Word: hemingways
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...imagine that he could bluff his way to more than a half million dollars by stealing a manuscript, challenging the entire Hughes empire, and dealing in recklessly prolific forgeries? Some of the answers may lie in Irving's career as a nomadic, minor league novelist of a post-Hemingway generation...
Entering Cornell University in 1947, Irving plunged into books, freshman crew and Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, of which he was elected president in his senior year. Initially he wanted to be an artist. Then he read Ernest Hemingway, whose style in life and prose had a profound effect upon him. "Erom that point on," says a classmate, "he wanted to be a writer." He took creative-writing courses at Cornell, stayed on for a year after graduation on a creative-writing fellowship...
...Like Hemingway's Nick Adams, Irving began wandering in quest of experience-"to taste life," he said, "to search for the basic truths." First he went to Detroit to work in a machine shop and absorb the life of the working class. For a time he was a Fuller Brush man in Syracuse. Then he went to Europe, where he finished On a Darkling Plain, a novel in which three college buddies encounter the disillusionments of the postwar world. On the dust jacket, the publisher offered an "unqualified guarantee of reader satisfaction" or the book could be exchanged...
Fistfight. His wanderings took him as far as Kashmir. If he lacked Hemingway's stature, he had gathered a certain amount of tragic experience to draw on. His second wife Claire, whom he had met on Ibiza, died in a car crash in Monterey, Calif., in the late '50s, when she was eight months pregnant. The wife of Novelist Dennis Murphy was also killed in the crash, and Irving, who had often been unfaithful to Claire, had a drunken fistfight with Murphy over who was to blame for the accident...
Actually, Cliff Irving, with seven published books, had gone farther than thousands of other young men of his generation who grew up trying to be writers in imitation of Hemingway. Still, Irving was in the literary backwaters. Then, by transferring all of his fictional dreams to nonfiction form -in a grand hoax-he finally performed an act of daring imagination. Through his Howard Hughes, through all of the minutely conjured secret rendezvous, through the forgeries, Irving, in some perhaps sleazily refractory way, entered a world of tabulation in which he was simultaneously living and creating high adventure. "Cliff lives...