Word Smith: Inaccrochable
Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were steady conversationalists and friends in Paris in the 1920’s.
Stein uses the word inaccrochable, as Hemingway retells it, in a book of short stories, called A Moveable Feast, Schribner,1964. The chapter is dubbed, Miss Stein Instructs.
Critics abound:
How much validity is there in the idea that a piece of literature (or art) can be, as Gertrude Stein supposedly once said of Ernest Hemingway’s early short story ‘Up in Michigan,’ “inaccrochable” – that is, “like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either”?
Another critic espouses:
Stein believed the story “Up in Michigan” was unpublishable because it was so controversial at the time – the subject being date rape … from what I understand. NO market, nobody to read it … if a tree falls in the forest??? Is the question about whether art is validated by the market?
Well, here’s another question! What IS too controversial now? Is ANYTHING? I honestly can’t imagine what would be? I mean, there are stories about alien midget lesbians having sex, ear lobe fetishism, uh … and so forth … you know? Hey, possibly fiction concerning mild, unviolent, unsexy old people having lunch! Now that may be unaccroachable …
And yet another states:
Could there be a new Picasso, or even a new Hemingway for that matter? I wish I knew. I wish, like Stein, I could see it coming. Because I’d love for things to be turned upside down just once more before I finish my go. But I have a feeling the reigns of control won’t be wrenched loose anytime soon. And it would take more than true genius anyway.
It is interesting how words and vocabulary come and go in society. I doubt we will see this one again …
Henry E. Hooper 