A little treat (to keep the pot boiling and to cover my arse)

I’ve been busy with a lot of reading to get this Hemingway bollocks finished — I don’t want to start anything else until I do or it will fall by the wayside and sit on my conscience until the day I breathe my last — and also some writing.

In order to clear my head on what I am trying to do and regain some kind of oversight, I’ve slightly re-written what will become the preface to the piece I am writing. And as I am getting a little lax about posting entries here, I thought I might keep that particular pot boiling by posting that preface. It is pretty much in its final shape, though as I am a terrible tinkerer (those bloody commas!) I won’t claim that this is the final shape.

Pip, pip.

PS I get virtually no comments left on my blog except the occasional one from B. and P., but in this case, with this entry, I would very much appreciate feedback of all and every kind. I mean my view is that comments such as ‘this is a piece of unreadable, self-indulgent cack’ are, at the end of the day, far more useful (if reasons are given) than ‘brilliant!’, ‘astonishing!’, ‘I was and still am breathless with admiration!’ So don’t hold back.

PREFACE

You can find more background reading — reviews of Hemingway’s works,

commentaries, other papers to which I refer as well as a list of quotations

about Hemingway the writer and man here. 

THIS essay/critique/monograph/project — call it what you will — began life as an entry intended for my blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t even remember why I even thought about doing so — I had read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and when I had finished it, I was baffled that the blurb on the back of my paperback edition described it as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. It and he, I thought, seemed to be anything but.

Certainly the novel wasn’t bad and, certainly, the claim owed a great deal to publishers’ hyperbole, puffing up a product to ensure greater sales. But that notwithstanding, it was certainly, in my view, no ‘masterpiece’, and to describe Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’ was and is frankly ridiculous.

I was, however, aware that my scepticism of Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ was definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still widely regarded by many as ‘a

leading modernist writer’, ‘a stylistic innovator’ and, most dangerously for an apostate such as me, ‘one of the greatest American writers’. Was it really likely that most of the world — several biographers, academics in their hundreds and notably the Nobel Prize committee which had awarded Hemingway the prize of literature in 1954 — were wrong in their evaluation of the man and his work, and that I was right?

Intrigued and not a little concerned that I was risking making a fool of myself, I scoured the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view, and almost immediately I came across reviews of a book published in 2016 by the New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.

It was a serendipitous find: well-researched, extensively annotated, well-written and — not at all least — very entertaining, Ms Blume’s book gave a full account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris in the 1920s and of the week-long trip to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in 1925 upon which he based his novel. Pertinently it provided all the details and more for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises. Incidentally, I was amused and rather pleased to see that the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is entitled Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf.

The main title simply translates, as one might expect, as ‘Everybody Behaves Badly’; but tellingly the subtitle in English translates as ‘How Hemingway Created His Legend’, an insight by the German publisher which reflects one of the conclusions I have come to. In fact, this project is essentially about the Hemingway legend and how he

actively created it. (Although Ms Blume’s book refers to The Sun Also Rises as ‘Hemingway’s masterpiece’, I suspect that was her publisher’s choice of words, given that in her book and its account of Hemingway and the genesis of his novel, Ms Blume herself seems rather less adulatory.)

As I read Ms Blume’s book, I realised I had a problem: she referenced the several biographies of Hemingway and other books about the man, and I increasingly felt that to do justice to both my project and the man, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway’ — notably, if rather ludicrously, proclaimed in 1950 (in a New York Times review of Across The River And Into The Hills) by a fellow novelist and a literary rival, John O’Hara, as ‘the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ — and a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize, I would do well to tread carefully. So knowing far more about the man and his work — including reading more of it — seemed not just necessary but a wise course to take.

The books I read included most of the biographies. The first of these to be published, in 1967 just six years after Hemingway’s death, was by Carlos Baker. He had been sanctioned by Hemingway as his ‘official biographer’ and he had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow. But having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword. As Baker found in his research, Hemingway, a complex character, could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and thoroughly dishonest — but, as subsequent writers have acknowledged, Baker had to tread carefully: Welsh had already taken one writer to court over his memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost) and he wanted to ensure her continued help.

