From: "Brian Thornton" <
tieresias@worldnet.att.net>
> Marc-
> I'd love to read your conclusions or even the whole
paper, once you've
> finished working on it. I think you have a very
provocative subject!
The funny thing is, I was not even planning on presenting
this year. I gave a paper at the last conference 2 years ago
on Lake Maggiore in the north of Italy, but I had no real big
ideas for this year (even though I live in Tampa-- Key West
is a whole lot easier a trip than Italy!). I was talking to a
colleague and explaining that I wanted to concentrate on my
dissertation, rather than have a million distractions. He
asked if there was any way to combine Chandler with
Hemingway; I began to tell him about how Chandler had
integrated Hemingway into his fiction (especially FAREWELL,
MY LOVELY) and mentioned him several times in his letters. I
mentioned the parody
(mentioned several times on this list) of Hemingway that
Chandler had written. Anyway, my friend finally said, "Marc,
you've TALKED about Chandler's treatment of Hemingway for as
long as a conference paper should last! Submit a proposal!" I
did, and (to my surprise) it was accepted. Now I must write a
paper that I have little on other than a collection of
relevant quotes. I really have no conclusions yet. Heck,
since Chandler is of OBVIOUS relevance to this list and
someone _else_ brought up Hemingway, here are some of the
quotes that I plan to draw upon. If anyone has any opinion
and/or feedback, I'd love the help. This is rather
long....
"Chandler on Hemingway"
[From Chandler's Working Notebook: Discussing the American
language style]
"It has too great a fondness for the faux na怜 by which I mean
the use of a style such as might be spoken by a very limited
sort of mind. In the hands of a genius like Hemingway the may
be effective, but only by subtly evading the terms of the
contract, that is, by an artistic use of the telling details
which the speaker never would have noted. When not used by a
genius it is as flat as a Rotarian speech." (LATER NOVELS
1013)
[Excerpt from a 1932 Hemingway parody entitled "Beer in the
Sergeant-Major's Hat, or The Sun Also Sneezes"] Chandler's
dedication reads: "dedicated with no good reason to the
greatest living American novelist: Ernest Hemingway"
Hank went into the
bathroom to brush his teeth.
"The hell with it," he said.
"She shouldn't have done it."
It was a good bathroom. It was
small and the green enamel was peeling off the walls. But the
hell with that, as Napoleon said when they told him Josephine
was waiting without. The bathroom had a wide window through
which Hank looked at the pines and the larches. They dripped
with a faint rain. They looked smooth and comfortable.
"The hell with it," Hank said.
"She shouldn't have done it."
He opened the cabinet over the
wash-basin and took out his toothpaste. He looked at his
teeth in the mirror. They were large yellow teeth, but sound.
Hank could still bite his way for a while.
Hank unscrewed the top of the
toothpaste tube, thinking of the day when he had unscrewed
the lid off the coffee jar, down on the Pukayuk River, when
he was trout fishing. There had been larches there too. It
was a damn good river, and the trout had been damn good
trout. They liked being hooked. Everything had been good
except the coffee, which had been lousy. He made it Watson's
way, boiling it for two hours and a half in his knapsack. It
had tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man. (MacShane
42-43)
In FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, Chandler makes Hemingway part of an
extended joke. In chapters 23 and 24, Marlowe is "taken for a
ride" by two corrupt L.A. cops. When the "big" officer (later
identified as Galbraith) begins repeating Marlowe's
wisecracks, Marlowe says: "Listen, Hemingway, don't repeat
everything I say" (884). Chandler mentions Hemingway fifteen
times in five pages, and finally delivers the
punch-line:
"Who is this Hemingway person at all?"
"A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until
you begin to believe it must be good."
"That must take a hell of a long time," the big man said.
(887) See also chs. 32, 33, 34, and 36. In all, Hemingway is
mentioned 52 times!
[From an October 22 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf] But as I
said I do hope the next one will be better and that one of
these days I shall turn one out that will have the fresh and
sudden touch that will click. Most of all perhaps, in my
rather sensitive mind, I hope the day will come when I won't
have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ
grinder's monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him
everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but
what he did he did superbly. But James Cain--faugh!
Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every
kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy
overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a
board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of
literature, not because they write about dirty things, but
because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and
cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in
the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do
I, for God's sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his
eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at
least Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on the
garbage can. (RCP 32-33)
[From a Jan. 29 1946 letter to detective writer Erle Stanley
Gardner] You never were a Black Mask writer in Shaw's meaning
of the term. You never really were tough. You owed nothing to
Hammett or Hemingway. Your books have no brutality or sadism,
very little sex, and the blood doesn't count.
