For your info (as I have not much else to write about at the moment. Fuck covid)

I recently joined the Hemingway Society as a means of getting access to the articles which are carried bi-annually in the Hemingway Review.

These articles are pretty much what you might expect, academia indulging itself (though why not?) on topics that would and will never interest the man on the Clapham omnibus and are only interesting to those who are fully believe Hemingway ‘was one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and are interested in minutiae. Having said that, some are — judging by their titles, I have only read three or four — more attractive than others, but my main point stands.

As a member, I was invited to attend a ‘webinar’ over Zoom, over four Fridays. The third will be tomorrow, but as you will see from what I write below, they are pretty much from my point of view a waste of time. But I shall still tune in tomorrow and next Friday.

Below is a ‘letter’ I emailed to a young Scottish academic (Juliet Conway) who moderated the first webinar. I thought I might post that here.

St Breward, July 27, 2021.

Dear Juliet,

As this is a long email, I have also attached it as a Word doc, which you might choose to print out and thus find easier to read. I have also cc-d Suzanne del Gizzo.

I first considered emailing you a few days ago, but dithered because of where I stand on the notion of Hemingway as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’. You can yourself gauge my view from the title of the project on which I’ve been working.

Ironically, that project began life simply as ‘a project’, any old project really, the undertaking of which was its purpose, but would also allow me to learn more intellectual discipline and other such skills, not least how fully to complete a task which was not necessarily straightforward. Hemingway just happened to be the, more or less random, subject that came along; but as I read more about him and got deeper into it all, the project expanded and expanded. It has now been three years in operation (and there was even a false start).

I’ve finally decided to write to you and try to pick your brains — my question is at the end of this letter — in view of my reading on Hemingway and his work (and of course his work itself ), as well as my membership of the Hemingway Society; and, most pertinently, my experience of the first two of the planned four webinars (of which you moderated the first).

Why am I writing to you rather than any of the other academics who have so far taken part? Well, many years ago, I was at Dundee University, nominally ‘reading’ English and philosophy (and at that age most certainly not equipped in any way to take a university course — university was where we middle-class white chaps ended up unless we were thicker than shit).

I am not Scottish, but while at Dundee I gained a great deal of respect for a certain Scottish independence of mind and scepticism, and I reasoned that as a Scot you might share those traits; and that brings me to my experience of the webinars (so far) and to report a certain disappointment I felt while listening to them.

I was the attendee who in a comment, and rather tactlessly, described the proceedings as somehow akin to a ‘Britney Spears convention’; and although that might be taken as nothing more than an uncalled-for throwaway remark, it does, curiously, hit the nail on the head.

In view of my project, I was hoping for — indeed expecting — rather more intellectual cut and thrust, more of a debate, differing points of view, more of an edge, more disagreement, less (as I said last week in second, possibly equally tactless, comment) ‘campfire cosiness’.

I don’t doubt I’d been a tad naive: the Hemingway Society is, after all, a group of like-minded folk who all — I assume all — accept that Hemingway was ‘one of our greatest writers’: so why would apostates such as me not signed up to the creed bother joining (although I did do so, but for practical reasons)? Why did I expect to find a partial dissenter or two among the Society’s ranks attending the webinars?

Yet I did, and I hoped there would be less uncritical consensus and rather more incisive comment, that even some who were more persuaded of his talents than I still had a doubt or two in this regard or that. But none of it. The ‘disagreements’ seem to me to be of the order of whether ‘Papa’ preferred his coffee black or white, in a mug or cup. (I recall from last Friday something about a ‘yellow house’.)

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that distresses me a little: my next (and I hope penultimate) ‘essay’ is about ‘literary interpretation’; and it will not just address the analysis of Hemingway’s work I have so far read, but such academic analysis in general. (NB Not only does the word ‘essay’ make me self-conscious, but when re-reading those I have so far written, I am aware of their many flaws. As for how they might be read with academic eyes, I try not to think of it. When they all are completed, they will revised mercilessly.)

To be clearer on my view of ‘literary interpretation’: such exegesis of Hemingway’s work or that of any other writer (and I have just read and re-read Carlos Baker’s chapter on Hemingway’s short stories) is, essentially and like it or not, opinion and supposition, no more. It is neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’. It is not — because it cannot be — in the same class of thinking as dealing in mathematics and science: you cannot ‘have an opinion’ of whether two and two is four as you can have an opinion on the symbolism — alleged or otherwise — in Hemingway’s work. Yet all too often such interpretations are, tacitly, treated as equally copper-bottomed.

