I began it, in July 1918, after reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel (often called his ‘debut novel’, but in fact his second) The Sun Also Rises. The blurb on the back of it — the publisher’s blurb as in ‘the publisher who makes money from selling copies of it and the more copies he sells, the more dosh he rakes in’ — described the novel as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. I thought it was neither, but I was aware that Hemingway was, apparently, regarded as ‘one of our greatest writers’ and had even been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I decided to write an entry for this blog wondering out aloud quite why the publisher made his claims.
I have described the genesis of my project in earlier posts and won’t repeat it all here, except to say it very quickly became apparent to me that to do my argument justice — my argument is summed up by the title I have given the Hemingway blog (‘The Hemingway Enigma: How Did A Middling Writer Achieve Such Global Literary Fame’) — I was obliged to do more reading of his work and, for want of a better word, a little ‘research’ (which in my case is just another word for ‘reading’). And that’s what I have been doing.
In that first year I wrote about 15,000 words, possibly a little more, as I was writing several files at the same time. But when a little later I came to read what I had written, with a more critical eye (it is always worthwhile letting a little time elapse before going over what you have written), I realised it was all rather superficial, not to say quite adolescent, crap. So I started over again.
By then I was more familiar with the life of Ernest Hemingway and the man himself, and I realised it would be pointless just to rehash the various biographies and memoirs I’d read, quite apart from irrelevant to answering the question I was asking: How did a middling writer . . . ? etc. To do that, I realised, I would have to write a series of ‘essays’ (the quotation marks are suitable for conveying how nervous I still am in part about what I am doing and that I’m running a very real risk of looking quite foolish) on various aspects of his rise to fame. And one of those ‘essays’ had to be the most dangerous one of all to undertake: what is ‘art’ and what do we mean by ‘art’?
It is, though, necessary to write about it and outline just what ‘art’ might be seen as because all the books, paper, memoirs, features and dissertations I have so far read on the writer refer to ‘Hemingway’s art’. The problem is that the still widely accepted use of the word ‘art’ places it high, high, high on a pedestal and even the mere mention of ‘art’ in connection with Hemingway is inclined the reinforce and spuriously substantiate the claims for him as being a ‘writer of genius’.
Undoubtedly, Hemingway did have a certain facility when writing — his journalism, though as facile as most such journalistic pieces are — is very readable. And he easily mastered the trick of writing in such as way as to persuade the reader he didn’t just know what he was talking about, but knew a great deal more and would reveal it if, well, you know, he were able to do so . . .
It’s just that in my view the end product of ‘Hemingway’s art’ was not and is not particularly good. I grant that it is not exactly bad, either — well, not to begin with and he certainly had a greater gift for short fiction than novel-length works — but I can’t get my head around the claims made for it. So, I realised, I shall also have to write about ‘art’, or better, ‘art’ as I understood it.
. . .
As it happens I had for some time been wondering and thinking about ‘what do we mean by art’ and had already reached some conclusions. I was, and still am, also aware that minds far greater than mine have done the same and that intellectually I am simply not in the same league as they.
Yet despite that I felt and feel, my observations might, at least, be pertinent. And by way of practising, rehearsing so to speak, what I want to write on ‘Hemingway’s art’, I thought I might do so in this entry. Some of the points I shall make I’ve made before and if, by chance, you have previously dipped into this blog, they might sound familiar.
There are several jumping off points when wading into the quagmire of ‘what is art and what do we mean by art’ and none is particularly better than any other. So I shall start with this observation: we often hear the question ‘. . . but is it art?’ or hear the declaration ‘. . . but it’s not art’; and we often hear a distinction being made between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’.
To my mind — and I should like you always to keep in mind the proviso that mine is merely one point of view and that I’m not, as too many do, in any way laying down the law — the thought behind each of those first two statements excludes the third.
If, on the one hand we wish to distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘not art’ and on the other to distinguish between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’, surely that begs the question: which is better/more worth our attention — ‘bad art’ or ‘not art’? That is: is ‘bad art’ still ‘better’ than ‘not art’? Is there some kind of hierarchy, some consolation for whoever is deemed to have produced ‘bad art’ that it is, at least, ‘still art’.
Well, I’ll let you off the hook and stop demanding that these questions should be answered because in my view ‘art’ is something very, very straightforward and simple and is created by the minute the world over: it is nothing special, that the badly painted, out-of-of proportion still life produced by 64-year-old widow Daphne Rutherford in her Leek, Staffs, Women’s Institute art class is as much ‘art’ and a ‘work of art’ as Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Certainly, Holbein’s work might hold your attention for longer than Mrs Rutherford’s Bowl Of Fruit At Sunset, but that is not the point.
