"… his talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
... excerpt from A Moveable Feast (posthumus 1964 edition), Hemingway (1899-1961) on Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
... excerpt from A Moveable Feast (posthumus 1964 edition), Hemingway (1899-1961) on Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express.
ReplyDelete[Fitzgerald agreed]
In the next letter, dated Aril 22, Hemingway reveals most clearly the ambivalence of his feelings about Fitzgerald. "I never had any respect for him ever," he wrote, "except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent. If he would have had fewer pompous musings and a little sounder education it would have been better maybe. But anytime you got him all straightened out and taking his work seriously Zelda would get jealous and knock him out of it.'
ReplyDeleteIt is clear that the editors culled this text from an earlier draft discarded by Hemingway,
ReplyDeletebut this kind of editorial decision, which casts Fitzgerald in a less sympathetic light than Hemingway’s final version, seems completely unwarranted. The last sentence intended by the author should
have read:
“Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think. He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.”