There were, however, also practical reasons for sitting down and writing something of some length which demanded more than just a little thought, but I shan’t go into them now because they aren’t relevant. Oh, and to my ears ‘critique’ does sound distressingly hi-falutin’, but I can’t at this point think of another word to use.
I’ve been writing that critique - can I now ditch my false modesty and dispense with the quotation marks? - ‘for the past few months’ for several reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t work on it daily (although I should and, rather more pertinently, could) but because I keep coming up with more sources of info on the man and the novel that are relevant and which info I want somehow to incorporate. And finally - there’s no other way of saying this - I want to do it well.
That last reason is especially important to me given that, on the one hand, Ernest Hemingway, novelist, big-game hunter, legendary toper and - supposed - all round macho man is still thought of as ‘a great writer’ who was very influential and who (note this well, Patrick Powell, I hear many cry you cynical, snivelling little jumped-up toad) in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I, on the other hand, think the man can’t write for toffee, had the luck of Old Nick and then some and is almost the very definition of a nine-bob note (US nine-dollar bill) who committed one of Life’s cardinal sins: he believed his own bullshit.
The piece will eventually appear in this blog, and I don’t want to say much more and pre-empt what I shall be writing, but I can say this: given my initial reaction to the novel, in the course of my quest for info on the man and the novel (popularly and sometimes rather pompously known as ‘research’) I came across this quote from the writer Raymond Carver (in a piece he wrote for The New York Times in 1985. It runs:
In the years since 1961 Hemingway's reputation as ‘the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ (John O'Hara's wildly extravagant assessment in praise of ‘Across The River And Into the Trees’) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought. They agreed that at least one, maybe two, of the novels (‘The Sun Also Rises’ and, possibly, ‘A Farewell to Arms’) might make it into the 21st century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center (sic) stage and deadly ‘reappraisals’ began taking place.(NB The ‘sic’ is, a little redundant, but what the hell. I added it because I am English and use English spellings — and to this day I am pulled up short when I see a reference to the colour ‘gray’ — and Carver is a Yank who uses American spelling. Oh, and ‘bamboozled’ is a strong word but as far as I can see apt.)
I was more than relieved to come across that quote from Carver, especially as during my ‘research’ I had previously come across John O’Hara’s claim that Hemingway was ‘the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’. Happening upon O’Hara’s judgment was all the more uncomfortable because I have read two of the writer’s novels and several of his short stories, and as far as I am concerned he can write the pants off Hemingway on any day of the week including Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. So here was a writer whose worked I liked and respected praising the work of a writer I thought was a certain kind of rubbish. Now whose view would have more credibility if and when push came to shove? Ah, but you’re way ahead of me.
. . .
I can’t for the life of me remember why I decided to read The Sun Also Rises after all these years. It was one of my set texts when I was studying for an English degree at Dundee University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I’m sure I didn’t read it then, but when I read it again last summer, I was so baffled by the claim on the back of the paperback (and elsewhere) that it is ‘a masterpiece’, I immediately - and I mean immediately - turned to page one and re-read it to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t and that second reading didn’t change my view.
One point I make in my critique (which at one point in the past few months grew to an unwieldy length of more than 10,000 words, but has since been cut back to about 6,000 by getting rid of as much of the shit as I can spot and several repetitions) is that - as far as I am concerned - all judgments of a ‘work of art’ are subjective, but that there is one very important proviso: given the greater experience some have, drawn from reading far more than the rest of us (and, obviously, in other fields, looking at far more paintings and drawings, and listening to far more music) it is fair to assume that they have a greater, more varied and nuanced context in which to set the literature, art and music they are commenting on. In short, their judgments and opinions might well regarded as better informed.
Certainly, and despite my claim that such judgements are essentially subjective, there can be and very often is a consensus that so and so ‘is a great writer’ and we, the great unwashed, would be foolish to dismiss the judgments of those who appear to know more about a certain area. Yet I still insist that at the end of the day each judgment is subjective for the simple reason that no judgment can be objective. If nothing else, how could we explain when the judgments of several critics and commentators on the same piece of work differ markedly?
