The Quiet Pool

He wanted me to read the new book, The Great Gatsby, as soon as he could get his last and only copy back from someone he had loaned it to. To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

I was enthusiastic about the trip. I would have the company of an older and successful writer, and in the time we would have to talk in the car I would certainly learn much that it would be useful to know. It is strange now to remember thinking of Scott as an older writer, but at the time, since I had not yet read The Great Gatsby, I thought of him as a much older writer.

From the “Scott Fitzgerald” chapter of A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway

I have decided to fill this “fresh time,” as I am calling it, with those books that have for almost a year now, been calling my name and begging for my attention. Ever since I returned from Paris there has been this urge for 20th Century American literature flowing coolly through my veins, that was until recently, stifled my much more aggressive and unhealthy urgings. But now that all that is finished I have come to these books like a puppy to it’s chew toys. I just finished reading both The Old Man and the Sea, and The Great Gatsby. The latter I read in the greater Cincinnati airport during a rather nasty layover I had coming back to school, and the former I bought and finished this evening. I am rightly ashamed of myself for never having taken the time to read these books before and I am pledging to make it up to them by reading other books in the very near future.

I would like to go right on talking about them both but I am so taken over with The Old Man and the Sea right now that I feel I should really take some time to collect my thoughts about it before trying to write them down. So I will have a go at talking about The Great Gatsby for the present.