Patrick King wrote:
>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.
Show, don't tell, Patrick. If it's so easy to find, please
show it to us. I've read A MOVEABLE FEAST twice and I don't
recall any specific reference along those lines at all. I
suppose it's possible that I missed it, but being the big
Hammett fan that I am, I doubt I'd have missed a reference
like that one.
>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.
Or of Hammett himself and Lillian Hellman. Nick Charles bears
as much resemblance to Scott Fitzgerald (either privately or
publicly) as (to borrow from your anaology below) he does to
John Carter, Warlord of Barsoom.
>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.
Sure sounded that way to me.
>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.
That's different than what you were saying earlier, but OK.
Got a source, here?
>I also take exception to the idea that Hemingway
was
>"a fellow-traveler on the post-Twain/Crane
>realist tide."
Take as much exception as you like, but bear in mind that
Hemingway's connection to Twain/Crane and the realist school
is well-documented on this list, so you're taking up the club
with more people than just myself, here.
Don't believe me? It's easily confirmed by a quick search of
the Rara Avis archives. We've been over that ground several
times in the five-plus years that I've been a member of this
list.
>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.
Spare us the hyperbole. I read everything by Burroughs that I
could get my hands on when I was a kid. Loved his stuff,
especially the Martian Chronicles. BUT if I go read his stuff
now, it reads as labored, histrionic, post-Victorian romantic
escapist fantasy with carboard cutouts for characters and
plots so laughably predictable that they'd make Carroll John
Daly blush.
Bear in mind, too, that "realistic" and "real" are not the
same thing in either Webster's dictionary or in literary
criticism.
You'll have to do better than that to convince most of the
folks on this list that Hemingway's writing was the stuff of
heroic fantasy and not someone struggling to write "one true
sentence."
Brian Thornton
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