"I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there"
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Harrison’s line is a sly piece of literary side-eye: a denial that immediately admits its own impossibility. “I’ve never felt influenced” is the proud American-writer posture of self-invention, the claim that your sentences sprang from the head of Zeus rather than the Great Male Canon. Then he undercuts it with “though I suppose,” a shrug that smuggles in both humility and fatalism. He knows the game. In the U.S., to write about men, land, appetites, war, drinking, and the blunt weather of feeling is to be compared to Hemingway the way a guitarist gets compared to Hendrix. You can resist the lineage; you can’t escape the comparison.
“Inevitable” does the heaviest lifting. It’s not praise so much as gravity: Hemingway as a force field in American prose, especially for writers who favor leanness, physical detail, and moral pressure without sermonizing. Harrison’s intent is to reclaim agency while acknowledging the cultural machinery that reads influence into you. He’s not confessing imitation; he’s pointing at the institutional reflex that turns every rugged lyricist into a Hemingway descendant.
The subtext has a faint sting. Harrison spent his career expanding the territory Hemingway supposedly owned - making it messier, more sensual, more ecological, more willing to let hunger and tenderness coexist. The “inevitable” isn’t that he borrowed from Hemingway; it’s that critics and readers will insist on hearing Hemingway whenever an American writer refuses to decorate a truth.
“Inevitable” does the heaviest lifting. It’s not praise so much as gravity: Hemingway as a force field in American prose, especially for writers who favor leanness, physical detail, and moral pressure without sermonizing. Harrison’s intent is to reclaim agency while acknowledging the cultural machinery that reads influence into you. He’s not confessing imitation; he’s pointing at the institutional reflex that turns every rugged lyricist into a Hemingway descendant.
The subtext has a faint sting. Harrison spent his career expanding the territory Hemingway supposedly owned - making it messier, more sensual, more ecological, more willing to let hunger and tenderness coexist. The “inevitable” isn’t that he borrowed from Hemingway; it’s that critics and readers will insist on hearing Hemingway whenever an American writer refuses to decorate a truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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