Re: further revelations
Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Fri, 11 Sep 1998 11:22:45 -0400
On Fri, Sep 11, 1998 at 08:31:07AM +0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> but now recognised as a symbol-sunk lead weight. After his suicide,
> the remaining vast load of unpublished material was examined,
> pruned, slapped about, rejigged & released to an embarassed public
> by his family & hangers-on.
>
> Three tons of junk.
Except (I feel obsessively compelled to say 8-) A Moveable Feast,
posthumous but splendid. I personally didn't dislike The Old Man and
the Sea, though; symbols are in the mind of the reader, I think, and
rather than seeing a writer creating SYMBOLS, I saw a writer striving
consciously to create archetype. Reading it is like reading prose that
has been created as if it were to be instantly mythic, which is how I
read that slim novel: Hemingway as Greek tragedian transposed to the
middle of the 20th century. One can fault him on that, or for being
excessively mannered, but it was an enormous improvement over Across the
River, and quite an achievement for a man in the state of diffusion
Hemingway had reached at that point in his life.
--tim