Hemingway: The Postwar Years And The Posthumous Novels – Rose Marie Burwell

I have to confess I gave up on this book, and as far as I can recall I’ve never before given up on a book. I’ve sometimes been tempted, certainly, but I have so far managed to resist the temptation. But with Ms Burwell’s production, I threw in the towdl, and I should explain why.

For the past few years, I have been engaged on a project, already a website and soon to be printed up as a book once I have finished re-writing it. (Anyone coming across the website is unlikely to land on the first page and will

land on any page depending upon their search terms; it the visitor is also unlikely to read its pages in sequence, so to avoid confusion in references, there is a great deal of necessary repetition from page to page. This could not be allowed to remain in the printed work.)

It is called ‘The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’, and that title will tell you succinctly what I think of a writer still regarded by many as ‘one of America’s greatest’: he most certainly wasn’t that.

What I write about Hemingway is, of course, just an ‘opinion’, but then so are the claims of everyone else, whether a ‘Hemingway champion’ such as Burwell or, like me, those baffled that his fiction, his ‘code’ theme and the man himself can be take seriously.

(Gore Vidal summed it up well in one of his essays when he noted that “American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like [Ernest] Hemingway and not seen the joke?”)

The real problem is that for many – including Burwell – Hemingway’s ‘genius’ and the status of his novels as ‘masterpieces’ are long-established, copper-bottomed facts. And they will not be gainsaid on the matter despite, for me, more than enough evidence that as a writer he generally had feet of clay (and that is being kind).

Certainly, his rise to prominence came about for complex reasons, but the important ones factors – both personal and external – had nothing to do with with any putative literary ability.

For me he had a talent for journalistic writing (which he forswore and which he shares with a great many other journalists) and descriptions of nature. But apart from possibly four or five short stories – and he only wrote less than 60, far less than all the ‘greats’ regarded, not least by Hemingway himself, as his peers – his writing was at best workaday and at worst really quite bad.

The Sun Also Rises finally boils down to a sad little non-love story, and A Farewell To Arms is basically just a Boys’ Own adventure story.

To Have And Have Not, cobbled together from two already publish short stories with a longer addendum, is a joke if it offered – as Hemingway did – as ‘serious literature’. For Whom The Bell Tolls is in part another adventure story, in part longwinded and in part quite dire; and that was it as far as the novels are concerned. The least said about Across The River And Into The Trees, the better.

Some rate The Old Man And The Sea as ‘a return to form’, but other critics worried at the time that at best it was Hemingway parodying himself, and some, like me, regard it as mawkish guff larded with some very cack-handed Christian symbolism.

He could not write characters, and with the exception of his first heroine, Brett Ashley and Pilar in Bell, his female characters often don’t even escape one dimension, let alone two.

I can accept opinions contrary to mine and I enjoy discussing our differences, but Burwell accepts without question that the posthumous novels were ‘great’.

So reading her book – as far as I got – was, in a way, like reading one of those goddam-awful pseud0-scholarly potboilers, popular with impressionable and spotty male teenagers, which try to ‘prove’ that many ‘ancient gods’, ‘aliens’ and I don’t know what else arrived ‘from space’ and had a hand in establishing mankind on earth.

Reading Burwell’s book is too much like being subjected to a non-stop lecture by some bore who is convinced ‘they’ are ‘behind it all’, rule our lives and who intends to convince you, too, of the fact, whether you like it or not.

When you are reading Burwell, you want to cry out ‘but Ms Burwell, you can’t just make claim after claim after bloody claim as though it were all hard fact and the gospel truth’. But she does and we are stymied: as readers there is nothing we can do about it.

So I finally gave up.

A couple of real facts about Hemingway’s two ‘major’ posthumously published novels, The Garden Of Eden and Islands In The Stream: he worked on both intermittently and in tandem from the late 1940s until some point in the mid-1950s when he stored the manuscripts in bank vault in Havana.

Both manuscripts were unwieldy and were substantially cut and edited before Hemingway’s publisher, Scribner’s, released them. And there is a strong suggestion that both were published more to squeeze as much cash out of Hemingway’s reputation as possible.

In the editing process of Eden whole chunks of ‘the plot’ were discarded and the work was reshaped into some kind of readable form. In the case of Islands, the novel consisted of three ‘parts’, none of which much gels with the other two.

The first part of that novel is more or less complete, the second becomes something of a rambling conversation and the third part is nothing but a poor excuse for yet another adventure tale.

Naturally, Ms Burwell sees gold nuggets and gems at every turn in those posthumous novels. The shame is that no one else did or does.