Sunday, 29 March 2020
Saturday, 28 March 2020
This ’n that — Ruskies, Commies, good guys, bad guys, morons like Trump, the Cold War, Jim Crow, lynching blacks, Howard Zinn, Billie Holiday — it’s strange what occurs to you sometimes of an hour
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s - ten years old in 1960 - ‘America’, by which we meant the US, was in an odd sort of way a kind of Nirvana. It was, we were led to believe, where everything worked and worked well, everything was efficient, everyone was well off, everyone was attractive, life was glamorous. America was slick, cool, and, for us in Britain at least, but also in post-World War II Europe and especially then West Germany, somewhere to be envied. It is pertinent that, as I say, when we spoke of ‘America’ we meant, and often still do, the United States. Bugger Canada, Mexico, Central America and the several huge nations to the south, ‘America’ was the United States.
At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.
Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.
That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.
He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.
Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.
Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.
Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.
She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French, but they rarely get the blame).
Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.
Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.
The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?
On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.
. . .
Several years ago, I read a book which most certainly did not ‘change my life’, but which most certainly did give me a wholly new perspective on the US and, as a result, on the rest of the world. It was Howard Zinn’s admirable A People’s History Of The United States. I have posted about it before and shan’t bother here to repeat myself, but, rather later in life, my eyes were opened to an extent which was long overdue. By that I mean merely that I began fully to understand the complexity of life, humankind and history.
There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.
Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.
Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.
. . .
All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.
From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?
The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.
Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?
At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.
Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.
That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.
He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.
Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.
Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.
Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.
She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French, but they rarely get the blame).
Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.
Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.
The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?
On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.
. . .
There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.
Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.
Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.
. . .
All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.
From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?
The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.
Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?
Thursday, 26 March 2020
We have nothing to fear except fear itself (and, of course, running out of loo roll, sugar, milk, shampoo, those tasty little choc things, coffee beans, the Radio Times, a back-up iPhone, porn mags and I really don’t know what else, but not having those scares me shitless!)
I’ve got out of the habit a little of posting here and I don’t know why. It’s not as though I don’t think of things to write about, but what with all the bloody reading of books about Hemingway and knowing that if I should be writing anything, it should be first drafts of the different elements that will go to make up the long blog I’m planning,
I don’t seem to get around to this blog (and I have got quite a bit of the Hemingway words done already, though I must fight the tendency to re-write and hone stuff I’ve already written instead of writing new stuff). There is one question, though, which has brought me back to this blog and it has — so bloody inevitably — to do with the global coronavirus pandemic.
I’ve long thought (as, I’m sure, have many others, although I haven’t yet heard much on TV and the radio or read much in the papers) that the true danger from the pandemic is not to our health, but to various global economies. It will damage them enormously, and after folk have stopped catching the virus and often dying from it, the effects of the pandemic will long be felt.
In short, in order to counter the spread of the virus many countries in the northern hemisphere have simply closed down, insisting everyone isolate themselves at home unless it is absolutely necessary that they go out. Don’t go to work, everyone has been told, and only go out briefly if you have to go shopping or pick up a prescription.
As for thus having no income, there are various government guaranteeing wages (somehow — I’m very unclear as to the details or how the schemes will work). Here in Britain it is even trying to find some way of guaranteeing that the self-employed don’t lose out either, a far trickier task. Businesses, who must also shut up shop, have been told that they, too, will get ‘government help’.
It all sounds fine and dandy, and even this grubby little cynic is impressed who, broadly, everyone is coming together for the sake of everyone else. Yesterday, I went out for the first time in several days — I am now retired and have not had to worry about income as my pension should not be affected — to the St Breward Store and Post Office (at the top of the village by the church and next to the Old Inn if you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods) and was puzzled to find six individuals standing alone in the pub car park, randomly in no particular order. They were, or seemed to be, just standing about. It turned out that only one customer was allowed into the shop at a time, and this was ‘the queue’, though as all were at least eight feet from anyone else it looked bugger all like any queue I have ever seen (and joined).
Quite whether that measure — keeping our distance in a pub car on the very rural North Cornwall Moor — is as useful as not travelling by crowded tube, commuter train or bus in a busy city, is a moot point. But as Tesco say
‘every little helps’, and — well, why not? We might eventually discover that ‘social distancing’ was about as useful as ‘hiding under a table in the event of a nuclear attack’. But until then . . .
It is March 26, 2020, today, and we have been assured that the pandemic will not be over soon and could last until well into June (Wimbledon will decide by next week whether to postpone this year’s tournament). So I have no rational reason for saying this and shan’t pretend I do: but I have a gut feeling the emergency will be over sooner rather than later. I might, of course, look very silly indeed to someone reading this in six months or a year’s time. All I am saying is that is my gut feeling, for better or worse and for what it’s worth. The knock-on effects, though, I suspect will be felt for month and possibly years. But, fingers crossed, there might even be some positive developments.
