Hemingway and Pynchon

[MalignD at aol.com]

I agree with most of what dmaus has to say about Hemingway and Pynchon.  
Regardless of how he's "rated" at the moment (I don't know), the arc and 
quality of Hemingway's work is pretty evident:  the stories are consistently 
good throughout his life; the novels an almost uninterrupted decline from Sun 
Also Rises forward (a blip upward with For Whom the Bell Tolls, then back on 
down), ending with the almost unreadable Old Man and the Sea, and Across the 
River and Through the Trees, which is so bad that it can be read enjoyably as 
a Hemingway parody.

In a series of articles in the NY Review of Books, Wilfred Sheed makes a 
strong argument that the decline is alcohol fueled, that Hemingway, usually 
regarded as a "big drinker," was rather a lifelong and total alcoholic.  
Drink's damage was only exacerbated by his lifelong propensity to dent his 
skull--he once had a skylight fall on his head; another time, after a plane 
crash in Africa, be butted open a stuck door.

At any rate, re his affinities with Pynchon, two things:  

one, his writing was never quite the testesterone-driven celebration of 
things manly it is regularly and casually described as being.  A Farewell to 
Arms, e.g., is about not even a soldier but an ambulance driver, who is 
injured not heroically but while eating dinner, then, after convalescing, he 
deserts.  

And two:  Hemingway could be very funny.  His letters are as funny as they 
often are vicious and bitchy.  And The Torrents of Spring is a dead-on and 
very funny send-up of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.