Miscellany

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29234, 18 June 1960, Page 3

Miscellany

Wr Ride. By Dwight Taylor? Victor Gollanez. 250 pp. Dwight 1 Taylor might have chosen as an alternative title for this book: “People I Met in the 1920’5.” That, at least, would have provided a clue to its contents. For it consists of a series of reminiscences, each having to do with some person—famous or obscure —whom the author met during the decade that followed the First World War. Some of the more famous people he writes about are Somerset Maugham, Osbert Sitwell, Charles Lindbergh and Theodore Dreiser. The occasions on which he met them —whether at a literary soiree, in the case of Sitwell, or at a secret party, in the case of Lindbergh—are imaginatively reconstructed so as to provide a series of flash-backs upon the period to which they belonged—a period in which gaiety knew its counterpart in a surfeit of boredom and restlessness. Midnight carousals were part and parcel of the social round for many who lived in that “age of dissipation”—as the author refers to it. In his final chapter —devoted to Scott Fitzgerald—he recalls one such party, held in Hollywood, at which Fitzgerald slightly embarrassed everybody by trying to sing a seemingly endless song, while hopelessly drunk. To the author, this gifted writer who was so much addicted to alcohol, “remains a lonely enigma.” .Dwight Taylor makes the most of this enigmatic quality in the people he writes about in these sketches, particularly in the account he gives pf Jimmy Rivers, the avifitor who was as daring as he was unpredictable. This is a really entertaining book, and should have a wide appeal.