Also the Sun Parodies: In the stud book and everything.
The Sun Also Rises is a book about a whipped no dick bitch and a rich whipped limey bitch and a hilarious taxidermy enthusiast and amateur trout, but most of all it is about the Jew who got away. Also, The Sun Also Rises features a Male Lolita. Refer to Adam Green vizaviz Essentially, a Lolita is predator who charms you with her appetite for sweets and her other kitten-like “eccentricities.” She’s looking to let somebody down, and do it in a sexy way. Note: Beware of grown-women who impersonate Lolitas because they are gold-diggers. Sensible enough. The plot hinges on whether or no the Male Lolita (the sole Spaniard not a caricature but rather a Fétiche) fits into his pants. He does but only for a while.
Brett (Her Highness Miss Rope-A-Dope) distracts the main characters from their male bounding. Brett has a fine chin. Brett simply turns all to jelly when touched. Like a flat Jelly Roll Morton sort of character. Chested and pitchy. "I think it's [love] hell ["Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff."] on earth." Brett's face was white. "I say, do I look too much of a mess?" You don't look it.
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“I'm too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun."
"Don't be an ass."
Don't let's
***
"You talk sort of bitter."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts.”
***
“But implied remembrances of the past involve more than Jake's own wounding. They concern the historical past, too; they concern what has ‘already happened,’ not only to the narrator Jake Barnes personally, but not for me etc.” It would have been marvelous tho, could Hem write Jake so intimately that things happened in the story only to him, and for him, and then his past would be his to keep. I suppose the book would have sold less but honestly Hem would be better off.
Hem had a taste for irony and academicians have an unquenchable thirst. I think the argument for codified names (whores) and slangs (particularly Anglo and Germanic - daunted, nix) carried its weight in mystique. This seems to have been a Parisian trend. Andre Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire among friends talked a befuddling composite slang of princely and thuggish French. They also famously challenged friends to duels and then for days sent seconds (friends of friends) back and forth from rival cafes negotiating terms. World War I would put an end to that silliness. Jake and Bill are hilarious, but they have paid a price in bitterness.
I fear that certain esteemed, spurious scholars display a preference for out of the way explanations. As in “Here, Jake jokingly identifies Bill to Brett as a taxidermist. 'That was in another country,' Bill said. 'And besides all the animals were dead’ (pp. 80-81). In Hemingway's fiction, ‘in another country’ implies the country of war and death. (Bill, who says that he is a naturalist or "nature-writer," may be alluding to the millions of horses and mules killed at the front, as Hemingway does in "A Natural History of the Dead.” True and as I am sure William Adair well knows Marlow from the School of Night and his hilarious:
FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--
BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.
Ernest the Grandmaster of Literary Minimalism shows off some semi-caricatured-anti-Semitism: "I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers.” Also that bit about the nose. Also haha "Must clean myself.” "Oh, rot! Come on."
Another example of Ernest at his finest.
"I haven't seen you since I've been back," Brett said. (She has, but not intimately)
"No." (agrees "you haven't" and disagrees i.e. no?)
"How are you, Jake?" (intimacy)
"Fine." (would not be wounded)
Brett looked at me. (owwie emotionally wounded)
“We said good night. ‘I'm sorry I can't go,’ Mike said. Brett laughed.” Brilliant, Brett, hot stuff, laughs that Mike would be sorry he can't, nullifying Mike and EMOTIONALLY WOUNDING everybody. "Indeed not!”
***
LOSSES: “Jake’s loss of his sexual potency and Brett, Robert Cohn’s loss of Brett, and Brett’s loss of Jake and Pedro Romero.” Brett does not give a damn about either of those losses. Cohn does not loose anything. He knocks them both down and lays down the other and walks away scot-free after some sentimental indigestion. Jake has of course given more than his life and an Englishman at that poor Jake to make matters worse an Englishman. Bill Gorton has a massive stomach. He behaves rather like an abused orca whale at sea world. He is the only likable character and a killer ladies man. But Brett gets the best of the best of them.
She took his tavern parliament, his cap, his cocky dance
She mocked his female fashions and his working-class mustache.
This all goes to say that Hemingway had a bloody good laugh writing this novel despite all that trash about sitting at a typewriter and bleeding. Quite! Don’t let’s do indeed! You are a regular Fonald Rirbank! Hmmm. Growl
***
Fitz. Fitz writing for the youth of his generation and the critics of ever after. About nobody have worse or more essays been written. I hear words I never heard in the bible. What a doll. And not bad to look at but peculiar. Like milk not quite turned. Fitz, very Romantic, like a tic submerged in champaign. His characters behave like children were children utterly charmless and unspontaneous. He had a sellable brand of observant narrow-mindedness. He apologized in a preface for taking 16 years on not Ulysses. Great God, Fitz. Put some clothes on. You look like crouching Aphrodite. Nobody can take you seriously if you insist on winking after every phrase. Like gotcha journalism after an informercial. I value you so little and yet you read well. Floyd Mayweather will beat that karaoke-evangelical parliamentarian into another dimension and neocolonialism will roar. I bet Fitzgerald would too. His dream after all is all of ours. Chlorinated like a public swimming pool.
