Tom Ford is 47 today - Happy Birthday! I cannot think of another man who is as iconic in contemporary men’s fashion as Tom Ford. Right now no-one is making better clothes for adult men of style.
History
Tom Ford was born on August 27th I961 in Austin, Texas. At 17 he enrolled at New York University and studied art history. He left after a year to study architecture at the Parsons School of Design. When he left he worked first for Cathy Hardwick, an American sportwear brand and then in 1988 he joined Perry Ellis. At that time Ellis was a premier brand and had a distinctive menswear line. At a time when menswear was becoming gimmicky, Ellis had seen that menswear classics could be updated for the modern age and was producing handsome manly menswear. It is interesting to speculate on the effect this had on Tom Ford.
Ford left Perry Ellis after two years and moved to Europe. This was the key move of his career, he felt that if he were ever to become a great designer he had to leave America. He felt that his own culture was inhibiting him and that style was looked down on America. Interestingly he saw the difference between American and European luxury goods as being the craft tradition of European fashion, hand-tailoring, family firms and traditions. He believed that Europeans had and respected style.
His move to Europe in 1990 coincided with Gucci offering him the position of women’s ready-to-wear designer. The truth was that no-one wanted the job. Gucci had been badly mismanaged since its heyday in the seventies and in 1990 was a byword for overpriced tat. Gucci had lost its reputation as a quality brand and was virtually bankrupt.
Gucci
It was here that Tom Ford showed his true genius. High fashion was falling over itself to create adolescent fashion, down-market brands like Tommy Hilfiger were dominating the market and other brands were falling over themselves to emulate them. Tom Ford realized that America and Europe were becoming wealthier and that there were people who wanted clothes that were designed and made well, were attractive and wearable. Ford’s designs were sexy and easy to wear and he referenced European high fashion of previous eras. The Tom Ford woman was sexy and desirable and the clothes were a huge hit.
The Ford Gucci man’s look was really important. At that time (as now) many menswear designers were fixated on clothes for younger men, adolescent and boyish. Tom Ford took the sexy menswear of the seventies and streamlined it. His suits were long, tight over the hips, broad at the shoulders and very manly. Suits were made of silky wools and mohairs, in sophisticated colours. He presented adult contrasts, the dark suit with the white shirt, the light suit with the dark shirt. The Ford look was confident, competent and predatory. Adult, sexy men of the world.
Ford was his own model. A good-looking man wearing his own clothes, he was the best advertisement for his own brand. There must be a thousand pictures of him wearing a black suit with a white shirt unbuttoned to the chest. He looks stylish in every one of them. Though he is gay, he is truly stylish masculine man.
And the punchline is that Ford is a superb businessman. When he joined Gucci it was worth very little. When he left it was worth more than 4 Billion dollars.
Tom Ford now
So now he is even more interesting. Starting in 2006, his Tom Ford menswear line is making a global impact. As a brand Tom Ford is on the leading edge. He saw, as some leading style analysts have seen, that the luxury brands were losing their status, as they market themselves across bigger and bigger territories. His own menswear is exclusive, in his own words “aimed at the men who want the very best”.
Tom Ford is an admirer of Savile Row, the bespoke experience and the exclusivity of Savile Row clothes. His menswear is exclusive, with the additional elements of being fun and a little more fashionable. His clothes are manly, adult and beautifully made. The suits are cut slim, the jackets have an open chest ( a la Savile Row) with wide lapels. Like Savile Row suits they flatter men.
For me his suits a are little eighties, beautifully proportioned and powerful-looking. Only Tom Ford could bring back the double-breasted suit and make it look good. Manly and powerful but with fine subtle tailoring rather than eighties excess. Ford has talked about how fashion brands produce clothes for the very young and how they exclude older men with style and taste. He is producing clothes for those adult worldly men. The provocative advertising for his menswear tells us that clothes are all about good taste, sex and power, definitely not for kids.
Tom Ford is a great designer of original style. Happy Birthday Tom Ford!
Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers. He changed the shape of American literature for all time. In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day. His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.
There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway. But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man. I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men.
A brief biographical note
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2nd 1961.