Their exponents, women and men such as Beegel, Baker, Daiker, Eby, Atkins, Moddelmog and Young and the rest are treated as the ‘experts’, the guides; and when you are a youngster in your third or fourth year of high school or studying English literature at undergraduate level, unsure of yourself and not just intellectually, you are apt to

 

follow their guidance. You are likely to accept almost wholesale ‘what you are taught’; and you will be reluctant openly to disagree, not least for fear of jeopardising your grades.

Yes, I know a great deal is made these days of trying to get students ‘to think for themselves’, but this cynic is inclined to dismiss that claim as a certain kind of liberal window dressing. For as always in life in every sphere, the orthodoxy will rule.

Were a student to suggest, honestly and not intending simply to be contrary, that A Very Short Story is essentially little else but an adolescent and nasty makeweight revenge tale signifying very little, or asking just what is the point of Mr and Mrs Elliot, ‘teacher/tutor’ might well conclude she or he ‘hadn’t yet understood them’.

Don’t get me wrong: I am certainly not dismissing all of Hemingway’s work (I especially like Soldier’s Home), although I agree with Dorothy Parker and others that he was a better short story writer than novelist; but I am baffled that all his work is somehow thought to be ‘of genius’. Yet that is the orthodoxy: it reminds me of Matthew Bruccoli’s astute line that ‘Everything [Hemingway] did [from 1929 on], everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway’.

It goes deeper: over time these ‘authoritative’ interpretations ‘of Hemingway’s art’ became the certainties, and, insanely, it is now increasingly up to the apostates to ‘prove them wrong’.

I’m sure you are familiar with Virginia Woolf’s Essay on Criticism as part of her review of Men Without Women. In it she wrote: ‘[Critics] 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.’

Substitute ‘academics’ for ‘critics’, and the same holds true. And Woolf’s observation might illuminate the dilemma of the high school and college student and the ‘lay’ reader: no one is inclined to disagree and become a tall poppy.

The title of my project is straightforward and expresses the essence of my interest — ‘The Hemingway Enigma: how did a middling writer come to achieve such global literary fame?’

In fairness the woman and man must — and must always — be distinguished from her or his work. We now know that the sculptor Eric Gill was an incestuous paedophile, but does that have any bearing upon how much his work engages and interests us, pleases us aesthetically and is valued? This question has been asked about Gill and others, and my answer is always: no, none at all.

So put aside, for now, the main factors which helped Hemingway achieve that global status — the subtle but continual self-promotion, the ambitious young man’s networking, the competitive and driven ambition.

Put aside, for now, the incongruity that the man who from an early age was more inclined to lie about his past and experience ostentatiously and noisily championed ‘the truth’; put aside, for now, that this man could — in all seriousness — suggest that ‘a writer creating fiction’ was synonymous with ‘lying’ and that ‘all writers were liars’: why do the ‘experts’ and the ‘guides’ still insist he was ‘a great writer’? On what do they base that continuing verdict?

Are they unaware that the literary and artistic quality of his work — for some of us not bad, but not great either — declined, gradually but inexorably, over the last 30 years of his life? Even the two exceptions among that body of work — For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man And The Sea — were not without reasoned and pertinent criticism. Can anyone ‘grown-up’ really take seriously the ‘love affair’ between Jordan and Maria? It is strikingly far more like the fantasy of a teenage boy.

How do the Hemingway champions explain that ‘one of America’s greatest writers’ and a man who prided himself on his journalistic training and professionalism turned out 120,000 words of copy for a feature when Life initially asked him for a 10,000 (later, at his request, bumped up to 30,000 word)? As a, now retired, print journalist, I know that ‘sticking to the brief’ is the essence of professionalism.

How do they explain that the writer who claimed he revised, revised and revised obsessively could allow one critic in a review of Death In Afternoon to write that Hemingway was ‘guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear’? Or that another reviwer, by no means maliciously, observed that one sentence in Green Hills Of Africa ran to 46 lines and that the result is ‘a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing’? The question is simple: just how conscientiously did Hemingway revise? How ‘professional’ was he?

I could give other examples — the ‘big book’ (which, drastically edited, became Islands In The Stream) that he could not complete in 15 years’, or that the one-time writer of ‘fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean’ prose became so distressingly prolix that he produced a full 2,000 pages for what was eventually cut by nine-tenths to become The Garden Of Eden. (Just how can the novel be seen as ‘Hemingway’s work)?

