"one's homeland"

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Yes you did debate several issues with me, and I seem to recall that, at
> the time, you accepted the validity of the narrative approach I adopted.
> So it does disappoint me somewhat to find you now echoing jbor's
> deficient-reader line, which of course he has just repeated, having
> nothing constructive to offer.

Do I contradict & disappoint myself?


The second thing one should know about him is that Fitzgerald is partly
Irish and that he brings both to life and to fiction  certain qualities
that are not Anglo-Saxon. For, like the Irish, Fitzgerald is romantic,
but also cynical about Romance; he is bitter as well as ecstatic;
astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of the
playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little
malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has an Irish gift for
turning language into something iridescent and surprising. He often
reminds one, in fact, of the description that a great Irishman, Bernard
Shaw, has written of the Irish: 

"An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him,
never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor
deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them
that do ... and imaginations such a torture that you can't bear it
without Victory Gin ... And all the while there goes on horrible,
senseless, mischievous laughter in the winds, in the willows, from the
pipers at the green green gates of his mad narrative."