[The following is a section of "A Paris Letter" that appeared in Charles Henri Ford’s journal Blues in 1930. Comparing Hemingway with Crosby in a sense pits Anglo-American modernism against continental modernism, though Boyle’s particular indictment contrasts a literature that can be commercialized with a literature that deliberately resists such consumption. Boyle provocatively argues that Hemingway’s obsessions with violence are morbid while Crosby’s spontaneity represents health and vitality. This excerpt begins as Boyle is ending her comments on Hemingway.]

… But how can you speak of life and death when in your own heart the terms are interchangeable? How can you say health and disease (health in a bull-fighter, in a man of few words, a man of winter-sports and blunt speech, a normal, full-blooded, healthy man), when oh, Hemingway, the desert of thy soul has no oasis, no blade, no spring, no shadow of a bird?

Hemingway has left Paris, and so has Harry Crosby. But the former should have put before him the work of someone who has retained life and health and glamor and glory for his generation. This does not mean that the diary that Harry Crosby left will ever be the popular thing, although it has preserved qualities that romance would go black without, and has justified Hemingway’s blasted age. Harry Crosby’s diary lacks the whimper, the wail, the false bravado of shrugging manly shoulders and giving up. Because Harry Crosby took each day as a new challenge, his work is a testament where Hemingway’s is a blasphemy. He wrote about the life he led with a strong natural gaiety, a health that was both in his flesh and his mind, a consideration for love, and a belief, that no men of the church surpass, in what would come when he died. He took every minute to task, which means that he preserved a rigid tradition that the tired young men and women never knew anything about, an upright, a stern and relentless Boston tradition upheld to the very end.