Book blog success (so they say)
4 months ago
A blog about researching a PhD in First World War Literature
The hands of this watch are fixed at 7:36 am, a timeless testimony to Thomas’s death by an explosion that left no visible marks on his body: a mute companion to the last, the clock had faithfully recorded the moment when its master’s heart stopped beating.
evoke the body of the user, traces of hands, quiescent but palpable. […] [T]hese objects have a precious, living quality for they are the archives of touch and intimacy – they have once held, protected or brushed against the bodies of their possessors in their youths or in the trenches and the hospitals, and through this intimate caress, these mute, insensate objects seem to have been touched to life, bequeathed with the very pulse of their owners’ being.
I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light was changed again and I had missed the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.
The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford [...]. I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford, that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles. I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult. But I tried.
Mr Hemingway [...] writes like an angel; like an archangel: but his talk - his matter - is that of a bayonet instructor.
The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out and he lay in the sand and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he could not get the sword in. He could hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull-ring....
That is very marvelous writing. If the American Father and Mother will just for a moment withhold their protests against the blood on the sand, they will realise that they now possess an incomparable picture and that that picture has been presented with almost fewer words than is believable.