voice: ‘It’s full of money.’ John O’Hara, a much lesser writer, had a superb ear for dialogue.
Does the writer have a distinctive style? Style, the manner of writing, the choice of one word rather than another, may be so distinctive that you read one sentence and you know who wrote it: ‘The hole in his forehead where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil. The hole in the back of his head where the bullet came out was big enough to put your fist in if it was a small fist and you wanted to put it there.’ Who else but Papa Hemingway could have penned these lines and challenged Dryden’s hitherto undisputed title to the most atrocious conceit in the English language for his stunning lines on Lord Hasting’s smallpox:
‘Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wail the fault its rising did commit.’
‘In his youth he had considered raising alligators in Florida. But there was no security in the alligators.’ Janey Bowles — who else?
‘I had not ridden since I was ten years old when my horrible little black pony had at last been given away. How I hated it! Once it had broken out of the stable and had galloped through the roses and over the lawns, showing its awful yellow teeth,’ Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage.
Style can become a limitation and a burden. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him. ‘I’d shoot down my own mother,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. If she was a mallard and I could lead her sweet and clean with no. 4 load.’
Papa is explaining to Papa about Hollywood. ‘One can with honor sell one’s soul in Hollywood. Everyone does it here,’ he says. His style was hermetic. No escape for Papa. Mektoub. It was written. Sold his soul for a Safari. For a valorous wildebeest steak after a muscular martini. For the sheer joy of killing a charging rhino. ‘Aye,’ says the wise old hunter puffing on his pipe which he lights from a firebrand, ‘That’s a natural feeling for a man.’
And the quick shot straight from the hip to the shoulder just so long and long enough, almost a snap-shot from my 270 Weatherby that folded the wildebeest at 305 yards, my boy paced it, the meat sweet and clean. If your wildebeest runs even three yards after the hit the glandular juices of stress spoil the meat The meat stinks of fear and death. The guests start back from the barbecue pit appalled.
‘Qu’elle est cette bête morte ?’
‘What is this dead beast?’
This was a fearless kill it would yield up brave steaks. And this was a joy too but a different joy, steadier, quieter, the joy of a craftsman in his trade. Joy that leaves a man fresh inside like the smell of salt spray and the smell of valor in the bull ring...
‘S’Death what stuff’s here?’
The Snows of Kilimanjaro was certainly the best if not the only writing Hemingway ever did. It is one of the best stories in the language about death, the stink of death. You know the writer has been there and brought it back. The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby. The pilot was pointing: ‘White white white as far as the eye could see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ And a blinding flash of white must have been the last thing Papa saw when he put the double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.
So Papa sold death to Hollywood when he let them tack a happy ending onto their dreadful movie of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Instead of the phantom messenger of death who appears at the end of the story, a real live shitting pilot from Hollywood arrives with penicillin —just the thing for a writer’s gangrene. And Papa sat and watched this butchery and signed his name to it.
‘Look, they’re gone!’ says wifey pointing to where the vultures had been roosting. Yes even the
Does the writer have a distinctive style? Style, the manner of writing, the choice of one word rather than another, may be so distinctive that you read one sentence and you know who wrote it: ‘The hole in his forehead where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil. The hole in the back of his head where the bullet came out was big enough to put your fist in if it was a small fist and you wanted to put it there.’ Who else but Papa Hemingway could have penned these lines and challenged Dryden’s hitherto undisputed title to the most atrocious conceit in the English language for his stunning lines on Lord Hasting’s smallpox:
‘Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wail the fault its rising did commit.’
‘In his youth he had considered raising alligators in Florida. But there was no security in the alligators.’ Janey Bowles — who else?
‘I had not ridden since I was ten years old when my horrible little black pony had at last been given away. How I hated it! Once it had broken out of the stable and had galloped through the roses and over the lawns, showing its awful yellow teeth,’ Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage.
Style can become a limitation and a burden. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him. ‘I’d shoot down my own mother,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. If she was a mallard and I could lead her sweet and clean with no. 4 load.’
Papa is explaining to Papa about Hollywood. ‘One can with honor sell one’s soul in Hollywood. Everyone does it here,’ he says. His style was hermetic. No escape for Papa. Mektoub. It was written. Sold his soul for a Safari. For a valorous wildebeest steak after a muscular martini. For the sheer joy of killing a charging rhino. ‘Aye,’ says the wise old hunter puffing on his pipe which he lights from a firebrand, ‘That’s a natural feeling for a man.’
And the quick shot straight from the hip to the shoulder just so long and long enough, almost a snap-shot from my 270 Weatherby that folded the wildebeest at 305 yards, my boy paced it, the meat sweet and clean. If your wildebeest runs even three yards after the hit the glandular juices of stress spoil the meat The meat stinks of fear and death. The guests start back from the barbecue pit appalled.
‘Qu’elle est cette bête morte ?’
‘What is this dead beast?’
This was a fearless kill it would yield up brave steaks. And this was a joy too but a different joy, steadier, quieter, the joy of a craftsman in his trade. Joy that leaves a man fresh inside like the smell of salt spray and the smell of valor in the bull ring...
‘S’Death what stuff’s here?’
The Snows of Kilimanjaro was certainly the best if not the only writing Hemingway ever did. It is one of the best stories in the language about death, the stink of death. You know the writer has been there and brought it back. The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby. The pilot was pointing: ‘White white white as far as the eye could see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ And a blinding flash of white must have been the last thing Papa saw when he put the double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.
So Papa sold death to Hollywood when he let them tack a happy ending onto their dreadful movie of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Instead of the phantom messenger of death who appears at the end of the story, a real live shitting pilot from Hollywood arrives with penicillin —just the thing for a writer’s gangrene. And Papa sat and watched this butchery and signed his name to it.
‘Look, they’re gone!’ says wifey pointing to where the vultures had been roosting. Yes even the
Similar Books
