The Notebooks
of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(D) Description of Things and Atmosphere
141
The wind shivered over the leaves, over the white casements—then as if it was beauty it could not stand, jumped out the window and climbed down from the cornice on the corner.
Then it came to ground. All that had happened was that green had blown through the wind and back and returned to settle on the same red walls, waving it forever after as a green flag, a heavy, ever bearded, ever un-shaven flag, like water when you drop a petal in it, like a woman’s dress and then the little trickles that wound about the casements—faint, somnescent and gone.
After that silence—the wind blowing the curtains. The cross child you had to scold. The moment had gone. The moment had come and existed for a minute. A lacy light played once more—a scherzo, no a new prelude to ever blooming, ever greening and he was sorry for what he had ever said or thought.
Once more the wind was dead. There was only one leaf flickering against the white casement. Perhaps there was someone back of it being happy.
142
The pleasant, ostentatious boulevard was lined at prosperous intervals with New England Colonial houses—without ship models in the hall. When the inhabitants moved out here the ship models had at last been given to the children. The next street was a complete exhibit of the Spanish-bungalow phase of West Coast architecture; while two streets over, the cylindrical windows and round towers of 1897— melancholy antiques which sheltered swamis, yogis, fortune tellers, dressmakers, dancing teachers, art academies and chiropractors—looked down now upon brisk busses and trolley cars. A little walk around the block could, if you were feeling old that day be a discouraging affair.
On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their knees marked by the red stains of the mercurochrome era, played with toys with a purpose— beams that taught engineering, soldiers that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood. When the dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for them. Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.
143
Days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory.
144
Dyed Siberian horse.
145
As thin as a repeated dream.
146
The sea was coming up in little intimidating rushes.
147
The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.
148
Lost in the immensity of surfaceless blue sky like air piled on air.
149
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another—as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightening entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder.
to]
150
The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the tables tore off through the burbling, billowing ends of the cloths.] There was Pat O’Mara, his hands, adequate enough smoothing hair. Blow, banners, blow. You in ermine slow down you, slow, whip, no snap, only whip wind in the corners of the tables. Can I have a flower if they don’t want one.
151
On the great swell of the Blue Danube, the summer ball rocked into motion.
152
A circus ring for ponies in country houses.
153
The tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.
154
A rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 80’s, the country poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again.
155
The groans of moribund plumbing.
156
The silvery “Hey!” of a telephone.
157
The curious juxtapositions made him feel the profound waves of change that had already washing this country—the desperate war that had rendered the plantation house absolete, the industrialization that had spoiled the easy-going life centuring around the old court house. And then the years yielding up eventually in the backwater those curious young products who were neither peasants, nor bourgeois, nor scamps, but a little of all three, gathered there in front of the store.
158
New York’s flashing, dynamic good looks, its tall man’s quick-step.
159
Afterward they would drive around until they found the center of the summer night and park there while the enchanted silence spread over them like leaves over the babes in the wood.
160
Stevedores appeared momentarily against the lighted hold of a barge and jerked quickly out of sight down an invisible incline.
161
Whining, tinkling hoochie-coochie show.
162
The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.
163
Metropolitan days and nights that were tense as singing wires.
164
The late sun glinted on the Mississippi flats a mile away.
165
When the stars were bright enough to compete with the bright lamps.
166
The limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.
167
Three frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats heaped like shells along the beach. Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.
168
That stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon.
169
The club lay in a little valley, almost roofed over by willows, and down through their black silhouettes, in irregular blobs and patches, dripped the light of a huge harvest moon. As they parked the car, Basil’s tune of tunes, Chinatown drifted from the windows and dissolved into its notes which thronged like elves through the glade.
170
Deep autumn had set in, with a crackling wind from the west.
171
Next door they were scrubbing a building upon a lit-up platform. It was fun to see it come out all bright and new.
172
The hotel we selected—The Hotel de la Morgue—was small and silent enough to suit even the most refined taste.
173
The droning of frogs in the Aislette Valley covered the sound of the bringing up of our artillery.
174
In the afternoon they came to a lake. It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.
175
You can order it in four sizes; demi (half a litre), distingue (one litre), formidable (three litres), and catastrophe (five litres).
176
In the deep locker-room of the earth.
177
The rear wall was formed by a wide flag of water, falling from a seam in the rock ceiling, and afterwards draining into some lower level cave beyond.
