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Preface to Papa: A Personal Memoir: Difference between revisions
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:Preface to ''Papa: A Personal Memoir''}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:Preface to ''Papa: A Personal Memoir''}} | ||
{{byline|last=Mailer|first=Norman}} | |||
{{notice|From {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Gregory H. |date=1976 |title=Papa: A Personal Memoir |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company |page= |isbn= |author-link= }} Reprinted by Project Mailer with permission of the estate of Norman Mailer. ([[76.22]])}} | |||
What characterizes every book about Hemingway I have read is the way his character remains out of focus. Even a writer with an edge as hard as Lillian Ross did not seem able to catch him properly in her famous ''New Yorker'' piece.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Ross |first=Lillian |date=May 13, 1950 |title=The Moods of Ernest Hemingway |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/05/13/how-do-you-like-it-now-gentlemen |magazine=New Yorker |location= |publisher= |access-date=2018-12-21 }}</ref> Hemingway was there, but much too precise in his portrait as if he had sat for one of those neo-realistic paintings where the pride of the artist is to make the subject look as if he has been photographed, not painted. | What characterizes every book about Hemingway I have read is the way his character remains out of focus. Even a writer with an edge as hard as Lillian Ross did not seem able to catch him properly in her famous ''New Yorker'' piece.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Ross |first=Lillian |date=May 13, 1950 |title=The Moods of Ernest Hemingway |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1950/05/13/how-do-you-like-it-now-gentlemen |magazine=New Yorker |location= |publisher= |access-date=2018-12-21 }}</ref> Hemingway was there, but much too precise in his portrait as if he had sat for one of those neo-realistic paintings where the pride of the artist is to make the subject look as if he has been photographed, not painted. | ||
For contrast, there is Carlos Baker’s monumental biography<ref>{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |page= |isbn= |author-link= }}</ref> and it gives us an immense amount of day-to-day material somewhat modestly undigested. It is nonetheless an invaluable book which every ambitious biography to come will evaluate detail by detail, a necessary task, for Baker’s book was written with a determinedly soft focus as if the author felt his literary mission was not so much to present the man as to cover every year of Hemingway’s existence in the recollections of his friends. | For contrast, there is Carlos Baker’s monumental biography<ref>{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |page= |isbn= |author-link= }}</ref> and it gives us an immense amount of day-to-day material somewhat modestly undigested. It is nonetheless an invaluable book which every ambitious biography to come will evaluate detail by detail, a necessary task, for Baker’s book was written with a determinedly soft focus as if the author felt his literary mission was not so much to present the man as to cover every year of Hemingway’s existence in the recollections of his friends. | ||
[[File:EH and Gregory Hemingway.jpeg|thumb|Ernest Hemingway and son Gregory, Sun Valley, Idaho, Oct 1941; Photo by Robert Capa.]] | |||
There is also A. E. Hotchner’s book<ref>{{cite book |last=Hotchner |first=A. E. |date=1966 |title=Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir |url= |location= |publisher=Open Road Media |page= |isbn= |author-link= }}</ref> which gives a portrait, and most readable it is, but askew. Hotchner is using a wide-angle lens; the very nostrils of the great man are distorted. Sadly we learn there is reason to believe the materials are transposed. A long and marvelously articulated speech which Hemingway makes once to Hotchner turns out in fact to have been taken from a letter. It is a minor literary peccadillo of the sort professional magazine writers commit often, since their skills mature in a school which demands you tell your story fast and make it track (and a quotation from a letter comes off slower than a man talking), but such methods breed distortion with their speed. | There is also A. E. Hotchner’s book<ref>{{cite book |last=Hotchner |first=A. E. |date=1966 |title=Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir |url= |location= |publisher=Open Road Media |page= |isbn= |author-link= }}</ref> which gives a portrait, and most readable it is, but askew. Hotchner is using a wide-angle lens; the very nostrils of the great man are distorted. Sadly we learn there is reason to believe the materials are transposed. A long and marvelously articulated speech which Hemingway makes once to Hotchner turns out in fact to have been taken from a letter. It is a minor literary peccadillo of the sort professional magazine writers commit often, since their skills mature in a school which demands you tell your story fast and make it track (and a quotation from a letter comes off slower than a man talking), but such methods breed distortion with their speed. | ||