A few weeks ago, I think it was, I let on that I was writing a quite long piece along the lines of — I exaggerate, of course, but just a little — what a fraud and piss-poor writer Ernest Hemingway was (in my humble, quite possibly ill-informed opinion), Nobel Prize for Literature and all. And what should you never do? Why, publish — prematurely — work in progress as I am dong now: it often makes poor reading, but...
Writing my take on how, contrary to accepted judgment, Hemingway’s nominal debut novel The Sun Also Rises is not ‘a masterpiece’ and the man himself is not ‘a writer of genius’ has been slow going because I am not the most diligent of lazy bastards. But I am getting there, and today I have written another bit, and I decided to post it here in the hope of getting just a little feedback.
Now I have to say that apart from B., who gives occasional feedback, and P., a friend and M. my sister who both give very occasional feedback, writing this blog and wondering whether anyone actually likes it is like trying to thread a needle at the far end of a deep cave. In fact the only reason I do it is because I like writing, not because I have anything at all ‘to say’.
(It’s always puzzled me why, when you hear Bookclub or some such on Radio 4, the novel being discussed, is these days invariably an ‘ecological thriller’, a ‘memoir of growing up gay in the industrial heartlands’, ‘what it means to be a Somali asylum seeker living in the Forest of Dean’, then for good measure a ‘dystopian vision of the future unless we all stick two bricks in the lavatory cistern and stop global warming’. And on and on and on. OK, we know already, and I doubt there is a novel novel still to be written. All we can do is write it in a different way. As they say, it’s not the joke but the way you tell it. But all that, too, is by the by.)
So, ladies and gents, boys and girls — feedback, please! If you think what I have written is a load of old cack, comment and say so. If you find it interesting, please do the same. But let me, please, please, please know that you are all alive and that I don’t actually — unusual and unlikely though it would certainly be — really do live in some solipsistic hell.
WHETHER Hemingway’s set of ‘rules on writing’ and his ‘theory of omission’ should be taken seriously or not is neither here nor there; but from what we know of the genesis of his supposed portrayal in The Sun Also Rises of a — or as many would prefer the — ‘lost generation’, the prominence and spurious significance it has achieved over the past 90-odd years is more than a little ridiculous.
In those 90-odd years, what is understood by the term ‘lost generation’ is, to quote Hemingway himself, very much a moveable feast, and rooting around the net, it is noticeable how often different sites simply quote one another when they attempt to define it. A great many, particularly sites which provide ‘study notes’ on Hemingway’s novel, simply repeat this from Wikipedia or slight variations of it: ‘Lost in this respect means disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years.’
Doesn’t that, one is encouraged to ask, pretty much describe a sizeable minority of every generation returning from war, whether that war was World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War or both Iraq Wars? I rather think it does. So one is then encouraged to ask quite why a particular ‘lost generation’, the one we are told which saw action in World War I and washed up in Paris in the 1920s and notably whose lives were chronicled in Hemingway’s novel, should be singled out as the ‘lost generation’? Isn’t, perhaps, for some an inability to settle down on returning home from fighting — in Britain a disproportionate number of homeless served in the armed forces — a common feature of every society in every age?
Certainly in Britain there was a huge problem with limbless and often mad army and naval veterans roaming the country after the Napoleonic Wars had been concluded. And now that we are far more aware of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by many ex-servicemen, shouldn’t we, perhaps, rethink what might cause such disorientation and lack of direction?
So, for example, reviewing a re-issue of Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast in its Books section (‘Reworked, reshuffled, and for what?’, subtitled ‘Ernest Hemingway’s heirs have desecrated his classic Paris memoir’, October 24, 2009, p42) a Vancouver Star contributor, the novelist and poet Brian Brett, writes:
‘The exquisite little volume [A Moveable Feast] was instantly recognized [in 1962 when it was posthumously published] as a masterpiece for the way it captured the life of an impoverished young writer in the fever of Paris in the early ’20s where he lived among a cluster of soon-to-be-great artistic companions now known as the Lost Generation. What luminaries he met! James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, the generous Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald.’
This might just be a case of a writer picking on one definition rather than another, or simply just getting it all wrong and a sub-editor/copy-editor not quite being on the ball, but the ‘luminaries’, Hemingway’s ‘artistic companions’ in the ‘fever of Paris in the early ’20s’, would certainly have been taken aback to be described as a ‘lost generation’. Ford Maddox Ford did see action after working in a British government propaganda department (he enlisted at the age of 41), but Pound, Joyce and Eliot did not serve, and although Fitzgerald enlisted, the war ended before he could be deployed to Europe.
I don’t doubt that they all felt a moral disgust for the justifications for that pointless way and at what had been perpetuated by all sides, but on the other hand the zeal and artistic dedication of these self-conscious
. . .
