THAT SUMMER IN PARIS

by Morley Callaghan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 1962

Like the Seine, memoirs of Paris-in-the-twenties just go on and on. The latest and just about the dandiest, is from Canada's top man of letters, Morley Callaghan. His book, disarming, frank, both touching and amusing, often very personal, always perceptive, is a chronicle of the safes, of the Rotonde and the Select, of the talented and the useless living in each other's pockets or dreams, developing the legends and the lifeblood that have made 20th century literature what it is today. There's Joyce wickedly playing an Almee McPherson record, Ford Madox Ford's worldly whispers, Fitzgerald performing a drunken drawing room handstand, Zelda's schizoid de vivre, and Robert McAlmon, the ""overlooked man"" of the expatriates, friend of Stein and Pound, a self-proclaimed bisexual challenging Hemingway's ""virility"". But above all, for Callaghan and the reader, it is the ""strange tangled relationship"" between Fitzgerald and Hemingway that holds away, of Hemingway the gentle bully boy with the primitive wisdom who just had to be champ ""no matter what"", and of Fitzgerald, the flappers' doomed darling, sustained and tormented by his own era and his genius all life long. The hidden resentments between the two, and incident when Callaghan and Hemingway were boxing and Fitzgerald was timekeeper and a ""scandal"" involving all three, are all brought to startling light. Clearly a must for ""lost generation"" devotees.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1962

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Coward-McCann

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962

Categories: NONFICTION