As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing. However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life. From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft. In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months. He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front. At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital. This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life. His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing.
He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child. Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published. Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave. His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity. By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man. However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.
My introduction to Hemingway
I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction. Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school. As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair. This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.
I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are). I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing. That he could make a story around them seemed incredible. He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking. Things I knew about. Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.
As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway. His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that. I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris. I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.
His Writing
We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully. His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive. From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject. To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true. In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this. Here he talks to himself about writing;
“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
A Moveable Feast
He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language. Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.
This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.
The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer. Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener. In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees. Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;
“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”
Across the River and into the Trees
I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.
The big questions
We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war. He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis. In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men. Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death. That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win.
In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it. How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be. In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.
His heroes are surprising vulnerable. They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins. However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated. What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost. If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man. Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places” I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.
Truth and love.
We read him and love him because he is true.
I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.
The truth is he was not. All the things he wrote about he did. The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars. He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars. Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent. He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger.
Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts. Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive. He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”. That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part. Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous. About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations.
The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger. I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing. He writes about this in ways that most men can understand. In the 20’s and 30’s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.
Honour
One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour. Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed. However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves.
Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard. Hemingway’s men have personal honour. Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right. And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed. Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour. Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit. We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory.
Style and men
Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle. He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented sportsman who was at home all over the world. Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings. It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined.
Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.
Hemingway had great style. His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him. He was a connoisseur of food and wine. He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons. He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees. Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men. Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best. Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today. The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.
Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death. However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them. For me he has always been an inspiration.
The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right. She said;
“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”
Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies.
Books
A Moveable Feast
A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties. Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably. Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.
Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War. Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission. Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.
The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin. Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.
Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously. From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives. Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the best introduction to Hemingway.
Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse. A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.
Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen. We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement. Here are five movies that did it well.
Islands in the Stream
This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books. However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving. George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good. Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.
Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book. Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.
Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer. Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer. One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.
Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical. Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie.
This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman. A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit. It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.
Update. Welcome Instapundit readers, hope you enjoy our reflections on Mr Cary Grant.
Today is the birthday of Cary Grant, who was born on the 18th January 1904 and died November 29 1986.
Happy birthday Mr Grant, wherever you are.
For me Cary Grant is the very personification of manly style.
He was unique and even after all these years no actor comes close to replicating his witty charm, his style or his joie de vivre. I did not “get” Cary Grant when I was younger but started to appreciate him as my knowledge of the world broadened and deepened. There is a great deal to Cary Grant and his style and one needs to have enough depth to appreciate him. Here are a few of my appreciations of him.
One of the most important and most obviously manly things about him was his athletic, animal physicality. I was reminded of this when I last watched “To catch a Thief”, which many consider his finest movie. The second scene of TCAT introduces Cary Grant as John Robie, at home in the South of France. Robie is a resistance hero and jewel thief. In the scene he wears a finely woven striped crewneck pullover, grey pleated Italian trousers and tan loafers. Around his neck he wears a red-atterned silk foulard, tucked into the pullover. So far, so metrosexual.
Suddenly he hears the screech of a police car racing into his drive. His walk becomes swift (but still unhurried) and as he reaches the stairs to the first floor he takes them in an effortless loping leonine run. The change in Grant is electric and shocking. He goes from calm to action in a split-second. Suddenly this debonair handsome man shows the reflexes of an athlete, or of a killer.
Cary Grant started out in showbusiness as an acrobat and that clearly helped. But somewhere in his evolution he built a harmony of mind and body that informs all of his roles. Comfortable in his own skin, he is capable of becoming a physical powerhouse in a moment and we, his audience, sense that. Men particularly, sense the presence of dangerous men. With Cary Grant there is always a sense that there is power in reserve, that this is a very dangerous man.
He does it again in North by Northwest, in the famous crop-duster scene. As the light aeroplance chases him across a ploughed field, he runs like an athlete (he was actually 55 at the time). Not only that but he looks back mid-run to check the plane’s position. Ever tried that? We would be lucky not to fall and break our necks. Cary Grant makes it look easy.
