In response to Deckard. (Who he? Oh, never mind)

Someone (‘Deckard’) left a comment on this website on a previous post and this was going to be my response. However, it got a little long, so I thought I might post it here and direct Deckard to this entry instead of leaving my response in the comment section. That also means I shall have another blog entry under my belt. It might, perhaps, help if I preceded it with Deckard’s comment but what the hell. Here is a link to the page where he left his comment.

I’ll start off by being facetious: a bus time-table ‘starts nowhere and ends nowhere’ except that it’s sequence is linear and it starts ‘in the morning’ (birth) and ends ‘in the evening; (death). Isn’t that ‘just like life’? Actually, you’ll get as many definitions of ‘life’ as there are snake oil salesmen, ‘mystics’ and self-help gurus. At the end of the day all you can do is pay your money and make your choice. None is ‘true’, none is ‘false’.

You might have argued — but you didn’t — that ‘because life is unpredictable and we can’t know what fortune or misfortune it might bring, Hemingway championed stoicism in the light of that unpredictability: deal with what life throws at you and be true to yourself, you have no other choice’. Or something. But as I say you didn’t.

I worked for newspapers all my life, as a reporter for several years, then — most pertinently —as a sub-editor / copy editor (they are the same thing), and I am very familiar with that you can do with words and ‘meaning’, how you can subtly manipulate the reader, which, face it is essentially what ‘literature’ is all about, the one variable being the ‘why’ and for what purpose you might try to manipulate the reader.

As for ‘reducing the veil between literature and life’, there are as many reasons and motivations for trying to produce ‘literature’ as there are writers trying to do so, and even more if those writers have been drinking. (NB I get very irritated by all the snoots who lay down the law on what ‘is literature’ and what ‘isn’t literature’. If you’re interested on knowing why, read this.)

Joyce might have thought A Clean Well-lighted Place was masterly, but I don’t. It is simply a slight take on despair and loneliness and little more. And I have read enough, often quite off-the-wall, interpretations of Hemingway’s novels and stories now to treat a great many with more than a pinch of salt. You mention the ‘lost generation’. Well, this quote might interest you on that score. It is by Frank L. Ryan in his book The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway:

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

There’s this from Hemingway’s friend John Dos Passos (who he later lampooned in To Have And Have Not) who reviewed The Sun Also Rises for the New Masses and wrote:

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight . . . When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona . . . reminds you of a travel book . . . it’s time to hold an inquest.

Think about it: after just one (for its age) ‘shocking’ volume of ‘modernist’ short stories, the novel everyone had high hopes for was already creating second thoughts. Here’s what the Times Literary Supplement said about The Sun Also Rises at the time:

Now comes Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises] . . . more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different . . . The Spanish scenes give us something of the quality of Mr Hemingway’s earlier book, but they hardly qualify the general impression of an unsuccessful experiment.

There’s this from Time magazine:

A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young author Hemingway. His short work [In Our Time] bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately . . . Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables in . . . Paris. He has chosen to immortalise the semi-humorous love tragedy of an insatiable young English war widow and an unmanned US soldier . . . The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained, quite subtle . . . But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake’s favorites, and presumably, author Hemingway’s, too, ‘Oh, what the hell.’

Then there’s this from another Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar, Matthew 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.’

That last observation from Brucolli is pertinent: the thinking became ‘this story/novel is good because it’s by Ernest Hemingway and because it’s good, Hemingway must be a good writer.

I have spent a great deal of time on a website I have called The Hemingway Enigma and you can find it here. I’m a firm believer in the subtlety of the world — at what point in a rainbow is it ‘more red than blue’? — but if I had to reduce my take on Hemingway to ‘a soundbite’, it would be this: he was a moderately talented writer, though limited in scope, who struck very lucky for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with him, and who came to believe his own bullshit. (Tip for younger folk reading this: don’t ever do that, it’s a real no-no).

In his book Fame Became Him, John Raeburn has analysed the ‘Letters’ Hemingway wrote for Esquire (for which he was paid bloody well, far more than other contributors) and demonstrates how Hemingway came to be accepted as an authority and expert in all kinds of areas — wine and find dining, sport, warfare, travelling, hunting and

fishing and so on — simply because he told people he was. It was that simple. He was even said to have had a literary reputation in Paris long before he had published a word: he was known as ‘a good writer’ because he said he was. Hemingway talked a very good game.

In fact he was said not really to be a very good shot (his dicky left eye didn’t help) and all his talk of ‘going to war in 1918’ boils down to four weeks with the Red Cross, three of which involved driving ambulances several miles behind the front. Oh, then there’s the claim that he was the youngest commissioned officer in Italy’s Arditi (their ‘shock troops’). There was a great deal of the Walter Mitty about Hemingway.

What, you ask, Hemingway the Nobel Laureate? Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? In short, yes. These things do happen: look up ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, ‘the Hitler Diaries’, ‘The Turin Shroud’ and many more, all very good examples of how we believe what we want to believe, often merely because that’s what our peers believe.

Oscar Wilde is reputed to have remarked about the passing of Nell Trent in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop:

‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears . . . of laughter.’

Something similar might be said about the ‘passionate’ love affair of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkly in A Farewell To Arms. Anyone who can seriously accept as even halfway real the adolescent coo-cooing between the two lovers and their eternal declarations of love for the other has not matured beyond his or her teenage years.

Henry and Barkly (who strikes you as not even escaping one dimension) talk of very little else in the nine to ten months they know each other. Not one conversation between them is recorded by Hemingway which might have come from anywhere but a trashy romantic novelette. A writer of genius? Up to a point, Lord Copper.

. . .

You mention the ‘masterly’ short story (in James Joyce's opinion, though not mine) A Clean, Well-lighted Place. Well, here is a story for you, a true story:

On Christmas Day 1973, I was working as a barman in public bar of The Galleon in Dock Street, Dundee (and I have no idea now why the pubs were open but they were). The pub had two other lounge bars, but they were empty. It was just me, the manager and a man of about 60 getting steadily drunker and talking about killing himself.

With nothing better to do, except every now than then to get him one more of what he was drinking every, I outlined to him why he shouldn’t bother topping himself and that, don’t worry, things will get better. In those days in Scotland bars shut at 10pm, so at 10pm we kicked him out and shut up.

Then on my way home up the Perth Road, through completely empty streets, I encountered another drunk. He was well away, steaming. He was wearing a flat cap and I took this off, stuck a £10 note inside it and put it back on his head. Why? Because 450 odd miles away from my family, I thought it would be nice to give a least someone a present, and it tickled me pink to imagine his astonishment the following day, or the day after that, or the day after that to discover that £10 in his cap.

He would, not doubt, believe it ‘a miracle’. I knew and know better (and that £10 would now be worth just under £100 ($126) today). He, too, might, like you, suggest that ‘life is absurd’. Actually, life ‘is’ merely what we choose to make of it at the time. It is no one fixed thing.

In the picture above, ‘X’ marks the spot where my good deed took place and I gave a Scottish drunk £10 for Christmas at about 11pm on December 25, 1973, as I made my way home. I can remember the occasion as though it took place just 48 years ago! It was just opposite the building where the Students’ Union then was (they have long had a spanking new one). I have reproduced the picture in B&W because this was another era and things were different then.