Ever since, first Wuhan, then Lombardy, now most all European countries have been in lockdown and folk are not going out (and, crucially, not commuting), air pollution has fallen dramatically as have CO2 levels. Now you might be a ‘man-made climate change’ freak or you might be an out-and-out denier, but that fact, the fall in air pollution and CO2 levels cannot be denied and has to be pertinent. The obvious conclusion is for us all to carry on ‘not commuting’. That, though, is not possible. Or might it be? Might this now not be an opportunity, given such dramatic evidence of how we can drastically cut air pollution and CO2 levels, for wholesale reassessment of how our economies are set up? Of course, it is, but it’s easier said than done.
My former employer, the Daily Mail, operates from Northcliffe House in Kensington, West London, and I should imagine that what with all the other departments involved in the operation of producing a newspaper — folk usually think in terms of ‘writer and reporters’ but, in fact, not only are there sub-editors busying themselves on the editorial side, but their work would simply not be possible if it weren’t for a range of other departments: advertising and marketing, promotions, personnel, finance and — not least — the IT department.
IT must get an especial mention: like every other pen-pushing industry in the 21st century, IT keep the show on the road. Any glitch has to be sorted out in minutes. And it always is. But over these past few weeks they have (former colleagues tell me) excelled themselves. Why? Because Northcliffe House is now completely empty and will be for the duration. Everyone is working from home (as I did when I was still placing the puzzles). Logging on remotely to the system is straightforward, but when I was doing it just a few did it regularly, certainly not more than 1,000 bods. So the system had and has to be robust and IT have to be on top of it 24/7. And they were and are.
But the Mail is, in a sense, lucky. Newspapers, in a way, operate on the fringes to mainstream pen-pushing companies. By the nature of their industry and what they do, they are accustomed and usually prepared to adopt and adapt to changing circumstances almost overnight (the paper is largely printed in East London, but they have an identical twin operation ready to take over at a moments notice for the paper to be printed in Didcot, just under 100 miles to the west).
I don’t think other industries are as flexible and, getting back to the bad knock-on effects of the pandemic, smaller companies, of which there are thousands throughout Europe simply can’t afford to shut down for a month or two. Once they shut down and have no cashflow they go bust and thousand, quite possibly millions, of jobs are lost.
I have seen warnings that we might be in for a worldwide recession: a ‘global economy’ smug economists boasted about 20 years ago which would, and has, distribute ever more prosperity to ever more people in ever more countries has a downside: problems travel equally as fast. If — and it can only be an ‘if’ — there is such a recession it will be deeper and last longer than anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
There are also claims that because of the social effects of widespread unemployment, it might have been better to let the pandemic take its course. And catastrophic economic conditions invariably play out in politics. Just how keen will Europe’s liberally minded folk be to look on the camps of several thousand migrants to the EU from
North Africa and the Middle East if they are out of a job with little prospect of getting another, falling into debt and are forced to sell their homes for less then they are worth? Rather less than they were last year, and last year they were rather less inclined to brotherly love than they were 15 years ago. In the context of the EU, it is also worth considering just what effect on the euro — the always rather flakey euro which has never quite found its feet — a collapse in the economies of Spain and Italy would have.
Naturally, on that and other questions there can only be opinions. There cannot be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Similarly, the prognostications of various ‘health bodies’ as how the pandemic will pan out are, at the end of the day, less copper-bottomed than they might be (and their supporters claim).
All are based on ‘computer modelling’ — ‘if this, then what?’ — and it depends upon what data you start with, for which read, to put it more brutally, what assumptions you make. So the results will vary, and, for example, just a few days ago ‘Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group’ suggested (here is one report) that perhaps things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. It’s ‘model’ suggested that more than half of Britain’s population had been infected by the Covid-19 with no serious effects, in many quite mild effect.
If true, that suggested coronavirus was not half as dangerous or lethal as had so far been feared. This conclusion from one ‘health body’, though, is at odds with previous conclusions from other ‘health bodies’ and has been criticised and downplayed. So who is right? I don’t know, I can’t know, and nor do you or can you. At the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. And that is all a tad pointless.
As for what effects the universal closing down of the economy will have in the coming months and years, who knows. (As I’ve recorded in this blog before: one definition of an economist is someone who can utterly convincingly explain this week why what he had utterly convincingly predicted last week didn’t actually happen.) But as I began this blog entry, I’ll end it: I suspect the future has less to fear from coronavirus medically than it does from the effects socially and economically of measures taken to counter its spread.
. . .
And just for good measure . . .
