My Washington Times Review Of 'The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Hemingway Library Edition'

The Washington Times published my review of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Hemingway Library Edition.

I’ve been an Ernest Hemingway aficionado since I was a teenager and read all of his novels, but it was not until a few years later that I discovered his short stories, which were even more powerful than his great novels.

In the mid-1970s I was in my early 20s and serving on a U.S. Navy tugboat at the nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland when I came across several paperback collections of his short stories in a Glasgow book store. Like his novels, the interesting and insightful stories were about crime, hunting, fishing, boxing, bull-fighting, rugged individualism, grace under pressure, and love and war. To use a simile that Hemingway, a boxing aficionado, might approve of, his short stories deliver like a right cross.

… This collection, edited by Hemingway’s grandson, Sean Hemingway, with a foreword by Hemingway’s son Patrick, is the fourth in a series of annotated editions of his work. The book offers some of his best known stories, such as “The Killers,” “Fifty Grand,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (three of my favorites), as well as a few unpublished stories and his early drafts and notes.

“Ernest Hemingway is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His writing, with its powerful, understated prose and economy of words, has influenced countless writers,” Sean Hemingway writes in his introduction to the collection. “More than any other writer of his time, Hemingway changed the course of literature and furthered the written expression of the human condition. His novels, such as ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ have entered into the canon of world literature, but it is arguably his contributions to the art of the short story that are his greatest literary achievement.”

… In the book is an early draft of “Fifty Grand.” The story has a beginning that Hemingway removed prior to publication based on a recommendation from fellow novelist and friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway later regretted the cut.

“Up at the gym over the Garden one-time somebody says to Jack, “Say, Jack, how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” and Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/sep/21/book-review-the-short-stories-of-ernest-hemingway-/ 

The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of The Real-Life 'Last Tycoon'

Michael Riedel at the New York Post offers a piece on Irving Thalberg (seen in the below photo), the Hollywood legend whom the late, great writer F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled his character on in his last novel, The Last Tycoon.

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald (seen in the above photo) dragged himself back to a place he hated “like poison” — Hollywood.He’d tried his luck in sunny California twice before, earning fat paychecks but accomplishing little. 

He’d tried his luck in sunny California twice before, earning fat paychecks but accomplishing little. It was hackwork, he thought, and he wasn’t good at it. But he had no choice. After the disappointing sales of his 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night,” he was drowning in debt. He needed movie money “as an emergency measure.”hackwork, he thought, and he wasn’t good at it. But he had no choice. After the disappointing sales of his 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night,” he was drowning in debt. He needed movie money “as an emergency measure.”

So he returned to the poisoned well for a third time.

MGM put him under contract at $1,000 a week, but he didn’t do much more than polish (badly) other people’s scripts. He had time on his hands and he began thinking about a novel that would capture the allure — and bone-crushing brutality — of the movie business. His inspiration was the one studio executive who had been kind to him the past, Irving Thalberg, the legendary head of production at MGM.

Fitzgerald never finished his novel, “The Last Tycoon,” before dying in 1940. But its six chapters contain some of his finest writing. Amazon has turned those scraps into a nine-part miniseries streaming on Friday. Matt Bomer plays Monroe Stahr, the brilliant, enigmatic and tragic movie executive modeled on Thalberg.

“He was a genius,” said celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (“Nothing Sacred,” “Notorious”) of Thalberg. “He had a flair for telling stories like comedians have for telling jokes. He lived two-thirds of the time in a projection room. He saw only movies. He never saw life. But he knew what shadows could do.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2017/07/27/the-spectacular-rise-and-tragic-fall-of-the-real-life-last-tycoon/ 

Note: It is a shame that Fitzgerald never finished The Last Tycoon. It would have perhaps matched his great novel, The Great Gatsby. I've not yet watched the TV series, but I liked the film version with Robert De Niro as Stahr.

F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote a series of Hollywood stories about a hack screenwriter that I love called The Pat Hobby Stories.

To Have And Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion

Martin Morse Wooster at the Weekly Standard offers a review of Philip Greene's To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion.

Ernest Hemingway drank far more than most people, and probably more than was good for him. He loved liquor so much that when he was in his late 50s, and a diabetic, his doctors tried to ration his alcohol consumption—to a liter of wine a day.

But Hemingway was far from being an uncontrollable drunk. He did most of his writing in the mornings, and he made sure not to drink while he was writing. Nor did he drink late at night.

