Jim Blue wrote:
>Hemingway's faithfulness to clean straight
unembroidered lines of >prose,
>his dedication to less is more, and his determination
to tell a >well
>paced, camera shot clear story, It's not tough to
argue that >without
>Hemingway the hard-boiled school would be different
and less, >and that the
>minimalists might not have happened at all. While
some in >literaryland
>might see that as a blessing these days, I
don't.
Though Chandler didn't like Hemingway, at least judging by
the digs Marlowe takes at him in (I believe) "Farewell, my
Lovely." I suppose with Chandler's fondness for the
well-placed (and sometimes not so well placed) caused him to
dislike the spareness of Hemingway's language; or maybe he
was just jealous, possible too :).
I'm not wild about either minimalism or Hemingway (except
"The Sun Also Rises," which reads a lot more like a book
Fitzgerald would have written anyway) but I wouldn't dispute
their importance. I wouldn't dispute the quality of
Hemingway's craft, either, but for the most part his
characters and particularly his subject matter leaves me
cold. Perhaps one could read the influence of Hemingway and
Chandler as twin traditions - sometimes converging, sometimes
opposed - behind the contemporary crime novel. Hammett's lack
of sentimentality (relative to Chandler) perhaps aligns him
more closely with Hemingway?
I wouldn't discount Fitzgerald as a father of crime fiction,
either. Gatsby certainly does have the crime element, as some
have pointed out, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's
a crime novel (I would say that I can imagine exactly the
same characters (Jordan Baker could be one of the Sternwood
girls) and a very similar plot occurring in a crime novel,
but Fitz's focus is elsewhere; the narrator, for one thing,
is too much of an observer and too little of an agent which,
unless you go back to Holmes and Watson, doesn't really fit
with what I think of as the crime novel). Some of those
extended party scenes - Nick's first trip to Myrtle's with
Tom and almost everything that happens at Gatsby's -
frequently echo for me in crime fiction "bender" scenes, from
"The glass key" to Block to Crumley to Pelecanos. It's not
the plot of Gatsby but something about the language and
pacing that brings the crime writers to mind.
carrie
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