Re: farewell to arms


Subject: Re: farewell to arms
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 03:50:13 EDT


    Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Except, Tim O'Connor,
    you should have been here long, long ago. What the hell
    kept you? Still, I suppose, better late than never.

    Only last night at dindins my younger son dropped the remark
    that '....except for scientific & mathematical statements words
    are little more than noises we make at one another....' - & which
    have such personal, complex, multifaceted 'meanings' for each
    individual that 'communication' employing them is hardly worthy
    of the name.

    This is where your: '.... rather than being the product of too-great
    a reliance on a thesaurus, it represents Fitzgerald's exuberance
    with language....' has, for me, such timely relevance.

    I can never understand the peculiar power that Hemingway has
    always held over me. Why is it that the plain word (with its
    innumerable connotations) conveys so much more exact &
    vital an image than the 'mot juste'? (Not, incidentally, that I ever
    accused Scott of having to resort to a thesaurus: only us parodists.)

    I once went through the first immortal pages of Farewell to Arms
    where he describes - with breathtaking vividness - the changing
    seasons of war in the Italian countryside. I can't remember the exact
    numbers but it was quite incredible how rarely he used a colour
    adjective: a couple of unadorned 'blues', a 'green' & one or two
    'blacks' & 'whites'. The same was true of the whole book.
    No turquoise blues, or salmon pinks, or snot greens, or shit browns.
    And, of course, it was not just colours but nouns too:
    a tree not an olive tree, a stream not a brook, a house not a villa,
    & so on.

    Having fallen in love with that I can never look at another girl.
    Not Nabakov, not Joyce, not Fitzgerald. And certainly not the late
    Salinger. Well, OK, I can admire, as one might admire a beautiful
    star of the silver screen - but not the way one feels about that
    particular girl that one must, just MUST have or die.

    I fling around the phrase word wanking a lot. It's not simply a remnant
    of adolescent guilt. It seems, rather, a good term to apply to that
    self-absorbed quality of the great 'stylists'. They're so fucking
    pleased with themselves & their lovely big facility - that they've
    forgotten their business of showing it to ME, their reader.

    Holden & Poldy & Molly & the old Sport himself survive by virtue
    of their personalities, their conversation & their jokes - & DESPITE
    the surrounding verbiage of waffling asides & exotic words & amusingly
    bunched parentheses.

    Scottie B.

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