Woody Allen’s recent hit, Midnight in Paris, attests to our longstanding fantasies about American authors gadding about Paris in the ’20s. Lawrence, Woolf, O’Hara, Salinger, Heller, Vonnegut ? Many of these names combine artistic genius, folk hero, and pure celebrity. Who would you circle-Faulkner, Forster, Greene, Wharton, Nabokov, Orwell, D.H. And Steinbeck-one would have expected dirty fingernails, a cloud of Okie dust and a whiff of mackerel. There’s Henry James, more interested in the image you impress on him than vice-versa don’t confide in him, Partygoer, otherwise you might find yourself later in his fiction, depicted with chilling clarity. And Hemingway-who wouldn’t want a drink with him? (Maybe, anyone who doesn’t want to be maliciously gossiped about in a subsequent memoir).
He’s just behind James Joyce, visibly ill-at-ease, wishing he were elsewhere. Of course, everyone wants a glimpse of a drunken F.
Imagine a dinner party held for the hundred writers selected by Modern Library as the authors of the best novels of the twentieth century.
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