Come Writers and Critics Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

From FAULKNER to HEMINGWAY...

Hemingway's brusque, spare, "iceberg theory"-prose floated on the oil of Faulkner, who famously used a 1,600-word sentence in his novella "The Bear". We should note the context in which Faulkner's remark was made: in 1947, Faulkner was asked while giving a lecture to list who he thought the "most important" contemporary writers were. Starting at the top, his list ran as follows: Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Jon Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Willa Cather.

The two kept their interactions terse, and apparently viewed each other as competitors more than anything else. Generally, they kept their competition sporting. The dig only reached Hemingway because some bushy-tailed pupil wrote it down. Hemingway responded negatively: "He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." Then (as if the defence alone were insufficient) he accused Faulkner of having wasted his talent to alcoholism - brazen talk from a man who, in his last decades, was drunk more often than sober. Faulkner would win the Nobel Prize two years later, five years before Hemingway.

Quote sourced from Encyclopedia Brittanica, "Was There a Feud between Faulkner and Hemingway?"

Answer: Gertrude Stein

...from HEMINGWAY to STEIN...

"Gertrude Stein was never crazy.
Gertrude Stein was very lazy."

Along with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein was one of the central loci of the Parisian literary scene. For a few years Hemingway revered Stein as a mentor, honing his sparseness of diction from her (not to mention, savoring the chance to mingle with Picasso). However, as it's told in "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Stein became either disenchanted with or jealous of Hemingway's success: "He wanted to be a major writer and a rich one." The two split on bad terms in 1927; the couplet was written around 1935.

About the couplet: entitled "Portrait of a Lady", Hemingway wrote (but never published) it with a rambling paragraph of introduction. "Now we will say it with a small poem. A poem that will not be good. A poem that will be easy to laugh away and will not mean anything. A mean poem." Etc. etc. It helps to know that the couplet and the lead-in both mimic Stein's repetitious, stream-of-consciousness, snipped-off style. He then closes by writing Stein into insignificance: "Now that it is all over perhaps it made a difference if it was something that you cared about." Ouch!

Quote sourced from "Complete Poems: Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961"

Answer: Ezra Pound

...from STEIN to POUND...

The friendship between Pound and Stein broke along similar lines to that of Stein and Hemingway. Always one to embrace the new, Pound began as an advocate for Stein's unusual writing, and maintained a friendship with her and Alice Toklas. Within a few years, however, Pound grew weary of her "lazy," tried-and-true tropes. Stein, for her part, did not appreciate Pound's proto-fascist politics. By 1922 Pound was publishing sorry reviews of Stein's latest in newspapers. As written in "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" (written by Stein), Stein "liked him but did not find him amusing," which sounds more like historical revision than could actually be true. The "village explainer" line describes Pound's tendency to go around to Paris luminaries and point out the next best, the up-and-comers, the writers of the Future. She, and apparently anyone who wasn't a sellout or a gossip, didn't care for it. (Sounds like what an editor ought to be doing, but what do I know.)

Quote sourced from "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein.

Answer: T.S. Eliot

...from POUND to ELIOT...

The random invocation of a foreign language could only be Eliot or Pound. The random invocation of a four (well, five) letter word could only be Pound or Hemingway. Q.E.D., it was Pound who said this about his protege Eliot, just before publication of "The Waste Land". Pound must've been relieved; Pound called Elliot's first, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American, PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS." But Pound was not just a jubilant bystander. (It was Pound himself that said: "Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work." Pound published "Prufrock" and rearranged many sections of "Waste Land"; the final published "Waste Land" carried the dedication, "For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro," ("the better craftsman").

Quotes sourced from Poetry Foundation, "The Waste Land at 100".

Answer: Henry James

...from ELIOT to JAMES...

This was, in case it wasn't obvious, meant as a compliment. James, he said, had "a view-point untouched by the parasite idea" - something similar, in other words, to an ideology. "England, on the other hand, if it is not the Home of Ideas, has at least become infested with them in about the space of time within which Australia has been overrun by rabbits. In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings [...] we corrupt our feelings with ideas [...]" He is describing, to my understanding, the origins of the British stiff upper lip. There is more than a bit of self-deprecation here - Eliot himself was an American fled to England, even to the point of disguising his origins.

Eliot seemed to be saddened that James was not appreciated by more readers, but said that on the other hand, "The 'influence' of James hardly matters: to be influenced by a writer is to have a chance inspiration from him [...] there will always be a few intelligent people to understand James, and to be understood by a few intelligent people is all the influence a man requires."

Quote sourced from "In Memory of Henry James", T.S. Eliot.

Answer: Edith Wharton

...from JAMES to WHARTON...

This excerpt was written about Wharton's 1912 book "The Reef". In his letter, James claims to be "truly helpless" with praise; he compares the book to George Eliot and the ancient Greeks, then says she beats "all of them put together" - Wharton, being an American expatriate, had the benefit of being able to write as though she were from anywhere. James and Wharton (whom James had nicknamed "Firebird"), the masters of the realist novel at the fin de siècle, enjoyed one of the great friendships in world literature, culminating in a series of trips the pair took through Europe experimenting with an exciting new invention, the automobile. These became the material for Wharton's travelogue "A Motor-Flight through France" and James' fictional story "The Velvet Glove". I stress in truth that their friendship was truly platonic, although James' dying letter to Wharton expresses how profound a friendship it was: "Lean on me as on a brother and a lover." Wharton called their friendship "a real marriage of true minds."

