***Writer's Corner- F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side Of Paradise"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Book Review

This Side Of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Simon& Schuster, New York, 1920

There was a time when if I used the name of the 20th century American writer Ernest Hemingway it also almost always meant that name of the author under review, F. Scott Fitzgerald, would follow in the next breathe (and then John Dos Passos). At that time I placed Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby” pretty closely together as exemplars of strong, non-nonsense writing styles and sparse but meaningful dialogue, along with a great narrative. “Gatsby” still certainly holds up. I find though , especially after re-reading this Fitzgerald first effort that put his name high up on the post-World War I literary scene, “This Side of Paradise”, that Hemingway has won the literary “battle” for the number one spot as the premier writer of that period. Strangely that period, “The Jazz Age” of the 1920s, is known as such in great part due to this book and is forever associated with Fitzgerald’s name.

As is to be expected from a first novel this book is very great indebted to the bits and pieces of autobiographical sketches that hold it together. And, moreover, is driven by the college exploits of the main and most developed character, Amory Blaine, at Fitzgerald’s alma mater, Princeton. The long and short of the story line is a very self-conscious attempt by Blaine , including plenty of now seemingly obscure literary references, to find out the mysteries of the meaning of life as a writer. That premise does not work so well in the college milieu that dominates the first part of the book. After all, many college students from time immemorial, from elite colleges and public universities alike, has thrashed over those questions, some successfully, some not.

What really made this book important (aside from a glimpse of “Jazz Age” manners, mores, styles and ennui) is the second part, after college and after Blaine had done military service during World War I in France (although the details of this service are only sketchily drawn). World War I acted a great divide for many of the men, and it was mainly men in those days, who suffered through it. The straight line, as the story line here details, from college to one’s proper place in the upper echelons of society got derailed, and not solely in Blaine’s case. This dislocation is mainly drawn out here as a spiritual crisis for Blaine but it also evoked class, sexual relations (almost all turning sour, for one reason or another), and life style. This is the heart of the book and the heart of Blaine’s (and Fitzgerald’s) dilemma: how to resolve the moral crisis within oneself without upsetting the social applecart that allows the wherewithal for such introspection.

What does not work here and what in the end makes this an unsatisfying work is Blaine’s rather vague and sudden attachment to some form of socialism near the end of the book. Although revolution was in the air and the great revolutionary efforts in Europe, including the seminal Bolshevik revolution in Russia, were in full blast for most of the book one would not know that things like the American government-driven Palmer Raids "red scare”, the split in the left-wing socialist movement in reaction to the American entry into the war and support of the Russian revolution, and the establishment of the American Communist Party were taking place. Blaine’s socialism is of a rather diluted sort, one suspects. Still this is a great first effort and if for no other reason that the display of Fitzgerald's' skill with language is worth reading, and re-reading.

Taking The World Back From Being Out Of Joint-Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers- A Film Adaptation

Taking The World Back From Being Out Of Joint-Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers- A Film Adaptation

By Josh Breslin


DVD Review

The Killers, starring Edmond O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, and Ava Gardner, based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, 1946

[I have noted in a recent bracketed introduction (see, Archives January 11, 2019 Jenny Dolan Speaks Her Mind) that some of the material that former site manager, then called administrator, Allan Jackson had let his old cronies run wild with whatever they wanted to write about centered on the old days their old days. Write about under his direction, some of the younger non-crony writers at the time said under his command, their old Acre neighborhood corner boy days back in their youthful 1960s. And they did, and truth, did a pretty good job. That however at the expense of other materials that this publication has been noted for since its hard copy inception back in the mid-1970s.

My background is from many years at the American Film Gazette in both its hard copy and on-line forms, so I was somewhat appalled when I noted that films, current or classic, were being given short shrift, especially in that last period of Allan’s reign when he had them running through hoops to pay 24/7/365 homage to the Summer of Love, 1967. The writer here, Josh Breslin although not an old time Acre neighborhood corner boy did hitch up with these older writers under the guidance of one Peter Paul Markin after he met this crowd out on Russian Hill in San Francisco in that long, hot summer of 1967. Notwithstanding that long association Josh wrote the following short, short by the Jackson standard then that every film review had to be only a little short of a cinematic studies dissertation without the footnotes, about an adaptation of one of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and did a good job of it. Thus the encore.

Although I have been in the film review business for many years going back to when Sam Lowell used to be at American Film Gazette as a stringer I have always had something of an ambivalent feeling about film noir, that 1940s mostly genre that turned hardboiled literary productions by guys like Ray Chandler and Dashiell Hammett into hard-boiled films complete with great black and white photography and some femme with a knife, no, better gun in her pocketbook for a little off-hand shooting if the occasion arose, and it did. Maybe I am just that half-generation removed from Sam, and Josh, who lived and died by this Saturday afternoon matinee double feature menu as they came of age but a recent review of this film under review has moved me a little in a positive direction. In any case watch out for that gal with the gun-simple eyes, yes, watch out. Greg Green]
    
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As I have mentioned before at the start of other reviews in this genre, I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they also have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh yah, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, femme fatale interest and sheer duplicity the film under review, The Killers, is under that former category.

Although the screen adaptation owes little, except the opening passages, to Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name this is primo 1940s crime noir stuff. Here, although Hemingway left plenty of room for other possibilities in his plot line, the question is why did two professional killers, serious, bad-ass killers want to kill the seemingly harmless “Swede” (played by a young, rough-hewn Burt Lancaster). But come on now, wake up, you know as well as I do that it’s about a dame, a frill, a frail, a woman, and not just any woman, but a high roller femme fatale. In this case that would be Kitty Collins (played by sultry, very sultry, husky-voiced, dark-haired Ava Gardner) as just a poor colleen trying to get up from under and a femme fatale that has the boys, rich or poor, begging for more.

