Re: My mind is gone
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 13 Dec 1997 18:37:53 -0500
> The most Salinger-like passage I've read yet, I think would have to be
>the end
> of A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, At the end when Hemingway sees his wife and
> his children after spending time with the rich people and what he has to say
> about all of it. I thought that the writing style and the message it
>conveyed
> was so much like Salinger. Did anybody else think so?
I find that part of the book heartbreaking, though Hemingway has slanted it
crazily away from the facts of the situation, because many of us who go
through a breakup of some kind look back on the relationship as if it were
golden and simple, and we often feel something along the lines of "I
wished I had died before I ever loved anyone like her" in our more
vulnerable moments of looking back.
As much as I love the book (I'm travelling and have a copy of it in my bag,
and I dip into it as if it were a box of assorted chocolates), I confess
that the last chapter sounds exceedingly like the Hemingway of the opening
chapter of A Farewell to Arms -- with his lists of qualities, and his
adjectives, and the sentences turning out steadily and truly and earnestly
and tied together with only enough connective tissue to hold it all
together so that you could read it once and feel that you had lived it and
would always live it even when you no longer had the book in front of you.
<grin>
I've never had luck finding echoes of Salinger in A Moveable Feast, I
confess; it's so intensely in Hemingway's voice that instead I use it as a
kind of compass to figure out which way is north.
Interestingly, I've also carried with me a 1994 book from Yale University
Press, "Hemingway's Genders" (by Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes). It's a
witty and brilliant examination of the subtle and unsubtle ways Hemingway
played with notions of gender in certain of his works. It's the kind of
book you can immerse yourself into for fun -- and I appreciate that they
make clear that they do not want to engage in Hemingway-bashing or -worship
regarding his *image*.
In fact, from the start they say something I suspect is relevant to this
list and some recent discussions here: "We believe that Ernest Hemingway
remains an interesting writer because it is possible to read him in more
than one way. We believe, even, that it is necessary to do so if his works
are to maintain their place in the literary canon. Literary works survive
over time because they continue to be part of a cultural conversation.
They survive because succeeding generations of readers find their concerns
represented in those texts and feel a need to discuss them with others,
whether in casual speech or in more formal contexts like ours. To all who
have read him in one way, as an embodiment of monolithic masculinity -- and
to all those who have resisted him on those grounds -- we ask simply that
you try reading him our way."
It's one of the most enjoyable critical books I've read in a while.
> I'm doing it because I want to protect lists like this and make sure that
> authors can say what they want and so that no more books get banned. (All by
> myself :) ) The problem is that right now I'm competing with people who
>dream
> about themselves in Armani suits, and that's a great motivator. During
>break,
> I'll be writing treatises on horse-picking! I'm sure that you'll all be
> holding your breath until then. Liz
The horses always outrun the Armani men and women. (At least, as we have
said here a few times recently, "Isn't it pretty to think so?") But like
those mythological post-nuclear-holocaust cockroaches, lists always find a
home somewhere, even in the worst of conditions, and often thrive. Good
luck with your finals!
--tim o'connor