178
SEEN IN A JUNK YARD
Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs., plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, Acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dingy, box of bolts, No. 1 van, stove, auto stuff (No. 2), army trucks, cast iron, body hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.
179
Across the street from me in Hendersonville, N.C. is a movie sign, usually with a few bulbs out in the center. It reads tonight: The Crusades: the Flaming Passion of a Woman Torn Between Two Camps.
This is the right idea and to aid in the campaign to prove that a woman (not women mind you—that point is granted) is at the tiller in every storm, I submit the following suggestions to draw in the elder gadgets and their tokens.
Huckleberry Finn—how a girl changed the life of a Missouri boy.
180
A strip of straw, half-braided, that fell across another desk.
181
A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city—darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.
182
Memory of coming into Washington.
183
All of a sudden the room struck like a clock.
184
For a while the big liner, so sure and proud in the open sea, was shoved ignominously around by the tugs like a helpless old woman.
185
There were Roman legionaries with short, bright swords and helmets and shields shining with gilt, a conqueror in his chariot with six horses, and an entourage of sparkling, plumed Roman knights, captured Gauls in chains, Greeks in buskins and tunics of Ionian blue, black Egyptians in flashing desert reds with images of Isis and Osiris, a catapult and, in person Hannibal, Caesar, Rameses and Alexander.
186
The evening gem play of New York was already taking place outside the window. But as Charlie gazed at it, it seemd to him tawdry and theatrical, a great keeping up of appearances after the reality was gone. Each new tower was something erected in defiance of obvious and imminent disaster; each beam of light a final despairing attempt to pretend that all was well.
“But they had their time. For a while they represented a reality. These things are scarcely built; not a single generation saw them and passed away before we ceased to believe.”
187
The rhythm of the weekend with its birth, its planned gaieties and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
188
The blurred world seen from a merry-go-round settled into place; the merry-go-round suddenly stopped.
189
The city’s quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative, pageantry and drama to the drab.
190
Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.
191
Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child’s dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon. Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were—perhaps money was a form of fin. In England property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
192
The nineteen wild green eyes of a bus were coming up to them through the dark.
193
The mingling and contrast of the silver lines of car track and the gold of the lamps, the streams of light rippling on the old road and the lamps on the bridge, and then when the rain had stopped the shadows of the maple leaves on the picket fence.
194
The train gave out a gurgle and a forlorn burst of false noise, and with a clicking strain of couplers pulled forward a few hundred yards.
195
When the freight stopped next the stars were out, so sudden that Chris was dazzled. The train was on a rise. About three miles ahead he saw a cluster of lights fainter and more yellow than the stars, that he figured would be Dallas.
196
The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.
197
There were only the colleges and the country clubs. The parks were cheerless, without beer and mostly without music. They ended at the monkey house or at some imitation French vista. They were for children—for adults there was nothing.
198
A half-displayed packet of innocuous post cards warranted to be very dirty indeed.
199
Against the bar a group of ushers was being photographed, and the flash-light surged through the room in a stifling cloud.
200
In one corner of the ballroon an arrangement of screens like a moving-picture stage had been set up and photographers were taking official pictures of the bridal party. The bridal party, still as death and pale as wax under the bright lights, appeared, to the dancers circling the modulated semidarkness of the ballroom, like those jovial or sinister groups that one comes upon in The Old Mill at an amusement park.
201
She thought of electric fans in little restaurants with lobsters on ice in the windows, and of pearly signs glittering and revolving against the obscure, urban sky, the hot, dark sky. And pervading everything, a terribly strange, brooding mystery of roof tops and empty apartments, of white dresses in the paths of parks, and fingers for stars and faces instead of moons, and people with strange people scarcely knowing one another’s names.
202
Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.
203
A sound of clinking waiters.
204
The music started again. Under the trees the wooden floor was red in the sun.
205
Phonograph roared new German tangoes into the smoke and clatter.
206
Cannes in the season—he was filling the cafe, the light which blazed against the white poplar bark and green leaves with sprightlier motes of his own creation—he saw it vivid with dresses just down from Paris and giving off a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes, and mingled with these another scent, the mysterious thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jeweled hands over the white tables; the vivid gowns and the shirt fronts swayed together and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow lighting cigarettes.
207
Parts of New Jersay, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.
208
The battered hacks waiting at the station; the snow-covered campus, the big open fires in the club houses.
209
Not long after noon—he could tell by the thin shadow of the shutter.
