Meetings are for decisions not discussions.

Looking forward to learning more about Mary Lavin whose life story is fascinating, and her friendship with so many Irish writers, and her successful writing career against so many odds.

“Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side....”

This Side of Paradise, 1920

Fitzgerald wrote about football all his life. At the young age of 44, he was sitting in his armchair after lunch, eating a chocolate bar and making notes on the football team in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Suddenly, he stood up, grabbed the mantelpiece and fell to the floor.

... falling behind the Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.”

... crashing bodies and aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, … finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming...

“Amory at quarter-back, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice that had diminished to a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, ...

In This Side of Paradise, written during the summer of 1919 in Saint Paul, Fitzgerald writes about football with the understanding of a player, albeit a poor one. He embellishes the autobiographical Amory Blaine with the skill and courage of a star player!

“I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

The Great Gatsby

“[Tom] had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.”

The Great Gatsby

Writing The Great Gatsby in the South of France in 1924, he wrote to his editor Max Perkins to send newspaper accounts of the Harvard-Princeton and Yale-Princeton football games.

“I reveled in football [but] I grew very tall and thin, and when at Princeton ... I looked anxiously over the freshman candidates and saw the polite disregard with which they looked back at me, I realized that that particular dream was over.”

The Bowel

BBC 4 link to 'Sarah Churchwell Remembers... The Great Gatsby'

Sarah Churchwell looks at the origins of The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald's evocative novel of the Roaring Twenties, and the inspiration behind its plot and characters.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...