From a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald:
"Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication ["Once again to Zelda"] it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. . . . You make a modern world and a modern orgy strangely enough it never was done until you did it in This Side of Paradise. My belief in This Side of Paradise was alright. This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. . . . "
Gertrude Stein cracks me up. ___________________________________________________________________
"In my younger and more vulnerable years," I saw the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, featuring a Karen Black so lubricious, a teenage girl wanted to shade her eyes.
As I remember it, and this may be wildly inaccurate, the movie began with a long shot of Redford standing on a dock with his back to the camera, making a frail open-handed gesture into the distance. The camera then moved closer and closer in. From Gatsby:
"...a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars...he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward-and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock."
With the camera tight to the back of his head, which filled the entire screen, Redford slowly turned & looked directly at the audience with an expression I can't describe but will never forget. Likewise, I'll never forget the long, quivering, palpable gasp from every woman in the theater. My first, and with Karen my second, encounter with adult female desire.
The Great Gatsby (First Edition, first issue).
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. First Edition. First Edition, first printing. First issue, with all four textual variants present, including: page 60, line 16 "chatter" vs. "echolalia," page 119, line 22 "northern" vs. "southern," page 205, lines 9-10 "sick in tired" vs. "sickantired," and page 211, lines 7-8 "Union Street Station" vs. "Union Station." Scribner's seal on copyright page. Near Fine condition without the rare dust jacket. Quite clean and trim, with a tiny stain at the middle of the spine, a small spot and very light soil on the rear board, and a small, tidy owner name at the top of the front flyleaf. A very attractive copy. $4125
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