Bearing in mind what Raymond Carver says above that ‘many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought’, how can be explain why for several decades academics and writers thought Hemingway and his work was the zenith of literary achievement and celebrated the man because of it? Discuss if you like, but the main thing that interests me is that I can be a little reassured that my apostasy on the matter of the ‘writer of genius’ Ernest Hemingway is not quite as insane as it might seem to some.
. . .
As part of my ‘research’ (those quote marks again, must stop trying to pretend I’m the modest sort) I came across and read two very entertaining books. The first is by the writer and Vanity Fair journalist Lesley M M Blume and is called Everybody Behaves Badly, The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. I can recommend it to everyone, even those who have no interest in Hemingway at all. Then recently, chasing up this link and that, I came across an equally entertaining book by Amanda Vaill called Hotel Florida: Truth, Love And Death In The Spanish Civil War. It was what Ms Vaill records in book as much as Ms Blume’s account of the genesis of Hemingway’s ‘masterpiece which persuaded me that my scepticism about ‘Papa’ Hemingway (and nickname he liked and encouraged, a detail about him which, to me at least, speaks volumes) was not entirely misplaced.
By 1936 and on the back of his first two novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, both bestsellers, Hemingway was able to cut something of a figure in the United States and beyond, and he loved it. He seems to have taken himself very seriously indeed and thought himself an important man of letters. Given the man-of-action persona he had developed - all that huntin’ and marlin fishin’ and big game huntin’ - his bombastic,
The matter was especially delicate as the only foreign support the Spanish government was getting came from Stalin and Soviet Russia - Britain, the US and France and pledged non-intervention (which also meant they would not supply any arms). The nationalist were not only supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but Italy sent several thousand troops to fight alongside Franco’s forces and Germany used the civil war as a testing ground for its air force as well as for new military techniques it was developing.
Hemingway was not very keen on communists (a bone of contention between him and the actively left-wing novelist John Dos Passos, who had nominally been a ‘friend’ since their Paris days, with whom, though, Hemingway was often arguing and falling out) but the only people supporting and fighting for the republic were socialists, anarchists and the myriad strains of communists - Leninists, Marxists and Trotskyists.
Hemingway had several reasons for going to Spain, not the least of which was seeking ‘material’ for a new novel. His latest literary triumph, A Farewell To Arms, had been published seven years earlier and since then he had only published two collections of short stories. Even his novel To Have And Have Not on which he had been working
The Hotel Florida, from which Ms Vaill got the title for her book, was a luxury hotel in the plaza del Callao in Madrid in which many of the journalists covering the Spanish civil war lived while the capital city, under siege by General Franco’s forces, was still in the hands of the republican government. In her book, Ms Vaill chronicles three years in the lives of five other individuals who briefly lived at the Hotel Madrid, including Hemingway’s lover and later wife Martha Gelhorn, the Hungarian photographer Endre Friedman, who was later known as Robert Capa, Friedman’s professional and romantic partner Gerda Taro, as well as the Spaniard Arturo Barea and his future wife, the Austrian Ilsa Kulcsar, who together ran the governments censorship office. By Vaill’s account these last two are perhaps the most sympathetic, although there is also something attractive about Capa and Taro. Both Hemingway and Gelhorn, in their own ways, come across as pains in the arse.
. . .
I had previously known little about Gelhorn except that she is celebrated today by bien pensant journalists as ‘probably the best war correspondent there has ever been’ or something like that. Perhaps her reputation is based on her subsequent career and perhaps she was a great war correspondent, but what Ms Vaill has established about her isn’t particularly admirable.
She came from a well-to-do St Louis family and attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania for a while before leaving without graduating to become a journalist. One notable detail about her career which is not much touted - and oddly, given its significance, it doesn’t rate a mention in her Wikipedia entry - was that an essay called Justice At Night in which she recounts being an eye-witness at the lynching in America’s Deep South, was pure fiction. That is all the more extraordinary because publishing the essay, at the behest of H G Wells, in whose London house she was lodging at the time (our Martha was well-connected - she was also besties with Eleanor Roosevelt) helped to make her reputation.