Why are the Hemingway faithful still in thrall to, and respectful of, Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’ when years ago Paul Smith pointed out that had Hemingway told his friends in Paris about it (at the time he mentioned it only to Fitzgerald, in a letter), they ‘would have seen it as a version of the commonplace that the structures of literature, like the sentences of the language, imply more than they state and make us feel more than we know’? As for the readers, for several centuries we have experienced it as ‘reading between the lines’; but it was not, as Hemingway convinced himself, his own ‘discovery’.

Yet Hemingway’s loyal champions do explain it all away and rationalise the list of such incongruities with the argument that boils down to the almost insultingly simplistic ‘but this was Ernest Hemingway, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’.

I was born and raised a Roman Catholic, but have long declared UDI and no longer have any truck with the official church line which tried to fob off a faithful baffled by doctrines such as ‘the Trinity’ and ‘transubstantiation’ as being ‘mysteries’ which ‘only God’s grace will allow us to understand’. Something similar seems, unwittingly, to be going on with Ernest Hemingway.

Has no one not wondered why — despite Hemingway’s ostentatious and studied anti-intellectualism and apparent view that talk about art was airy-fairy nonsense — he, who, Baker insists, tackled ‘difficult problems’ and ‘experimented’, did not now and then discuss technique, theory, his experiments and such with like-minded women and men? If he did, there is no record of it.

When he did seem to be ‘discussing’ writing, he simply laid down the law, which is to say his law. (‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’? Sorry, but that’s little more than guff to dazzle the teens.) Is it not as obvious to the Hemingway faithful as to the rest of us that there is no such thing as ‘the’ truth, that there is an infinite number of ‘truths’, ranging from the personal and subjective truths to the scientific and forensic; and that in fiction any number of ‘truths’ can be posited?

Is it not as obvious to them that such bargain-basement metaphysics as something being ‘truer than true’ is simply jejune sentiment which should impress no one older than 19? What does it mean? It’s about as profound as a Britney Spears pop lyric.

Have the Hemingway champions not considered these and other questions? Apparently not. Apparently it is us, the apostates, the non-believers, who are at fault in that we still don’t ‘get’ Hemingway. That’s why I was so disappointed with the webinars. Where was the incisive cut and thrust which can make debate a real pleasure?

So here is my question to you, Juliet. Apart from wanting to make the above points and, I dearly hope, elicit a response to them from you, this is why I am writing: are there any academics, equally respected as the Hemingway champions, who are more inclined to share my scepticism and acknowledge the essence of the enigma I describe?

I am not talking of anyone of the ilk of a certain Richard Bradford, whose biography of Hemingway was quite bizarre and irrationally hostile, but women and men who have considered the matter and find they can’t disagree with me. If there are, I would dearly like you to pass on their names so that I can read some of their work, if it exists.

Sorry for going on so long, but I’ve been feeling guilty that my tactlessness risked spoiling the party for the past two Fridays and, apart from anything else, I wanted to say so.

With my best wishes for the rest of the week,

Patrick Powell (no longer in Dundee but now in deepest, darkest North Cornwall).

PS Since writing almost all of the above, I’ve come across the podcast by Suzanne which discusses A Very Short Story which I shall now go and listen to with interest.

I am also considering flying out to Wyoming and Montana next July to attend a society conference, though not because I’m going soft on the man, but I’ve always wanted to visit Montana (after reading a ‘cowboy’ story called The Man From Montana when I was about six), have a good break, take in a visit to friends in Philadelphia, attend such a conference.  (For that reason I also attended a Conservative Party conference in Blackpool years ago, which raised a few eyebrows. My reasons were not orthodox, though: I went because I wanted to to attend a party conference (any might have done) and to visit Blackpool (which for many in Britain was for long a byword of a certain kind of holiday. Perhaps I even wrote a blog about it. I’ll check).

I’ve done various costings on the basis of a ten-day stay and it won’t — in my world — be cheap. But it will be a one-off. I’m toying with the idea of trying to get one or two publications interested in a feature, to be written once I return.

In which I touch upon a son’s disrespect for the 5th Commandment, the weather, the importance of ‘a glass of something’ and the Last Days, but please don’t be alarmed by the biblical references. (Biblical! Capital B! ED)

Sitting outside our cottage in the garden just now on one of those rare days of warmth and sunshine we are granted by the good Lord here in Old Blighty, I recalled a conversation I had with my son W. a few days ago. It was the same set-up: I was sitting in the garden with a glass of something to hand and it was sunny, though with the one main difference that it was hot. Very hot, in fact, but not too hot.

