Wednesday, May 22, 2013

F. Scott Fitzgerald and GKC, part 2

Since the movie The Great Gatsby was recently released, I just decided to do another post on the connections between GKC and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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"Did you ever notice that remarkable coincidence. Bernard Shaw is 61 years old, H.G. Wells is 51, G.K. Chesterton 41, you're 31 and I'm 21---All the great authors of the world in arithmetical progression"


-F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Shane Leslie in February 1918 published in A Life in Letters

(Not accurate as to all the ages, but an interesting quote nevertheless)

BTW, while I admittedly don't quote from GKC's fiction as much as his non-fiction on this blog, Fitzgerald was an admirer of Chesterton's novels. 

To quote from my page of Chesterton's influence (where you can also find the references for the following as well):

[Fitzgerald] wrote that he put "Barry [sic] and Chesterton" above "anyone except Wells" as well as confided in 1917 that
I want to be one of the new school of American novelists — the Wells- Shaw- Chesterton-Mackenzie combination
He also confessed elsehwehre
I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastelle dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.[emphasis mine]
In fact, in the first chapter of Fitzgerald's very first novel, This Side of Paradise, the protoganist is said to have read Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
...which he liked without understanding

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