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34efdb1
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Human sympathy has its limits.
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quotes-to-define-my-life
the-great-gatsby
f-scott-fitzgerald
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F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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28ac147
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"she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson..." "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway--a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe--all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it."
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emily-dickinson
henry-james
light-in-august
nathaniel-hawthorne
tender-is-the-night
thomas-wolfe
william-faulkner
willa-cather
ernest-hemingway
f-scott-fitzgerald
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Truman Capote |
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18bae26
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He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.
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dashiel-hammett
detective
detective-fiction
detective-noir
detective-novel
detective-novels
detective-stories
ernest-hemingway
f-scott-fitzgerald
sartre
francois-truffaut
hart-crane
jean-paul-sartre
mystery-and-crime-drama
mystery-suspense
mystery-thriller
raymond-chandler
truffaut
crime-thriller
crime-fiction
noir
noir-fiction
detectives
mystery
crime
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Barry N. Malzberg |