Courtesy of ‘global warming’ – actually ‘climate change’ is now the more modern and more correct term to use, and apparently the problem is getting so serious in some English counties, Hampshire, I believe and Derbyshire and Cumbria you can now be fined for calling it ‘global warming’. It has to be ‘climate change’, so that we are all signed up to sing from the same hymn sheet. Wasn’t it Archbishop William Laud who observed quite wisely . . . (No it wasn’t and get on with it! Ed) — courtesy of ‘climate change’ we had been basking in very hot weather for several days. Well, comparatively very hot here in Britain, where the Met Office designates ‘a sunny day’ by how many queues of more than 10ft long form outside My Whippy vans in designated seaside resorts.

Today is not at all hot, but what we middle-class white folk have been taught to call ‘very pleasant’, and if we are in the company of someone who went to the right school, we are encouraged to describe the day as ‘very pleasant indeed’, to ensure they know that we, too went, to the right school. But as I was saying. . .

The other day I was also sitting outside (reading up on more guff about that old fraud Ernest Hemingway, but that’s not relevant, I just want to assure you I wasn’t frittering my time away) and the spot I have chosen was just outside my son’s downstairs bedroom, which was once the utility room, that is where we had our chest freeze, washing machine, my desk and computer and whatever crap we couldn’t stash elsewhere. (It’s a lot nicer now.) At that spot is a wooden table and a solid wooden chair I treated myself to, to use on just such occasions as these). Anyway . . .

After some minutes I went inside to get something from the kitchen (no doubt to top up my glass of something, ouzo and Pernod are my current tipple) and my son, who bedroom (that is the former utility room is next to the kitchen asked me: ‘Where you talking to yourself, Dad?’ Well, as it happens I was. As it happens I do that quite a bit, usually imaginary conversation I have with people.

‘That’s odd,’ he said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘I was daydreaming.’

Well, I was, and I do daydream quite bit (and have always done so which led to an awful lot of trouble at work when I was not concentrating one what I was reading).

‘It’s still odd,’ he said. And that’s how we left it. Trying to persuade someone that daydreaming ‘is not odd’ (even if it involves having imaginary conversations) is rather more pointless than trying to persuade someone who is convinced the Moon is made of cheese or that aliens built the pyramids that it isn’t and they didn’t. My advice in that situation is to cut your losses and shut up and go and top up your glass of something.

Here are the inside of my shed (pictured below, and I have to say more comfortable than the small corner of the utility room I was granted), the table outside my son’s room where I sit (also pictured), and — as a bonus, a snap I took by mistake but which I quite like (the one that doesn’t look like the inside of a man cave or an outdoor wooden table. You'll spot it, hard to miss). I’ve added copies of all three piccies in black and white for those souls who still like to call radios ‘the wireless’ and think the internet and ‘streaming’ are indubitably signs of the Last Days.

Pip, pip.

Incidentally, my son has in the past also accused my of being ‘theatrical’. I took exception to that, but let the matter rest at the time when we established he didn’t mean the word as code for ‘gay’.

 

Three more entries (well, one entry split into three as it was very long) on my interminable ‘Hemingway project’ if you are interested (though the resounding echo I hear when I write those words does not make me sanguine)

If you are interested, here are three more entries for my Hemingway project blog. In fact, this particular essay, called The theology of evaluating Hemingway is quite long, so I split it into three entries. Here is Part I, Part II and Part II.

A gentle night’s reading?

I could bang on about what a dickhead ‘Boris’ Johnson is and who — without actually intending to — is selling Britain down the river, but the chances are you’ve not heard of ‘Boris’, and anyway I’m not feeling in a sounding off mood. Then there’s China and how soon war will break out, Trump and whether the stories about the gay porn films he acted in when he was in his teens are about to surface, England — specifically it’s national football (‘soccer’) side and that it’s high time the penny dropped that it is not God’s gift to humanity, and finally covid, bloody, sodding covid.


But enough trivialities: here are the most recent stories I’ve submitted to the deadlines website and also posted on a website I run where I can keep all my stories and poems. If you are interested in reading them — after all, they are written to be read and there’s bugger all else a story can get up to once written than to be read — here, in no particular, are the last ten I’ve written. If you want to read more, you can find them here.

Mrs Hotchkiss

My Year Away

Dear Reader,
My Eye Was On Him

Decisions

A Tense Relationship

First Life, Then Death

The Odd Ways Of Others

Country Life

Friday Lunch With Same

The Unhappy Buccaneer

Any feedback, just . . . oh, forget it, I might as well pray for world peace.

Is there a God? Was Ernest Hemingway infallible? Do academics simply have too much bloody time on their hands? Is there any such species as an honest academic? William of Occam and I set about tackling these and other pressing issues

 

Note to reader:

This is LONG. Better go and have a wee before starting it.