As I have noted recently in a review of the 1945 crime noir, Fallen Angel, femme fatales come in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. But, high or low, all want some dough, and man who has it or knows how to get it. This is no modernist, post-1970s concept but hard 1940s realities. And duplicity, big-time duplicity, is just one of the “feminine wiles” that will help get the dough. Now thoroughly modern Kitty is not all that choosy about the dough's source, any mug will do, but she has some kind of sixth sense that it is not the Swede, at least not in the long haul, and that notion will drive the action for a bit. And if you think about it, of course Kitty is going with the smart guy. And old Swede is nothing but a busted-up old palooka of a prize fighter past his prime and looking, just like every other past his prime guy, for some easy money. No, no way Kitty is going to wind up with him in some shoddy flea-bitten rooming house out in the sticks, just waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Let’s run through the plot a little and it will start to make more sense. You already know that other shoe dropped for Swede. And why he just waited for the fates to rush in on him. What you didn’t know is that to get some easy dough for another run at Ms. Kitty’s affections he, Swede, is involved along with Kitty’s current paramour, “Big Jim”, and a couple of other midnight grifters in a major hold-up of a hat factory (who would have guessed that is where the dough, real dough, was). The heist goes off like clockwork. Where it gets dicey is pay-off time. Kitty and Big Jim are dealing the others out, and dealing them out big time. And they get away with it for a while until an insurance investigator (yah, I know, what would such a guy want to get involved in this thing) trying to figure out why Swede just cast his fate to the wind starts to figure things out. And they lead naturally to the big double-cross. But double-crossing people, even simple midnight grifters, is not good criminal practice and so all hell breaks loose. Watch this film. And stay away from dark-haired Irish beauties with no heart, especially if you are just an average Joe. Okay.

Note: This is not the first Hemingway writing, or an idea for a writing, that has appeared in film totally different from the original idea. More famous, and rightly so, is his sea tale, To Have Or Have Not, that William Faulkner wrote the screenplay and that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall turned into a steamy (1940s steamy, okay) black and white film classic.

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise 

By Zack James

No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the applecart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only  written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.        

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last i before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.          

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21^st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20^th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids he would take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various products. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own careers out of the literary mass of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                  

Josh told Sam that he was rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long    since dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed him about how wrong he was to compare the juvenile antics, her term of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.   

End of debate. No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars had to put their two cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if he had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby. Pointed out that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.

It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from mucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placate kind of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano y mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to germinate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devils’ advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together.      

Up Close and Personal with the 1920s “Lost Generation”- Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” – A Short Book Clip

Short Book Clip

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, 1960

This book, published after the death of Ernest Hemingway, but written in 1960 is a little gold mine of insights about the personalities and places that made Paris in the 1920’s the home of the post- World War I “lost generation” (Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age denizens when they travelled abroad). Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through that lens. Certainly the writing is as sparse and well turned as any of his short stories, including the characteristic last sentence or two of each section built to sharply give the point he was trying to get across.

Of course Hemingway was young , newly married and fairly poor in this Paris but apparently his reputation was such that all the great American and British expatriates crossed his path (or he theirs). Literary arbiter and art patron Gertrude Stein (“a rose is a rose is a rose,” okay, along with a cameo by lover Alice B.) gets plenty of space. As does unjustly neglected Ford Maddox Ford, overblown T. S. Eliot (not overthrown until “beat” mad monk sent him howling in that 1950s good night, made monk wordsmith celtic blasphemer James Joyce, mad monk, mad for real Ezra Pound and a smaller group of secondary writers and poets. All worthy of mention in the modern Western literary canon (of that time, if not now, now in some purified politically correct passé deconstructed corners). Hell, I believe that you had to have been in Paris at that time if you wanted to fertilize your work, those who stayed strictly in America suffer somewhat by comparison.

A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway’s perspective this was a very difficult man but one who he tried to befriend. And of course there, as always, was the Zelda problem. If you want to understand the inner strain of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night read Hemingway’s tidbits. At some level Hemingway was trying to ‘save’ Fitzgerald as a writer but as we know it was not to be. Read his take here and then go out and read other books on, and by, the literary lights of the “lost ‘generation.” Some of it will make more sense then.

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some-100 Top Summer Books- A NationalPublic Radio Survey

Click on title to link to the results of a National Public Radio (NPR) survey about the 100 favorite summer books that interest its listeners. I have read many of them, have you? Some I would never think of reading, others they missed.

From NPR-Chronicling Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some

CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures. It describes Hemingway's relationship with Soviet intelligence.

Click on link for a piece of Papa Hemingway’s link with the Soviets during World War II  

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/18/520631331/chronicling-ernest-hemingways-relationship-with-the-soviets

*From The Jazz Age-Fitzgerald Is In The House-The Great Gatsby

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the "Jazz Age" writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

BOOK REVIEW

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Random House, New York, 2002

One would have to be rather pedantic not recognize that F. Scott Fitzgerald was an important, if not the most important, novelistic voice of the Jazz Age in post World War I America. Nobody, with the possible occasional exception of Ernest Hemingway, has chronicled the end of the age of American innocence signaled by the Jazz Age better than Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald certainly was not the only voice of that age, think Hemingway again, but the voice that best exemplified the tensions between the mores of `old wealth' and the emerging sources of `new wealth' that were produced by the huge amount of money available, mainly through government contracts, as result of the war or riches gained through the illegal liquor trade. That is the sociological underpinning that drives Fitzgerald's work.

There is no better example of those tensions than the hero (or is it anti-hero?) of this book, Jay Gatsby. If nothing else it is a dramatic enactment of the strivings of the new money to `make it' in the world of high society, one way or another. And what better way to do that than in the age old tradition of buying one's way into that society through marriage. This is the modern American version of that old story.

And the story itself? One Jay Gatsby, the former Jimmy Ganz, freshly reinventing himself after indeterminate service in the American military in World War I and loaded with cash from questionable financial resources, attempts to win, or rather re-win the affections of one Daisy Buchanan his vision of the perfect life companion and exemplar of the `old money' crowd that he wishes to crash. One little complication, however, gets in the way. She has found herself married to a brutish but very wealthy member of that `old money' crowd. Gatsby's lavish but fumbling attempts to lure her away from the high society of Long Island, then the summer watering hole of the `old money', forms the core of the story.

