Roll up, roll up and thrill to the spectacle of Hemingway academics — possibly (be careful, dear boy) — disappearing up their own arses. Moral of the tale: a little exegesis goes a very long way indeed

Well, that’s silly: I decided that my main blog was too public for me to record more private things, so I started this one. But I made the mistake — an odd mistake if you think about it — of giving it labels. Now as labels are intended to allow folk to use a search engine to find your blog, but as it was intended for my eyes only, that was not thought through. As it happened only one other person (or, I suppose, a bot) found it, but that person/bot returned again and again. I think he/she/it resides in Portugal or at least that’s what one aspect of the stats told me.

I began to feel a little hemmed in and unable to record private stuff, so I ended that blog, too, except that I didn’t. I started yet a third blog, amended the blog pic to say ‘adieu’, then carried on posting to the wrong blog. Most recently I’ve realised that even without all that crap the ‘private’ blog could and can be easily found by anyone viewing my ‘profile’ where all my blogs are listed. As I say, silly, so now, well what the hell.

. . .

It would be nice to write privately but it doesn’t seem I shall be able to. I can always — well, could always — come up with a new Google identity and use that to start a blog with, but, really, what the hell. There’s nothing I would put in it which would be that embarrassing.

As it is I’ve been feeling oddly low for a few weeks. It is better now, thought not completely cleared up and I think it had more to do with some kind of bug or cold or virus than anything else. I seem to think it started in the last few days at Marianne’s in Heinitzpolder, but whether it did or not, the left side of my head began hurting, but I could work out whether it was muscular or the skin or inside my head. I also had a continual low-grade headache (and still have something along those lines, but really not half as bad).

Feeling low, I also admitted to myself that I don’t, at the moment, like being 70. For that is what I am. It’s odd: at 11.59 on November 20 I was 69 and didn’t give a flying fuck and certainly didn’t feel old. A minute later I was 70 and although still didn’t feel ‘old’, I certainly felt sidelined in an odd way. It also has something to do with ‘being retired’, which, unless you, too, ‘are retired’ is almost impossible to describe to someone else. Thankfully, those who ‘are retired’ and to whom I have mentioned it know exactly what I am talking about, and it is also a certain comfort that they, too, feel it.

. . .

Been getting one with writing this Hemingway project, though it has boiled down to working at different aspects at the same time. While in Germany I was getting down a piece — I’ve decided that best format would be a series of semi-autonomous ‘essays’ covering different aspects of what interests me — on the old fraud’s personality and health, both physical and mental. Today I began reading what all the pieces I have so far written, or better all the pieces of the pieces I have so far written, just so I have an overview. And as always I sidetrack myself by re-writing as I read. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does slow down progress.

I’m also carrying on with the reading and am halfway through Carols Baker’s biography, and today Kenneth Lynn’s arrived so that will be next. I’ve also got to re-read (I’ve decided) the one about Hemingway by Leonard Jeffs. If I remember it was a good and entertaining read, but find I remember more of what I have read the second time around. Then, damn it, then I’ve finally got to get down to reading A Farewell To Arms which I am not looking forward to.

Today I read his story God Rest You Merry, Gentleman (the comma being in that place on purpose I think, although why I do no know) which was OK, though no great shakes, and then some cock-eyed commentary on it which, as far as I am concerned, typified that tendency to analyse to fuck a piece of writing for no very good reason.

This guy, some kraut called Horst Herman Kruse from the University of Münster believes there are significant allusions to The Merchant of Venice and that the piece is intended as a satire/condemnation of Christian hypocrisy and, on a personal level for Hemingway, an apologia for his anti-semitism. Well, who knows? Might well be the case. But what is noticeable is how every possible piece of ‘evidence’ to proof a particular thesis is able to be bent into place to make the case convincing. Here’s an example:

There are two doctors on duty in a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day, one, a Doc Fischer, is Jewish and the other, Doctor Wilcox, is a gentile. So far so good. But Doc Fischer, the Jew, is described as ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth’ whereas it is the other doctor, the gentile, who is short and dark. Odd you might think, but Herr Kruse is not to be outplayed and says Hemingway is making a point by going against our stereotypes. Kruse writes:

Hemingway’s description of Doc Fischer as ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth, amused eyes and gambler’s hands’, for instance, breaks up a traditional stereotype. In fact, as the story progresses and the Jewish doctor is set up as its true moral center, the portrait of his perspicacity and humanity might be viewed as an attempt on Hemingway’s part to atone for his former anti-Semitism.

Well, perhaps. And there again, perhaps not. Who knows? Did Hemingway really mean that?

Kruse also sees a connection between Doctor Wilcox, who is not a good doctor and who might well soon be responsible for a young lad’s death and is, apparently sarcastically — although this is not clear, either — referred to by Doc Fischer as ‘the good physician’ (the line is ‘‘The good physician here. Doctor Wilcox, my colleague, was on call and he was unable to find this emergency listed in his book’ and you might agree the phrase might well simply have been a conventional usage) and the Good Samaritan of Luke’s gospel.

Sorry, I hear you asking? Ah, you see, Kruse, suggests the comparison between Doctor Wilcox, who is not a Good Samaritan and who had the day before given the lad who might now die short-shrift, and the Good Samaritan is ironic. Well, again, perhaps. And perhaps not. Who knows? You can’t win.

I have come across this kind of things quite often in the past two years while tracking stuff down on the internet: academics finding all kinds of meaning and significance here, there and everywhere. For example, Hemingway begins his story by saying that Kansas City (where he was a trainee reporter for six and a half months) reminds him of Constantinople (which he visited while living in Paris and freelancing for the Toronto Star when asked to report on the Greco-Turkish war in 1922). Fair enough, you might say, but for Kruse and others, the comparison is also significant — though, dammit! they can’t quite work out why.

If you are interested (well, someone might be) here is a link to the story — don’t worry, it’s not very long — and the piece my Herr Kruse.

Me, I have to tread carefully. I really don’t want to slip into an old gammon’s ’s’all stuff ’n nonsense’ pose (I fucking 70 now, remember, and there are such banana skins everywhere) but I would very much like to take a more grounded view of Hemingway’s work than much of what I have come across. I mean, The Sun Also Rises, is still touted as a portrayal of a ‘lost generation’ who can think of no more to do with their lives than drink and shag their way through their despair. To which one can only add ‘up to a point, Lord Copper’.

But there I must end it because I have been watching Ken Burns documentary on Jazz (called, would you believe Jazz) and I want to watch the next instalment.