Books |
Ernest Hemingway
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Fiction
I once asked John Cheever, arguably the greatest American short-story of the last century, what — if anything — he learned from Ernest Hemingway.
“Not to put a shotgun in my mouth,” Cheever said.
Cheever meant to be funny. But I think he was accidentally revealing — he was saying that Hemingway the man so overwhelmed Hemingway the writer that the thing we most remember is the shotgun blast to the head that was his larger-than-life exit. Were we to go on in that vein, we’d list more biographical events: the hunting and fishing, the four marriages, the wars and the war wounds. The books? Relegated to the back of beyond.
Anyway, who wants to read a macho novelist with literary credentials? These days, not so many. Not enough happens in his books for the “action” reader. And why would a woman care about Hemingway at all?
Until recently, I hadn’t read Hemingway in decades. I think that’s about average. Hemingway’s a stop on the tour of American Lit, so you plunge in, get the idea and get out of there fast. Not because the writing’s a bore — Hemingway pretty much invented a clean, crisp, “modern” style that’s too damn hard for most writers — but because the themes are. Men testing themselves? Sure. But there’s just no way we can relate to big-game hunters and deep-sea fishermen. And who was the last guy you knew who went to war to test his manhood?
A few years ago, my stepson was assigned The Nick Adams Stories for school. I read along. And was surprised — and delighted — by Hemingway’s first efforts. To read these stories is to be transported to Northern Michigan in the fall in the early years of the last century. The mornings are cold, the water is clear, and for the young Nick, the issues are simple: Is dying hard? What do you do about the cries of a woman in labor? You can see the caterpillar becoming a butterfly in these stories. Though uneven, they’re exciting to read.
The Sun Also Rises was the novel that put Hemingway on the map. The narrator was a war hero — if, that is, heroism means getting your penis shot off. Naturally, he’s in love. Naturally, the romance is doomed. I looked into the book recently. It seemed… mannered. And the casual anti-Semitism seems gratuitous.
Hemingway’s real breakthrough came with his World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms. I recently re-reread it, and I can see why. Lt. Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered as a medical corpsman in the Italian Army, is in the hills, awaiting advance or retreat, it’s all the same to him. He meets a nurse, Catherine Barkley, who seems a bit soft in the head. Initially, he’s interested in her for the usual shallow reasons, but as the war wears on and she becomes pregnant, they both mature; they form a world against the world.
The last hundred pages of “Farewell to Arms” are as exciting as anything written today. The Italians are in retreat, and in the chaos , officers are being shot. Lt. Henry rips off his bars, but the soldiers grab him anyway. His escape is dramatic, his reunion with Catharine deeply satisfying. But it’s just a breather — he needs to get out of Italy. That second escape is brilliant, and the end of the book is as fine as anything Hemingway ever wrote. If you’re going to read only one Hemingway novel…
“A Farewell to Arms” was a scandal in 1929. The publisher put blank spaces in the text where “bad words” would have appeared. The Caesarian birth scene — oh my! And The New York Times reviewer had a problem: How do you praise a book in which the main character is a deserter?
I struggled with For Whom the Bell Tolls. The politics of the Spanish Civil War aren’t as clear-cut now as they were in the late 1930s. And politics, in any event, leads to talk: endless blather, in this case. The language is stilted, the book padded. To read one of Hemingway’s takes on death, skip to the last two pages.
In 1952, when Hemingway was pretty much dismissed, he came back with his biggest commercial success, The Old Man and the Sea. “Unforgettable”? I found the story of an old Cuban fisherman’s struggle with a massive swordfish a pretentious parable. The spirit that fights on in the face of defeat — oh, please, give me a break. And please, English teachers, stop inflicting this book on your students.
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954. The man who had once knocked off three classic stories in an afternoon didn’t attend; by then, plane crashes and fame and the high bar he had set for himself had taken their toll. And, of course, alcohol, for Hemingway was of the generation — Fitzgerald was his bookend — that drank heavily on a daily basis. Reliable reports suggest he put away a quart of whisky a day for the last two decades of his life.
Like Norman Mailer, his literary successor, Hemingway is mostly read these days for his non-fiction — Americans who cannot get enough of Paris in the 1920s gobble A Moveable Feast. They crave the food and the name-dropping; they tend to overlook Hemingway’s egomania, paranoia and general nastiness.
I’m all for the light stuff (and for The Garden of Eden, a patched-together novel, published after his death, with some surprisingly kinky sex scenes). But what strikes me of greatest value in Hemingway — in addition to a writing style that’s clean as a scalpel — is his literal preoccupation with the big subjects. Until you get to “Old Man and the Sea”, Hemingway wrote bluntly and honestly about what was important: how you lived, how you died, if you betrayed friends all the way.
”A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” he said. “His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.”
In a brace of stories and few novels, he did exactly that.
To buy “A Farewell to Arms” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “For Whom the Bell Tolls” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Sun Also Rises” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Old Man and the Sea” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “A Moveable Feast” from Amazon.com, click here.
To read more about “The Nick Adams Stories” on HeadButler.com, click here.
To read more about “The Garden of Eden” on HeadButler.com, click here.