Gatsby's trial and tribulations on the way as narrated by Nick Carroway (and Gatsby's somewhat unwitting accomplice in the Daisy matter) keeps the story line going until the final deadly ending. The morale- the very rich are indeed very different from you or I. Moreover, someone else will always have to pick up the messes they have made for themselves. They merely move on. This may serve as a cautionary tale for that time and, possibly, today.

A word on literary merits. According to the inevitable changes in literary fashion as well as literary politics Fitzgerald, for long a leading figure in the canon of American literature, has been somewhat eclipsed by other more post-modernist trends. While I firmly believe that the Western canon is in dire need of expansion to include `third world', woman and minority voices Fitzgerald's literary merits stand on their own. His tightly- crafted story line, his sense of language and the flat-out fact that that he knew the subject matter that formed the basis of his expositions merit renewed consideration by today's reader.

Simply put, if you want to understand part of what was going on in America in the 1920's before the Great Crash of 1929 then you have to read the man. If nothing else read the last few pages of Gatsby. If there is a better literary expression of the promise of America as seem by the early Dutch settlers of New York (and the New World) as the last best hope of civilization and the failure of that promise at the hands of the later "robber barons" and their descendants I have not read it.

On the 100th Anniversary Year Of The Armistice That Stopped The Blood Bath Of World War And Swept Away The Flower Of A Generation-From The Pen Of Ernest Hemingway On Love And War- "A Farewell To Arms"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

BOOK REVIEW

A FAREWELL TO ARMS, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, GROVE PRESS, 1997

I have spent a political lifetime arguing that the nature of modern society turned on the dramatic and deadly events that became what we know in history as World War I. A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Hemingway’s attempt to come to grips with that notion in novelistic form. He combines the two themes that he is noted for and accomplished at - love and war- and demonstrates how hard that combination is on the love side of the equation. Here we find the first flourishes of that angst, desperation and sense of futility in the persons of the main characters, a young fancy-free American officer and a British nurse who had recently lost her fiancé in battle, that would characterize the survivors of the war- the "lost generation".

When I reviewed Hemingway’s "The Sun Also Rises" I argued that Scott Fitzgerald had the truer ear for the pathos of the "lost generation" after the war. I also noted that Hemingway had a much better ear and style for the love and war combination. Here Hemingway clearly wins. Maybe it is the trauma of war that makes his sparseness of language and stripped emotion work. Maybe it is his eternal quest for honor and the other attributes of machismo closely associated with the war experience. Maybe it is because he could just flat-out write a hell of a war story. But, damn, you had better read this novel if you want to know what writing is all about.

Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers”- A Film Adaptation

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Killers.

DVD Review

The Killers, starring Edmond O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, and Ava Gardner, based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, 1946

As I have mentioned before at the start of other reviews in this genre I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background and shadowy moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they also have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh ya, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, femme fatale interest and sheer duplicity the film under review, The Killers, is under that former category.

Although the screen adaptation owes little, except the opening passages, to Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name this is primo 1940s crime noir stuff. Here, although Hemingway left plenty of room for other possibilities in his plot line, the question is why did two professional killers, serious, bad-ass killers want to kill the seemingly harmless “Swede” (played by a young, rough-hewn Burt Lancaster). But come on now, wake up, you know as well as I do that it’s about a dame, a frill, a frail, a woman, and not just any woman, but a high roller femme fatale. In this case that would be Kitty Collins (played by sultry, very sultry, husky-voiced, dark-haired Ava Gardner) as just a poor colleen trying to get up from under and a femme fatale that has the boys, rich or poor, begging for more.

As I have noted recently in a review of the 1945 crime noir, Fallen Angel, femme fatales come in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. But, high or low, all want some dough, and man who has it or knows how to get it. This is no modernist, post-1970s concept but hard 1940s realities. And duplicity, big-time duplicity, is just one of the “feminine wiles” that will help get the dough. Now thoroughly modern Kitty is not all that choosy about the dough's source, any mug will do, but she has some kind of sixth sense that it is not the Swede, at least not in the long haul, and that notion will drive the action for a bit. And if you think about it, of course Kitty is going with the smart guy. And old Swede is nothing but a busted-up old palooka of a prize fighter past his prime and looking, just like every other past his prime guy, for some easy money. No, no way Kitty is going to wind up with him in some shoddy flea-bitten rooming house out in the sticks, just waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Let’s run through the plot a little and it will start to make more sense. You already know that other shoe dropped for Swede. And why he just waited for the fates to rush in on him. What you didn’t know is that to get some easy dough for another run at Ms. Kitty’s affections he, Swede, is involved along with Kitty’s current paramour, “Big Jim”, and a couple of other midnight grifters in a major hold-up of a hat factory (who would have guessed that is where the dough, real dough, was). The heist goes off like clockwork. Where it gets dicey is pay-off time. Kitty and Big Jim are dealing the others out, and dealing them out big time. And they get away with it for a while until an insurance investigator (ya, I know, what would such a guy want to get involved in this thing) trying to figure out why Swede just cast his fate to the wind starts to figure things out. And they lead naturally to the big double-cross. But double-crossing people, even simple midnight grifters, is not good criminal practice and so all hell breaks loose. Watch this film. And stay away from dark-haired Irish beauties with no heart, especially if you are just an average Joe. Okay.



Note: This is not the first Hemingway writing, or an idea for a writing, that has appeared in film totally different from the original idea. More famous, and rightly so, is his sea tale, To Have Or Have Not, that William Faulkner wrote the screenplay and that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall turned into a steamy (1940s steamy, okay) black and white film classic.

*Hemingway-Up Close and Personal-"A Moveable Feast"-A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

BOOK REVIEW

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Vintage-New Edition, New York, 2000

This book, published after the death by suicide of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, but written in 1960 is a little gold mine of insights about the personalities and places that made Paris in the 1920's the home of the post World War I "lost generation". Hemingway notes that these memoirs can be treated as fiction but that one can still gain some insight even through approached through that lens. Certainly the writing is as sparse and well turned as any of his short stories, including the characteristic last sentence or two of each section structured to sharply give the point he was trying to get across in the story.

