bend a procession came into sight First was a lone cyclist in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer Then three together in a harlequinade of faded color, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired Tommy faced Dick, saying: "I think Nicole wants a divorce—I suppose you'll make no obstacles?" A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the dupes of accident and defeat They were back at the table Nicole wanted Dick to take the initiative, but he seemed content to sit with his face halfshaved matching her hair half-washed 303 "Isn't it true you're not happy with me any more?" Nicole continued "Without me you could get to your work again—you could work better if you didn't worry about me." Tommy moved impatiently "That is so useless Nicole and I love each other, that's all there is to it." "Well, then," said the Doctor, "since it's all settled, suppose we go back to the barber shop." Tommy wanted a row: "There are several points—" "Nicole and I will talk things over," said Dick equitably "Don't worry—I agree in principal, and Nicole and I understand each other There's less chance of unpleasantness if we avoid a three-cornered discussion." Unwillingly acknowledging Dick's logic, Tommy was moved by an irresistible racial tendency to chisel for an advantage "Let it be understood that from this moment," he said, "I stand in the position of Nicole's protector until details can be arranged And I shall hold you strictly accountable for any abuse of the fact that you continue to inhabit the same house." "I never did go in for making love to dry loins," said Dick He nodded, and walked off toward the hotel with Nicole's whitest eyes following him "He was fair enough," Tommy conceded "Darling, will we be together to-night?" "I suppose so." So it had happened—and with a minimum of drama; Nicole felt outguessed, realizing that from the episode of the camphor-rub, Dick had anticipated everything But also she felt happy and excited, and the odd little wish that she could tell Dick all about it faded quickly But her eyes followed his figure until it became a dot and mingled with the other dots in the summer crowd 304 Chapter 12 The day before Doctor Diver left the Riviera he spent all his time with his children He was not young any more with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself, so he wanted to remember them well The children had been told that this winter they would be with their aunt in London and that soon they were going to come and see him in America Fräulein was not to be discharged without his consent He was glad he had given so much to the little girl—about the boy he was more uncertain—always he had been uneasy about what he had to give to the ever-climbing, ever-clinging, breast-searching young But, when he said good-by to them, he wanted to lift their beautiful heads off their necks and hold them close for hours He embraced the old gardener who had made the first garden at Villa Diana six years ago; he kissed the Provençal girl who helped with the children She had been with them for almost a decade and she fell on her knees and cried until Dick jerked her to her feet and gave her three hundred francs Nicole was sleeping late, as had been agreed upon—he left a note for her, and one for Baby Warren who was just back from Sardinia and staying at the house Dick took a big drink from a bottle of brandy three feet high, holding ten quarts, that some one had presented them with Then he decided to leave his bags by the station in Cannes and take a last look at Gausse's Beach The beach was peopled with only an advance guard of children when Nicole and her sister arrived that morning A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar; an American photographer from the A and P worked with his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps At the hotel his prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their recent opiate of dawn 305 When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent In a minute Baby joined her, saying: "Dick's still there." "I saw him." "I think he might have the delicacy to go." "This is his place—in a way, he discovered it Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick." Baby looked calmly at her sister "We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions," she remarked "When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up." "Dick was a good husband to me for six years," Nicole said "All that time I never suffered a minute's pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me." Baby's lower jaw projected slightly as she said: "That's what he was educated for." The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg She was not quite thinking about it Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them "Is he gone?" Nicole asked after a while "I think his train leaves at noon." Baby looked "No He's moved up higher on the terrace and he's talking to some women Anyhow there are so many people now that he doesn't have to see us." He had seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared again He sat with Mary Minghetti, drinking anisette "You were like you used to be the night you helped us," she was saying, "except at the end, when you were horrid about Caroline Why aren't you nice like that always? You can be." It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things 306 "Your friends still like you, Dick But you say awful things to people when you've been drinking I've spent most of my time defending you this summer." "That remark is one of Doctor Eliot's classics." "It's true Nobody cares whether you drink or not—" She hesitated, "even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do." "You're all so dull," he said "But we're all there is!" cried Mary "If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment." "Have I been nourished?" he asked Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear Again she refused a drink and said: "Self-indulgence is back of it Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it—since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism—" Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality Dick felt fine—he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary His eyes, for the moment clear as a child's, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman … Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky… "You once liked me, didn't you?" he asked "Liked you—I loved you Everybody loved you You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking—" "There has always been something between you and me." She bit eagerly "Has there, Dick?" "Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them." But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn't keep it up much longer "I always thought you knew a lot," Mary said enthusiastically "More about me than any one has ever known Perhaps that's why I was so afraid of you when we didn't get along so well." His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together Then, 307 as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun "I must go," he said As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more—his blood raced slow He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace Faces turned upward from several umbrellas "I'm going to him." Nicole got to her knees "No, you're not," said Tommy, pulling her down firmly "Let well enough alone." 