--- Brian Thornton <
tieresias@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> I don't see Hemingway so much influenced by
Hammett
> as being a fellow-traveler on the
post-Twain/Crane
> realist tide. If you're talking "influences"
where
> Hemingway was concerned, you'd be better able
to
> prove "The Kansas City Star"'s
stylebook/Ring
> Lardner/Twain/Crane/Sherwood Anderson/a bunch
of
> French impressionist paintings.
>
> I also fail to see any substantial
*stylistic*
> influence by Hammett's work on either Fitzgerald
or
> Faulkner.
>
> All four of these men were giants, no question,
and
> their writing bears some similarities that can
be
> chalked up to them being (as I mentioned
above)
> "fellow travelers."
******************************************************
Hemingway cited Hammett as an influence on his sparse,
discriptive sentence structure. It may be in A MOVEABLE
FEAST, but Hemingway's specific quote on Hammett is not hard
to find. The other writers all acknowledged reading Hammett.
Fitzgerald was so impressed by Hammett's work that he
revising TENDER IS THE NIGHT, when half way through it, to
make it a murder mystery. That revision went a long way
before Perkins convinced him to go back to the original idea.
Robbe-Grillet, of course, has openly credited his very
peculiar style to Hammett's use of sentences and
description.
What writers perhaps most admired and were envious about
Hammett was his ability to create stories that translated
into MANY successful movies. The similarity of the public
image of Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald and the fictional
protrait of Nick & Nora Charles as drawn by Hammett is
certainly there. None of Fitzgerald's own stories were made
into successful movies during his lifetime and if you read
his bios, this was very frustrating to him.
I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, saying that all
these writers consciously attempted to change their writing
to be more like Hammett's. I am saying they were all very
aware of the successes Hammett achieve by comparably little
effort. And they all found his work absorbing and
amusing.
James M. Cain, whose work was constantly compared to
Hammett's by critics, was the one writer who maintained he
never read more than a paragraph of Hammett's work in his
life. Cain, of course, our own feelings aside, is not in the
same catagory as the other writers under discussion.
I also take exception to the idea that Hemingway was
"a fellow-traveler on the post-Twain/Crane realist tide."
Hemingway, like Fitzgerald, was a romantic writer. He owes
much more to Jack London than he does to either Twain or
Crane. His novels are not realistic. They are tragic
romances. FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, arguably his best
full-length book, has as much to do with reality as does
Burrough's A PRINCESS OF MARS.
Patrick King
____________________________________________________________________________________
Get easy, one-click access to your favorites. Make Yahoo!
your homepage. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 24 Nov 2007 EST