Granted, in the estimation of many Blinding Lights by The Weeknd can’t hold a candle to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Freddie Freeloader by Miles Davis, but I suggest there is absolutely nothing intrinsically ‘better’ about that fourth movement compared to Blinding Lights: the preference is wholly subjective.
I had to look up what in pop terms is recent and found Blinding Lights on You Tube. I’d heard of The Weeknd, though I’d never heard his music before, and in my — admittedly also subjective — view Blinding Lights is pretty bloody ordinary, pretty bloody indistinguishable from 1,001 other tracks with whom it is vying for prominence and really can’t hold a candle to either of the other the Beethoven or the Miles Davis. But that isn’t the point: I suggest again that there is nothing whatsoever intrinsically ‘better’ about Beethoven’s fourth movement than The Weeknd’s track. Both are ‘works of art’.
At this point many will think ‘the guy has lost the plot’. Actually, I haven’t done so at all. The essential issue here is that for decades, for centuries even, we have got into the habit of genuflecting before ‘art’ and insisting there is something very special about ‘works of art’, often, to make that point, referring to ‘real art’ and ‘real works of art’. It is now a convention, a tradition.
Even all those, often quite self-conscious, iconoclasts and would-be iconoclasts who demand regularly something of ‘a clean sweep’ of the art world, ‘away with the old and in with the new’ are dancing to the same old tune, worshipping the same old gods. It’s just the gods have different costumes (and the young Turks inevitably become the dinosaurs a new generation of young Turks demands should ‘make way!’ And it is most certainly not the tune I am singing).
Perhaps to clarify what I have just written: both that fourth movement and The Weeknd’s latest release are ‘works of art’. But if many of us value the one — the fourth movement — more than the other, it is not because one is ‘a work of art’ (‘it is art’) and the other isn’t. It is because as a work of art the one achieves more than the other. And I am using such a vague phrase not just because I can’t think of a better one, but because quite what it achieves, the value of what it achieves and whether or not it should be given more respect are entirely separate questions.
Over the years many claims are made for ‘art’ and ‘works of art’. ‘Art’, some have declared, has a ‘moral dimension’. At other times the demand is made that ‘art must be political!’ Towards the end of the nineteenth century the cry
As I understand it — I haven’t yet read the book What Is Art in which he makes that claim, but dear hearts, ever the dedicated and responsible man of integrity I have ordered it and shall read it once Amazon have delivered it next Tuesday as promised — but I gather Tolstoy, who became something of a religious nut in his later years when he put down his thoughts on art, insisted that to be regarded as ‘art’ a work must be grounded in the truths of christianity.
So he has already limited what might become ‘art’ in his definition, and ruled out as potential producers of art all those who had never heard of one Jesus of Nazareth. And what if a writer puts pen to paper, paint to canvas or quill to score sheet to do something entirely different than ‘communicating to other people a feeling he once experience’? What if she or he simply wants to entertain, to engage? Would that preclude anything she or he produced from ‘being art’?
You might or might not agree with these and the many other demands and claims made of and for ‘art’. My point is that all such demands, definitions and claims are, in one context, quite irrelevant. ‘Art’ is essentially nothing special at all. Individual ‘works of art’ might be thought of as special — the obvious examples would be that fourth movement I keep mentioning, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Miles Davis’s album Kind Of Blue and many other works you reading this can think of. But that is because of the qualities some find in them as individual pieces, not because they are works of ‘art’.
Some ‘art’ interests or engages or entertains us more than other ‘art’. Some art does have a moral dimension — Dickens’s novels are said to have tried to highlight the awful working conditions many children were forced to endure in his time. Some art might have a ‘political’ dimension — Goya’s Black Paintings and Picasso’s Guernica could be cited as examples. But, I suggest, these dimensions are particular to each work, not general attributes of ‘works of art’.
. . .
Another, as far as I am concerned glaring, anomaly in all our talk of ‘art’ and ‘works of art’, ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ is the very inconvenient distinction we are obliged to make — if we are honest — between an ‘objective judgment’ and a ‘subjective judgment’. Crucially, the one can never be the other, and no number of subjective judgments reaching the same conclusion can transmute majority judgment into one‘objective judgment’.
Equally crucially, many works are regarded as ‘masterpieces’ simply because it is now accepted that is what they are, that is the general consensus and because ‘the critics’ say so. But it is hard to deny, because it is impossible to deny, that each and every critic’s judgment is, at the end of the day, ‘subjective’. In An Essay On Criticism which was her review of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf has some very trenchant things to say about ‘critics’ and the power they seem to wield. Thus strictly speaking they cannot say ‘Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’, but ‘I think that Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’.