Whenever I want to think things through and get my thoughts straight, I find either articulating them in conversation or writing something is very useful. Conversation is helpful because the other party or parties are likely to spot the flaws in your — my — thinking a lot sooner than you do — I do. Something similar happens when you I set down my thoughts, although the advantage of someone else’s mind spotting that you are talking complete crap and telling you so, is unfortunately not part of it. 

However, when — as I now do (and bloody well should have been doing all my working life as a sub-editor) — you re-read and re-read and re-read what you have written, you are more likely to spot the flaws in your argument as well has any horrible literals. Reading the piece out aloud is even more useful, although I do sometimes feel like a prune doing that.

Along those lines — and this is relevant to what I want to write here, although not exactly that — I am pretty bloody certain Hemingway never did enough revision; or, more charitably, not half as much as he should have done. And for all his big talk about re-writing his stories up to 50 times and insisting he took the utmost care over his writing, the work itself often doesn’t bear out that claim.

For example, if he really did re-write his stories 50 times and extensively revise them, you wonder why didn’t he spot those occasions when he ignored his own ‘rules on writing’? Repeated revising, which he claimed to do, should have sorted them out, but they didn’t.

For example, despite his claim that he was taught by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to cut his prose to the bone and most certainly never use not just adverbs but adjectives and stuck to that practice, time and again he does use adverbs. In his ‘celebrated’ short story The Undefeated, which appeared in his second volume of short stories, he has his central character say say something ‘hopefully’, then something ‘reproachfully’. Later, the second main character in the story, reads a newspaper ‘laboriously’. Really? Nothing wrong with that expect, of course, if you preach to others that you shouldn’t do it.

In another celebrated story — you’ll notice I managed to resist but the word in quote marks this time — called The Capital Of The World, two priests become ‘hurriedly conscious of being the last people in the room’, a picador ‘swaggered quite steadily’ on his way out of the dining room, and in the kitchen of the pensione the dishwasher is ‘bitter and cynical’ who watches a younger lad ‘critically and cynically’.

I’m not one to lay down laws — I’ll leave that to Hemingway who was addicted to pontificating on ‘good writing’ and two his books, Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa were written in part to allow him to pass judgment on other writers. But I was never one for the attitude of ‘it’s one rule for you and another for me’. More to the point, the man who bragged a great deal about his abilities and talents would certainly have been trying to establish himself as ‘the great and conscientious artist’ with his claims about taking infinite care when composing his story. Those claims are distinctly iffy.

The great thing about writing is that you can do write what the hell you like, about anything and in whatever style. There are no rules. The caveat is, though, whether or not what you produce ‘engages’, interests and ‘entertains’ readers (using the word as one might ‘entertain’ friends for a meal). If you want to use adverbs (though they are a tad lazy), go ahead by all means. But surely to goodness if you do lay down the law, you must yourself to abide by it.

. . .

Assuming Hemingway was as punctilious about re-writing and revising his work as he claimed he was (and he must have done a little re-reading The Capital Of The World first appeared in Esquire magazine (called The Horns Of The Bull), then, a few months later, in Winner Take Nothing, his third volume of original short stories), did not those three adverbs stand out like a sore thumb? As any sub-editor will tell you, there are many, many ways to rephrase and re-write a phrase or a sentence — that’s often their job — and here Hemingway might have tried not to tell us that the priests were ‘hurriedly conscious’, not that the dishwasher viewed his colleague ‘critically and sneeringly’ but conveyed the same information without using adverbs. I mean ‘show don’t tell’ is probably the first bloody thing they tell you at writing school.

NB I have to admit I’m a little sniffy about ‘creative writing courses’, but there you go. I suppose there are one or two hints you can pass on to eager-beaver would-be novelists and techniques they can learn to help them get out of a corner, but when push comes to shove . . . And as I being more than a bit sniffy, I might as well add that whenever I hear some young lad or lass proclaim that he or she ‘wants to be creative’, I have to bite my tongue hard to stop myself telling them ‘well, what’s stopping you? Be creative or shut the fuck up. And if you can’t think of a way of being creative, you never will be’. I hope I haven’t bruised too many egos with that one. Oh dear, I’ll probably not sleep tonight now.

. . .

That brings me on to what I intended this entry to be about. I am writing, I hope, the last ‘essay’ (or possibly the last-but-one) for my Was Hemingway A Twat Or Am I Just A Sour Philistine Who Doesn’t Know Shit From Sausages? website.

With all the reading about the old git I have done, it seems to me that Hemingway and others like him enter a kind of magic circle. He is now, still by many, spoken of as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’. How such a ‘middling writer’ managed it is what interests me, not the man himself. It’s hell’s own business to get into that magic circle, but once you are in, you seem your’e likely to get a pass at every turn.

