Word: hemingways
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...ERNEST HEMINGWAY: SELECTED LETTERS...
...Hemingway molded his life in his own image before the image makers took over and gave us the Marlboro man of American letters. He played the game when it suited him. When it did not, he was apt to circulate statements like 'While Mr. H. appreciates the publicity attempt to build him into a glamorous personality like Floyd Gibbons or Tom Mix's horse Tony he deprecates it and asks the motion picture people to leave his private life alone...
...writer to begin renaissance in a tired form he needs to introduce a diction, tone and sensibility that somehow sums up his era and delineates an artistic program for it. One thinks of the short stories of Fitzgerald or the works of Hemingway. But Helprin's art seems produced in almost complete withdrawal from the contemporary scene. He strives for "loveliness" above all else, a tasteful--but hardly compelling--goal for a young writer today, the world and the collective psyche being what they are. Thus, one can hardly call Helprin a voice of our times. Instead, he chooses...
...title does not apply to Those Drinking Days. Newlove takes a hard, unsentimental line with himself and writers better known than he. There are the fall-down drunks, like Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and Dylan Thomas. Heavy drinkers of the Hemingway and James Joyce class are made to seem especially self-deluding about their problem because they usually tanked up after working hours...
Though Gifford works it all into a tense, private nightmare using a narration derived in part from Hemingway, the reader never feels that his fixed state and slightly withdrawn I've-been-through-hell voice are chic affectations adopted to suit the role of Tough Young American Novelist. He avoids the stylized macho disillusionment that characterizes much Hemingway imitation--and for that matter, much of Hemingway. His voice, with its tightlipped, overwrought intensity, is a voice terse enough for the end of the world. He and his characters, uptight and dream-ridden, have stared into the intolerable darkness...