Hemingway was a journalist. He remained a journalist his entire life. He wrote fiction, you say. Yes, and he gave rise to the cliche once popular in film and stories, that every journalist imagined they had the Great American Novel in them. But Hemingway always wrote from his experiences, just as a journalist writes about what has happened, what the news is. Hemingway couldn’t write news as fiction. He wrote his life. He was his subject. All of Hemingway’s work is just thinly-veiled autobiography. That, or it’s Hemingway writing about his ideas, almost a philosophy, through the words and sometimes actions of characters.
Hemingway was a real ass. Whatever else he was as a writer.
Hemingway’s subject was Hemingway, for all of his life. His writing style was just the newspaper style he’d learned first. Nothing more.
All the writers in the documentary who praise Hemingway as a protean genius, a Picasso of print who made us see everything as he did, who changed everything about writing, are all old men and women from the generation influenced by Hemingway. Give me Fitzgerald. Give me Bradbury, who is the anti-Hemingway, although Bradbury’s characters are about as well-developed and observed as any of Hemingway’s.
I don’t really care what Bradbury was like, because his subject is never himself. Hemingway is always concerned with writing about Hemingway. “What he knows,” that famous dictum about what writers must write about, was just a dictum of journalism. It wasn’t a brilliant insight into the nature and act of writing. It was just all Hemingway knew about writing. It’s really not that much. Stop treating it like it’s a profound insight.
And all those writers in the film bleating about how hard writing is, how much of a toll it takes on the writer. Please. You aren’t Hemingway, and you don’t want to be. Hemingway was an alcoholic, and an ass. He wasn’t an ass because he wrote books worth reading (some are, some aren’t, and kudos to Burn for showing Maria Vargas Llosa praising The Old Man and the Sea as a masterpiece, and Edna O’Brien pointing out that it’s school-boy writing. It is.). That book, Burns tells us, is a fictionalized version of an article he’d written for publication decades earlier. Hemingway was a journalist, and the subject was always Hemingway. Besides, as Fitzgerald said, he needed a new wife for every new book. Who thinks that’s what’s needed to be a writer?
Prove me wrong.
We read Hemingway because we are interested in Hemingway. Or we aren’t. It’s one or the other. We don’t read him for the characters, like Dickens, or the insight into humanity, like the Russian novelists, or the humor of Sterne or the meditations on existence of the French novelists (yes, all the real novelists wrote in the 19th century. Prove me wrong.). At his best, as in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” his art and his intent perfectly align, and he is so subtle and careful and close to the “truth” he professed to always being trying to write (what else does a journalist do?) in that story that most people overlook it in favor of “Kilimanjaro” or “Macomber”, because those better align with the persona, the myth, that he himself created.
Burns shows this, if you pay attention. The invention of the myth by Hemingway himself, I mean.
He did like cats. That is a mark in his favor. A very strong one. But cats can be asses, too. It’s forgivable in them.
Nobody tries to write like Hemingway anymore. The writers in the film all pretend the only thing to do after Hemingway is to write like Hemingway. Bradbury lists his influences in his stories, and Hemingway is never among them. I grew up reading Bradbury, so it took me a long time to get anything out of Hemingway. It’s not clean and lucid and revealing. It’s rocky and hard; like eating pebbles when you thought the dish was soup, or oatmeal. It’s dry when you want moist; boney and stripped of meat, making you feel like a vulture denied any benefits of the carrion put before you.
And in the end, it’s always about Hemingway.
Edna O’Brien says the test of a book is how many times you want to re-read it. Then again, she also complains about how hard it is to write one good sentence; in the same paragraph. Pfft! (True, Yeats agonized over every line of his poetry, sometimes at a risk to his health. Still, none of us are Yeats, and sweating over lines word by word won't make us Yeats.) But her test of a book is a sound one. I re-read Bradbury (your favorite writer sucks, too.). Aside from a few short stories, one pass through Hemingway is enough. I get tired of his navel-gazing dressed up as a struggle of manhood. I get tired of every story being so clearly fictionalized, or barely fictionalized, biography.
Hemingway is a journalist, more than a writer.
Hemingway is an ass.
Hemmingway suffers from his admirers. There was some good criticism, I thought, in the program, but some fawning as well. I've never been a huge fan of Hemingway. I like "The Sun also Rises" very much, didn't like "For Whom the Bell Tolls" or "The Old Man and the Sea." Ought to have read some of his short stories, and, of his non-fiction, I liked the posthumous "Moveable Feast," but couldn't get into "Death in the Afternoon" at all. But of course the one was guilty-pleasure type celebrity gossip, the other Hemmingway at his macho-posturing worst. I think popularity hurt him, and though his "image" was genuine, in the sense that it was rooted in what he considered his real values, those values, from my perspective, look increasingly pitiable. Especially all that Big Game Hunter stuff, and the one-wife-per-book habit. A talented man living a melodrama. But credit where credit is due. As Belloc wrote,
ReplyDeleteWhen I am dead,
May it be said,
"His sins were scarlet,
But his books were read."
Agree. “Moveable Feast” has some outstanding passages. Some of his work is excellent; some isn’t. And it was a good film on Hemingway.
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