308 Chapter 13 Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children When she said, as she often did, "I loved Dick and I'll never forget him," Tommy answered, "Of course not—why should you?" Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practising general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another 309 Loved this book ? 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That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's and his country's most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us It eluded us then, but that's no matter tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther And one fine morning " Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem *** 311 "Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking." James Dickey *** The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F Scott Fitzgerald First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 The novel takes place following the First World War American society enjoyed prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world, and is ranked second in the Modern Library's lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century Wikipedia Francis Scott Fitzgerald The Beautiful and the Damned The novel provides a portrait of the Eastern elite during the Jazz Age, exploring New York Café Society As with his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters are complex, especially in their marriage and intimacy, much like how he treats intimacy in Tender Is the Night The book is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald Francis Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and statusseeking Francis Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 312 The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F Scott Fitzgerald First published on April 10, 1925, it is set in Long Island's North Shore and New York City during the summer of 1922 The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age." Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamor of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it Francis Scott Fitzgerald The Curious Case of Benjamin Button This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books." The story was published in "Collier's" last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati: "Sir-I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will." Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857 And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and 313 provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions E M Forster A Room with a View This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza Attracted to this man, George Emerson—who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist—Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires Back in England, she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion 314 www.feedbooks.com Food for the mind 315 [...]... in the ancient hill village of Tarmes The villa and its grounds were made out of a row of peasant dwellings that abutted on the cliff—five small houses had been combined to make the house and four destroyed to make the garden The exterior walls were untouched so that from the road far below it was indistinguishable from the violet gray mass of the town For a moment Nicole stood looking down at the. .. meet his first guests, his coat carried rather ceremoniously, rather promisingly, in his hand, like a toreador's cape It was characteristic that after greeting Rosemary and her mother he waited for them to speak first, as if to allow them the reassurance of their own voices in new surroundings To resume Rosemary's point of view it should be said that, under the spell of the climb to Tarmes and the fresher... been piped to the surface of her, so that she ceased her struggle to make tangible to herself her shadowy position as the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived Then came Dick, with his arms full of the slack he had taken up from others, deeply merged in his own party Then her mother, forever perfect Then Barban talking to her mother with an urbane fluency that made Rosemary like him again Then Nicole... Mother." After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here "Let's only stay three days, Mother," Rosemary said when they... swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car—after much haggling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of money in France—and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names—Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings... he refused the fatherly office In turn she was equally firm when he tried to monopolize her hand, so they 33 talked shop or rather she listened while he talked shop, her polite eyes never leaving his face, but her mind was so definitely elsewhere that she felt he must guess the fact Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking... Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine The Divers' day was spaced like the day of the older... himself with one sharp movement He was a few years younger than Diver or North He was tall and his body was hard but overspare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms At first glance he seemed 20 conventionally handsome—but there was a faint disgust always in his face which marred the full fierce lustre of his brown eyes Yet one remembered them afterward, when one had forgotten... not fond of the Divers—I am, especially of Nicole." "How could any one help it?" she said simply She felt far from him The undertone of his words repelled her and she withdrew her adoration for the Divers from the profanity of his bitterness She was glad he was not next to her at dinner and she was still thinking of his words "especially her" as they moved toward the table in the garden For a moment... glad familiarity Rosemary followed him into half darkness Here and there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen faces to her like souls in purgatory watching the passage of a mortal through There were whispers and soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow of a stage, where a French