Sublime

“‘Robert,’ he was addressing me, ‘haven’t some of the people from your school been able to go down and register without violence here in Pike County?’ I thought to myself that Southerners are exposed the most, when they boast.”

Sylvanshine could almost literally see the small pink man drinking Pepto-Bismol straight out of the bottle and going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger.

Paris, where he hobnobbed with many other American expatriates, Fitzgerald among them.

The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big