Of course Hemingway was young , newly married, and fairly poor in this Paris but apparently his reputation was such that all the great American and British expatriates crossed his path (or he theirs). Gertrude Stein (and Alice B.) get a nod. As does Ford Maddox Ford, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and a smaller group of secondary writers and poets. Hell, I believe after this exposition that you had to have been in Paris at that time if you wanted to fertilize your work.

A special note should be taken of the sections dealing with his relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. From Hemingway's perspective Fitzgerald was a very difficult man but one whom he tried to befriend. And of course there, as always, was the Zelda problem. If you want to understand the inner strain of Fitzgerald's Tender is The Night read Hemingway's tidbits. At some level Hemingway was trying to `save' Fitzgerald as a writer but as we know that was not to be. Read here and then go out and read other books on the "lost generation". Some of it will make more sense then.

*From The Pen Of Ernest Hemingway-Bullfighting 101- "Death In The Afternoon"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

BOOK REVIEW

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, PUTNAM, NEW YORK, 1931

At the time that Hemingway wrote this book the rather exotic art of bullfighting was fairly unknown to English audiences. Hemingway's book almost single-handedly drove many expatriate Americans and Europeans of the ‘lost generation’ to the corrida. Some of his novels and short stories also have the bullring as a backdrop. This book is an interesting combination of Hemingway’s literary flair and a 'how to' book on the art of bullfighting. The bullfight experience (watching, that is) became a mandatory exercise for later, mainly American, male writers and formed a rite of passage for manly writing. One thinks immediately of Norman Mailer but there were others.

Having watched a bullfight in Mexico I find it hard to see the interest that Hemingway and the others had in the sport. I do not care for prizefighting either, another rite of passage for an earlier generation of writers. I have, on the other hand, seen the 'bullpen' at Fenway Park of the beloved home town Boston Red Sox do things to blow a lead that would shame even a novice matador. On its own terms, Hemingway surely had more than an amateur interest in describing the ritual of the fight and grading the performances of man and beast. That part, in essence, the literary part is what held my interest. If one suspends judgment on the obvious surface brutality of the event and rather delves into the ‘man against nature’ and ‘dancing with death’ aspects of this stylized ritual that is where you will find Hemingway. Ole

Out Of The Swing And Sway 1920s Jazz Night- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Basil And Josephine Stories”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Basil and Josephine Stories.

Book Review

The Basil and Josephine Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner’s, New York, 1973

The name F. Scott Fitzgerald is no stranger to this space as the master writer of one of the great American novels of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby. And as one of the key players (many of them spending time in self-imposed European exile) in American literature in the so-called Jazz Age in the aftermath of World War I. For this writer he formed, along with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and a little, Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein the foundation for modern American writing. But that recognition was a later development, far later, because I knew of Fitzgerald’s work long before I had read any of his (or the others, for that matter) better known works. I knew the Basil and Josephine stories well before that.

As a kid in the 1950s the library that I spent many an hour in was divided, as they are in most libraries even today, into children’s and adult’s sections. At that time there was something of a Chinese Wall between the two sections in the form of a stern old librarian who made sure that kids, sneaky kids like me didn’t go into that forbidden adult section until the proper time (after sixth grade as I recall). The Basil and Josephine stories were, fortunately, in the kid’s section (although I have seen them in adult sections of libraries as well). And while the literary merits of the stories are adult worthy of mention for the clarity of Fitzgerald’s language, the thoughtful plots (mainly, although a couple are kind of similar reflecting the mass magazine adult audience they were addressed to), and the evocative style (of that “age of innocence” just before World War I after which the world changed dramatically. No more innocent when you dream notions, not after the mustard gas and the trench warfare) for me on that long ago first reading what intrigued me was the idea of how the other half-the rich (well less than half, much less as it turns out) lived.

This was fascinating for a poor boy, a poor "projects" boy like me, who was clueless about half the stuff Basil got to do (riding trains, going to boarding school, checking out colleges, playing some football, and seriously, very seriously checking out the girls at exotic-sounding dances, definitely not our 1950s school sock hops). And I was clueless, almost totally clueless, about what haughty, serenely beautiful, guy-crazy Josephine was up to. So this little set of short stories was something like my introduction to class, the upper class, in literature.

Of course when I talk about the 1950s in the old projects, especially the later part when I used to hang around with one Billie, William James Bradley, self-proclaimed king of the be-bop night at our old elementary school (well, not exactly self-proclaimed, I helped the legend along a little) I have to give Billie's take on the matter. His first reaction was why I was reading this stuff, this stuff that was not required school reading stuff anyway. Then when I kept going on and on about the stories, and trying to get him to read them, he exploded one day and shouted out “how is reading those stories going to get you or me out of these damn projects?”

Good point now that I think about it but I would not let it go at that. I started in on a little tidbit about how one of the stories was rejected by the magazine publishers because they thought the subject of ten or eleven year olds being into “petting parties” was crazy. That got Billie attention as he wailed about how those guys obviously had never been to the projects where everyone learned (or half-learned) about sex sometimes even earlier than that, innocent as it might have been. He said he might actually read the stuff now that he saw that rich kids, anyway, were up against the same stuff we were. He never did. But the themes of teen alienation, teen angst, teen vanity, teen love are all there. And while the rich are different from you and I, and life, including young life, plays out differently for them those themes seem embedded in youth culture ever since teenage because a separate social category. Read on.

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Sam Lowell, who had usually an easy going guy when not preoccupied with his profession, his lawyerly profession, was frustrated. No, better, was, had been, beside himself with frustration for a fairly long time. He had, as he wound down the management of the day to day operations of the small independent law firm that he had helped start with a fellow law school student, Ben Ames, decided that finally he could begin to pursue an avocation as a writer that he had been eager to do since high school. Back then the war, the Vietnam War if anybody is asking, intervened, and had caught him up in the draft call and after his tour of duty into the counter-culture night around San Francisco which had set him back several years when he couldn’t/did not want to face the return to the “real” world for a while.

