We could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front, and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. They re always connected.
Style is content, content is style.
Uh, but, uh, I think that people begin reading Fitzgerald for the social history aspects of his work, and then as they become better readers, they understand how well he wrote. And Joseph Heller, he wrote about the beautiful and the damned, about great possibility and about great failure. I would say so, and I think so much of what he wrote came out of his own experience, real living experience and fantasy experience, imagined experience. There is a continuity I believe in all his work, from the short stories through the novels, and I think there s a continuity in the character, having read Prof. Bruccoli s biography, Fitzgerald as a child, Fitzgerald as an adolescent, and Fitzgerald as a successful writer, and then as a writer who saw himself go into decline. He had a sense of time.