being a novelist, even one whose name was o the lips of every literary saloniste and cocktail party-goer, no ticket to dignity and no anodyne to status anxiety

This whole farrago stopped the British literary-industrial complex in its tracks for weeks

He ekes out a precarious living as an editor at a vanity press, a man of all work at the impecunious Little Magazine

the unaccountable success of his quondam best friend

an infinitely and perplexingly ascending trajectory towards an empyrean of extraliterary fame

a time, of course, in a great swivet over conformity, inauthenticity, and sterility

the temptation, though, to unreel an invidious procession of mighty literary figures parading across the centuries