This one has got bugger all to do with what I am writing about, but I like it. It is just a screenshot I took while watchign a documentary and which I then dicked around with briefly in Photoshop.
I don’t seem to get around to this blog (and I have got quite a bit of the Hemingway words done already, though I must fight the tendency to re-write and hone stuff I’ve already written instead of writing new stuff). There is one question, though, which has brought me back to this blog and it has — so bloody inevitably — to do with the global coronavirus pandemic.
I’ve long thought (as, I’m sure, have many others, although I haven’t yet heard much on TV and the radio or read much in the papers) that the true danger from the pandemic is not to our health, but to various global economies. It will damage them enormously, and after folk have stopped catching the virus and often dying from it, the effects of the pandemic will long be felt.
In short, in order to counter the spread of the virus many countries in the northern hemisphere have simply closed down, insisting everyone isolate themselves at home unless it is absolutely necessary that they go out. Don’t go to work, everyone has been told, and only go out briefly if you have to go shopping or pick up a prescription.
As for thus having no income, there are various government guaranteeing wages (somehow — I’m very unclear as to the details or how the schemes will work). Here in Britain it is even trying to find some way of guaranteeing that the self-employed don’t lose out either, a far trickier task. Businesses, who must also shut up shop, have been told that they, too, will get ‘government help’.
It all sounds fine and dandy, and even this grubby little cynic is impressed who, broadly, everyone is coming together for the sake of everyone else. Yesterday, I went out for the first time in several days — I am now retired and have not had to worry about income as my pension should not be affected — to the St Breward Store and Post Office (at the top of the village by the church and next to the Old Inn if you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods) and was puzzled to find six individuals standing alone in the pub car park, randomly in no particular order. They were, or seemed to be, just standing about. It turned out that only one customer was allowed into the shop at a time, and this was ‘the queue’, though as all were at least eight feet from anyone else it looked bugger all like any queue I have ever seen (and joined).
Quite whether that measure — keeping our distance in a pub car on the very rural North Cornwall Moor — is as useful as not travelling by crowded tube, commuter train or bus in a busy city, is a moot point. But as Tesco say
It is March 26, 2020, today, and we have been assured that the pandemic will not be over soon and could last until well into June (Wimbledon will decide by next week whether to postpone this year’s tournament). So I have no rational reason for saying this and shan’t pretend I do: but I have a gut feeling the emergency will be over sooner rather than later. I might, of course, look very silly indeed to someone reading this in six months or a year’s time. All I am saying is that is my gut feeling, for better or worse and for what it’s worth. The knock-on effects, though, I suspect will be felt for month and possibly years. But, fingers crossed, there might even be some positive developments.
Ever since, first Wuhan, then Lombardy, now most all European countries have been in lockdown and folk are not going out (and, crucially, not commuting), air pollution has fallen dramatically as have CO2 levels. Now you might be a ‘man-made climate change’ freak or you might be an out-and-out denier, but that fact, the fall in air pollution and CO2 levels cannot be denied and has to be pertinent. The obvious conclusion is for us all to carry on ‘not commuting’. That, though, is not possible. Or might it be? Might this now not be an opportunity, given such dramatic evidence of how we can drastically cut air pollution and CO2 levels, for wholesale reassessment of how our economies are set up? Of course, it is, but it’s easier said than done.
My former employer, the Daily Mail, operates from Northcliffe House in Kensington, West London, and I should imagine that what with all the other departments involved in the operation of producing a newspaper — folk usually think in terms of ‘writer and reporters’ but, in fact, not only are there sub-editors busying themselves on the editorial side, but their work would simply not be possible if it weren’t for a range of other departments: advertising and marketing, promotions, personnel, finance and — not least — the IT department.
IT must get an especial mention: like every other pen-pushing industry in the 21st century, IT keep the show on the road. Any glitch has to be sorted out in minutes. And it always is. But over these past few weeks they have (former colleagues tell me) excelled themselves. Why? Because Northcliffe House is now completely empty and will be for the duration. Everyone is working from home (as I did when I was still placing the puzzles). Logging on remotely to the system is straightforward, but when I was doing it just a few did it regularly, certainly not more than 1,000 bods. So the system had and has to be robust and IT have to be on top of it 24/7. And they were and are.
But the Mail is, in a sense, lucky. Newspapers, in a way, operate on the fringes to mainstream pen-pushing companies. By the nature of their industry and what they do, they are accustomed and usually prepared to adopt and adapt to changing circumstances almost overnight (the paper is largely printed in East London, but they have an identical twin operation ready to take over at a moments notice for the paper to be printed in Didcot, just under 100 miles to the west).
I don’t think other industries are as flexible and, getting back to the bad knock-on effects of the pandemic, smaller companies, of which there are thousands throughout Europe simply can’t afford to shut down for a month or two. Once they shut down and have no cashflow they go bust and thousand, quite possibly millions, of jobs are lost.
