Re: the Jerry & Ernie show
Emily Friedman (bananafish_9@yahoo.com)
Wed, 17 Feb 1999 09:11:41 -0800 (PST)
---Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie> wrote:
>
>
> Trying my best, Rick, not to let your criminal neglect
> of capitals put me back on the bottle I have to admit
> I was much engaged by your thoughts about the Hemingway
> connection.
>
> It's my impression that, on the whole, old Ernie is not
> a greatly popular writer with Bananafish members.
> Am I right in this &, if so, how come? It's very hard
> for someone of my advanced senility to imagine
> a generation growing up who never felt the dizzying,
> liberating, wind-from-the-sea experience that that
> first encounter with a page of Hemingway brought
> to so many of us.
>
> I recall only vaguely reading Salinger's initial letter
> of self-introduction to the older writer but I remember
> it as expressing all the adulation that would have gone
> into any letter from myself at that age. Is my memory
> playing tricks?
>
> They wound up writing rather different kinds of story
> but I'm not so sure they might not have found quite a bit
> in common - if only the miseries that all writers come
> to share. Hemingway certainly seems to have been
> a compulsive reader & expressed his admiration for many
> writers who, at first glance, would hardly have shared
> his expressed view of the world. If he could express
> profound respect for a dinky little Frog like Marcel Proust
> wheezing away in his cork-lined cocoon recreating
> the Paris haute monde he would have had little difficulty
> relating to Sergeant Salinger as he put himself together
> again after Normandy.
>
> Scottie B.
>
I have always been a big fan of Hemingway and I can understand why
Salinger and Hemingway would connect. They both have a kind of dry
literary style that I like.
-Liz Friedman
>
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