Re: Salinger & Burns (NOT George!)actually not, but Gatsby
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 18 Dec 1999 10:28:19 -0500
At 8:09 AM -0600 on 12/18/1999, you wrote:
> "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 --
> "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
>ceaselessly into the
> past."
Thanks!
Interestingly enough, FSF got into a large tiff with his editor, Max
Perkins, about this. Perkins -- a good 19th century gentleman but a
stickler with language (while Fitzgerald couldn't spell worth a damn;
he didn't even get Hemingway's name right, up until the day he died)
-- wanted the word "orgiastic" replaced by "orgastic." They had a
long etymological dispute over it, but FSF won, because he wanted to
connote a sense of out-of-controlness; Perkins though, thought it
ungrammatical.
Yes, I love that sentence as much as I love Joyce's:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over
Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the
treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward,
softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too,
upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the
spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as
he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling,
like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
"The Dead" is perhaps the greatest coda to a collection of stories
I've ever read. It may well be the finest collection of stories, in
toto, I've ever read. (Although some of Hemingway -- not the later
sloppy, self-indulging parts -- comes close. "In Our Time" and "Men
without Women" are good contenders.)
--tim o'connor