I have seen warnings that we might be in for a worldwide recession: a ‘global economy’ smug economists boasted about 20 years ago which would, and has, distribute ever more prosperity to ever more people in ever more countries has a downside: problems travel equally as fast. If — and it can only be an ‘if’ — there is such a recession it will be deeper and last longer than anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
There are also claims that because of the social effects of widespread unemployment, it might have been better to let the pandemic take its course. And catastrophic economic conditions invariably play out in politics. Just how keen will Europe’s liberally minded folk be to look on the camps of several thousand migrants to the EU from
North Africa and the Middle East if they are out of a job with little prospect of getting another, falling into debt and are forced to sell their homes for less then they are worth? Rather less than they were last year, and last year they were rather less inclined to brotherly love than they were 15 years ago. In the context of the EU, it is also worth considering just what effect on the euro — the always rather flakey euro which has never quite found its feet — a collapse in the economies of Spain and Italy would have.
Naturally, on that and other questions there can only be opinions. There cannot be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Similarly, the prognostications of various ‘health bodies’ as how the pandemic will pan out are, at the end of the day, less copper-bottomed than they might be (and their supporters claim).
All are based on ‘computer modelling’ — ‘if this, then what?’ — and it depends upon what data you start with, for which read, to put it more brutally, what assumptions you make. So the results will vary, and, for example, just a few days ago ‘Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group’ suggested (here is one report) that perhaps things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. It’s ‘model’ suggested that more than half of Britain’s population had been infected by the Covid-19 with no serious effects, in many quite mild effect.
If true, that suggested coronavirus was not half as dangerous or lethal as had so far been feared. This conclusion from one ‘health body’, though, is at odds with previous conclusions from other ‘health bodies’ and has been criticised and downplayed. So who is right? I don’t know, I can’t know, and nor do you or can you. At the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. And that is all a tad pointless.
As for what effects the universal closing down of the economy will have in the coming months and years, who knows. (As I’ve recorded in this blog before: one definition of an economist is someone who can utterly convincingly explain this week why what he had utterly convincingly predicted last week didn’t actually happen.) But as I began this blog entry, I’ll end it: I suspect the future has less to fear from coronavirus medically than it does from the effects socially and economically of measures taken to counter its spread.
. . .
And just for good measure . . .
This one has got bugger all to do with what I am writing about, but I like it. It is just a screenshot I took while watchign a documentary and which I then dicked around with briefly in Photoshop.
Friday, 13 March 2020
Thursday, 5 March 2020
. . . the fact is, nothing much changes, and an older generation will always sooner or later get the two-fingered salute (just as they gave it to their mums and dads)
If for whatever reason — it could be frustration, simple boredom or just malice — you want to end a discussion in its tracks, the ruse to use is to announce ‘well, it really does depend on what you mean by . . .’ It works every time.
First of all, the discussion itself is immediately diverted from its original course, and from there on in it is the simplest of tasks to muddy the waters to such an extent that everyone taking part, all intent on promoting their own take on whatever is being discussed and rarely having the patience and tolerance, let alone the good manners, to listen to the views of others loses interest; and, metaphorically, they wander off.
The irony, of course, is that it is true: it really does depend on ‘what you mean by . . .’ It really does matter that what is understood by a word or idea is crucial to any discussion of that idea; and if we are all working on a different understanding, any discussion becomes more than a little pointless. Yet all too often those involved in such discussion are simply unaware that the others don’t understand that concept in the same way.
A good, though undoubtedly hoary first-year-of-philosophy example is the notion of ‘freedom’: does it mean ‘free to’ or ‘free from’? In some situations, of course, they might coincide — if I live in a society ‘free from’ tyranny, I am ‘free to’ speak my mind without concern for my safety. In others, though, the distinction is crucial.
If someone were to claim that it is crucial ‘that we all have our freedom’, you might then ask him or her whether or not that would cover the freedom of a paedophile to indulge in sexual activity with a child. The likely response to that would be ‘of course not, it must be freedom to act and behave within the bounds of our established morality’. Well, quite, but by then — within a very brief ten seconds — you have already taken a diversion from the main discussion.
Certainly, the bounds and dictates of the morality prevalent in any given culture have a bearing on what we are ‘free to do’, but by now we are no longer discussing the notion of ‘freedom’ in abstract (as we thought we were) but already limiting ourselves to the notion of ‘freedom’ in our particular culture. And that is more of a practical matter than philosophical.
I got to be thinking along those lines when, plodding on with this bloody Hemingway project (which, contrary to what you might gather from my description of it as ‘this bloody Hemingway project’, I am still enjoying although almost by the hour the task seems to get bigger and bigger) I got to a point where I decided the best and simplest way forward is to look at the man, his life and his work a little more obliquely, to consider various related matter.
