Forum / Faulkner on Hemingway

Michael Dickes
May 17, 10:48pm

Stumbled upon this quote recently:

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

It was in a list of personal slams.

My response to Faulkner would have been, "Yeah, so?"

James Lloyd Davis
May 18, 03:39pm

You could never accuse Hemingway of needlessly complex structure, or bloodless prose. Faulkner? Another story altogether. Besides, when's the last time you heard about a Faulkner look-alike contest?

stephen hastings-king
May 18, 04:50pm

Reasons I like William Faulkner no. 35

Q: How do you like Hollywood?

William Faulker: I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65. I prefer Florida.

Neil Serven
May 18, 05:42pm

That quote was a Final Jeopardy! clue a few weeks ago.

Ramon Collins
May 19, 09:58pm

One writers' "how-to" book has the two writers describing (by some stroke of fate) the same, exact situation. Faulkner; one page. Hemingway: one short paragraph.

In your opinion, which writer would appeal to today's dwindling reader-market?

David Ackley
May 19, 11:20pm

Faulkner, so the story goes, was once talking with the Hemingway on the subject of converting books to movies. A "Script Doctor" as he described himself re his screen writing career, Faulkner maintained it was possible to take a bad book and turn it into a decent film. Hemingway demurred and Faulkner offered to take one of his books and write the screenplay to see which was the better.

Hemingway agrees.

"Okay," says Faulkner. "What's your worst book?"

The result: the film version of "To Have and Have Not," thanks largely to the script(Doctored by Faulkner) and the presence of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, a pretty decent film, from a book that even Howard Hawks the producer thought was "junk."

This is obviously tangent to the discussion as to whether Hemingway ("He is much horse," from "For Whom the Bell Tolls") or Faulkner is the better writer. As has been said, comparisons are odious about such matters, and for anyone who'd read very much of both irelevant. Faulkner's gift was protean, sometimes nearly Shakespearean in its richness. Hemingway played a few notes very well, and stayed away, for the most part, from any situation or character that would have tested his limits. Faulkner dove in and wrote wondrously varied works, including one of the two or three best Novellas in English," Spotted Horses." Along with "The Sound and the Fury," "Absalom, Absalom," and "Light in August," "As I Lay Dying" each daring, full of risk brought off in masterly fashion.

Hemingway: "The Sun Also Rises," his best novel, a very good one, but narrow and derivative in some ways. " A Farewell to Arms" good enough, but not even the best book about WWI. The short stories, are fine of course, a few classics, but still with that constricted reticence.

With a far briefer career, in his best books Fitzgerald was a better writer than Hemingway.

As to who is likely to appeal to a dwindling reader( Shrinking minds is the image) ship; perhaps in time only children's books will be read. In which case, Hemingway's occasionally primitive diction will have the edge. What a shame.

eamon byrne
May 20, 03:41am

Hemingway's style is easier for today's readers. Faulkner's is way too difficult.

Ramon Collins
May 20, 07:45pm

David: Years ago, I read this Hemingway comment on screen writing (not verbatim): "If you get a phone call saying Hollywood is interested in your book, back up to the California line and yell, 'Where's the money?' -- then throw your ms over the line and get the hell out of there!" (I like your term; Shrinking Minds).

Eamon: I agree with your observation. For me, Faulkner is more academic and literary; he constructs the story. Hemingway's background was newspapers and he tends to report the story. Today, there's whole lot of reporting goin' on, because of word limitations in Micro and Flash fiction.

Henry Pelifian
May 21, 03:05pm

Comments on Faulk and Hem seem right on.

Both wrote great stories, though Faulkner is sometimes not the easiest to read.

I read awhile ago a Faulkner quote from a letter in which he was very critical of Americans, something no elected politician worth his pandering tongue would utter.

James Lloyd Davis
May 22, 02:53am

"Americans" are easy targets for intellectuals at home and abroad. The methodology for criticism is not unique. First you define "Americans" in your own terms. Then you ridicule the subject as it is thus defined.

The typical Americans of which they speak, though, are quite elusive. I've lived in every region of the country and they have consistently avoided me. Everywhere I've been, I've found intelligent and thoughtful people. Everywhere.

I have no problem comprehending Faulkner's work. Of the two, however, I prefer Hemingway.

