No Googling...."Then I saw the girls leap up and follow Jim into the water. I heard them giggling and screaming like mindless . . . what? No, they were nice. They weren't like grown-ups and parents. They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless."
Good luck.
Sounds like Hemingway, but I couldn't say where. Maybe his memoir, A Moveable Feast.
ReplyDeleteJohn Updike.
ReplyDeleteNope.
ReplyDeleteIt's a twentieth-century American author, though.
Walker Percy?
ReplyDeleteNope.
ReplyDeleteBono quotes him on Zooropa.
Jeepers, who listens to Bono?
ReplyDeleteJust me and a few friends.
ReplyDeleteAll right, all right. My mistake. You're not going to tell us this is Salinger, are you?
ReplyDeleteNo, but it does have that ring to it.
ReplyDeleteA-ha.
ReplyDeleteRing Lardner.
Ha ha, nope.
ReplyDelete(Sports-guys have the best names, don't they? Ring Lardner, Vin Scully, Chick Hearn, Harry Carray.)
Norman Mailer.
ReplyDeleteOooh, you're getting close.
ReplyDeleteJust to narrow the field, it's not Carver, Capote, Vonnegut, or Hunter S. Thompson.
Speaking as a soon-to-be senior citizen, ex non-hippie, child of the '60's: "Like, man, who cares?"
ReplyDeleteIs it Fitzgerald?
ReplyDeleteKerouac?
ReplyDeleteNope and nope.
ReplyDelete"These days run away like horses over the hills"? Nothing?
Flannery O'Connor?
ReplyDeleteJJS has been reading Merton lately.
ReplyDeleteOK, time to end the suspense (drumroll please):
ReplyDeleteIt's Charles Bukowski from his book .
Oops. Ham on Rye.
ReplyDeleteGood grief. Charles Bukowski. Hands up, how many people have heard of Bukowski, much less read him? Besides Bono?
ReplyDeleteAww, someone's a sore loser....
ReplyDeleteI'm no American Lit expert, but whenever I hear the names of such twentieth-century authors as Carver, Mailer, O'Connor, Capote, and Vonnegut, I always hear Bukowski right along with them.
Ah, the lowlife laureate.
ReplyDeleteI think he's maintained his outsider status fairly well. I was a lit major, and he was barely a blip in my Amer. Lit. 2 class. I'll have to check if he's even in my anthology.
And I will have to check whether he is even in our public library. "Ham on Rye"?
ReplyDelete