So, for example . . .
Some time ago I came across the review by Virginia Woolf of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories. It is, though, more an essay by Woolf on critics and criticism. In it she makes some good points, not least that most of us, almost despite ourselves, regard ‘the critics’ as somehow better informed and more qualified to pass judgment than we are (and wonders why). You can read her piece here, but her introduction sums it up well:
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity.
Perhaps her observation rings a bell with you. It certainly did with me. And I wonder how many of us settle for simply adopting wholesale as our own the verdict of a critic (and, of course, then pontificate loudly about the book or writer in question as though we knew what we were talking about) for no good reason than that she or he is ‘the New York Times/The Observer/The Sunday Times/the Washington Post reviewer?
So in this Hemingway bollocks I decided to consider different questions in relation to Hemingway rather than just approach him and his work four-square. That approach also has the virtue of not having to plough my way through all his bloody work and just stick to the three volumes of short stories and his first three novels. Death In The Afternoon, The Green Hills Of Summer, Across The River And Into The Hills and the rest? Fuck off. I’ve read enough reviews of them to know when enough is enough.
So, in relation to Woolf’s essay, I’ve decided, for example, to consider the notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, as in ‘can there really be an “objective judgment” of a work by Hemingway (or any other writer for that matter)?’ And if we line up all the critics in their underwear and strip them of their robes and wigs, just how much more ‘valid’ are their verdicts than yours or mine?
Then there’s the question of what are we supposed to make of the fact that critics disagree with each other in their judgments of a novel, exhibition, play or film? Who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?
From there it was just a short skip and a jump to realising — or, more cautiously, coming to the conclusion — that there is no ‘objectivity’ in criticism because there simply cannot be. Each judgment is subjective, like it or not. Granted, a critic is probably better read than you or I, but her or his judgment, at the end of the day, is still a subjective one. And, strictly, no number of such ‘subjective’ judgments, however much they agree with each other, add up to one ‘objective’ judgment — ‘the critics are all agreed’ merely means ‘the critics are all agreed’. It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the critics are all right’.
A further complication, though I make this point merely by the by, is that different generations favour different styles and, furthermore, each ‘new generation’, keen to put as much clear blue water between itself and its parent generation, will favour books, music, films and fashions as different from those popular with its parent generation as possible.
That, I shall be suggesting when I post my Hemingway project (are preliminary post is here, though what I have posted there has since been cut by two-thirds to make way for a prologue) is one essential factor in the rise of Hemingway to prominence. (Would the rise of ‘conceptual art’ really have occurred if its quintessence wasn’t sticking up two fingers (US ‘the middle finger) at the previous generation?
So with Hemingway, no one had before used the words ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ in print, for example, or had the novels characters getting rat-arsed and sleeping around, and the dizzy, hedonistic young folk of the Jazz Age, as keen to upset the older generation as they were to have a great time loved it. Just loved it.
Another aspect I want to take a look at is ‘modernism’ and more specifically Hemingway’s modernism. What it might be? Like many other things, we — well, more modestly, I — think we ‘know’ something, but when we begin to consider what it is we ‘know’, we realise we know close to fuck-all about it.
Hemingway is often talked of as a ‘modernist’ writer, but from where I sit (and I am really not as well-read as I might be to make such a point, but . . . ) there seems to me less ‘modernist’ about him than there was about Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and later Virginia Woolf. But what is modernism? How is it defined?
I’ve always assumed that ‘modernists’ were working from some underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory, but how true is that? Were they? Was it necessary? From what I know of Hemingway’s views, there wasn’t much theorising, and even his much-quoted ‘iceberg theory’ is, to be frank, essentially pretty threadbare and, as he states it, middlebrow Sunday supplement stuff.
One very obvious point, which has been made several times by others, is to ask why he thought his ‘theory of omission’ was so ‘new’ or even revolutionary when for many years writers had been composing their work specifically to allow and encourage their readers to ‘read between the lines’. We, the readers, read between the lines, for example, in Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants and gather a guy is trying to persuade his gal to have an abortion. But ‘writing between the lines’ (if you see what I mean), is also something writers of fiction had been doing long before that story was written.
A Hemingway freak might counter that ‘that isn’t what Hemingway meant’ by his ‘theory of omission’, to which I would counter-counter that if Hemingway did mean what he seems to have meant — that ‘you could omit anything . . . and the omitted part would strengthen the story’ — he was kidding no one but himself if he meant that he could leave out a detail completely and I mean completely (like the suicide in the oft-given example of his story Out Of Season), but that the reader would somehow still ‘pick up’ on that detail. It’s all just a tad too pseudo-metaphysical for me. Or perhaps I have got it wrong and he doesn’t quite mean that, either.
