I was very engaged by Mattis's piece on literary cubism. It had never occurred to me before that Hemingway's early prose might be seen as a parallel to that movement which was being developed in the visual arts around the same time. Insofar as they both entail something radical & simplifying I can see that there's something to be said for it. I personally find though that the effects, as far as the reader or viewer is concerned, are quite different. To explode a visual image & reduce it to its component geometric shapes moves it back, to some extent, from what it represents. The viewer sometimes has to make a distinct effort to recognise what he's meant to be seeing & is often left with the feeling of the artist at play, someone horsing around, experimenting. The enjoyment offered is essentially `fun'. Hemingway's brilliant early stuff doesn't affect me that way at all. I don't feel as if I'm being invited to look at things from some intriguing new viewpoint. It may be a purely personal reaction, but I don't have the feeling of Hemingway disintegrating the world & then inviting me to reassemble it. He does the work all too powerfully *for* his reader. Nor does his writing have any great quality of `fun'. It feels, rather, as if he had shaved off one of the layers protecting the nerve endings, leaving the real world to makes its impact in an uncomfortably immediate way. On the other hand, Salinger *does* to some extent go in for cubism - as now defined. Those endlessly modifying clauses & the multifaceted way Buddy presents Seymour, for example, is not unlike a painting by Duchamp or Picasso. With Salinger more is better, whereas with Hemingway less is more. At a purely personal level, I find writers who concern themselves with the recreation of the `real' world more compelling than those whose interests are essentially spiritual or moral. Which is the reason, I suppose, that Hemingway will always make my heart turn over in a way that Salinger only ever did once - when he created Holden. Scottie B.