Reading is the best antidote to debauchery I know of, and I’ve been hitting the books lately. History mostly. Once upon a time I used to read novels. Back then I found real magic embedded in the prose of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Maugham, Leo T and Fyodor D, Waugh, Greene, and John O’Hara’s potboilers about upper-class swells. I was friendly with Irwin Shaw and James Jones, of The Young Lions and From Here To Eternity fame and read both men assiduously. Shaw and Jones were tough guys, army vets, and Hemingway types. Yet it was Fitzgerald, whose indelible stamp of grace, haunted my youth. Dick Diver and Tender Is The Night and the Riviera and all that. His romantic imagination transfigured his characters and settings to people and places I knew well. When I wasn’t chasing some girl or hitting a tennis ball, I was curled up reading Papa and the tragic Scott.
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