Certainly, many of his stories were not ‘about’ what they were ostensibly ‘about’, but that has been the essence of interesting and engaging fiction for many years before young Ernie first put pen to paper. Why did he think he had hit upon something new?
On the question of ‘Hemingway’s modernism’, it is also worth mentioning that he was notoriously, not to say very ostentatiously, anti-intellectual. There are suggestions that, much like his very ostentatious and increasingly unconvincing displays of machismo, the anti-intellectualism was something of a front.
One friend from on the Toronto Star, Greg Clark, who had known him when he first turned up in Toronto in 1919, remarked when he returned to the paper in 1923 for a staff job after freelancing in Paris (for what turned out to just a few months): ‘A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked this earth’. But whatever the reason for it, Hemingway was remarkably reluctant to discuss intellectual matters.
His friend in Paris (and later until, invariably and inevitably, Hemingway fell out with him) Archibald McLeish remembered many occasions when he attempted to start a discussion and tease out Hemingway’s thoughts on aesthetics and related matters, only for the great man swiftly to change the subject to hunting or fishing or boxing or bullfighting or some such topic.
For me the task is now to learn a lot more about ‘modernism’. But at least I now realise I know next to bugger all, so that’s a start of sorts.
Pip, pip.
Here’s a bit of modernism for you to keep you happy . . .
First of all, the discussion itself is immediately diverted from its original course, and from there on in it is the simplest of tasks to muddy the waters to such an extent that everyone taking part, all intent on promoting their own take on whatever is being discussed and rarely having the patience and tolerance, let alone the good manners, to listen to the views of others loses interest; and, metaphorically, they wander off.
The irony, of course, is that it is true: it really does depend on ‘what you mean by . . .’ It really does matter that what is understood by a word or idea is crucial to any discussion of that idea; and if we are all working on a different understanding, any discussion becomes more than a little pointless. Yet all too often those involved in such discussion are simply unaware that the others don’t understand that concept in the same way.
A good, though undoubtedly hoary first-year-of-philosophy example is the notion of ‘freedom’: does it mean ‘free to’ or ‘free from’? In some situations, of course, they might coincide — if I live in a society ‘free from’ tyranny, I am ‘free to’ speak my mind without concern for my safety. In others, though, the distinction is crucial.
If someone were to claim that it is crucial ‘that we all have our freedom’, you might then ask him or her whether or not that would cover the freedom of a paedophile to indulge in sexual activity with a child. The likely response to that would be ‘of course not, it must be freedom to act and behave within the bounds of our established morality’. Well, quite, but by then — within a very brief ten seconds — you have already taken a diversion from the main discussion.
Certainly, the bounds and dictates of the morality prevalent in any given culture have a bearing on what we are ‘free to do’, but by now we are no longer discussing the notion of ‘freedom’ in abstract (as we thought we were) but already limiting ourselves to the notion of ‘freedom’ in our particular culture. And that is more of a practical matter than philosophical.
I got to be thinking along those lines when, plodding on with this bloody Hemingway project (which, contrary to what you might gather from my description of it as ‘this bloody Hemingway project’, I am still enjoying although almost by the hour the task seems to get bigger and bigger) I got to a point where I decided the best and simplest way forward is to look at the man, his life and his work a little more obliquely, to consider various related matter.
So, for example . . .
Some time ago I came across the review by Virginia Woolf of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories. It is, though, more an essay by Woolf on critics and criticism. In it she makes some good points, not least that most of us, almost despite ourselves, regard ‘the critics’ as somehow better informed and more qualified to pass judgment than we are (and wonders why). You can read her piece here, but her introduction sums it up well:
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity.
Perhaps her observation rings a bell with you. It certainly did with me. And I wonder how many of us settle for simply adopting wholesale as our own the verdict of a critic (and, of course, then pontificate loudly about the book or writer in question as though we knew what we were talking about) for no good reason than that she or he is ‘the New York Times/The Observer/The Sunday Times/the Washington Post reviewer?
So in this Hemingway bollocks I decided to consider different questions in relation to Hemingway rather than just approach him and his work four-square. That approach also has the virtue of not having to plough my way through all his bloody work and just stick to the three volumes of short stories and his first three novels. Death In The Afternoon, The Green Hills Of Summer, Across The River And Into The Hills and the rest? Fuck off. I’ve read enough reviews of them to know when enough is enough.
So, in relation to Woolf’s essay, I’ve decided, for example, to consider the notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, as in ‘can there really be an “objective judgment” of a work by Hemingway (or any other writer for that matter)?’ And if we line up all the critics in their underwear and strip them of their robes and wigs, just how much more ‘valid’ are their verdicts than yours or mine?
