Archives for November 2012

The Rivalry

November 15, 2012

Faulkner vs. Hemingway | By Joseph Fruscione

It took me until 1998, when I went to graduate school, to begin to appreciate Hemingway. In my junior year of high school, I couldn’t finish The Old Man and the Sea soon enough. In my senior year of college, I couldn’t finish The Nick Adams Stories soon enough. Yet his collection In Our Time—specifically the opening piece of the 1930 edition, “On the Quai at Smyrna”—hooked me. I remember reading it while waiting for a Metro train outside DC. Twice, in fact. It was probably a combination of being a little older, starting a doctoral program, and reading such indelible descriptions of the chaos of refugees evacuating Smyrna that finally helped me “get” Hemingway, particularly this kind of writing from the last paragraph:

When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn’t take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.

Wounded mules, scared refugees, repeated they pronouns, no commas—all of this resonated with me in a way Hemingway never had before.

It was different with Faulkner: I’ve never not liked his work. It started in my junior year of college with his story, “The Old People,” which I was reading in a course on Magical Realism. The first time I read it, I marked this opening passage:

At first there was nothing. Then there was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, with the voices of the hounds converging somewhere in it and toward them. Then Sam Fathers, standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun and almost with the first load it ever carried, touched his shoulder and began to shake, not with any cold.

I’ve never hunted and likely never will. Yet, such writing—with its clear imagery, many commas, and the evocation of Isaac McCaslin’s wilderness initiation—grabbed me. I then spent the 18–19 months between college and graduate school reading a lot of Faulkner’s work—primarily his novels, but most of his Collected Stories as well.

Perhaps the richest part of the writing process involved in my book on these two writers was the week in summer 2003 I spent working with Hemingway’s unpublished correspondence at the Kennedy Library in Boston. I read through folders upon folders of his letters looking for references to Faulkner, noting throughout how complex (and sometimes misunderstood) a personality Hemingway’s was. As I delved later into Hemingway’s career, I struggled more to read his handwriting and edits, all indications of his increasing mental struggles. The writer of many of these letters was highly emotional, anxious, and insecure—a person very different from the macho, worldly image he helped promote.

The most consistently revisited moment of my study is April–July 1947. Hemingway, Faulkner had noted in comments at the University of Mississippi, lacked sufficient courage as a writer to experiment. Faulkner, Hemingway thought when he got wind of this a month later, was off base and needed to be presented with conclusive evidence of his battlefield composure (in the forms of a letter from General Charles Lanham and a copy of Hemingway’s Bronze Star citation). The authors returned to this moment often: in the letters they wrote to each other that summer, in later correspondence with others, and in their public remarks. The charge nettled Hemingway, and in his fiction and letters he often returned his own (humorous) criticisms of Faulkner’s drinking and excess experimentation—such as in his observation about Faulkner’s “boozy courage of corn whiskey” (redefining the “courage” charge). “When I read Faulkner,” he wrote to Harvey Breit in 1952, “I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it, beginning with Tender Is The Night.” (Fitzgerald, dead nearly twelve years by this time, continued to figure frequently in Hemingway’s thoughts.)

Faulkner’s observation qua appraisal of Hemingway’s courage to experiment as a writer also showed me something significant about Faulkner: he was always more private and reserved, and he felt himself superior to his contemporaries. He never retracted his assessment. Even when he ostensibly apologized for the remark, he sounded a note of one-upmanship, such as in his observation in a 1957 Vogue interview that Hemingway’s controlled “method” meant he “wasn’t driven by his private demon to waste himself in trying to do more than that.” Yet Faulkner remained preoccupied with Hemingway for crucial decades of his career, perhaps feeling a conflicted sense of camaraderie as well as competition.

Each time I return to this episode—which led to the only located correspondence between them—it’s shown me the psychological hold these authors had over one another. In their rivalry, they shaped and influenced each other more than either was ever willing to admit.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Joseph Fruscione is adjunct professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an adjunct assistant professor of First-Year Writing at George Washington University. His first book, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry, was published in January 2012. He has also taught Faulkner-themed classes at Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, DC. He lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Kathryn Davis Reading at Middlebury

November 12, 2012

Kathryn Davis, the author of such gems as The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Versailles, and, most recently, The Thin Place, will come to Middlebury College to read on November 14 (4:30 p.m.). We’re proud to say that some of Davis’s early stories appeared in New England Review: “Floggings” in 1989 (11.3) and “Eternity” in 1982 (5.1).

from “Floggings”:

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” the voice asked, making the young man, Lucien, drop the hem of the petticoat from his soft freckled fingers, whereupon it spread out against the wall in a white fan, like a wave spreading across the beach, the eyelet shirred and smelling of fish. The petticoat was tacked to the wall at its enormous waistband; beside it was displayed an equally enormous pair of bloomers, hand-sewn of flannel, the seams finished off in the French manner with stitches so tiny they appeared to be the work of mice. “Qu’est-ce que tu fais?” the voice asked, coyly this time. “Or are you a mute?” It was late afternoon and through the room’s single window the light issued in a single yellow block, as if the glass Lucien had polished just that morning wasn’t there, and the light was a corporeal substance of which there was too much. He looked around. The museum had been closed for an hour, but that didn’t always stop the tourists- people who, no doubt, in their normal lives respected the message of locked doors – from lifting the peevish faces of their offspring up against the windows, hinting by gesture at the need for a bathroom. But the room was empty. “Like tree trunks,” the voice said. “Or so the Captain claimed. He was my equal, and he adored my legs. Mes jambes. He had a tongue in him the size of a hand and, let me tell you, the manual dexterity to go with it.”

