62
edits
User:JFordyce/sandbox: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an in- tegral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hem- ingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point, | interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an in- tegral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hem- ingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point, | ||
{{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of a lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid per- sonality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an in- heritance that at last he could not bear.{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }} | {{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of a lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid per- sonality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an in- heritance that at last he could not bear.{{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }} | ||
I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author {{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}}, but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance sepa- rating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” {{sfn|Appel|1972|P=456}}.{{efn|Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is HH’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our attempts to com- municate. “‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once (p.). It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf sug- gested by Lolita’s palm” {{sfn|Appel|1972|456}} }} | |||