That’s one of the points I make but here I’ll simply reprint part of what I have written so far (i.e. copy and paste it) to save myself the trouble):

In all monotheistic theologies, of whatever faith, two immutable facts are that ‘God exists’ and that ‘God is always right and without fault’. They are, if you are a believer, the sine qua non of every theological debate. Indeed, they have to be: what would be the point of basing moral strictures on the ‘word of God’ and debating the various arcana of ‘His’ existence and laws if God, too, were flawed and imperfect and no better than us mortals? 

Given ‘His’ unimpeachability, it is axiomatic that if there are some aspects of God, ‘His’ existence’, ‘His laws’ and ‘His word’ we do not yet comprehend (or to put it less delicately on the face of it sound like complete rubbish), it is necessarily and most certainly our fault: we are ‘too insignificant in the face of God’ and we must try far harder to understand what ‘He’ means. All too often aspects of ‘God’ and ‘His word’ which we find incomprehensible, such as the Roman Catholic doctrine of ‘three persons in one God’, are rationalised as being ‘a mystery’ (or its first cousin ‘a miracle’), ones we pitiful, sinful folk cannot be expected to understand. 

Such a concept of an unimpeachable, all-powerful and all-knowing God leads to a distressing circularity when it comes to ‘proving’ or demonstrating to a non-believer ‘His’ existence: how do we know God exists? Because he tell us he does (with the elegant variation that ‘it is though His grace that we are able to believe’). How do we know we can accept that assurance? Because he’s God and as he’s God he’s always right. How do we know God is always right? Because he tells us he is. Why should we accept ‘His word’ and obey ‘Him’ without question? Because he tells us we must. And why must we accept that imperative? Because he’s God. And so on and on and on. 

I know the world has moved on in the past two centuries and become far more secular and atheistic, but the essence of our thinking has remained the same: we might no longer hold that the ‘will of God’ cannot and should not be questioned, but many grant the same sacred, unimpeachable status to, for example, ‘human rights’: it is axiomatic that every man, woman and child alive has inalienable human rights which must be respected. Human rights inalienable? Discuss. 

A similar circularity appears to plague academics, eager post-grads, scholars and literary critics when they examine and analyse the work of Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, there is something quasi-theological about such analyses, interpretations and exegeses of his work. All too often the logic is that ‘this an excellent story and superb writing because it is by Ernest Hemingway’. Its twin is ‘Ernest Hemingway was one of our greatest writers because he wrote this excellent story, and his writing is superb’. And once you are caught in that loop, it’s really difficult to escape it.

(NB I must point out here I am solely talking about the various cack-handed philosophical and intellectual attempts to ‘prove’ why human rights are inalienable, not those rights themselves. I fully support the notion that everyone must be respected and has several ‘inalienable’ human rights. Many a philosopher, 1,000 brighter than me, has shattered on the various hidden rocks in moral philosophy.

It’s all very well trying to move on from placing ‘God’ at the centre of your moral system with something else and attempting to ‘prove’ ‘why we should be good’, but it never works. We usually end up simply awarding the same status to some notion as we once awarded to ‘God’ and are then stuck in the same bloody circularity. But all that, perhaps, for another time. End of Lesson.)  

. . .

What got me thinking along those lines were several analyses of Hemingway stories which seek to explain and rationalise apparent anomalies. In one case one academic ties himself in knots to ‘prove’ that what is now assumed — even by Scribner’s, Hemingway’s publishers — to have been a careless error in one of his stories was nothing on the kind.

On the contrary, he argues, it is a superb demonstration of Hemingway’s exquisite artistry and demonstrates an existentialist dimension to the story and Hemingway’s thinking. I’ll try to keep my outline of it brief, but if you want to read his full paper which appeared in the US journal College English in 1961 and others I shall mention, you can read or download copies here and here and here.

The relevant academic, a Joseph F Gabriel, wrote the Logic of Confusion In Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place while he was completing is doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. That story concerns two waiters in a cafe ready to shut up for the night and their only customer, a lonely old man who is lingering, presumably because he doesn’t want to go home. 

The two waiters, one old, one young, discuss the old man, the young waiter impatient for him to leave so he can go home to his wife, the older waiter more sympathetic. It seems a week earlier the lonely old man had tried to hang himself but was saved by his niece. The error — I’m obliged to write ‘apparent’ error or Mr Gabriel will be fearfully upset — is that there are several inconsistencies in what the two waiters say. Although at first neither waiter is immediately identified by Hemingway, each is eventually referred to as ’the young waiter’ and ‘the old waiter’; and when, once they are identified, one can work back to what each is saying about the old man. One of them ‘knows’ something about the old man’s suicide attempt and makes a comment he, if the to and fro of conversation is conventional, cannot have ‘known’. It should have been the other waiter who ‘knew’ it because of what else he says at other points.