Then there’s the question of what are we supposed to make of the fact that critics disagree with each other in their judgments of a novel, exhibition, play or film? Who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?
From there it was just a short skip and a jump to realising — or, more cautiously, coming to the conclusion — that there is no ‘objectivity’ in criticism because there simply cannot be. Each judgment is subjective, like it or not. Granted, a critic is probably better read than you or I, but her or his judgment, at the end of the day, is still a subjective one. And, strictly, no number of such ‘subjective’ judgments, however much they agree with each other, add up to one ‘objective’ judgment — ‘the critics are all agreed’ merely means ‘the critics are all agreed’. It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the critics are all right’.
A further complication, though I make this point merely by the by, is that different generations favour different styles and, furthermore, each ‘new generation’, keen to put as much clear blue water between itself and its parent generation, will favour books, music, films and fashions as different from those popular with its parent generation as possible.
That, I shall be suggesting when I post my Hemingway project (are preliminary post is here, though what I have posted there has since been cut by two-thirds to make way for a prologue) is one essential factor in the rise of Hemingway to prominence. (Would the rise of ‘conceptual art’ really have occurred if its quintessence wasn’t sticking up two fingers (US ‘the middle finger) at the previous generation?
So with Hemingway, no one had before used the words ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ in print, for example, or had the novels characters getting rat-arsed and sleeping around, and the dizzy, hedonistic young folk of the Jazz Age, as keen to upset the older generation as they were to have a great time loved it. Just loved it.
Another aspect I want to take a look at is ‘modernism’ and more specifically Hemingway’s modernism. What it might be? Like many other things, we — well, more modestly, I — think we ‘know’ something, but when we begin to consider what it is we ‘know’, we realise we know close to fuck-all about it.
Hemingway is often talked of as a ‘modernist’ writer, but from where I sit (and I am really not as well-read as I might be to make such a point, but . . . ) there seems to me less ‘modernist’ about him than there was about Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and later Virginia Woolf. But what is modernism? How is it defined?
I’ve always assumed that ‘modernists’ were working from some underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory, but how true is that? Were they? Was it necessary? From what I know of Hemingway’s views, there wasn’t much theorising, and even his much-quoted ‘iceberg theory’ is, to be frank, essentially pretty threadbare and, as he states it, middlebrow Sunday supplement stuff.
One very obvious point, which has been made several times by others, is to ask why he thought his ‘theory of omission’ was so ‘new’ or even revolutionary when for many years writers had been composing their work specifically to allow and encourage their readers to ‘read between the lines’. We, the readers, read between the lines, for example, in Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants and gather a guy is trying to persuade his gal to have an abortion. But ‘writing between the lines’ (if you see what I mean), is also something writers of fiction had been doing long before that story was written.
A Hemingway freak might counter that ‘that isn’t what Hemingway meant’ by his ‘theory of omission’, to which I would counter-counter that if Hemingway did mean what he seems to have meant — that ‘you could omit anything . . . and the omitted part would strengthen the story’ — he was kidding no one but himself if he meant that he could leave out a detail completely and I mean completely (like the suicide in the oft-given example of his story Out Of Season), but that the reader would somehow still ‘pick up’ on that detail. It’s all just a tad too pseudo-metaphysical for me. Or perhaps I have got it wrong and he doesn’t quite mean that, either.
Certainly, many of his stories were not ‘about’ what they were ostensibly ‘about’, but that has been the essence of interesting and engaging fiction for many years before young Ernie first put pen to paper. Why did he think he had hit upon something new?
On the question of ‘Hemingway’s modernism’, it is also worth mentioning that he was notoriously, not to say very ostentatiously, anti-intellectual. There are suggestions that, much like his very ostentatious and increasingly unconvincing displays of machismo, the anti-intellectualism was something of a front.
One friend from on the Toronto Star, Greg Clark, who had known him when he first turned up in Toronto in 1919, remarked when he returned to the paper in 1923 for a staff job after freelancing in Paris (for what turned out to just a few months): ‘A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked this earth’. But whatever the reason for it, Hemingway was remarkably reluctant to discuss intellectual matters.
His friend in Paris (and later until, invariably and inevitably, Hemingway fell out with him) Archibald McLeish remembered many occasions when he attempted to start a discussion and tease out Hemingway’s thoughts on aesthetics and related matters, only for the great man swiftly to change the subject to hunting or fishing or boxing or bullfighting or some such topic.
For me the task is now to learn a lot more about ‘modernism’. But at least I now realise I know next to bugger all, so that’s a start of sorts.
Pip, pip.
Here’s a bit of modernism for you to keep you happy . . .
Tuesday, 18 February 2020
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.
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.
