Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Though we had lived in the East since I had been a baby, it was always understood that home meant the prosperous Western city that still supported the roots of our family tree. When I was twenty I went back for the first time and made my only acquaintance with Uncle George.

I had dinner in the apartment with my aunt, a very brave, gentle old lady who told me, rather proudly, I thought, that I looked like George. I was shown his pictures from babyhood, in every attitude: George at Andover, on the Y.M.C.A. committee, strange anatomy; George at Williams in the center of the Literary Magazine Picture; George as head of his fraternity. Then she handed me a scrapbook containing accounts of his exploits and all favorable criticism of his work.

“He cares nothing at all about all this,” she explained. I admired and questioned, and remember thinking, as I left the apartment to seek Uncle George at his club, that between my family’s depressed opinion of him and my aunt’s elated one my idea of him was muddled to say the least. At the Iroquois Club I was directed to the grill, and there, standing in the doorway, I picked one out of the crowd, who, I was immediately sure, was he. Here is the way he looked at the time. He was tall with magnificent iron grey hair and the pale soft skin of a boy, most remarkable in a man of his mode of life. Drooping green eyes and a sneering mouth complete my picture of his physical self. He was rather drunk, for he had been at the club all afternoon and for dinner, but he was perfectly conscious of himself, and the dulling of faculties was only perceivable in a very cautious walk and a crack in his voice that sank it occasionally to a hoarse whisper. He was talking to a table of men, all in various stages of inebriation, and holding them by a most peculiar and magnetic series of gestures. Right here I want to remark that this influence was not dependent so much upon a vivid physical personality but on a series of perfectly artificial mental tricks, his gestures, the peculiar range of his speaking voice, the suddenness and terseness of his remarks.