I read all of Francis' novels from the Beautiful and the Damned on. Tender is the Night is probably his best but why not read Keats and leave it at that. They are great reads. Francis Scott Key penned the Star-Spangled Banner but he plagiarized it like Bob Dylan but jingoistic and not much of a pimp. In the good way. Pimps are not what they were. Ever since Don Juan's Reckless Daughter they feel emasculated and eviscerated like a rhyming dictionary hanging too long around Walt Clyde.
Frazier is Liberty now, not the blasted Statue of Surveillance.
"The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines in a war." O Fitz. As Sidney would say You got to be in the sun to feel the sun.
***
Ernest and Ezra would travel through Italy together and would write pithy, back country epistles while away. For awhile they were rarely apart. They were living in the same arrondissement in Paris through the 20s. This was a breakthrough time for both of them. Ezra would write Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and reanimate Propertius and Ernest would publish his first groundbreaking short stories and the blockbuster novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway had the charm of a disciplined but irascible disciple and Ezra by all accounts was a generous, ingenious and dubious mentor. They relished the posture of a cowboy bohemian in Paris. Twin modernist from Idaho and Illinois, Hem and Ez brought verve and musculature to the efflorescent Parisian kulture of that epoch.
They really were soulmates in those early days. Lovers of satire and honesty with a taste of bawdy humor and womanizing that would go on to define American verse and prose prosody. Disagreeing on politics and the universality of bullfighting, Papa and Grampa had a falling out. Hemingway condemning Pound to ridicule from his fascist sympathies (if you could call it that) and Pound for Papa's lack thereof. Among the insults flung this one surpasses all: “Since when are you an economist, pal? The last I knew you you were a fuckin' bassoon player." Ezra famously had an avid taste for music with indefinite (to put it delicately) talent. Pound also pursued a colossal range of interests from Confucian odes to Social Credit. Impresario par excellence Pound corresponded with everybody from Cocteau to George Santayana. Hemingway had diverse interests as well. 'Gee I'd love to take you to a bull fight. You'd like it better than anything I'll bet ... I saw 3 matadors badly gored out of 24 bulls killed.' Tourists before tourism was almost universal among middle class Americans, these youngins bragged to their compatriots back home of distant Romantic lands of matadors and holocausts.
***
But nobody wants an argument over pathos and bathos any more than anybody wants to distinguish. But do learn to discriminate. D.H. Lawrence stuck in a stucco wall. But as to the technique, of course it is emasculate, excuse me immaculate. Ford Maddox Ford had the genuine affection of many brilliant man. Pound, William Carlos Williams, both of whom wrote charming eulogy to the man. I laugh to think of you wheezing in Heaven. He was at any rate a stupendously liar. Williams blurts out damn it you lied grossly / sometimes. But it was all, I / see now, a carelessness, the part of a man / that is homeless here on earth. Touching and Hem would spit on it. But how so? Ford Maddox Ford had been cast out of English literary and social favor and aligned himself progressively with the avant-gard of American and French letters. Pound praises Ford in that Fordie / never dented an idea for a phrase’s sake. This refers to an honesty beyond language. As for Paris and verité, Hem and Ford told their truth. They were as a matter of fact and a matter of speaking full of it.
***
Sextus Propertius loiters by Q.H. Flaccus' book-stall catcalling. Just an all around nuisance. In snakeskin pants. Frank gets a little Verlaine. There are a parti-color lights somewhere. And Hemingway browses through the Russians on a blustery day. Bookseller to modernist what folksinger is to manager. Rocknroll
***
Ernest composes his Sylvia so gracefully, with such resolute tenderness, one thinks of portraits Cézanne did of his son Paul. Humanity and craft and heart, wherever whatever that is, Cézanne so moved by his public, must paints more meticulously, made up of mes petites sensations.
***
Gertrude Stein and Hemingway had a peculiar friendship. Much has been written about how Hemingway learned from Stein. Something about repetition and the American idiom. Much has been written about how Hemingway assisted Stein. Much has been written about the ways the pair betrayed each other. Not much has been written about the whimsical and tender friendship of a then unknown matriarch of American letters and a young aspiring poet and journalist.
Gertrude Stein is hilarious. Her facility and wry sensibility paired with her intellect and sharp perceptive prowess become her to such a degree that despite her linguistic overhaul of the language her prose remains sociable and one finds a levity and grace in everything she has written. Cependant controversy has surrounded Gertrude from the onset and she has always embraced this just as she embraced celebrity later in her career. I would not call Gertrude Stein an abstract writer any more than I would call Picasso an abstract painter but both ventured further into ambiguity and reduction than anybody before them. Tender Buttons has its parallel in Cubism wherein forms are not so much abstract as dissociated or wrought and Stanzas in Meditation reminds me in its spontaneity and simplicity of late Picasso. Picasso and Stein also had refined noses for publicity. Stein apparently demanded that any magazine that published parodies of Tender Buttons also include her original because after all nothing could be funnier or more interesting.
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