Word: hemingways
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Gertrude Stein is something else again. Indeed, A Moveable Feast should settle for all time the question of whether Hemingway learned his style under the tutelage of that strange lady. Hemingway was a generous man, and if a debt of this kind existed, he would have acknowledged it. He does not, and is at some pains to make clear that her experiments in written speech-simple rhythms, using repetition and echo for subtle psychological effects ran parallel with his own. Hemingway's sketch of her is a masterpiece of controlled malice in which she appears as a monster...
Fact or Fiction? Perhaps it is better to read the book as fiction; Hemingway recommends just that in an introduction where he says, ironically, that it "may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Take his account of Scott Fitzgerald. The indictment-by-anecdote is irresistibly funny, but was the author of The Great Gatsby such a petulant clown, fatuous snob, and pathetic simpleton about...
...Hemingway's saying, Zelda Fitzgerald almost destroyed Scott through her insane envy of his talent by convincing him that he was sexually inadequate. Hemingway claims that he realized she was insane long before Fitzgerald was forced to accept the fact. As evidence, he cites the time that Zelda asked him: "Don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?" Perhaps the lost generation was not really lost after all, merely mislaid...
...trivia were cut and polished by a man soon to take his own life. So the reader searches for a clue to the tragic flaw in a nature that seemed all confidence and gallantry, and finds it in a pride so vast that it demanded others live according to Hemingway's own stern and complicated code (even when they could not know the rules), a pride so touchy that it could make the humdrum business of ordering a cup of coffee a mortal combat...
...Hemingway had to win, even when others were unaware that anything was at stake. In lesser men, this is now called oneupmanship, and it made taxing for Hemingway the ordinary business of living. He aspired to the natural grace and integrity of the truly simple man, but often seems to have achieved something closer to the contrived spontaneity of the method actor. The exactions of pride were made tolerable by an equally vast joviality-a humor that could be gentle or sardonic, and served as mask, armor and weapon of his severe stoicism...