—The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931–1965 I read an essay once—I don’t recall who wrote it—about waiting in Hemingway. There’s that couple at the station in “Hills Like White Elephants” waiting for the express from Barcelona, and the little boy with a fever who is waiting to die in “A Day’s Wait.” That situation, waiting to die, is one Hemingway returned to often, as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” when the man with a gangrened leg is recalling his youth in Paris; nor is he waiting alone—the hyenas and vultures are waiting, too. In other stories, the men are alone. Nick Adams waits out the night in “A Way You’ll Never Be.” In “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” Mr. Frazer listens to a hospital radio that plays only at night—a clever touch—as he waits out the pain of his fractured leg. All these characters have, in one way or another, been wounded. * * * When the phenomenon known as the Men’s Movement was in fashion, I was invited to give a poetry reading at a “gathering.”
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