Baker’s volume was the definitive work for 18 years until Jeffrey Meyers published his biography in 1985. Two years later, in 1987, came the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work and Kenneth Lynn’s take on Hemingway, and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography. By the time they were writing, Hemingway’s work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of Hemingway, both the man and his work, than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.)

I did not bother reading Philip Young’s biography, which was written while Hemingway was still alive or A. E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I gather, were distinctly hagiographic and took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ all the tall stories and lies Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway in makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is more of a coffee-table book for which he did no original research. Then there’s a curious volume by Richard Bradford, published in 2019), which is notable for its outright hostility to Hemingway (and, I have to add, extremely poor editing.

Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway’s women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied on not just the emotional support of his wives but in two cases also their money. Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparatively slim volumes on the writer by Linda Wagner-Martin and Verna Kale, books on the man and his writing by Peter Griffin and Charles

A Fenton, and The Second Flowering, Malcolm Cowley’s volume of essays (which include two on Hemingway). From my point of view, Leonard J. Leff’s rather luridly titled Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and The Making Of American Celebrity Culture was especially interesting. It examines the growth of celebrity and pop culture in 1920s ‘jazz age’ America as well as developments in advertising and marketing, and how Ernest Hemingway and his literary career benefited from them.

The more I read and, as work on my project progressed (I had by then already written just under 15,000 words, much of which, it dawned on me, was junk), I also realised that given the standing Hemingway had, and for many still has, in modern literature, I would have to do more than simply examine The Sun Also Rises and question why it was and still is hailed as ‘a masterpiece’. It seemed to me that the central conundrum was: just how and why did Hemingway, essentially a middling writer of some talent but no more than others, reach such extraordinary worldwide prominence?

. . .


In the course of his writing career, roughly just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — perhaps even, compared to other writers, surprisingly little; and despite the acclamation his early work met, even by the mid-1930s, with the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) some critics were beginning to have their doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier. It was summed up well by Matthew J. Brucolli, in Scott And Ernest: The Authority Of Failure and the Authority of Success:

‘Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’

With the exception of For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), which became a bestseller, not least because in the US it was chosen as a Book Of The Month, and 12 years later The Old Man And The Sea, another commercial success, not least because it was published in its entirety by Life magazine in an edition which sold more than five million copies, Hemingway’s scant work from the 1930 on (much of it published posthumously) was regarded as not very good at all. Writing in the New York Times in September 1950, about Across The River And Into The Trees (which, inexplicably, so impressed John O’Hara) the Times former literary editor and by now columnist J. Donald Adams, confessed:

‘To me, Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.’

Hemingway’s one-time friend the novelist John Dos Passos was even more brutal. He observed in a letter to a friend:

‘How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?’

My project took shape: it was no longer to investigate why The Sun Also Rises was and still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and, on the strength of it, Hemingway hailed as ‘a genius’; I would examine not just aspects of Hemingway, his writing and his rise to worldwide fame, but other issues which obliquely touched on them.

I suppose it would be best to view this project as a series of individual essays. One of these considers, on the back of Virginia Woolf’s pithy remarks about critics (as part of her review of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories), whether objective judgment of a piece of writing is even possible. Another looks at Hemingway’s writing ‘style’, his ‘iceberg theory’ of writing and why, exactly, it is celebrated and regarded — not

least by Hemingway — as an ‘innovation’. A third considers the commercial background and imperatives which helped to ensure Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel became success. I also wonder why Hemingway is still touted as ‘a modernist’ writer, why and how the myth took hold that The Sun Also Rises portrayed the despair of a ‘lost generation’, and I consider the force of his personality on his rise to fame.

Interspersed with these short pieces are accounts of Hemingway’s life, mainly of the early years in Paris and a little later in the 1930s when his fame was consolidated and he began to play the part of ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the celebrated hard-drinking, hard-living, action man writer. Incidentally, the sobriquet ‘Papa’ was self-awarded by Hemingway by the mid-1920s and he encouraged everyone to address him with the name, but no one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it. I have not done any original research, but I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have any of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth. All the views expressed here are my own.



When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following two observations. The first is from Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers:

‘No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.’

Then there is the comment by Michael Reynolds made in Hemingway: The Paris Years, the second volume of his five-volume biography:

‘Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.