More than that Sam found as he foundered and as his new “real” world foundered that he needed to move on. Moving on in the direct sense by taking up the law career that his mother, grandfather and several others had been harping on him since his youth. But he still hankered after that idea of being a writer, being a writer maybe in Paris, San Francisco, or some other town where blossoming the written word counted, counted a lot. But time and tide had passed that idea by and it had only been the previous decade or so that he got back to writing just for the hell of it.

Fortunately the times he choose to come back in were very propitious for amateur writers, writers who were not making their livelihoods trying to eke out a living at so many words per day. He had over the course of that decade, first very sporadically then more consistently, joined several writing-oriented blog and other self-publishing enterprises.        

That return to recreational writing however was really what Sam had been frustrated by. Or rather as he took his writing more seriously he realized that he had come to a block in the road, not a writer’s block fortunately because one way or another he could still produce the words, sometimes a torrid of words, but an understanding that he would always be a first rate third rate writer as somebody back in the day had said about some public servant whom the person who said the words was trying to smear.

This is the way Sam explained it to his long-time companion Laura, Laura Perkins, who had encouraged him in his writing as best she could. He had just written a short story based on a few episodes in the current love life of his old schoolboy friend, Bart Webber, from Carver where they grew up together. Bart had had a short torrent affair with a fellow student in their class, Melinda Loring, whom he had rekindled a relationship with after their 50^th anniversary class reunion. The affair, in the end, floundered on Bart’s inability to meet Melinda’s demands that they think about marriage which Bart, having suffered through three failed marriages (and more alimony, child support and college tuitions than any man should have rightly been required to do in that loveless legal world Sam inhabited along with some nasty judges),    was adamantly against, although he was open to the idea of living together or some such non-legal arrangement. Bart’s position set off a firestorm from which the relationship could never recover.

Bart, in telling Sam the details of the split up between him and Melinda, mentioned that he suddenly realized what the author Thomas Wolfe meant when he titled one of his books You Can’t Go Home Again. That idea, that hook, the notion that in some things you cannot go back stirred Sam into the thought of writing up a sketch, duly fictionalized, about Bart’s affair as some kind of cautionary tale for the generation of ‘68 now filled with plenty of regrets and sorrows about their pasts-and time to think about them as well. Bart agreed, although he was skeptical that anybody could learn anything from the exposition. In any case Sam wrote the piece up, about three thousand words, let Bart look it over and make corrections as well as check for any incidents revealed that might be tied to anything real that had happened in the Bart-Melinda relationship.

Bart satisfied, Sam sent the piece to various publishing outlets where there was a certain small interest expressed in publishing the story especially by one young female editor. It was a comment by that editor, Julie Stern, which riled Sam and set off his latest round of frustration. She said that the way he wrote the story, the way he defended his protagonist Jack Callahan, the piece as a whole read like, and this is a direct quote, “the closing argument of legal brief.”          

Initially stung by the comment Sam later, after several days’ reflection, realized that Julie was right, was right not only about that piece which she had read but after looking over some of his other earlier writings he had the same sense that she was onto something. All the years of dry legal writing had atrophied his creative writing skills, had left him thinking strictly inside the box. Had made him realize that he was a prime example of that first rate third rate writer he dreaded that he might become when he was young despite his junior and senior year English teacher, Miss Soros, at Carver High encouraging him in his creative endeavors.        

Sam thought it was funny that back in high school he had had such creative bursts, had stirred Miss Soros and his classmates with a few of his efforts mostly about the absurdities of teenage life, angst and alienation. He had fashioned himself, maybe imitated is a better word, after various heroic writers that he had read. In those days he was crazy for Ernest Hemingway’s sleek style, meaning crisp dialogue, clear short sentences yet with words that were power-packed to descript not only the action of the story but the environment in which the characters worked out their particular problems. Sam had been crazy to study about the Spanish Civil War after he had picked that event as the subject of his first term paper in high school. Along the way he found out that many Americans, not all of them communists or socialists, had supported the Republican side against the Nazi-infested Fascists and that Hemingway was one of them. Had written For Whom The Bells Toll as a result of his experiences (Sam would not find out until later that the American Communist Party and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades were not at all happy about Hemingway’s work on that book, its’ what would be today called its political incorrectness. Many years later when he had run into a veteran of the Lincolns at a conference at Brandeis where the Lincoln Archives were housed he had been still incensed that Hemingway had slighted them.

Sam had not known Hemingway’s work before his efforts around his term paper except maybe some film adaptation of one of his short stories, The Killers, but he was in thrall ever after, thought everybody wherever they might end up on their literary journeys should write following his style. Naturally, something that Sam was inclined to do when he was “hot’ on a writer he would read (and re-read later several times) all Hemingway’s works that he could get his hands on. Never could then though figure out why a guy who could write like a whirling dervish, a mad monk if you don’t like the dervish description, took his own life. That was then and like in a lot of things later Sam could understand that a person with declining stamina, some form of writer’s block, and a feeling that his best work was behind him, could take that way out. Not a way Sam’s would be inclined to take for those reasons since a first rate third rate writer would only bring laughter from the crowds upon himself if he fancied himself enough of a driven writer to contemplate that.    

Jesus, Sam thought, thinking back to the time when he first heard about how guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald abandoned the vacuity of post-World War I America for the bright lights of Paris, or France anyway. Yeah, if Hemingway gave Sam pause on style then Fitzgerald was the master of the narrative, of telling a great story letting the reader sink beneath the pauses. Like the first time he read The Great Gatsby and realized that Jay Ganz was just like a lot of guys he knew, corner boy guys who had big dreams. Except Jay driven did more than dream about what he wanted. He had had to read that famous last page about the Dutch sailors reaching the New World around New York Harbor way and seeing the possibilities of the fresh new start once they had seen that unsullied “fresh green breast.”  Yeah, Fitzgerald knew a certain milieu and worked that minefield for all it was worth.