210
Duty, Honor, Country, West Point—the faded banners on the chapel walls.
211
But while the crowd surged into the bright stadium like lava coming down a volcano from the craters of the runways.
212
No one has even seen Richerees, near Asheville because the windows fog with smoke just before you get there.
213
The — Hotel was planned to give rest and quiet to tired and overworked business men and overwrought and over societied women.
214
When opened up the fish smelled like a very stuffy room.
215
Trolley running on the crack of dawn
216
An old style flivver crushed the obliterated borders of the path.
217
It was a not at all the remodelled type of farmhouse favored by the wealthy, it was pristine. No wires, and one was sure no pipes led to it.
218
Occasionally two yellow disks would top a rise ahead of them and take shape as a late-returning automobile. Except for that they were alone in a continual rushing dark. The moon had gone down.
219
The decks were bright and restless, but bow and stern were in darkness so the boat had no more outline than an accidental cluster of stars. Francis took the trip one lonely evening.
220
One of those places they used to call somebody’s “Folly.” Already for a whole slew of people who weren’t there—hopeful little shops built into the hotel, some open and some closed.
221
There was rosy light still on that big mountain, the Pic de Something of the Dent de Something, because the world was round or for some such reason. Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity. Down in the valley there were already bright windows and misty glows from the houses and hotels of the town.
222
The sun was already waving gold, green and white flags on the Wildstrubel.
223
Its familiar light and books and last night’s games always pushed just out of sight under something, the piano with last night’s songs still open on it.
224
A toiling sweating sun stoked the sky overhead.
225
Green jars and white magnolias
226
Clairmont Avenue
227
Shallows in the Lake of day
228
Colors at Oregon: gold, dark green, little white buoys on safety rope, background white figures, grey underpinnings—all seen thru foliage dark and light green.
229
Bird call: Weecha, weecha, weecha, weecha eat?
230
Suddenly the room rang like a diamond in all four corners.
231
Josephine picked them out presently below a fringe by their well-known feet—Travis de Coppet’s deft, dramatic feet; Ed Bement’s stern and uncompromising feet; the high, button shoes of some impossible girl.
232
He passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten.
233
The two orchestras moaned in pergolas lit with fireflies, and many-colored spotlights swept the floor, touching a buffet where dark bottles gleamed.
234
Abruptly it became full summer. After the last April storm someone came along the street one night, blew up the trees like balloons, scattered bulbs and shrubs like confetti, opened a cage full of robins and, after a quick look around, signaled up the curtain upon a new backdrop of summer sky.
235
White chestnut blossoms slanted down across the tables and dropped impudently into the butter and the wine. Julia Ross ate a few with her bread.
236
The stench of cigars in small houses. (Remember it with old mill.)
237
Zelda’s worn places in yard and hammock.
238
The river flowed in a thin scarlet gleam between the public baths and the massed tracks upon the other side. Booming, whistling, far-away railroad sounds reached them from down there; the voices of children playing tennis in Prospect Park sailed frailly overhead.
239
God’s whitest whiskers dissolved before a roaring plane bound for Corsica.
240
The corpses of million blue fish.
241
Bryn Mawr coverlet.
242
Her face flushed with cold, etc. (more to this)
243
It was a crisp cold night with frost shooting along the grass.
244
the familiar, unforgotten atmosphere of many Negroes and voices pleading-calm and girls painted bright as savages to stand out against the tropical summer.
245
The Grand Duc had just begun its slow rattling gasp for life in the inertness of the weakest hour.
246
Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.
247
The lights of many battleships drifting like water jewels upon the dark Hudson.
248
We looked out at the port where the rocking masts of boats pointed at the multitudinous stars.
249
The wind searched the walls for old dust.
250
cluster of murky brown doors so alike that to be identified it seemed that hers must be counted off from abutting blackness of an alley.
251
listless disorder
252
on the sky-blue sky, the clouds low above the prairie, the grand canyonesque architecture of the cliffs, the cactus penguins extending conciliatory arms
253
the new trees, the new quivering life, the new shadows that designed new terrain on the old
254
The main room, for which no adequate name has yet been found in the Republic.
