Peter Quennell
The appearance of a new biography always raises my hopes, particularly if its subject is a writer, and it helps me to understand the genesis of a book that I have long admired. Thus Scott Fitzgerald by Andre Le Vot strikes me as especially recommendable; not only does it illuminate the origins of that minor masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, but it explains why the products of the novelist's middle years, for example, Ten- der is the Night, are often so sadly dis- appointing. The fact that Andre Le Vot is an astute and well-read French critic en- ables him to cut down 'gossip about Zelda' and put such background material into its proper place; while he possesses a deeper knowledge of the storyteller's art and, incidentally, of Fitzgerald's debt to French literature, than the average transatlantic pedagogue.
On a somewhat lower level, I have also much enjoyed The Ludovisi Goddess by
Virginia Surtees, a vividly detailed and, at times, wonderfully amusing portrait of Louisa Lady Ashburton, the preposterous Victorian literary hostess, whom Thomas
and Jane Carlyle adored, and Robert Browning, after she had rejected her adv- ances or he hers — we cannot quite be sure which — detested and savagely reviled. Lady Ashburton was one of those eminent
Victorians who, since they were impulsive, headstrong and immensely rich, seems to have crashed through all the social fences.
I hope that the editor will exuse me from listing one or two books I have thoroughly disenjoyed and have rather unfavourably reviewed. None of them, so far as I remember, was either bad or really funny enough to deserve a second mention.
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