As Sam dozed off a bit while thinking about all the great literature around, all the stuff that was worthy of being read he was dazzled by the progression of great writers who had influenced him at various time. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Wharton (even though he was not at all familiar with Brahmin life), Dorothy Parker and her Big Blonde, the max daddy detective story writers Raymond Parker and Dashiell  Hammett (who Sam swore learned their dialogue  craft from Hemingway after reading The Maltese Falcon  and the Big Sleep by them) and a whole bunch of others. And now he is to go without a bang but with a whimper, maybe better a sigh. Sighs the fate of first rate third rate writers.

The American Literary Canon- The View Of The Late Norman Mailer

Click On Title To Link To Norman Mailer "New York Review Of Books" article mentioned in commentary.

Commentary

Regular readers of this space know that over the past year or so I have done more than my fair share of book reviews of the journalistic and literary works of the late Norman Mailer. It is hardly a secret that in my youth (and later, as well) I devoured anything of his that I could get my hands even as we parted political company in the late 1960’s. With that in mind, I took full note of a recent three-part series concerning Mailer’s correspondence with fellow writers, editors, erstwhile critics and an occasional literary lumpen proletarian in the New York Review of Book. In the third part (dated March 12, 2009, page 28) there is a letter by Mailer to and editor of “The Reader’s Catalogue”, Helen Morris, listing his ten choices for inclusion into a project whose aim seemingly was to provide a who’s who of the Western literary canon. I list those choices below:

“U.S.A.” John Dos Passos; “Huckleberry Finn” Mark Twain; “Studs Lonigan” James T. Farrell; “Look, Homeward, Angel; Thomas Wolfe; “The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck; “The Great Gatsby” F. Scott Fitzgerald; “The Sun Also Rise” Ernest Hemingway; “Appointment At Samarra; John O’Hara; “The Postman Always Rings Twice” James M. Cain; and “Moby Dick” Herman Melville.

Now Mailer, when all is said and done, is a man of the Great Depression/ World War II generation, the so-called ‘greatest generation’ so that his choices reflect an earlier literary tradition that stressed his beloved male muscularity in writing, and much else in that pre-woman’s liberation world. Here is the twist though, with the exception of “Huckleberry Finn” that I would replace with Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” reflecting a generational shift on the search for the meaning of America story, Mailer’s list is the same that I would give if asked. This from a man of the “Generation of ‘68”. Go figure.

The ‘go figure’ part is actually very easy. His list or mine, these works are very strongly representative of the best in the American literary tradition. The literary canon, if you will. They DESERVE to be read, and re-read. Where the late Mr. Mailer and I would, perhaps, part company is on the questions of who else should be included, under what criteria and how expansive the canon should be. Not inconsequential questions if, however, they are really beyond the scope of what I want to say here. If one pays careful attention to his list (or mine for that matter) it is filled with the names of dreaded dead white males so feared by the literary political correctness squads. So here is a list, by no means extensive or exclusive, of a few of the ones that I would add to that list today and that I wished I had read earlier in life. Hell, though, read them all:

Richard Wright("Native Son" and "Black Boy" are a must); Langston Hughes (if you love the blues you need to read his poetry; Willa Cather; Edith Wharton (ya, I know that old Algonquin Roundtable crowd); Russell Banks; Allen Ginsberg Is there a better modern, modern poem than "Howl"); William Burroughs; Toni Morrison; William Styron; August Wilson; Joan Didion; Flannery O’Connor (she is starting to get some well deserved attention from the academy, please read her "Wise Blood"; Jimmy Breslin; Harper Lee (a million kudos for "To Kill A Mockingbird"), Lorraine Hansberry; Gertrude Stein; Eudora Welty; and, Tennessee Williams (read every play you can get your hands on starting with "Street Car Named Desire").

What no now departed John Updike? And no John Cheevers? No, but that is what makes the literary name game so much fun. Who makes your literary pantheon?

The Last Time I Saw Paris-With Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast In Mind

Last Time I Saw Paris-With Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast In Mind

By Sam Lowell


Jack Callahan, the king of the Eastern Massachusetts Toyota dealers with his showroom down in Hingham and known in the industry as Mister Toyota as a result, had spent a fair amount of his life pining away to go to Paris. Well, maybe not pining away since rugged hefty former schoolboy star running backs of his era, the early 1960s, maybe now too, did not pine away for stuff, at least not publicly but with an internal inflamed desire to go across the great ocean for that purpose. He had had that desire ever since he was a kid down at Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver and in the fifth grade his teacher, Miss Winot (now called Ms.by her request) regaled the class with photographs of a trip she had taken to that locale the summer before. Jack had gotten wrapped up in the Nortre Dame, Seine, Bastille, Eiffel Tower, Louvre scenes and had never really forgotten how thrilled he was by the idea of going where the poets, writers and the artists hung out, although then he probably could not have named a specific member of any one of those professions but Miss Winot had gone on and on about the romance of such grand figures and he was hooked.

Life is funny sometimes though and with one thing and another Jack and his high school sweetheart, Chrissie McNamara, known these days far and wide as Mrs. Toyota (not Ms. reflecting an old-fashioned marriage sensibility), married after his college football career was over with a shattered  knee injury junior year, never got to Paris until his late forties. First was that business with college football which seriously tied up his time on the gridiron and not much farther. Then marriage and later raising those four girls who came in quick succession that he adored and doted on. Along the way too having to hustle like crazy to earn dough for that growing family when that professional football career that he aimed at got shattered along with that knee, and truth be told, he had no other marketable skills except a gift of gab having spent his youth tied up with football heroics so he landed in the car selling business, a tough racket starting out. All in all he did not have time or money or energy to go to Paris on a spree back then. As part of his business interests he had gone to London, Berlin, Madrid but something always happened that he couldn’t squeeze time for Paris until the girls came of age and the car business kind of ran itself.       

