Conversations July 15, 2010

Thursday, July 15, 2010

1:20 AM. Got a little sleep but I’m wheezing again and my mind is active, so why not go to work? Last night I took the header notes I have put together, broke them up one per line, read them into excel, sorted first by date and then, another sort, by date within individual. It comes to 14 pages, through June. More than eight pages of the 14 are Hemingway. A lot of information, if I can organize it. Never was able to do it in The Sphere And The Hologram.

3:30 AM. Might as well try; can’t read well enough to go back to sleep anyway. Who do I talk to? Papa?

Sure, why not?

Shall we continue with the questions I have accumulated so far? What about Agnes? How did you feel, all the way down, when you got that Dear John letter? [Agnes and he fell in love when he was her patient after he had been wounded in Italy in July 1918. He went home to America in January 1919, thinking that he and she would be married as soon as he could support them, but a few months later she wrote him, breaking off the engagement, redefining their love affair as kid stuff, more or less.] Obviously you were angry and hurt — but was that all? You weren’t 20 yet. Was there also some relief mixed in?

Continue reading Conversations July 15, 2010

Conversations June 5, 2010

Saturday, June 5, 2010

6 AM. I am still reading Reynolds, Papa, getting toward the end of The Paris Years, and while he is very good as a recorder of your life, and seems to be appreciative of your work as it changed our literature, I don’t get the sense that he knows the kind of thing you’ve showed me here. The analysis of A Farewell To Arms, for one, though I haven’t gone back to reread that session.

It does show me the value of this, and the autonomy of the information source (that is, I’m not just making it up) — and shows me I need to index the material, though I don’t know how I’ll do it.

Continue reading Conversations June 5, 2010

Conversations with Hemingway (14)

The Revolution titled A Farewell to Arms

Thursday, May 13, 2010

10 AM. All right, papa. As you will know from tuning into this station, I found A Farewell To Arms different this time. Perhaps because I had just come from your later works, I found this one disappointing in the love story, riveting in the war story, for a total effect that was much less than The Sun Also Rises, which had been written earlier, or, of course, Bell or The Old Man.

You are reading with the benefit and this advantage of hindsight. You can see how the work falls down, but it is much harder for you to see how revolutionary it is, how hard-edged, next to the novels that were being published at the same time.

Continue reading Conversations with Hemingway (14)