eGad: Gaddis & Hemingway

[jbor at bigpond.com]

It reminds me that there's also that dreadfully turgid story or 
fragment of Gaddis's which appeared in _The Missouri Review_ a while 
back. Titled 'A Father is Arrested', though that was perhaps not 
Gaddis's own title, the piece was apparently written c. 1948-9 "after 
Gaddis returned from the Costa Rican Civil War", where he'd spent "two 
weeks with the army of Figueres" (according to a 1948 letter to Edith 
Gaddis in the Gaddis archives). In the story itself Gaddis seems to be 
trying very hard to out-Hemingway Hemingway.

Perhaps part of Gaddis's antipathy towards Hemingway was borne of 
frustration and resentment. Wherever one might rank _The Old Man and 
the Sea_ in one's list of personal favourites today, the fact remains 
that it won the Pulitzer back in 1953, which is about when Gaddis was 
unloading on both it and its author in _TR_.

best

On 10/03/2006:

>>> Wyatt's angry rant about _The Old Man and the Sea_ (which had won the
>>> Pulitzer in 1953) clearly sounds like it originates with Gaddis
>>> himself, and the portrayal of the B.U.M. throughout the novel is
>>> anything but flattering.
>
> On 10/03/2006:
>
>> _The Old Man and the Sea_ is hardly Hemingway at his best.  In 
>> places, it
>> comes across almost as self parody.  The short stories, especilly 
>> those
>> through the twenties, are magnificent.  Hemingway, along with Chekhov,
>> helped shape the direction of the short story through mid-20th 
>> century.
>
> That might be so, though there's some dross among the short stories as 
> well. But still no evidence has been presented to validate the claim 
> that Gaddis made this distinction, or that he actually "approved" of 
> Hemingway's early work (in contradistinction to _The Old Man and The 
> Sea_).
>
> There is, however, the portrayal of the B.U.M. and Wyatt's rant 
> against Hemingwayesque writing in _TR_ to suggest that Gaddis didn't 
> like Hemingway or his work at all.
>
> best
>