Reflections of a working writer and reader
The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn't a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn. Colm Toibin
With thanks and acknowledgements to Hemingway’s Paris and Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog
But if your browser won’t let you watch the video, goto YouTube and watch it there.
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Plus fours – surely due for a revival.
There’s something very poignant about old photographs – small parcels of time, captured and frozen, leaving you wondering what had gone before, and what happened next?
What was each of them thinking behind the posed smile and the raised glass? And those in the background, making one-off random appearances in history’s scrapbook, nameless and unremembered. What became of them after going home and saying, “I saw Ernest Hemingway tonight”?
Fascinating. Is Hemingway wearing Chico Marx’s hat or did Chico nick it from Hemingway? I think we should be told.