Yet even today the essay Justice At Night - or better the piece of fiction Justice At Night - is held up as an ‘inspirational piece of journalism’. Here is a good example, written in 2014, how Gelhorn’s ‘eye-witness account’. And here’s another example, from the founder and writer of Popbitch https://popbitch.com/ no less, who still hasn’t heard the news that Gelhorn’s piece was made up.
To be fair to Gelhorn I suspect the whole matter of her fictional ‘eyewitness’ account was more a case of a situation getting out of hand than any attempt on her part at outright fraud. The piece was written to impress H G Wells who thought her rather lazy for a supposedly working journalist and to prove she wasn’t just a silly blonde with silly ambitions. Wells was so impressed with it that he urged Gelhorn to get it published and she contacted her London agent. (She had one because she had previously published a memoir of the time she spent in Germany as the Nazis came to power and later an account of her travels through disadvantaged America).
Her agent sold it to the London magazine, The Spectator, and it was then picked up - and thus widely circulated - when Readers Digest and later The Living Age published it in the United States. By now she had reached a point of no return and coming clean would have seemed to her to be impossible. But she finally did come clean when several months later she was invited to talk about the incident she had written about in Justice At Night before Congress. She bit the bullet and fessed up.
She and Hemingway were very much tourists in Spain on their civil war sojourn, but persuaded themselves they were somehow doing something worthwhile by ‘reporting on the front’. Gelhorn was in Spain as a correspondent for Colliers Weekly and Hemingway was sending home dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). It was a lucrative gig for him: he was paid $500 for a cabled report and $1,000 for a typed dispatch sent back to the US.
Ms Vaill has established that in his first few trip to Spain, reporting for NANA, Hemingway made $120,000 - just over $2 million dollars in today’s money. Ironically, the pieces he was filing - political analyses and prognostications - were not what NANA wanted and when he filed his last piece (from Paris on his way back to the US) he was politely and pointedly asked not to file any more pieces: NANA obviously did not feel they were getting enough bangs for their bucks (in this case literally).
. . .
Pretty much everything I have read so far about Hemingway gives me the impression that he was a just a very, very lucky sod with ambitions and an infinite capacity for self-delusion. He certainly had several gifts, of which self-promotion and making the right friends were two, but as far as I can see none was a literary gift. Years ago I read A Farewell To Arms and several of the short stories, and I am well aware that to justify my sweeping statements about ‘Papa’ Hemingway, I really should read all of the man’s work. The trouble is I really don’t feel like it, and there is most certainly a great deal of stuff out there I know I would find more rewarding.
Although Hemingway always denied it, The Sun Also Rises was largely autobiographical and the characters in it readily identifiable. ‘Bill Gorton’ the old friend of the novel’ main character, Jake Barnes, was a composite based on two friends who had accompanied Hemingway and his first wife Hadley to Pamplona. One, Donald Ogden-Stewart, a writer and screenwriter - he wrote The Philadelphia Story and The Barretts Of Wimpole Street among other films - was one of Hemingway’s friends remarked that the novel ‘was so absolutely accurate [as to their 1925 stay in Pamplona] that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’. How’s that for a ‘writer of genius’?
Oh, and as for Hemingway’s much-vaunted dedication to the truth - his advice to writers is ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’, I’ve yet to understand what that means. Sounds just dandy, doesn’t it, but what the fuck does it mean?
But about one of the saddest incidents in the Spanish Civil War, when between May 3 and May 8 in Catalonia the various factions of the left - the anarchists, the socialists, the Stalin-supporting communists, the Trotskyists and the Marxists - turned on each other and fought their own civil war within the civil war Hemingway had nothing to say. No one knows why, but I suspect that for all his posturing about ‘the truth’, Hemingway just wasn’t interested.
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