Quart of Whiskey and the Loft of a Barn

Funny that Hemingway didn’t like A Fable. As I recall, Faulkner struggled to write it, too, taking, like, seven years with it, while As I Lay Dying took six weeks. I Imagine receiving the Nobel Prize is probably somewhat rattling to one’s creative propensities. 

“[Hemingway] had a sour grapes theory that ‘no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards.’ The case seemed to be proved by Faulkner’s A Fable, published in August. It struck Ernest as false and contrived: all a man needed, in order to do 5,000 words a day of that kind of stuff, was a quart of whiskey, the loft of a barn, and a total disregard of syntax.” Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.

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