Here is the first of Writing Smartly’s new Thursday posts, very short selections from significant writers and thinkers to help keep keen perceptions and masterful language before us.
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This most beautiful passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” defeats logic at its own game, for the noun surfeit means not only excess, but satiety, repletion, utter completion. So how can it be, as Fitzgerald describes this tender moment, that surfeit would demand more surfeit? Such a thing is possible only in the impossible world of love:
Then he saw—she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit…kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.
You can find this story, along with many other fine tales (don’t miss William Carlos Williams’s “The Use of Force”), in Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, 1982. The editors have important things to say about reading short stories, among them this: “The really fine story is by a writer who has some characteristic slant on the world, some characteristic reading of human values.” And if you are working on your own short story, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, 1983, makes an excellent companion for the task—whatever one’s age.
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