So in his late forties Jack saw no reason for not going, along with Chrissie to the “city of lights.” The specific impetus came from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon although that book has little to do with Paris. Here’s how Jack’s mind works, or worked in the build-up to Paris adventure. He had seen the film version of The Last Tycoon starring Robert DeNiro which got him interested in reading the book that the film was based on. Since that book had been unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1941 he wanted to see how the book and film differed. Reading that book got him thinking that Fitzgerald had been an ex-patriate in Paris after World War I during the Jazz Age when a lot of cultural types were fed up with the American Babbitry. Of course reading Fitzgerald led to his friend and contemporary, fellow writer, and fellow Paris ex-patriate Ernest Hemingway. At that time Hemingway’s posthumous A Moveable Feast, a memoir of sorts about Paris in the 1920s, was hot off the presses and after reading that book Jack was determined that he and Chrissie were heading to Paris that very year once the September new car year had settled down.                

Before they left for Paris that October Jack had met up with his old friend Josh Breslin who was a journalist and who had been to Paris a number of times, a couple of times for extended periods  when he was on writing assignments. Jack was not as interested in Josh’s low-down on the high spots of Paris as in discussing the Fitzgerald and Hemingway books and their Paris. Jack and Josh had met out in San Francisco in the summer of 1968 when Jack had gone out there with a couple of his corner boys (that’s what he, they called themselves then after a whole flare-up over sullen, sulky alienated teenage boys restlessly hanging around corner variety stores, bowling alleys, pizza parlors, pool halls and the like by the authorities after films like The Wild One and Rebel Without A Cause came out and every self-respecting corner boy put on that pose). Jack and his corner boys, Frank Jackman and Bart Webber, had gotten involved with a travelling caravan, a converted yellow brick road school bus that a guy named Captain Crunch (real name Saul Stein) had rigged up to go up and down the Coast and look, well, look for whatever they were looking for (thosck to say out of hand, a talent he had developed for anybody who had a contrary literary opinion, saying that even if publication of unfinished materials only thrilled an author’s aficionados that in itself was worth the effort. Moreover anything of Fitzgerald’s was worth putting in the public prints just to show the youngsters what it was like when men and women wrote clear prose for keeps (same with Hemingway). They ended the night half-drunk but with their usual “agree to disagree” that had transcended any periodic disagreements.   

A few days later, no, more like a couple of weeks later, after Jack and Chrissie had flown to Paris Josh, with a little time on his hands since he was between assignments, decided to read some Fitzgerald, and read some Hemingway including the two books Jack and he had discussed that night at the High Hat. Something had struck him about Jack’s comments that “stuck in his craw,” as his late father, a man born and raised in the rural South, used to say when he was confused about something, that maybe Jack was onto something about keeping an author’s unfinished works off the public stage. As usual with such readings he decided to write short reviews of both books, actually drafts of reviews of both books since he was not sure whether any of the literary magazines who might be interested in the topic would buy and publish them. As it turned out those drafts remained as such, remained in Josh’s unpublished pile since the “mags” were no longer interested in any disputes over posthumously published books and were head over heels gathering up a storm around “deconstructing” an author’s works.

However he did sent a copy of each in turn to Jack for his inspection with cover letters telling Jack that for once he might be right about a literary dispute. Jack, after he got back from Paris and read the piece about Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast which Josh had written after The Last Tycoon, had laughed a smart –ass laugh:          

“A while back I wrote a short review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last work, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously in 1941 where I commented that the publisher had done something of a disservice to the great writer’s name by publishing something that was not completed and that would not, on the internal evidence, add to his place in the American literary pantheon (he had already made it either under “the old dead white men” version or the modern, more inclusive pantheon on the strength of The Great Gatsby alone).

“I stated in the review that at most the publication would over the long haul be grist for academic studies and not the general reading public and so it has proved except for the brief flare-up around the initial publication and the much later film version of the book. I also mentioned in that review a comparison with the book under review, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, also published posthumously in 1964 which had been completed and could with the normal editing make sense to publish.

“I noted that, moreover, the subject matter of Hemingway’s efforts, his take on the post-World War I American (and others) ex-patriate scene in Paris among the “lost generation” during the decade of the 1920s provided plenty of useful information about those times for the general reader as well as some interesting tidbits and leads for the academic reader. I think that is the key different in the publishing history of the two works.      

“Hemingway, a “veteran” of World War I (had volunteered for the ambulance corps and had been grievously injured in Italy), newly and apparently happily married to his first wife, Hadley, felt alienated from the American scene back home, felt alienated from his journalistic career undertaken to make a living, and joined the exile to Paris to see what it was all about, and maybe write some things, who knows maybe the great American novel (he had the ego for such a project, no question). Hemingway became something of the prototypal creative artist living in “splendid squalor” in the crowded quarters of literary Paris with its cafes and cabarets. So much of the book, maybe too much, is spent on his travels around Paris and France, his various skiing expeditions, and endless descriptions of the foods and wines, cheaply bought, that he and his comrades ate.           

“But that is filler. What grabbed this reader were the descriptions of his writing and reading work habits which were pretty regular despite the wine, women, and song aspects that he tells us about. And of that great bookstore/lending library, Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach which must have been something to have been part of back then. Of course this little book is a goldmine of information about “being present at the creation” of the modernist artistic movement which blossomed in Paris in the 1920s when he name drops meeting almost every important cultural figure who passed through that town.   Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Picasso, Ezra Pound and on and on met usually at the home of fellow exile, Gertrude Stein, who is even today underestimated as a gifted writer.  And to put paid to this book plenty of gossipy stuff including a ton of information about his hot and cold relationship with that F. Scott Fitzgerald who name I invoked at the start of this review.  Thanks for publishing this enjoyable, readable, informative book.”   

As for Jack, Chrissie, and Paris they had a great time especially in Montmartre, the writers, poets, and painters quarter of Hemingway's time.

As We Approach The 80th Anniversary Of The Barcelona May Days In The Spanish Civil War- Another Look By Ernest Hemingway At The Spanish Civil War.

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry on the Barcelona May Days of 1937 in the Spanish Civil War (as usual with political events, past and present, be careful using this source).

Book Review

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND 49 OTHER STORIES, ERNEST HEMNGWAY, P.F. COLLIER&SON, NEW YORK, 1950


I have written reviews of many of Ernest Hemingway’s major novels elsewhere in this space. I have reviewed his major novel on the Spanish Civil War For Whom the Bells Toll, as well. Here I review a short play of his concerning that same event. This play is the main item of interest for me in an anthology that also includes his first 49 short stories. I will make a few minor comments on them at the end. However, here I wish to address the main issue that drives the play, The Fifth Column. I believe that this is fitting in the year of the 75th anniversary of the Barcelona May Days-the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution.