Strangely enough the actor that reminds me the most of Cary Grant is Clint Eastwood. There is a similarity in their calm stillness and their confident presence.
Cary Grant and his clothes.
The thing that everyone knows about him is his clothes. He was always immaculately dressed. He believed that a gentleman had a duty to dress well. He also knew that clothes were a key facet of one’s style and he knew that women love stylish men.
Despite being born in poverty and having very limited schooling, Cary Grant believed passionately in learning. He learnt everything he could about style. He learnt about clothes from tailors, he watched wealthy American men to learn about manners and he made friends with intelligent learned men of all kinds. When one stops to think, it is amazing what this poor boy from a broken home made of himself.
He learnt what clothes could do for him. A wider, broader collar to de-emphasis his muscular neck. English-cut suits to make his lean athlete’s body look wider across the shoulders. Made-to-measure suits with high armholes to lengthen his silhouette and make him look taller. He learnt this and hundreds of other details to build his style. Like many men who start off poor, Grant prized good clothing and relished the opportunity to look good in the world. I always felt this way and Cary Grant confirmed the feeling for me.
Grant understood style, his clothes were classic, in proportion, colours complementing each other. And is this not that what men of style try to do? Don’t we stand in front of the mirror, making sure the tie complements the suit, that the cufflinks are right? Style is also about getting the details right. Cary Grant taught me that.
Cary Grant and women
Cary grant loved women and they loved him. He once said “Women are one of my favourite causes!” Over the course of his life he loved many women. This love of women informed both his style and the characters he played on-screen.
Cary Grant was very competitive, especially when it came to women. He would court women persistently, cleverly, with charm and good manners, until they in turn fell in love with him. When other men tried to attract a women he was courting, he treated them as competitors to be beaten. Which, in my view, is absolutely right. A man does not let other men take things from him without a fight, especially intimate relationships.
In his movies he uses his competitiveness over women to good comic effect.
In His Girl Friday (1940) he plays hardbitten newspaper editor Walter Burns, who is still in love with his ex-wife Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell. Russell turns up with her soon-to-be new husband in tow. She wants to move to the quiet of the country and be a stay-at-home wife. Burns (Grant) takes them both out to lunch and proceeds to slyly mock “life in the country” to ribbons. It is one of the funniest scenes on film.
He did it again later that year in The Philadephia Story, one of those perfect Hollywood movies that define American cinema. He plays C.K. Dexter Haven, a debonair man-about-town who is obliged by circumstances to attend the forthcoming wedding of his ex-wife, played by Katherine Hepburn. Haven (Grant) still loves his wife and dislikes her nouveau riche husband-to-be, who he suspects is marrying her for her position and money. Grant plays this out to perfection in a scene where he quietly skewers the husband-to-be for his pretension, pomposity and niggardly ways.
Incidentally if you want to see great actors playing off each other, get this movie and watch the scenes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart together. Pure cinematic genius.
The other, more important aspect of Cary Grant’s love of women was his respect for them and his interest in them as people. In an age when women were treated as less than men, his enlightened understanding stood out. Almost all of the women in his life remained his friends and they all had something good to say about him.
In the movies the fact that he was listening to his leading ladies made the dialogue seem more real and the scenes more alive. If we go back to ”To Catch a Thief” again, Grant’s jewel thief plays opposite Grace Kelly’s spoilt little rich girl, Francie. Francie is often arrogant and snippy but Grant’s John Robie listens to everything she says, with courtesy and consideration. The end result is that Grant’s character looks even more manly and assured and Kelly’s Francie becomes more real and touchingly vulnerable.
And all of this rings true today, in real life as in the movies. Women love men who hear them, men who have the courage and gravitas to engage with them honestly. Cary Grant was the pioneer, the model to copy and the man who made loving women central to a man’s style.
So much of Cary Grant’s charm lies in his good manners and his consideration of others. Everyone who knew him talked of his respect for other people and his simple joy in talking to anyone he happened to meet.
You know, I think that is the secret of his style, his joy in life. His joy in clothes, women, movies and anything else he came across.