 

Moreover, Hemingway well understood the problems that uncontrolled alcohol consumption could cause for a writer’s career: Reminiscing about F. Scott Fitzgerald, who often was barely able to control his drinking, Hemingway recalled, “I told Scott that being a rummy made him very vulnerable—I mean, a rummy married to a crazy is not the kind of pari-mutuel that aids a writer.” 
 

Drinking was an essential part of Hemingway’s character and of his fiction.

 

Here, Philip Greene provides a highly entertaining look at what Hemingway drank, where he drank, and the characters Hemingway encountered while drinking.   

 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/moveable-thirst_784263.html?page=1 

Happy Birthday To F. Scott Fitzgerald

Happy birthday to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As Biography.com notes, the author of The Great Gatsby was born on this date in 1896.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His first novel's success made him famous and let him marry the woman he loved, but he later descended into drinking and his wife had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a short video on the life of Fitzgerald via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/f-scott-fitzgerald-9296261

Fitzgerald is one of my favorite writers and I enjoyed his novels, especially The Great Gatsby, and I also enjoy his short stories. I especially love his Pat Hobby short stories, which are about a hack Hollywood writer.

Hollywood Hack: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Pat Hobby Stories

As May as been designated as National Short Story Month, and the late F. Scott Fitzgerald is in the news due to a new film version of his novel The Great Gatsby, I'd like to pass on a link to a piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, as well as a link to the stories.

My favorite Pat Hobby story is Two Old-Timers.

Andrew Turnbull wrote about the Pat Hobby character in 1962 for the New York Times.

Forty-nine, with red-rimmed eyes and a soft purr of whisky on his breath, Pat Hobby seemed less like a film writer than like an extra down on his luck, or like a bit player who specialized in the sort of father who should never come home. His jalopy was the property of the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Company; his Chesterfield came from the costume department of the studio where he sporadically worked; he was so impecunious that his two former wives has given up asking for alimony. He hadn't read a book in a decade and his daily newspaper was the racing sheet-- yet he was a film writer of sorts, a left-over from the good old silent days when he had miraculously earned up to $2,500 a week.

The talkies, with their increased demands on writers, had inaugurated his long decline; by 1940 he was lucky when he could wangle $250 a week for the "polish jobs" that were thrown his way in pity or contempt. Imaginatively sterile, he was skilled at making small changes in a collaborator's script ("crimson" to "red," "Get out of my sight!" to "Scram!"), so he could claim part credit for the final product. The rest of his ingenuity was reserved for blackmail, borrowing money and palming off other people's inspirations as his own. From our first glimpse of him we know he is doomed, that none of his machinations can possibly succeed. Yet there is fascination in watching him wriggle, and we come to admire his resilience, his infinite hope.  Fitzgerald created this anti-hero out of his own long and painful experience as a scriptwriter. On three occasions (between 1927 and 1937) he had been lured to Hollywood not simply by the large salary but by the artistic possibilities of the cinematic form. It seemed to him that the movies, with their "more glittering, grosser power," were stealing the fire of the novelist, and he longed to conquer the insurgent medium. All his scripts, however, had been rejected, or else rewritten to the point where he no longer recognized them as his own. His intricate, personal, evocative style was perhaps unsuited to the movies, and it wasn't his nature to "write down."  During the last two years of his life, when he was pinioned to Hollywood by financial necessity, he saw his dilemma for what it was-- that of the artist caught in a tough, materialistic enterprise-- and he turned it to fictional use. His tragic side went into Monroe Stahr, hero of "The Last Tycoon," while his comic spirit found release in Pat Hobby. Stahr became the embodiment of Fitzgerald's aspirations, Hobby of his degradations and humiliations.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-hobby.html

And you can read the Pat Hobby stories online via the below link:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400821h.html#c15 

You can also read an earlier post on National Short Story Month via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/05/may-is-national-short-story-month.html 

'The Great Gatsby' Review (The Book, That Is, Circa 1925)

Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times offers us a look back at the Times' 1925 review of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby.

Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" opens wide this Friday. Eighty-eight years before -- to the day -- the Los Angeles Times ran this review of the original "The Great Gatsby," the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Today, perception of the book's reception in 1925 varies -- some say it was successful, others that it was a dismal failure -- but our review, by Lillian C. Ford, is purely positive. And she captures something of what has made the book a classic.