255
Hot Springs:
In a Spring vacation hotel the rain is bad news indeed. The hundred French windows of the great galleries led the eye out to ink-and-water pines snivelling listlessly on to raw brown tennis courts, to desolate hills against soiled white sky. There was “nothing to do” for hotel and resort were one and the same and no indoor activity was promised on the bulletin board until the concert of the Princeton Glee Club Easter Monday. Women who had come to breakfast in riding clothes rushed to the hairdresser instead; at eleven the tap-k’tap of ping-pong balls was the only sound of life in the enormous half empty hotel.
The girl was one of a pair in white skirts and yellow sweaters who walked down the long gallery after breakfast. Her face reflected the discontent of the weather, reflected darkly and resentfully. Looking at her Deforrest Colman thought: “Bored and fierce,” and then as his eyes continued to follow her, “No, proud and impatient. Not that either, but what a face—vitality and hand cuffs—where’s this getting me—liver and bacon, Damon and Pythias, Laurel and Hardy.
256
The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the march trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.
257
The gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.
258
Save for two Russian priests playing chess their party was alone in the smoking room.
259
Everybody in the room was hot. There was a faint flavor of starch on the air that leaked out to the lovely garden.
260
One of those huge spreading hotels of the capital, built to shelter politicians, retired officers suddenly discovering themselves (homeless, of ginless in their retirements, foreigners with axes to grind) without a native town, legation staffs, and women fascinated by one of the outer rings of officialdom— everyone could have their Congressman or Minister, if not their Senator or Ambassador—
261
The terrible way the train had seemed to foreshorten and hurry as it got into motion.
262
It was already eight o’clock when they drove off into a windy twilight. The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torredell Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine. Above them loomed Vesuvius and from its crater a small persistent fountain of smoke contributed darkness to the gathering night. “We ought to reach our destination about twleve,” said Nosby. No one answered. The city had disappeared behind a rise of ground and now they were alone, where the Maffia sprang out of rank human weeds and the Black Hand rose to throw its ominous shadow across two continents. There was something eerie in the sound of the wind over these gray mountains, crowned with decayed castles. Hallie suddenly shivered.
263
Motor boat like clock tick.
264
The sky that looks like smoke on Charles Street
265
Feeling at Francis Fox like cat-house.
266
Orange in Province
267
He heard them singing and looked down toward the lights. There was a trembling of the leaves before they passed.
268
Night at Fair—Eyes awakening.
269
March—The crepe myrtle was under corn stalks
270
“I’m glad I’m American,” she said. “Here in Italy I feel that everybody’s dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings—”
The solemn gloom of the countryside communicated itself to all of them.
The wind had come up stronger and was groaning through the dark-massed trees along the way.
271
White and inky night
272
A soft bell hummed midnight
273
In children’s books forests are sometimes made out of all-day suckers, boulders out of peppermints and rivers out of gently flowing, rippling molasses taffy. Such books are less fantastic than they sound for such localities exist, and one day a girl, herself little more than a child, sat dejected in the middle of one. It was all hers, she owned it; she owned Candy Town.
274
The red dusk was nearly gone but she had advanced into the last patch of it
275
Yellow and lavender filled her eyes, yellow for the sun through yellow shades and lavender for the quilt, swollen as a cloud and drifting in soft billows over the bed. Suddenly she remembered her appointment and uncovering her arms she squirmed into a violet negligee, flipped back her hair with a circular movement of her head and melted into the color of the room.
276
Lying awake in bed that night he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another. When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture was pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking.
277
The road was lined sparsely by a row of battered houses, some of them repainted a pale unhealthy blue and all of them repainted far back in large plots of shaggy and unkempt land.
278
It was a collapsed house, a retired house, set far back from the road and sunned and washed to the dull color of old wood.
One glance told him it was no longer a dwelling. The shutters that remained were closed tight, and from the tangled vines arose, as a single chord, a rich shrill sound of a hundred birds. John Jackson left the road and stalked across the yard knee-deep in abandoned grass.
279
Stifling as curtain dust
280
The pavements grew sloppier and the snow in the gutters melted into dirty sherbet.
281
The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.
282
It was the Europa—a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his own pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.
“Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried.
283
She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York.
284
hammock was of the particularly hideous yellow peculiar to hammocks.
285
adorned in front by an enormous but defunct motometer and behind by a mangy pennant bearing the legend “Tarleton, Ga.” In the dim past someone had begun to paint the hood yellow but unfortunately had been called away when but half through the task.
286
On all sides faintly irregular fields stretched away to a faintly irregular unpopulated horizon.
287
In the light of four strong pocket flash lights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional menservants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razoe along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.
