Hemingway and Pynchon

[Paul Mackin]

Brooding about H's 1950 (or thereabout) Across the River I plugged
the phrase into an internet search engine and scored something
interesting to wit:

   This is a response paper I wrote for my Hemingway class on November 16,
   1995. If you haven't read any Hemingway, please do so.

                     Across the River and Into the Trees

   About half-way through reading AtRaItT, I remembered to do what I had
   wanted to remember to do each time I read one of the Hemingway books,
   which is to say I remembered to take a pad of those yellow Post-It
   notes and mark things I found especially interesting so I would
   remember them later. I only had a few sheets of it, though, and by the
   time I was three-quarters of the way through the book, I was ripping
   them into little shreds because I found I liked so much of the book.
   Damn, he's a good writer. What a remarkably lovely book. Well....here
   goes. Here are the six best:

     1. "Of course not," the Colonel told her. "If he is a mediocre writer
        he will live forever." p.139
     2. It was simply a splendid portrait painted, as they sometimes are,
        in our time. p.146
     3. What hand or eye framed that dark-ed symmetry? p.149
     4. The Colonel took the ten cetesini gondola across the Canal, paying
        the usual dirty note, and standing with the crowd of those
        condemned to early rising.p.184
     5. "Please love me true and tell me as true as you can, without
        hurting yourself in any way." / "I'll tell you true," he said. "As
        true as I can tell and let it hurt who it hurts..." p.225
     6. We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer
        glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. p.227

   The third is one of the most important to me. It confirmed something I
   have always suspected: at some point in his life, Hemingway had read
   Blake. There is something in a man's mind, I think, that can be
   affected by reading too much Blake. And Hemingway had it. I also think
   that in his free time he must have taken up reading Shakespeare. There
   were more allusions, quotes, sayings, etc. from Shakespeare than I have
   seen in quite awhile in one work.

   The fourth quote touched me (I'm so tired of hearing people say they
   were "struck" by something.) also, because for my whole life it seems,
   I have been one of those condemned to early rising. I have worked at a
   truck terminal in Seekonk, MA where I was awake long before the
   milk-carriers stared their rounds. And now I row for UF and the only
   ones on the road at 4:30am are donut-makers. Being condemned is exactly
   the best way to express that feeling. The world is run by people who
   have been long awake before sunrise.

   And lastly, the sixth one was odd because he used almost exactly the
   same imagery, expression, smell, what-have-you in For Whom the Bell
   Tolls when Pilar was describing the smell of death. I guess when you
   find an absolutely perfect way to say something, there's no shame in
   using it twice.

   I wish he would have remembered to give the dog its sausage.

End of quote and hold that tiger. Think MalignD is right about the booze.

			P.