[the story is available via JSTOR (subscription required) or by purchasing Vol. 11, #3]

A single year

November 8, 2012

Brook Lane | By Leslie Bazzett

On a still day, you can see the greater stillness of the homes reflected on the surface of the lake. Houses of stucco and brick, with rows of silent blue-black windows. Some have Spanish tile roofs, and limestone terraces that are leaf-swept and beautifully worn like ancient marble. In August the place begins to empty. Men return to jobs in the city, older residents head south. It becomes perfect and lifeless as a world behind glass. The little street dappled in sun; the covered pools and cracked birdbaths; the hidden, overgrown pathways. On the lawns, cast iron settees hold forgotten shawls and books whose pages are puckered and stuck together from rain. A wordless, privileged place like countless others. Those neighborhoods we drive through slowly, forgetting the flux of our own lives, imagining ourselves fixed inside.

On this particular road, there are seven houses. One of them was mine for a single year, my twelfth. It is the house in which I witnessed my mother marry a second time. This was the place in which I tasted my first kiss. It had been built as a wedding gift to a beloved daughter, its descending terraces meant to invoke the layers of a pale pink cake. But marriages are apt to fall apart. Already at twelve I knew this. Husbands find younger wives and move closer to the city; women abandon the solitude of the lake for solitude elsewhere. In such a world only the children seem fully alive.

And of course, the lake itself.

In August kitchen calendars are marked for school, and the children run laughing as if they might outdistance time. They hide in the weeds beside the old dam. The lake is not yet drained, as it will be in late fall. The bottom is soft with silt, the mud burrowed by crayfish. Near the bridge a single leaf sways downward through the shallows, ushered through thick bands of light. Fish dart past, then suddenly open their fins, and pause. Somewhere a telephone rings, echoing across the water.

In the evening comes rain. The lake’s surface turns silver, mottled like hammered tin. Lightning strikes, and the tops of the trees flash out from the night. The old turtle is ill, he is disoriented. With one false step he slips through the dam, crashing to the pavement below, and dies, his neck swelling like risen dough. In the houses women draw up their feet, and the men build fires, the first of the season. Amidst sounds of rain, the children are put to bed, and they dream of being able to breathe water, their small bodies slick as fish. In pairs they run at the surface, arc through the air like lovers, and descend.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Leslie Bazzett’s fiction has appeared in NER (32.2), where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and West Branch. A finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, she lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children.

NER Vermont Reading Series: November 8, 2012

November 5, 2012

On Thursday, November 8, 7 p.m., at Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe in Middlebury, four writers will read from their work as part of the NER Vermont Reading Series: Benjamin Aleshire, Larry Bradley, Bette Moffett,* and Marguerite Sullivan.

* Unfortunately, Bette Moffett will not be able to participate. We hope to reschedule her soon.

Benjamin Aleshire is editor of The Salon. His poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Seven Days, and elsewhere. He is a Creation Grant recipient from the Vermont Arts Council and is currently in residence at the BCA Center. His play, Gauvain the Good Knight, won the 2009 Nor’Easter Playwright Competition, and he recently placed third for the Neil Shepard Poetry Prize. Benjamin also tours internationally with the Vermont Joy Parade. Dropped Apples (2012) is his first book of poems.

Larry Bradley’s work has appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Poetry, the Southwest Review, and the New England Review. He has received the Morton Marr Poetry Prize and the Reginald Shepherd Memorial Prize, and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee. He lives in the Northeast Kingdom.

Bette Moffett, author of the memoir Roots, Shoots and Wings (2010), has been a resident and active community builder in Brandon for forty-two years. Her passions include theater and vocal music.

Marguerite W. Sullivan‘s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, NOON, Conjunctions Web, gigantic, and Sleepingfish, among others. She has lived in Pawlet, Vermont, with her children for five years. Currently she is at work finishing a novel.

This event is free and open to the public. Carol’s is located at 24 Merchants Row in Middlebury.

Sponsored by New England Review, with support from Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe, the Vermont Book Shop, and Middlebury Community TV, the NER Vermont Reading Series provides an opportunity for Vermont writers to read their work in front of an audience, and to acquaint local audiences with the talented writers who live and work among us.

New England Review