The main action here concerns the actions, manners, and love life of a seemingly irresolute character, Phillip, in reality is a committed communist who has found himself wrapped up intensely in the struggle to fight against Franco’s counter-revolution. His role is to ferret out the fifth columnists that have infiltrated into Madrid for intelligence/sabotage purposes on behalf of the Franco forces in the bloody civil war that was shaking Republican Spain. The term “fifth column” comes from the notion that not only the traditional four columns of the military are at work but a fifth column of sympathizers who are trying to destabilize the Republic. What to do about them is the central question of this, or any, civil war.

At the time there was some controversy that swirled around Hemingway for presenting the solution of summary executions of these agents as the correct way of dealing with this menace. I have questioned some of Hemingway’s political judgments on Spain elsewhere, particularly concerning the role of the International Brigades, but he is right on here. Needless to say, as almost always with Hemingway, a little love interest is thrown into the mix to spice things up. However, in the end, despite the criminal Stalinist takeover of the Spanish security apparatus and its counter-revolutionary role in gutting the revolutionary promise there this play presents a question all militants today need to be aware of.

49 short stories

I recently reviewed this same compilation of short stories in an edition that included the short play The Fifth Column that I was interested in discussing concerning the problem of spies and infiltrators from the Franco-led Nationalist side-and what to do about them- in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. This edition does not contain that play and therefore I can discuss the short stories on their own terms. Although Hemingway wrote many novels, most of which I have read at one time or another, I believe that his style and sparseness of language was more suitable to the short story. This compilation of his first forty-nine although somewhat uneven in quality, as is always the case with any writer, I think makes my point. In any case they contain not only some of his most famous short stories but also some of the best.

The range of subjects that interested Hemingway is reflected here, especially those that defined masculinity in his era. Included here are classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro about the big game hunt, The Killers- a short and pungent gangster tale that was made into a much longer movie much in the matter of his novel To Have Or Have Not, many of the youthful Nick Adams stories tracing his adventures from puberty to his time of service in World War I, stories on bullfighting- probably more than you will ever want to know about that subject but reflecting an aficionado’s appreciation of the art form, a few on the never-ending problems of love and its heartbreaks including a metaphorical one, reflecting the censorious nature of the times, on the impact of abortion on a couple’s relationship, and some sketches that were included in A Farewell to Arms. Well worth your time. As always Hemingway masterly wields his sparse and functional language to make his points. Again, as always read this man. This work is part of our world literary heritage.

*Writer’s Corner – Ernest Hemingway’s Last Hurrah- “The Garden Of Eden”

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great American writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Book Review

The Garden Of Eden, Ernest Hemingway, Collier Books, New York, 1986

Recently, in a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first published novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), I mentioned that I thought his contemporary, friend, expatriate and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had definitively won the battle for “number one” writer of their generation, variously named the post -World War I, “lost”, or “Jazz Age” generation. Paying due respect to the greater literary merit of Fitzgerald ‘s “The Great Gatsby” as, perhaps, the best of the individual novels (or short stories) each produced the respective collective bodies of work of each gave the nod to the “Old Man”. That conclusion, however, was premised on such Hemingway masterpieces as “Farewell To Arms”, “The Sun Also Rises”, and “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, and his sparse, knife-like skill with descriptive language. It did not, could not and, unfortunately, does not, include the present book under review, “The Garden Of Eden”.

Of course, as the Publisher’s Note makes clear, this post-mortem find (Hemingway committed suicide in 1961), brought forth in a shopping bag (along with other manuscripts) to the publisher’s office by Hemingway’s widow, Mary, is certainly the stuff of legend, and a compelling reason for publication. However, beyond the seemingly modern trend to publish every bit of paper that a famous writer every put to pen, the hoopla seems entirely misplaced. I will chalk this one up to mere publishing “trade-puffing”.

Why? Well, this is material, basically another tale from the vaults of that “lost” generation mentioned above, that was covered by Hemingway brilliantly at the time in such works as “The Sun Also Rises”, his masterly effort to define that generation and it malaise (and perhaps, incidentally, his own). This book, or rather rolling “travelogue” from one European “hot spot” to another (in the off-season no less), complete with descriptions of an enormous amount of drinking, early and late, eating in that same condition, and going for the occasional swim should make bells ring in the heads of Hemingway aficionados that something very familiar is being reworked here.

Oh, the plot. Newlyweds, David and Catherine, he a writer and she a… well, whatever she is, are off on a seemingly endless trip around Europe after his recent completion of a successfully received book. After endless bouts of lovemaking, and the aforementioned eating and drinking, David itches to get back in harness and write again. Catherine, formally, at least, encourages that desire, and moves on to other pursuits in the sexual field, a girlfriend (Marita) for herself… and for David. The story line pushes along from there around this central entanglement and stalwart David’s pressing need to write some tales of his youth in Africa as well as another novel. Needless to say, the wheels come off the cart in a somewhat unexpected way.

Despite various reviews of this book upon publication commenting on Hemingway's character development of Catherine to the contrary, he never really got his woman characters to be anything more than objects, beautiful, crazy or smart. That is certainly the case with the shallow, demonic Catherine, whatever charms she possessed for David, and Marita as well. As I read along I kept on saying Catherine why don't you go write a novel yourself. But apparently this sensible notion is too modern a conceit for those times. Still there is more than enough good, strong use of language that first attracted me to Hemingway to keep him up in that valued number one position. Just not off of this work though.

Mississippi Noir- William Faulkner's Sanctuary

BOOK REVIEW

Sanctuary, William Faulkner, Vintage Books, New York, 1931

I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee. My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon. Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism. Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that.

So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930’s Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it.

The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis. Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'. Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks. Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect. Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way.

That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him. As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do). Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one. The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge’s daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity. All others watch out. Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi. Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon? Based on this effort I think not.