Barbaric or Insightful?

An ardent believer in the institution of marriage--Hadley, Pauline, Martha, Mary--with a noticeable taste for the grape and the grain--"He had begun with absinthe, continued at dinner with a bottle of good red wine, shifted to vodka before the jai alai games, and then settled down to whiskey and soda for the rest of the evening," Ernest Hemingway is a role model for writers fiercely uninterested in the "evolution" of contemporary literary theory, one who in his early career was distinctly apolitical, believing the only way a novelist could "do good" was "to show things as they really were," (the narrator of his autobiographical novel True at First Light referring to novelists as "congenital liars"), this attitude changing after his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his love of hunting and fishing--over one period of a hundred days he hooked and killed over fifty marlin in the waters off Cuba--justified, in a passage in TaFL one can't find at the moment, by the logic that compared to the nightly killing among the animals themselves, his victims constituted a tiny fraction, and there was no denying they would all die anyway at some point, death by gunshot causing less suffering than a slow death resulting from disease or a lethal attack from another animal. Reportedly drinking three scotches before dinner as a matter of routine, he relied on sleeping pills to turn off his interior light at night, not the first writer to fall into this trap. And he didn't believe in living as a fountain pen. During World War II, he was away from his writing desk for four years.

Crossing the Water

Peculiar, arresting phrasing throughout, an abundance of metaphor treats, and high stakes, assuredly, but lacking a beginning, middle and end, and a single overriding problem or challenge to clarify and unify the action, and build, not adaptable to the screen--unless von Trier takes it on.

Shoot To Kill

Hemingway is a wonderful writer, of a kind, in many ways, but he wasted so much time with all the stupid hunting. And it rubbed off on him. "There are no subjects I would not jest about if the jest was funny enough, just as, liking wing shooting, I would shoot my own mother if she went in coveys and had a good strong flight." (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker, [7-year undertaking, Scribner's, 1969, p. 234.)

But he's given us so much. And it's a small man who throws stones at a dead giant.

Courtesy Fogg Art Museum.

Henry Miller

One cannot say his wide-armed embrace of the sordid and vulgar much appeals, or his kneejerk contempt for most of the people in the shabby circles his narrators move

through in New York and Paris, but his general enthusiasm for moment to moment living is not intolerable, though the texts are overgrown with the poison ivy of exaggeration and "poetic" flights of fancy; one drop of LeCarré's blood in his veins would kill him instantly.