The decade after ‘the Great War’ had ended in November 1918 certainly saw a fair degree of turmoil, change and upheaval throughout Europe, but despite the threat of revolution in Germany and rampant inflation in the Weimar Republic until 1924, and despite industrial problems in Britain which culminated in the General Strike in May 1926, economically most nations experienced increased prosperity from the early 1920s on until the depression which followed the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. Even France’s description of that decade as les années folles (‘the crazy years’) was more admiring than pejorative. Because of the number of men who were killed in the war — an estimated nine million on all sides — there was certainly an imbalance of the sexes, yet that was by no means the whole picture, and the social upheavals experienced in the so-called ‘Roaring Twenties’ (with the second half of the decade even referring to itself as the ‘Golden Twenties’) also saw women feel more liberated socially and sexually, possibly because there were fewer men available to partner with.
The decade also saw the development and the widespread adoption of domestic gadgets, affordable cars and telephones; the film industry grew enormously, and the public began to celebrate stars of the silver screen and radio; writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald were also feted and became celebrities, and (Lesley Blume records) fans would even queue up to buy a new edition of a magazine if they knew a new short story by their favourite writer was being published; jazz became the popular music of its day, and the modernism in arts of which Hemingway was so pleased to be seen as a part sent them off in a wholly new direction.
Some — many of the men who did survive the war had to live with, as did The Sun Also Rises narrator Jakes Barnes, both physical and mental wounds — might well have been felt disoriented and directionless, and for them the only solace and release might well have come from a bottle. Others, though also drinking a great deal, rather enjoyed it. In fact, drinking to excess, whether occasionally or regularly, has been a feature of a young life for as long as I can remember and, I’m led to believe, for even longer: are we to accept that essentially we are only doing — or only did — it to seek solace from some pain or other? Might it not sometimes be the case that young folk like to party because they like to party? The question is rhetorical.
. . .
That search of the net came up with varying definitions of who the ‘lost generation’ were (and, as I point out above, many parroting each other), and the online Encyclopaedia Britannica mainly opts for the literary angle. It writes that the ‘lost generation’ is a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s’ but it then goes on to muddy the water a little by adding ‘The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation’.
It adds: ‘The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the post-war world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.’
That description is certainly plausible enough, but it does ignore the simple fact — acknowledged by Hemingway himself in short piece he wrote from Paris for the Toronto Star — that for Americans the very favourable dollar/franc exchange rate allowed them to live extremely cheaply in Paris, at the time regarded as the world’s most vibrant artistic centre.
This would have been especially encouraging for those like Dos Passos, e e cummings, MacLeish, Crane and Fitzgerald intent on making a name for themselves, especially as earning a living from writing, painting or composing was always precarious — Fitzgerald was already doing very nicely, but he was the exception. In fact, there were an estimated 200,000 English-speaking ex-pats living in Paris at the time, although not all of them were American and certainly not all of them were would-be writers, painters and musicians. If you had just left college, didn’t want to settle into a career just yet and wanted to see the world a little, a spell in Paris living high on the hog for very little will have had its attractions.
Some who went to live and work in the French capital might well have done so because they felt a ‘spiritual alienation’ from the United States and preferred to breathe the more nourishing air of Paris, but it is also certainly easier to be idealistic when you are able to live a pleasant and comfortable life on a pittance (and most certainly when you are not starving).
In relation to Hemingway’s novel describing — so the claim — a group of ‘disoriented’ and ‘directionless’ expatriates, there is a further difficulty with the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s description of a ‘lost generation’ that had moved to Europe because of the ‘spiritual alienation’ it felt from the United States. Yet when Jake Barnes’s friend Bill Gorton does allude to Jake being an ex-pat and tells him ‘You're an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés, it reads far more as though he were criticising his friend for choosing to live in Europe rather than in the United States, ‘spiritual alienation’ or not. Jake, his friend Bill tells him has been ‘ruined’ by fake European standards, has become ‘precious’ and has ‘lost touch’ with ‘the soil’ (presumably American soil).
So what is going on? If Jake (and those like him) escaped the United States because they felt ‘spiritually alienated’, they had, one assumes, done the only thing they could to seek some kind of salvation and sanctuary. But if in doing so they had ‘ruined’ themselves, either way they were ‘lost’. Was that what Hemingway was getting at? Was that his point? I don’t think so. I just think he hadn’t quite thought it all through.
But then the claim, which provided an essential element of Hemingway’s overnight success and later reputation, that in his novel he had skilfully defined the despair of a hopelessly disengaged younger and ‘lost’ generation by examining the lives of five of them is full of such inconsistencies and contradictions. Like a great deal in Hemingway’s work, career and reputation from every angle it is approached nothing quite fits.
