Word: brett
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...true in the sense that it coheres in a vivid, living life of its own within the book, and true in serving as an affecting illusion of the way we wish things were. We all wish, decadents that we are, that we could imitate the languid laconic cynicism of Brett and Jake and Bill Gorton; we all wish, stout hearts that we think we are, that we could argue as honestly with ourselves as Robert Jordan or the Old Man of the Sea. Heming-way's answers may be shallow and short-sighted, blindly idealist; his is not the horrifying...
...that ex-Blonde English Actress Barbara Steel's dark hair is nearer to her true hair color (Sidney Skolsky), or even, in the lead of Eleanor Roosevelt's column, that "We have just celebrated the Fourth of July." The Journal-American was busy informing its readers that "Brett Halsey hasn't heard a thing from his estranged wife, Luciana Paluzzi, since she sent him a terse cable informing him that she had a baby boy in Rome" (Louella Parsons), that "when enameled bathtubs and lavatories become yellow, rub with a solution of salt and turpentine to restore...
...route." In Hemingway's view, the universal moral standard was nonexistent, but there were the clique moralities of the sportsman or the soldier, or, in his own case, the writer. So he invented the Code Hero, the code being "what we have instead of God," as Lady Brett Ashley puts it in The Sun Also Rises...
...Most of the other love stories read like adolescent male fantasies. In Hemingway there are only two kinds of women-the bitches like Margaret Macomber who shoots her husband the moment he displays courage, and the somnambules like Maria, who sleepwalks into Robert Jordan's sleeping bag. Lady Brett Ashley is a special breed, a likable bitch. Ibsen's Nora wanted to be her own woman. Promiscuous, aggressive Brett, with her habit of calling everybody "chap," is both her own woman and her own man, with the fatal sterility of being able to give herself...
...author's characters in violent and generally entertaining motion. (The characters are named Bimbo and Bunny and Cuckoo and Buddha, as they always are in British light fiction. No one knows why, just as no one knows why characters in U.S. ladies' fiction are all named Brett and Brick and Brack and Blade.) The tizzies in which the islanders become involved may be trivial-can anyone really fret about the problems of a cuckolded duke if he is called Droopy?-but they are enjoyed by all hands, including the author...