(Selected Letters 69-70)
[From a March 27 1946 letter to Blanche Knopf] But don't take
me too seriously. I am becoming a pretty sour kind of
citizen. Even Hemingway has let me down. I've been rereading
a lot of his stuff. I would have said here is one guy who
writes like himself, and I would have been right, but not the
way I meant it. Ninety per cent of it is the goddamnest
self-imitation. He never really wrote but one story. All the
rest is the same thing in different places - or without
different parts. And his eternal preoccupation with what goes
on between the sheets becomes rather nauseating in the end.
One reaches a time of life when limericks written on the
walls of comfort stations are not just obscene, they are
horribly dull. This man has only one subject and he makes
that ridiculous. I suppose the man's epitaph, if he had the
choosing of it, would be: Here Lies A Man Who Was Bloody Good
in Bed. Too Bad He's Alone Here. But the point is I begin to
doubt whether he ever was. You don't have to work so hard at
things you are really good at - or do you? (RCP 67)
[From an Oct. 4 1950 letter to Dale Warren (editor for
Houghton Mifflin)] Look what they've [critics] done to the
old war horse, Hemingway, and what they've been doing to him
for a good many years for that matter. He'd have quit writing
a long time ago if he had the faintest suspicion that any of
them knew what they were talking about, that they had no
spite in their systems, and that they were not sniping at him
just because he had made good. Let's face it. One of the
penalties of any kind of success is to have the jackals
snapping at your heels. They don't hate you because you're
bad. They say you're bad because they hate you. (Selected
Letters 227-28)
[An Oct. 9 1950 letter to Charles W. Morton, Ass. Editor of
the Atlantic Monthly] My compliments to Mr Weeks on belonging
to that very small minority of critics who did not find it
necessary to put Hemingway in his place over his last book
[ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES]. Just what do the boys
resent so much? Do they sense that the old wolf has been
wounded and that it is a good time to pull him down? I have
been reading the book. Candidly, it' s not the best thing
he's done, but it's still a hell of a sight better than
anything his detractors could do. There's not much story in
it, not much happens, hardly any scenes. And for that reason,
I suppose, the mannerisms sort of stick out. You can't expect
charity from knife throwers obviously; knife throwing is
their business. But you would have thought some of them might
have asked themselves just what he was trying to do.
Obviously he was not trying to write a masterpiece; but in a
character not too unlike his own, trying to sum up the
attitude of a man who is finished and knows it, and is bitter
and angry about it. Apparently Hemingway had been very sick
and he was not sure that he was going to get well, and he put
down on paper in a rather cursory way how that made him feel
to the things he had most valued. I suppose these primping
second-guessers who call themselves critics think he
shouldn't have written the book at all. Most men wouldn't
have. Feeling the way that he felt, they wouldn't have had
the guts to write anything. I'm damn sure I wouldn't. That's
the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ
may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't
be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one,
he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't
just walk off the mound and weep. Mr Cyril Connolly, in a
rather smoother piece of knife throwing than most of the
second-guessers are capable of, suggests that Mr Hemingway
should take six months off and take stock in himself. The
implication here apparently is that Hemingway has fully
exploited the adolescent attitude which so many people are
pleased to attribute to him, and should not grow up
intellectually and become an adult. But why? In the sense in
which Connolly would define the word, Hemingway has never had
any desire to be an adult. Some writers, like painters, are
born primitives. A nose full of Kafka is not at all their
idea of happiness. I suppose the weakness, even the tragedy,
of writers like Hemingway is that their sort of stuff demands
an immense vitality; and a man outgrows his vitality without
unfortunately outgrowing his furious concern with it. The
kind of thing Hemingway writes cannot be written by an
emotional corpse. The kind of thing Connolly writes can and
is. It has its points. Some of it is very good, but you don't
have to be alive to write it. (RCP 137-38)
[From an Oct. 5 1951 letter to Hamish Hamilton, RC's London
friend and publisher]
[Speaking of second-rate authors like Marquand, Irwin Shaw,
Herman Wouk, Nicholas Montserrat, and Preistley] I like to
read them and while I read them they seem very good. It is
only afterwards that the quality fades. [. .
.] Essentially one good chuck of Flaubert or Hemingway at
their best is wirth the whole pack of them. (Selected Letters
293)
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