He is not forgotten, but sadly overlooked. Too much glamour surrounds this shy dignified man. It would be an honor to chat with him if one wandered to his silent corner, but eyes do not rest on him for long. Hughes (1900–1976) is a reserved gentleman in this ballroom of celebrities.
A shame-Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is a match for his contemporaries, and remains a startling reading experience.
Yet critics rarely dip into this work nor into the author’s subsequent novels, and, of the preeminent writers listed, his life has merited only one lengthy biography in decades. Modern Library agrees, listing the book at number seventy-one, right below Conrad and Sinclair Lewis, just above Naipaul and Waugh. By gad-ding, I mean drinking, screwing, more drinking, hobnobbing, and, once in a while, writing.Īcross the English Channel at that precise moment, a contemporary of Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote a novel, published in 1929, that remains one of the oddest and most unsettling works of that century. Woody Allen’s recent hit, Midnight in Paris, attests to our longstanding fantasies about American authors gadding about Paris in the ’20s. Lawrence, Woolf, O’Hara, Salinger, Heller, Vonnegut ? Many of these names combine artistic genius, folk hero, and pure celebrity. Who would you circle-Faulkner, Forster, Greene, Wharton, Nabokov, Orwell, D.H. And Steinbeck-one would have expected dirty fingernails, a cloud of Okie dust and a whiff of mackerel.
There’s Henry James, more interested in the image you impress on him than vice-versa don’t confide in him, Partygoer, otherwise you might find yourself later in his fiction, depicted with chilling clarity.
And Hemingway-who wouldn’t want a drink with him? (Maybe, anyone who doesn’t want to be maliciously gossiped about in a subsequent memoir). He’s just behind James Joyce, visibly ill-at-ease, wishing he were elsewhere. Of course, everyone wants a glimpse of a drunken F. Imagine a dinner party held for the hundred writers selected by Modern Library as the authors of the best novels of the twentieth century.
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