Sunday, 16 February 2020
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Saturday, 8 February 2020
To be blunt, I'm a bit put out. I don't do this for fun, you know, or rarely. OK, sometimes, but just sometimes . . . OK, quite often, but don’t take me for granted. Roll up, roll up and get your friends to do the same
And that includes all the spooks or whoever who regularly drop from Turkey, Russia and North Korea, undoubtedly because the far distant pass I made a few uncomplimentary remarks about Erdogan, Putin and Kim Whatever. They, or perhaps their bots, still drop by and although their visits aren’t recorded in the stats, that they visited is recorded under the ‘audience’ figure. But apart from that, hardly no one.
You might think it odd that I should be put out that this blog is not attracting as many readers as once it seems to
Perhaps you guys would be queuing up to read my latest pontifications if I bothered to pass on my take on coronavirus, or the latest Brexit situation, or Philip Schofield coming out as gay, or tawdry political set-up in Thuringia, or why does the Mail hate ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ so much?
But, sadly, I don’t have a take on coronavirus, Brexit must now be left to fester in peace for at least six months until the ‘trade’ negotiations get underway in anger, I don’t give a flying fuck about Philip Schofield, I don’t understand the political shenanigans in Thuringia so can’t really comment (who said ‘never before stopped you laying it on with a trowel?) and the campaign against ‘Harry ’n Meghan’, otherwise a huge yawn as are ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ is down to one thing: Meghan is taking the Mail on Sunday to court over a breach of copyright (‘alleged’ breach of copyright? A fuck it). The word is — I read somewhere — that Associated Newspapers who publish the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have been told by their lawyers that they don’t have a leg to stand on and are resorting to getting ‘their retaliation in first’. Also ‘the Royals’ sell papers and as that is the game AN are in . . .
As for the coronavirus, well it’s another great story while it still only affects China and despite ‘alarming’ claims that ‘three people have been taken ill in Britain’ we are, still, very much in the clear. What is worth pointing out is that we don’t really know much about the virus or how ‘deadly it is’. Yes, some people have died, but as, in China, as of today 724 people have died from an estimated 35,000 infected (and many of those previously infected might now be better again) which makes a mortality rate of just over 2pc it’s all a tad disappointing for the British tabloids who want death, death, death to make it all worthwhile.
Now if ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ were to contract it and even die — red-top seventh heaven! That would be especially true at Northcliffe Towers, 2 Derry St., London W8 5TT if Meghan were to croak because not only would the lawsuit would bite the dust, but, additionally, it would the ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ sage legs in legions of Glenda Slaggs churning
But now, sob, she’s dead (and here’s what she was wearing on her deathbed, all shit-hot fashion items clones of which you can all pick up for around £9.99 at Next, Top Shop, Miss Seflfridge and elsewhere. (I might be a little out of date on those names, by the way, because immensely to my credit I take little interest in fashion and even less in what young gals choose to wear these days.)
As for Brexit, it has occurred to that, obliquely the coronavirus outbreak might queer things for the Johnson and the British government. Here’s why: in Hubei province where Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak sits, but also elsewhere factories have been shut down to minimise the chances of folk catching the virus. People have also been told to stay indoors. There was even a report that the lifts have been turned off in high-rise living blocks to encourage people to stay in. I mean if nipping out for 20 Benson & Hedges involves walking down 30 flights of stairs and, even worse on the way back, climbing 40 flights of stairs — there are always more when you climb stairs — you might seriously consider again trying to knock smoking on the head.
There have, here in Britain already been several reports that companies are facing severe parts supply difficulties if these are sourced in China. The larger, richer companies (as well, as I should think smaller, less rich but wiser companies) had contingency plans to obtain supplies so production could go on, but others might well also have to shut up shop until parts start arriving again.
This would not be good news at the best of times but now that Britain is gearing up to strike the trade deals of the century, it doesn’t help that it’s biggest trading partners are either doing badly or so pissed off with Britain that they are reluctant to play ball: China is in the shit and could sink deeper in the shit; and the EU and the US are
Another knock-on from a situation where the coronavirus could hit the Chinese economy is if it also affected world trade. That’s the thing with having a global trade network: we all benefit but when the shit hits the fan, we all share in that shit. That is, of course, all just speculation, being ‘just speculation’ doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
But never mind, spring is on its way, the clocks go forward in seven weeks, the weather can now only get warmer and I have been getting more writing done. As for the latest on Philip Schofield, I’m afraid you will have to look elsewhere.
Pip, pip.
Thursday, 23 January 2020
Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland
Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actually taken just two days ago. They are all of East Frisia/Ostfriesland, the part of North-West Germany I am in for the next two weeks (and have already been here for two weeks). I hope you like them. The church is in a tiny hamlet called Marienchor.
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