At this point some might point out that the judgments of ‘the critics’ is worth far more than my (or your) judgment. And to my subsequent question ‘why’, they might respond that ‘the critics have far more experience and that their judgment thus carries far more weight’. Perhaps.
Granted they have read, seen and heard more than I have (and thus their views might demand more attention than mine do), their judgment is still a ‘subjective judgment’, just one of many. And what are we to make of the fact that all too often the judgments of critics contradict each other: this is ‘a masterpiece’ one will say, to which another will respond ‘rubbish!’ In those cases, to whose wagon do we hitch our horse so that we — or those for whom these matters are important — hold ‘the right opinion’?
That last point highlights another difficulty with ‘art’: the part snobbery, money and the venal interests of the various ‘arts’ industries play in deciding what is art and what isn’t. If I have persuaded you and you have now adopted my position on ‘art’ – that ‘art’ is commonplace and than some ‘works of art’ are valued more than others not because of some intrinsic essence, but because of the work itself — that won’t trouble you at all.
But there are many folk who are desperate to be seen to have the ‘right’ opinion among their peers, who have enough money to buy ‘art’ and are desperate to buy the ‘right’ works and who rely on the folk who decide that ‘this is art’ and ‘this is not art’ to ensure they buy the right shite.
Then there are others who buy art as an investment, the essential point being that they expect what they have bought to command a price higher than what they paid if and when it comes to be sold. If they bought a piece because as ‘art’ it commanded a high price, but if it were from one week to the next to be deemed not to be ‘art’ its price would fall substantially, they are very keen to ensure ‘it is still art’ — or, at least, it is still seen as ‘art’.
Thus the arbiters of what is and what is not ‘art’ become important people who would be decidedly put out if, as I suggest, ‘art’ is commonplace and has no intrinsic value at all. Certainly, a picture by Picasso might still command a high price at auction, but now its snob value would be more important, not its status as ‘art’.
Actually, that was always the case, but remained unspoken. You do not tell a wealthy man or woman about to buy a picture (whose sale will earn you a nifty commission) that they are not women or men of taste at all but simply out-and-out snobs with more money than sense.
Auction houses, publishers, concert halls and promoters, galleries and museums also like to get in on the act: it is quite obvious why an auction house is keen that there should be something ‘special’ about this work: the price is will fetch and the 10% commission they charge (or however much they charge) will be accordingly higher. The same is true of art galleries. Museums, many of which are funded by public money, must be careful that what they purchase with that public money passes muster, and having a group of ‘art experts’ declare the unmade bed they have just purchased is ‘art’ goes a considerable way of getting them off the hook. In fact one unmade bed, Tracey’s Emin’s by now famous My Bed was sold in 2014 for just over £2.5 million. If a gallery shelled out £2.5 million on my unmade bed and, crucially, no one had yet declared it to be ‘art’, there would be hell to pay.
Incidentally, one surefire way of assuring a ‘work of art’ acquires credibility is to wash it in pseudo-intellectual verbiage: on the website artnet Emin’s My Bed was described as an ‘iconic installation’ that ‘offers an uncompromising glimpse into the life of the then 35-year-old after a traumatic relationship breakdown’ — note
the strategic use of the buzzwords ‘iconic’ and ‘uncompromising’. I doubt whether anything produced by, say, unemployed 35-year-old mother-of-five Sharon O’Connor of the Wordsworth Estate, in Ebbw Vale, to provide an ‘uncompromising’ glimpse into the traumatic breakdown of her latest relationship — the bucket of vomit she produced after guzzling too much vodka and lime to soothe her heart — would garner quite as much attention. Perhaps I’m being too cynical.
. . .
Other ‘essays’ I shall have to write for this Hemingway project include just how ‘modernist’ was Hemingway and, as I allude to above, the spurious role the subjective judgment of some plays in the advancement of many a career.
I also want to look into the role the growth and evolution of advertising and marketing played in establishing Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’, and how our need for celebrities — by no means a new craving as the Lord Byron might have testified — also helped push ‘Papa’ Hemingway ‘to the top’.
By the way, Hemingway himself invented the nickname ‘Papa’ and insisted everyone should use it. As Michael Reynolds astutely points out in the third volume of his biography of the writer, commenting on Archibald MacLeish calling him ‘Pappy’:
Archie thought it referred to Ernest’s fatherhood, but he could not have been more wrong. To be ‘Papa’ was to have authority over whatever the game happened to be.