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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