This anomaly was first spotted in 1956, but written about in papers that appeared for the journal College English — independently — in 1959 by two other keen academics, both English professors: F. P. Kroeger, who described the anomaly as an ‘insoluble problem’, and William E. Colburn. Crucially, neither agreed with the other as to what had happened, but eventually, in 1965, after more academics added their voices, Hemingway’s publishers, Scribner’s, emended the text in a new version of the story to get rid of the anomaly. That was when the trouble started.

The Law of Parsimony (which is also known as Occam’s Razor, named after the Franciscan friar William of Occam or Ockham) would have proved useful here if all those academics had resorted to it: Occam’s Razor states that of  all possible explanations, the simplest explanation is the most likely. applying that law here, the most likely explanation is that ‘Hemingway cocked up’, didn’t keep track as well as he might have done and didn’t notice the discrepancy, and that despite his avowal that he re-wrote and revised his stories 50 times, er, didn’t always seem to do so (and on that point a little more later).

Everyone had (and I suppose, like me, has) their two ha’porth to add, especially in view of Scribner’s ‘correction’: only a few agreed that Hemingway was at fault, but the majority who might not have agreed with each other were united in the belief that ‘this is Hemingway! Surely, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century knew what he was doing and this was not an error?’ It’s the same monotheistic approach to ‘God’s existence’: you simply cannot question it.

Some claimed the error occurred when the story was typed up (presumably not by Hemingway), others when the story was typeset for print. Yet others, notably some bod called Otto Reinert, argued that there was no anomaly: he explained that although the convention when writing dialogue was usually to start a new indented line for each fictional speaker, it was only a convention and need not necessarily be observed.

Reinert suggested that because Hemingway had wanted to indicate a ‘reflective pause’ in one of the speaks, he had decided to break the convention: the problem was solved because there is no problem. Others, of course — this being the vipers’ nest that is academia — disagreed. All of them, though, tie themselves in complete knots to ‘prove’ that Hemingway, ‘one of our greatest writers who might well have been able to walk on water had he turned his mind to it’ did not ‘make a mistake’ (and had it occurred to them, they might well have added ‘bugger William of sodding Occam and his bloody razor!’)

. . .

By far the silliest explanation I’ve yet come across is Joseph F. Gabriel’s take. But a few more details are required before I launch into it, though I’ll keep my account succinct and simple: when one waiter asked the other — at this point neither is identified — what had led the old man to try to hang himself, the reply is

‘He was in despair’.

‘What about?’ the first asks.

‘Nothing,’ says the second.

‘How do you know it was about nothing?’ asks the first. 

He has plenty of money,’ says the second.

Note: at this point neither waiter/speaker is identified.

Ah, ha! you can almost hear Gabriel cry, there we have it! He argues that Hemingway uses the word ‘nothing’ ambiguously: the one waiter understand it to mean he tried to hang himself ‘for no reason’, but the other — who Gabriel then identifies as the ‘older waiter’ takes ‘nothing’ to signify ‘the meaningless of existence’.

The old gent had tried to top himself because for him life no longer had a purpose. And because, later in the story, the older waiter is shown to be similarly lonely and despondent — he parodies the Lord’s Prayer, repeating the Spanish for nada (nothing), ‘nothing’ — used in two separate meanings by both waiters — as in ‘the meaningless of existence’ is partly what the story is about.

OK, you might ask, but what does this have do to the ‘anomaly’ in the story, ‘the insoluble problem’? Well, Gabriel argues, there isn’t one: it was not an error at all but that Hemingway set out to confuse the reader, to make the dialogue inconsistent, for a very good reason. The confusion of who is saying what, says Gabriel, was intended by Hemingway to reflect the ‘confusion of existence’. Thus: no anomaly, no typist or typesetter’ error, and certainly no carelessness by Hemingway. This, insists Gabriel, proves the story was ‘artfully contrived’.

Hmm, as both I and, I suspect, William of Occam might have responded. And in case you missed it: hmm. Are you sure?

. . .

Unfortunately for Gabriel, Reinert and others, in January 1979 one Warren Bennett, of the University of Saskatchewan, published a paper, The Manuscript And The Dialogue Of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in American Literature which rather makes a nonsense of all their hi-falutin’ claims. Since 1972, Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s widow had begun donating some (or perhaps all, he doesn’t say) of her husband’s manuscripts to the JFK Library in Boston. Among them was the original handwritten manuscript of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, which Bennett examined.