"The Seamy Side of Society," read the headline, with this below: "In 'The Great Gatsby,' F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a New Kind of Underworld Character and Throws the Spotlight on the Jaded Lives of the Idle Rich." The full book review follows:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who won premature fame in 1920 as the author of "This Side of Paradise," a book that first turned into literary material the flapper of wealthy parents and of social position, whose principal lack was inhibitions, has in "The Great Gatsby" written a remarkable study of today. It is a novel not to be neglected by those who follow the trend of fiction.

Wisely, Mr. Fitzgerald tells his story through the medium of Nick Carroway [sic], who, after graduation from Yale in 1915 had "participated in the delayed Teutonic migration known as the great war." When the story opens, Carroway had left his western home and had gone east to learn the bond business. He was living in a tiny house at West Egg, Long Island, near an emblazoned mansion owned by the great Gatsby, an almost mythical person who lived sumptuously, knew no one, but entertained everyone at his great parties given Saturday nights.

Very gradually this Gatsby is revealed as a restless, yearning, baffled nobody, whose connection with bootleggers and bond thieves is suggested, but never mapped out, an odd mixture of vanity and humility, of overgrown ego and of wistful seeker after life.     

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-great-gatsby-review-book-1925-20130506,0,3860329.story 

May Is National Short Story Month

I love short stories.

I prefer the short stories of some great writers, like Ernest Hemingway, to their more notable novels.

Hemingway's short stories were very powerful. To use a boxing simile that Hemingway might have approved of, his short stories were like a short right knockout punch.

I also like the short stories of his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yes, The Great Gatsby is a great novel, but check out his Pat Hobby short stories about a hack Hollywood screenwriter.

The web site www.storyaday.org is sponsoring the celebration.

Short stories make the perfect intro to a new author’s work, a great way for readers to get a top-up from their favorite authors between novels, a perfect impulse purchase on a phone or e-reader.

After years of languishing in the shadows as magazines stopped publishing them and the big prize money went to novels, short stories are poised for a huge comeback.

You can check out the web site via the below link:

http://shortstorymonth.com/

You can also read three of my short stories, which originally appeared in the Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine, via the below links:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/01/cat-street-short-story-about-murder-and.html

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/small-timer-crime-fiction-by-paul-davis.html

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2011/12/christmas-crime-story.html 

Punching Papa: Callaghan, Hemingway And Fitzgerald

Steve King at www.todayinliterature.com notes that today is Morley Callaghan's birthday and tells the story of his boxing match with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway, with F. Scott Fitzgerald as timekeeper.

On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him "the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language." Much of the attention that Callaghan did receive was not for his twenty novels and story collections but for That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his Lost Generation days among "a very small, backbiting, gossipy neighborhood" of Latin Quarter expatriates -- Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Callaghan's account of his boxing matches with Hemingway especially raised eyebrows --including those of Norman Mailer in a 1963 review entitled, "Punching Papa": "For the first time one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality." 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/22/2013

Thank You For The Light: F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'New' Story Rounds Out Our View

 

Nicolaus Mills at Newsday offers an interesting piece on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story and posthumous publishing.

The New Yorker has just done a favor for all of us who are admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Great Gatsby." Earlier this month, the magazine published a story of Fitzgerald's, "Thank You for the Light," that it rejected in 1936. In so doing, it opened up the whole question of what we should expect from posthumously published writing.

The New Yorker got its second chance at "Thank You for the Light" because Fitzgerald's grandchildren found it while going through his papers for an auction at Sotheby's. It wasn't the first Fitzgerald story to be discovered after his death. His uncompleted final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941, a year after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack at the age of 44.

In the case of "Thank You for the Light," the good news is that the one-page story required no editing. It stands as Fitzgerald wrote it, so we don't have to wonder about his intentions.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/mills-f-scott-fitzgerald-s-new-story-rounds-out-our-view-1.3909298

Babylon Revisited: A Look Back At F. Scott Fitzgerald And One Of His Greatest Short Stories

The British newspaper The Telegraph published an interesting piece about American novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and one of his greatest short stories, Babylon Revisited.

You can read the newspaper piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8289335/Babylon-Revisited-When-the-money-runs-out.html

Note: I've always enjoyed Fitzgerald's short stories, including Babylon Revisited.

I'm a particular fan of a series of Fitzgerald's less known short stories, which were about a hack Hollywood screenwriter called Pat Hobby.

You can read Tom Nolan's piece in The Wall Street Journal on the Pat Hobby stories via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574497523063247890.html