Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Scrappy and rough-pieced information on this increasingly engrossing topic fitted gradually into my consciousness in the next five years, like the parts of a picture puzzle. Here is the finished portrait from the angle of seventeen years—Uncle George was a Romeo and a misogamist, a combination of Byron, Don Juan, and Bernard Shaw, with a touch of Havelock Ellis for good measure. He was about thirty, had been engaged seven times and drank ever so much more than was good for him. His attitude toward women was the pièce-de-résistance of his character. To put it mildly he was not an idealist. He had written a series of novels, all of them bitter, each of them with some woman as the principal character. Some of the women were bad. None of them were quite good. He picked a rather weird selection of Lauras to play muse to his whimsical Petrarch; for he could write, write well.

He was the type of author who gets dozens of letters a week from solicitors, aged men and enthusiastic young women who tell him that he is “prostituting his art” and “wasting golden literary opportunities.” As a matter of fact he wasn’t. It was very conceivable that he might have written better despite his unpleasant range of subject, but what he had written had a huge vogue that, strangely enough, consisted not of the usual devotees of prostitute art, the eager shopgirls and sentimental salesmen to whom he was accused of pandering, but of the academic and literary circles of the country. His shrewd tenderness with nature (that is, everything but the white race), his well-drawn men and the particularly cynical sting to his wit gave him many adherents. He was ranked in the most staid and severe of reviews as a coming man. Long psychopathic stories and dull germanized novels were predicted of him by optimistic critics. At one time he was the Thomas Hardy of America, and he was several times heralded as the Balzac of his century. He was accused of having the great American novel in his coat pocket, trying to peddle it from publisher to publisher. But somehow neither matter nor style had improved; people accused him of not “living.” His unmarried sister and he had an apartment where she sat greying year by year with one furtive hand on the bromo-seltzer and the other on the telephone receiver of frantic feminine telephone calls. For George Rombert grew violently involved at least once a year. He filled columns in the journals of society gossip. Oddly enough most of his affairs were with debutantes—a fact which was considered particularly annoying by sheltering mothers. It seemed as though he had the most serious way of talking the most outrageous nonsense, and as he was most desirable from an economic point of view, many essayed the perilous quest.