The Notebooks
of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(A) Anecdotes
1
Rene had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother.
2
But he came back because the herd (society) is all we have and we cannot stray without shortly finding that the wolves have to eat us too. He preached his special gospel to the herd. They (let us assume) liked it or half liked it. It worked.
3
Versailles fourth class (enlarge)
4
Story about Rose Marie’s husband (Geneva) and his sleeping upstairs instead of working.
5
Isn’t it too bad that the cow stepped on Eleanor’s pencil.
6
Eleanor and the shot gun.
7
B.D.’s first frightening experience.
8
Paris, Sept. 22nd, 1926.
Dear Charles:—I send you a copy of your wire as it came to me
Mrs. Hose Mattison
Happ Birdy From
Gunch and Me
Charles
These French!
9
Then there’s Emily. You know what happened to her; one night her husband came home and told her she was acting cold to him, but that he’d fix that up. So he built a bonfire under her bed, made up of shoes and things, and set fire to it. And if the leather hadn’t smelled so terrible she’d have been burned to death.
10
Mutiny in the army.
11
The drowning
12
Sgt. Este
13
The absent minded gentleman on the train started to get off at the wrong station. As he walked back to his seat he assumed a mirthless smile and said aloud as though he were talking to himself;
“I thought this was Great Neck.”
But he couldn’t smooth over his mistake—we all knew that he had made a fool of himself and looked upon him with distaste and contempt.
14
A man wrapped up some domestic rate in small blankets cut from an old carpet, lest they should spread germs. A few months after he had turned them loose he found young rats around the house with carpet patterns on their fur.
“How peculiar!” he exclaimed, “I didn’t suspect it would turn out that way when I wrapped up those rats.”
But it did.
15
Story of the ugly aunt in album
Jimmy the 95 pd. center
The girl who fell off the shelf
16
Once there was a whole lot of bird seed around the room because an author had adopted a chicken. It was impossible to explain to anyone just why he had adopted the chicken but still more impossible to know why he had bought the bird seed for the chicken. The chicken was later broiled and the bird seed thrown out, but the question of whether the man was an author or a lunatic was still unsolved in the minds of the hotel servants who had to deal with the situation. The hotel servants didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand how months later the author could write a story about it but they all bought the magazine.
17
A man in the next room started a fire. The fire burned all through the mattress. Maybe it would have been better if the fire had burned through him but it missed him by a few inches. The mattress was carried out with great ceremony.
18
…would become a literary man and wrote an imitation of Ivanhoe called Elavoe. (I guess I wasn’t alone in such phenomena for my daughter tells me about a composition of a friend at school concerning a certain Sir Tonsidor—who got his name, I gather, from some tonsilitis operation combined with some fragmentary memory of el toreadoro—I never heard any of the effusions about Sir Tonsidor but the name will stay with me forever. What did he look like? Would he break through doors with the facility of Mickey Mouse or were his tonsils always swollen?
19
Levan was a paralysis case. It was doubtful if he’d ever walk again. When he reached Lawrenceville he was placed on the team in the important position of Headguard, then considered the keystone post.
Few of these people will get to the Rose Bowl, but if they do, we’ll all be back of them. And few will be farther back than I will.
1781
Man who got radio by hooking ear phones to bed springs.
Next: B: Bright clippings.
Переводы: A: Анекдоты (разные переводчики).