Subject: Re: farewell to arms
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 08:29:35 EDT
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 08:50:13AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> 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.
Oh, things, many the thing, many the six tigers under my tree....
> 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.
Yes, that's a good point. I sometimes despair at the issue of
communication. Forget on the written page; think of the communication
difficulties we have right here on this semi-cross-cultural list, with
missed references and ragingly different points of view. But then,
then, then, then we work on being more universal and we get the point
across, we hope. As you say:
> 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.)
Precisely. And this is (to be metalistical) what I don't grasp about
the people who study, say, Hemingway with their electron microscopes.
Where does that raw power come from? How do you achieve it? How
understand it? Not with a microscrope. I guess you do it with a
sensitivity to rhythm (the power behind the early Hemingway short pieces,
such as "Nick sat against the wall" and the immaculate opening
of "A Farewell to Arms," which is as majestic as ... well, for me
there is no comparison) and to the simplicity of words that require no
explication. I suppose one could compare the opening of "A Farewell
to Arms" to Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony (no. 41, I believe). There is
very little for me to measure it against.
> 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.
Yes! You have it right there. You can re-read those lines three
times or a hundred and you will never get past the magic that makes
them work.
Which is why it saddens me that after reaching the heights with that
book, and then with what stories came after, Hemingway slid rapidly
downhill with so much of the mediocrity that came later.
> 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 agree with you here, as well. It is difficult to move to another
writer after reading Hemingway at his best.
> 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.
This, I think, is what I mean about the difficulty of getting the
message across, though in this case I think we made a connection.
I've always felt that to keep this ability to make a connection with
readers, a writer has to stay out in the world. Perhaps covertly,
like DeLillo or Pynchon or (most recently) Auster or Madison Smartt Bell.
But not in the talk-show circus, where you don't see reality unless you
look behind the curtains that part for you.
> 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.
There you have it. Even Jiminy Jiminy Joyce himself became, as
someone was to write later, "bogged down in his own" locution and
mannerisms and such, which is where we get the unreadable "Finnegans
Wake." (Yes, Scottie, you know I like Joyce, but even I draw the line
after Ulysses, which -- much as I like it -- I must read with one or
more *books* at hand to put it in context. And that saddens me, much
as I admire Joyce. I don't want someone to translate the damned thing
for me. I want to read it myself, as I've been reading everything else,
for as long as I can remember.)
At least we, here, can get the references -- sometimes barely -- of
the Glass family, but I fear that the youngest of us, and that may be
the last generation to have that touch, will be the final people who
can make the cultural connections so demanded by Salinger. A Davila
bicycle? Vaudeville references? A little soft-shoe, anybody? A box
of Kolynos toothpaste on the stairs, to be tripped upon? (Is there
anyone here but me who has ever tasted that wonderful toothpaste?)*
The contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet? Soon all these
references will be as lost as are those to last century's Dublin.
That is the difference between Hemingway and other modern writers like
Joyce and Salinger and (to some extent) Fitzgerald and many others.
You have never seen a "key" published to interpret Hemingway. Nick
and the doctor and Uncle George take the camp rowboat to "Indian
Camp," and we get the story straight. There isn't much fiction that
tells it as straight as that. But yes, I somehow enjoy the
circumlocutions of "Seymour: An Introduction." I don't know why,
because I otherwise have little patience for that kind of writing, as
found, say, in "Infinite Jest," which is an amazing high-wire act, but
as self-conscious and hermetic as anything Salinger ever wrote. (But
now I speak only for myself, not for the management of "bananafish.")
--tim
*All thanks to Google! I find that our German readers can purchase a
tube of Kolynos toothpaste for 2.5 Euros, and that it can be had in
Brazil too, though here in the U.S., it appears to be a lost product.
[Sorry to have broken my word, but now I really return to slumber. I
thank Scottie for rousing me.]
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