After reading Ernest Hemingway’s “The Nick Adams Stories” as a whole, I have changed my mind about him a little. (Please refer to my previous goodreadAfter reading Ernest Hemingway’s “The Nick Adams Stories” as a whole, I have changed my mind about him a little. (Please refer to my previous goodreads.com reviews of other books by ‘Hemenstein’ as he sometimes called himself.) Whereas in the past, I have not liked his sometimes boasting about his muscularity as a writer and his bragadoccio masculinity, which to me hints at some self-doubt in that regard.
His Nick Adams stories is about the life of Hemingway as a youth—hunting, fishing, his relationship with his father (especially in the final story, “Fathers and Sons”), the craft of writing, relations with women, early war years in Italy, and so on.
You can detect how original he was in his day by his skirting around plot and homing in on the importance of mood, atmosphere and observation. I thought “The Killers” was an example of this.
Hemingway was obsessive about accuracy in his descriptions of fauna and flora, almost as if he were practicing accuracy. His descriptive writing became somewhat weighty for me until I realized that he was purposely putting me in a trance over baiting a fish hook or describing the hills and rivers of northern Michigan. Hemingway reminded me of Henry David Thoreau, even Audubon, in how keenly he observed nature.
A little distracting for me was his attempt at experimentation with techniques and styles used by contemporaries of his such as Sherwood Anderson, Joyce or Faulkner, all of whom he admired to some degree. When he respected writers, he was generous with his praise. If he didn’t, you could wind up with seeing him do things like breaking your cane over his own head just to prove a point as he did with John O’Hara. Being highly competitive, he sometimes challenged others to a boxing match and talked of keeping score comparing his work to those of his contemporaries.
Yet, there is a sweetness in many of his stories which portends, to me anyway, an impending sadness, even doom. As we know, Hemenstein blew out his own brains either by accident or on purpose (as Sigmund Freud would have it), leaving this world by his own hand as his father had done. He seems to have been in awe of his father who had taught him so much about nature.
The stories I liked most in “The Nick Adams Stories” are the following: The Last Good Country which I have already reviewed on goodreads.com; four stories about Indians—probably Ojibways; The Killers, The Last Good Country, Big Two-Hearted River, Three-Day Blow, On Writing, and Fathers and Sons. Summer People has one of the best love scenes that I have read. The rest deserve to be read as well.
The main thing I would venture to say about Ernest Hemingway is that he was vast....more
I read "Barn Burning" by Faulkner during my "knob" or freshman year at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. We had a good teacher, a former navaI read "Barn Burning" by Faulkner during my "knob" or freshman year at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. We had a good teacher, a former naval captain, who slill wore his uniform although in a rather disheveled way and who reminded me of the actor, Robert Guy Newton as Long John Silver ('Aargh') in the 1950 movie "Treasure Island". He had a way of getting us interested not only in the story but also the author and the setting of the material we were assigned to read. "Barn Burning" reminded me of how some poor whites and others in the south would sometimes take revenge on a person for commiting a perceived injustice....more
As I have written in previous reviews of the novels I’ve read by Sloan Wilson, he has been among my favorite authors. Writing at about the same time aAs I have written in previous reviews of the novels I’ve read by Sloan Wilson, he has been among my favorite authors. Writing at about the same time as such authors as Hemingway and Faulkner, Shaw and Mailer, he excels at telling a story while exhibiting a smooth, unencumbered style. Wilson is one of those writers that sets you so at ease that his style creates its own suspense. You sort of hang onto every sentence as you pay attention to the story.
In “Pacific Interlude” a young but not inexperienced US Coast Guard officer moves from tension at home to conflict in the Pacific with a crew who has just lost their old captain. He now has a captaincy on a tanker full of gasoline bound for the combat zone in the Pacific. Of the main dangers they would encounter were suicide planes.
The Interlude part of the novel also gives us a love story that is intense. Sloan Wilson has always handled love scenes in his novels in a dignified way. Things happen but adult readers have enough experience that an author like Wilson doesn’t have to detail the nitty-gritty of how lovers express their feelings for each other.
Racial conflict is also handled in a truthful way. You can feel the hate that some feel and the fear it causes. Friendship is another theme deftly handled in Interlude. So, with combat as the background, Sloan Wilson weaves these other themes in a very satisfying way, as he does in all his novels.
I’ve said this before, too, that all seamen and in fact middle managers on up would benefit by reading not only the present novel, but also Voyage to Somewhere, Ice Brothers and his classic, Man in a Gray Flannel Suit and its sequel. Sloan Wilson will make you feel welcomed as you board his ship.
Pacific Interlude was Wilson’s final novel; but he also wrote short stories for the New Yorker and Harpter’s. I would like to read these next....more
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