Jim V
May 25, 05:09am

I agree in equal parts with Ackley and Davis. Difficulty in reading shouldn't preclude an attempt or admiration of any work, but neither should it determine the worth of that work. An author who is difficult to read may be wonderful, or very bad, and the same with more accessible writers.

Different writers being different skills and ambitions to the work. I love Faulkner and Hemingway, though of course I love them in different ways. (In general, I prefer Faulkner's stories and Hemingway's novels.) Anyway, I say viva la difference.

I also agree with JLD about the American-bashing by Faulkner or anyone else. It's cheap, pointless, and unfounded nonsense. (If Faulkner wasn't an American, what was he?) If a sophiticated Easterner were to meet Mark Twain as a boy, he would have probably found him to be a backward bumpkin with a heavy accent. And if someone would have said that this product of the Mississippi River would become perhaps the greatest literary force in American history, the literary elitists of the time would have laughed in his face.

Jim V
May 25, 05:11am

Different writers bring... sorry.

Susan Tepper
May 25, 01:31pm

I adore Hemingway who is accessible as oppossed to Faulkner's oblique writing, run on (forever) sentences. Hemingway was there to tell his stories. Faulkner seemed to be there for a different purpose. But since I wasn't there (at all) it's just an observation from a "Saturday morning coach." That Faulkner was a genius is obvious. But I like to be able to get through a book and out the other end. With Hemingway I can do that and feel satisfied I am one with what I just read. Not so, for me, with Faulkner.
But an interesting thread..

James Lloyd Davis
May 25, 02:43pm

The florid complexities in Faulkner's language bear study, yes, rooted as they are in conversational "Southern." These odd quirks of veiled speech are part of the southern 'charm,' I suppose, the result of a willing sense of delicious irony stewed in a malicicious sauce of sarcasm that requires complexity of structure in order to allow the speaker to walk unscathed in a bellicose world. "Confuse 'em and shoot 'em as you walk away." It's a kind of verbal Parthian shot ... often perfected in the South. It's marvelously used in some instances, say ... in Truman Capote's fiction.

I can speak "Southern," 'cause I am one, but prefer crisp, direct prose in longer fiction. Could enjoy Faulkner when I'm in the mood, but can always sit down with the directness and artfully shaved prose of Hemingway.

One should never assume that complexity is the greater demonstration of genius in the art of creative writing. Sometimes the flip side's the true winner.

David Ackley
May 25, 05:52pm

The Faulkner critics above--at least of his writing, rather than his public/published remarks which are the awkward attempts at wit and wisdom of a shy and private man--should really look closely at his later work, especially the limpid, clear and beautifully simple "Spotted Horses" which is taken more or less intact from his novel "The Hamlet."

As to the earlier works, I don't think anyone in his right mind would defend complexity as a virtue of writing ; every writer strives to be as simple as she can be given the nature of the material. In Faulkner's early works he was striving to present a layered reality in which the present is always the vehicle of multiples of the past. That this necessitates a simultaneity of representation, present infused with all kinds of past, is hard to argue with and I think Faulkner himself would say that he was doing only what needed to be done, as simply as he could.

stephen hastings-king
May 25, 06:15pm

It's nice that there are people for whom the world appears to be linear and who cultivate the technical skills in order to make writing from within that space into something that's interesting to read.

But it's better, in my view, to be able to catch something of the complexity of the world, the way sense-data overlaps, the multiplicity of time.

It's the difference between reproduction and thinking philosophically, say.

I live in an area that's subjected to lots of landscapes. I can't figure out the point of them when I can look at the landscape, which isn't flat, which isn't static. But to try to make things that catch motion or simultaneity or which are open-ended and so are what they're talking about---that's more interesting in my view. I don't look out a window and see that but better.

But I digress.

I found reading Faulkner to be a kind of sensory overload and the sentences to be kind of like contrapunctual lines threading through the overload.

After a while, that sense of overload reversed and the sentences came forward in all their complexity and balance and control.

For me, reading Hemingway is listening to a children's song. Sometimes they're lovely. Mostly they're dull. But I rarely learn anything from them. Faulkner I can learn from.

Susan Tepper
May 25, 07:07pm

RE Jim Davis: I too adore Capote's "southern" in both his stories and plays. He never confuses, rather his southern edifies the reader and richens the whole experience. His stories are truly amazing in that he has this ability to capture voice in all ages and genders.
You must log in to reply to this thread.