Quote sourced from: The American Reader, "4 December (1912): Henry James to Edith Wharton".

Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald

...from WHARTON to FITZGERALD...

This was Wharton's opinion of how "to make Gatsby really Great." She was, in actuality, a huge fan of the book, and was merely answering Fitzgerald's requests for feedback. Several letters to him indicate that she thought him an extremely promising writer who needed to rein himself in. In the opposite direction, Fitzgerald was fairly well a fanboy of Wharton's - for him she was the finest example of the previous generation of American writers. According to Matthew Bruccoli's biography of Fitzgerald, on the one occasion she invited him over to tea, he swiftly humiliated himself. First he bowed before her and asked, "How can I possibly speak to the author of 'Ethan Frome'? I feel like a boy standing in front of a cathedral." Then - certainly drunk - he awkwardly told a story about an American couple living in a brothel. It did not impress his hostess, and he was never invited back for a chance at a second impression.

Quote sourced from letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald dated April 8th, 1925.

Answer: Edmund Wilson

...from FITZGERALD to WILSON...

"Bunny" Wilson is probably better-known as writer than as critic, though he wrote in many genres; "Memoirs of Hecate County", a "Winesburg, OH"-style novel-made-of-stories, proved a great success. I think Wilson's best-known foray into fiction, though, was his treatment of Fitzgerald's last unfinished novel, "The Last Tycoon". Mutual admiration aside, Wilson and Fitzgerald had a sparring friendship, and loved throwing jabs at each other. Wilson, a consummate lit critic and master of the back-handed compliment, would mock Fitzgerald for being (in one version) "a very second-rate writer with first-rate gifts." His nickname for Scott was the "professional prodigy"; he said in his essay collection, "The Shores of Light", that "for a person of his mental agility, he is extraordinarily little occupied with the general affairs of the world."

As for the nickname, it originated in Wilson's childhood. Fitzgerald made a point to circulate it through the Algonquin Circle, to Wilson's embarrassment.

The quotation is from Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, letter #323.

Answer: Katherine Anne Porter

...from WILSON to PORTER...

Katherine Anne Porter, the author of short stories like "Flowering Judas" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall", and the novel "Ship of Fools", was a favorite of Edmund Wilson's. He found her sui generis and free of the childish melodrama - that is, the kind of "melodrama" he hated in H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien, to name a few. His 1944 review in The New Yorker above all speaks to his bafflement: he finds her impossible to describe well enough to praise, and ends by simply quoting from her "the only general opinion [...] she has put on record." I, too, will quote from it: "[T]he arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith [...] They outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them."

Quote taken from "Katherine Anne Porter" by Edmund Wilson, printed in The New Yorker.

Answer: Eudora Welty

...from PORTER to WELTY...

Porter was Welty's slightly older mentor, and they maintained a close friendship from 1941 onwards. That year, Porter provided the introduction to Welty's first book of stories, "A Curtain of Green", where she gave the praise above. Porter says that works like Welty are "perhaps a case against realism, if we cared to go into it" - Porter and Welty certainly had this aspect in common between them. Another funny aspect of this introduction: Porter openly cautions Welty against the inevitable editorial pressures: "Give us first a novel [she paraphrases], and then we will publish your stories." Welty ignored the caution; her novel "The Optimist's Daughter" eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. In reference to her glowing praise for Welty, Porter told her in a letter: "I love to praise what I love, and I don't for a minute believe that love is blind - indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything."

Quote sourced from Porter's intro to "A Curtain of Green'.

Answer: Sherwood Anderson

...from WELTY to ANDERSON...

In some ways Sherwood Anderson had the same type of encompassing, pre-modern influence on his successors (Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck) as Nikolai Gogol did on Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Bulgakov. Like Gogol, Anderson also managed to do so on quite a thin body of acclaim: his reputation stands almost entirely on "Winesburg, Ohio" alone. In her essay on "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories", Welty pointed out that writers who build their plots and settings like projections of the characters. "The Turning of the Screw", Henry James' psychological ghost story, is the straightforward example she provides (as everything in that story can be explained in its main character's head). But "Winesburg" is a fascinating point of comparison: she notes how his revisiting the same places in the same small town "expands" them - revealing deeper problems, deeper malaise, as the river-like narrative repeats its course.

Quote taken from "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories", published in The Atlantic.

Answer: William Faulkner

...and from ANDERSON back to FAULKNER.

The letter (recorded in "Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters") was written to publisher Horace Liveright, about Faulkner's first novel, "Soldier's Pay". At the time Faulkner was staying with the Andersons in New Orleans. Faulkner was more than grateful for Anderson's early encouragement, writing in his essay "Sherwood Anderson: An Appreciation" for the Atlantic: "It was as though he wrote not even out of the consuming unsleeping appeaseless thirst for glory for which any normal artist would destroy his aged mother, but for what to him was more important and urgent: not even for mere truth, but for purity, the exactitude of purity. [...] The exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude: whichever you like."

Not that the relationship was all giddy praises and sage apothegms. Anderson's correspondence also tells us: "Yesterday I was called by the Algonquin Hotel. Bill Faulkner had been there, on a big drunk. The poor chap is an alcoholic. [...] Bill had been wandering - nude - about the hotel corridors."

Now, from FAULKNER to HEMINGWAY...

Quote taken from "Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters", ed. Charles E. Modlin.