Sublime

I asked Ernest about Harold and Pat and he explained that Harold Loeb was Princeton from a very rich New York family, had been on the boxing and wrestling teams in college. He had literary aspirations, even started a little magazine in Paris called Broom. Fiercely devoted to Duff, very jealous of Pat, who alternated weekends with Duff.

a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material,

Malcolm Cowley assisted me in three important ways: His New Yorker profile of Perkins, “Unshaken Friend,” published in 1944, was the most comprehensive account of Perkins’s life to date.

Consider our first encounter with Gatsby, that smile he flashes Nick Carraway, which, we are told, “seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,

I could not forget her.

He brimmed with that most conventional and embarrassing of qualities—“taste.”

Ces riches l’aimaient et lui faisaient confiance parce qu’il était timide, drôle, insaisissable, et qu’il était déjà productif, et, parce que c’était un poisson-pilote infaillible, ils se disaient que ses idées politiques, tout à fait sincères à l’époque, n’étaient qu’une imposture passagère et qu’il était bel et bien l’un des leurs, même s’il l’ig

He was a despicable human being, an egoist with nothing inside him. But he was a far more capable individual than I was.

“Crack-Up”