288
But here beside the warm friendly rain that tumbled from his eaves onto the familiar lawn
289
Next morning, walking with Knowleton under starry frosted bushes in one of the bare gardens, she grew quite light-hearted.
290
“Ballroom,” for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase “Let’s go in and dance.” It was referred to as “inside” or “downstairs.” It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America.
291
They were there. The Cherbourg breakwater, a white stone snake, glittered along the sea at dawn; behind it red roofs and steeples and then small, neat hills traced with a warm orderly pattern of toy farms. “Do you like this French arrangement?” it seemed to say. “It’s considered very charming, but if you don’t agree just shift it about—set this road here, mis steeple there. It’s been done before, and it always comes out lovely in the end.”
It was Sunday morning, and Cherbourg was in flaring collars and high lace hats. Donkey carts and diminutive automobiles moved to the sound of incessant bells.
292
Those were the dog days. Out at the lake there was a thin green scum upon the water and in the city a last battering exhausting heat wave softened the asphalt till it retained the ghastly prints of human feet. In those days there was one auto for every 200 inhabitants so in the evening
293
A large but quick restaurant.
294
Aeolian or Wind-built Islands
295
They all went to the porch, where the children silhouetted themselves in silent balance on the railing and unrecognizable people called greeting as they passed along the dark dusty street.
296
The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence
297
At three o’clock in the morning, grey broken old women scrub the floors of the great New York Hotels.
298
(Missed) re great flatness of American life when everything had the same value—the cook’s complaint etc. etc.
299
The run to the purple mountains and back.
300
Spring had come early to the Eastern seaboard-thousands of tiny black surprise berries on every tree were shining with anticipation and a fresh breeze wafted them south all day.
301
Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?
302
A Mid-Victorian wind.
303
This restaurant with a haunted corner.
304
Lunar Rainbow
305
New Jersey village where even Sunday is only a restless lull between the crash of trains.
306
Elevators look like two big filing cabinets.
307
Out in the suburbs, chalk white windows looked down indifferently at them in sleeping roads.
308
The abundent waiters at Dartmouth seemed to me rather comedy characters—I mean not in themselves but in their roles. They go all out of character and begin to talk to the guests just like the man who hires himself out to do that.
309
St. Paul in 1855 (or ’66)—The rude town was like a great fish just hauled out of the Mississippi and still leaping and squirming on its bank.
310
The lobby of the Hotel Roi d’Angleterre was as desolate as a school house after school. In the huge, scarcely completed palace a few servants scurried about like rabbits, a few guests sidled up to the concierge, spoke in whispers and vanished with a single awed look around at the devastating emptiness. They were mostly women escaped from the deep melancholy at home, and finding that the torture chamber was preferable to the tomb.
311
Passing the building which housed the negro wards. The patients were singing as always. Among the voices that lay suspended in sweet melancholy on the August air in the early summer night, Owen recognized the deep base of Doofus who had been there two years—an interne on that ward had told him that Doofus was due to die; his place in the chorus would be hard to fill.
312
Red and yellow villas, called Fleur des Bois, Mon Nid, or Sans-Souci.
1726
Car description on quiet night, padded hush of tires, quiet tick of a motor running idle at curb.
1727
There was a bright sun and a wind, and the woods were singing.
1753
The mechanical sound of pingpong balls on a rainy afternoon.
1763
Early dark of a December afternoon in 1929. Lower New York and all the great blocks still gleaming with light, and after five going out row by row but with many tiers still gleaming out into the crisp dusk.
1764
In Spring when there was no leaf dry enough to crackle and the loudest sound was a dog barking in the next county.
1767
There was only spring whispering in the air, faint as the flutter of last year’s leaf.
1773
Swallowy air, velvet texture of the air on the Spartansburg road.
1779
Trees resting gold green bosoms on the water of Lake Lanier.
1780
Zelda picking pink flowers from the sedge.
1782
Zelda says of the Cevennes——chestnut trees, ghosts and a lone cow.
1784
The kind of man who stamps just before he laughs or shoves forward your chair with each change of emotion.
1791
Houses of 1925 overflowing with the first editions of Joseph Hergersheimer and colored toilet paper.
1800
Misty, enchanted arbors of light
1801
The deep South from the air—a mosaic of baseball diamonds set between dark little woods.
Next: E: Epigrams, Wise Cracks and Jokes.
Переводы: D: Описания: природа, атмосфера (разные переводчики).