When he is onscreen he is alive in a way no other actor has every been. His good humour, his confidence in the fundamental goodness of life is transmitted from the screen to us. The great film critic Pauline Kael said that just by appearing he makes us smile. Well, yes. He is telling us that manliness is good and graceful, that a sense of humour and consideration for others is style and that it is a joy to be alive.
There is so much more that I could write about Cary Grant but everything has to end somewhere. However, there is one really important thing to say.
Thank you Mr Grant, for everything.
For those readers who want more of Cary Grant (and who would not?) here are my five favourite Cary Grant films.
Stylish caper about a jewel thief on the French Riviera whose robberies are being blamed on Cary Grant’s John Robie. Robie is obliged to catch the thief in order to clear himself. Grant plays opposite Grace kelly who never looked more beautiful than in this film. Her flair for dialogue and Grant’s generous and subtle acting make their interaction crackle and the jokes pop and there is a real erotic charge between them. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock with consummate care and perfect timing.
Cary Grant gives a wonderful performance, by turns tricky, funny, loving and kind. His stylish socialite anchors this tale of a rich cultured American family beset by celebrity hunting media in the approach to a divisive wedding. Katherine Hepburn is the bewildered patrician bride and Jimmy Stewart the smart-but-stupid reporter. The repartee is sharp enough to cut paper with.
Hitchcock again, placing Grant in harms way as communist assassins mistake him for an American secret agent. The mood of the film becomes very black towards the end, with Grant having to draw on all of his resources to survive.
This really is a man’s film, with Grant as the lead pilot for a small air service that flys dangerous mail runs across the Andes. Directed by Howard Hawks, it focuses on the bravery and professionalism of men in dangerous jobs, whose pride and ingenuity enable them to make near impossible flights. The film is an emotional cauldron, with Grant’s Geoff Carter trying to hold onto the ruthless discipline that enables him to do his job, in the face of Jean Arthur’s love for him.
Made in 1963 when Cary Grant was 59, Charade was a light thriller with Nazi gold and devious criminals, set in Paris. Charade proved that Cary had lost none of his magic. Hugely successful when it was released, not least because Grant’s leading lady was Audrey Hepburn, who was the perfect foil for his sophistication and charm. Grant plays a character who may be a thief, a spy or a bureaucrat and has enormous fun inhabiting each of these roles. Audrey hepburn summed Grant up for all time with the following lines:
Reggie (Hepburn): “Do you know what’s wrong with you?”
Peter (Grant): “What?”
Reggie (Hepburn): “Absolutely Nothing”
Books
There are also two books that I like about Cary Grant:
Excellent on Cary Grant’s life, if sometimes a little light on his movies.
Richard Torregrossa
Cary Grant, a celebration of style.
Now this book is invaluable. Do you want to know how Cary Grant looked so stylish? Would you like to be like Cary Grant? This book tells you where he bought his clothes, how he had them cut and how he customised them. Torregrossa talks about Grant’s style and his life with insight and real information.
I first discovered Ernest Hemingway when I was sixteen.
School was busy feeding me a diet of politically correct kitchen sink novels that I was supposed to “identify” with. Poor kids growing up in rough neighbourhoods, against a backdrop of bad weather and alcoholic parents. I hated all them all.
Hemingway was a revelation. He wrote about things I knew about, like boxing and fishing. He wrote about them with a concise grace, describing their essential beauty. He wrote in short, stripped down sentences, rythmic, trying to isolate the truth of every sentence. Love, sport and manliness dignified in literature.
Hemingway was my introduction to manly style. His worldly, grizzled men, equally at ease in Paris and Pamplona, had a style that I wanted to emulate. His women were beautiful and unsettling, often the equal of the men they were in love with, yet compromised by that love, compelled to act against their own best interests.
Hemingway’s men are a combination of action and reflection. Hemingway’s men are stoic yet I am always amazed at how much they feel. The sensitivity of Nick Adams, the hero of The first 49 Stories, the compassion of Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not.
Hemingway had a style that was complex and lived out both in real life and his books. Read the books first, then delve into his life. He contributed to my style, to both good and bad effect.
I have his picture on my blog and I have more to write about him and his books.
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