The manuscript (pictured below) was originally written in pencil and, says Bennett, Hemingway made slight

 

revisions: doing so almost immediately (that is as he was writing the story), a little later on in the day, and a day or two later. Bennett said we can distinguish between the original version first put down by Hemingway and the slight revisions for several reasons: the varying thickness of the pencil or pencils used, the space between the lines on the manuscript and the number of lines on the 11 pages of manuscript.

Comparing this manuscript and its changes to the story as originally published, Bennett concludes that a typist or a typesetter was certainly responsible for one error, but that Hemingway also confused himself and was responsible for the other inconsistency.

Finally, Bennett says he sanctions the emendation made to the published text by Scribner’s in 1965 because it did solve one of the problems.

Bennett does rather pull his punches a little when in conclusion, and tacitly acknowledging that in at least one case the writer who insisted he took immense care about his writing, weighed every word and I don’t know what else, he concludes

This pictures Hemingway not as the slow perfectionist, hovering over every word and detail, but an artist ‘fired up’, and writing at considerable speed in producing what must be regarded, in spite of the flaw in the dialogue, as classic Hemingway: expressing much by showing little.

So, Mr Bennett would still insist, there is still a God.

I’ll just add one small point: there’s nothing wrong with writing at considerable speed’ but exactly what is hindering the writer about taking as much time as needed to revise the piece at leisure to ensure it is exactly what he wants?

‘Oh, [I hear the wiseacres, cry[, he must have revised it with care (as he always did because he tells us he did) and did realise the was an anomaly, but realised it was a useful anomaly and added to the artistic impact of the piece’.

You pays your money and you makes your choice, is all I can add. That is not, however, the end of the story. Still with me? If so, well, done. If not, you’re not going know why I asked the question.

. . .

In the Sept 1998 edition of The Hemingway Review, a Ken Ryan, of the University of Alaska, published his paper The Contentious Emendation Of Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and as you can gather from the title, after Bennett had added a little much-needed sanity to the whole ‘debate’, Ryan through returned to square one, pretty much chanting the old theological article of faith that ‘Hemingway was a genius, he knew what he was doing [all the time] and he didn’t make mistakes.’

He more or less backed up the Joseph F Gabriel line, although he softened it a little withe one, very slight concession he made: Hemingway just might had dropped a small bollock, but when he realised what had happened, he also realised it was a ‘happy accident’ and left it in. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (though, to be frank, I’m the ejit even bothering to mix it with these loons).

. . .

As this entry is becoming far too long, I had better wrap up here. I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve, to get one or two matters a little straighter in my mind, and I shall be copying and pasting this entry, though then re-writing it, for my ‘essay’ along the lines of ‘The Theology of Understanding Hemingway (and why it’s not just best, but saner to be an atheist)’.

The upshot is that academics, not just those with a hard-on for Hemingway, are far keener on arguing that ‘black might well be white — who knows?’ As for the man himself, there’s no getting away from the awful conclusion that many are still willing to settle for the line that ‘Hemingway was a genius, almost a god, and could do no wrong.

Next week: Did Jesus Christ ever take a dump (being God made Man). Discuss.

And if you have rather less time on your hands, try sorting out the Israel/Palestine problem. You might have more luck with that one.

PS 3,494 words — is anyone really going to read this? Answers, please, to the usual dead letter box in Moscow on the south side of Yeltsin Park.

Two more Hemingway posts for those keen and eager to see my literary career take off and reach stratospheric heights quite unknown to mankind. Can the Nobel Prize be that far off? If Hemingway can crack, pretty rest of us can, too.

Two more Hemingway essays (if you are interested) Yes, I have been a busy little bee. The Sun Also Rises and the ‘lost generation’ — Part I and The Sun Also Rises and the ‘lost generation’ — Part II

Exciting news! Good Lord, I can’t quite tell you how exciting! Make sure you are sitting down when you read this post!

Two more Hemingway entries, if you’re interested. Getting there I’m glad to say. Just another 2/3 ‘essays’ and 2 ‘potted biogs’ and I can start getting on with other stuff.

The first and the second.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s this from Time magazine:

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

Then there’s this from another Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar, Matthew Brucolli in Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success:

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two more stories (if you’re interested)

Today I posted two more stories in the Deadlines for Writers website, and you can read them if you are interested. One is called A Tense Relationship and the other Friday Lunch With Sam. 2 Both are very short because the word count — sticking to it is a feature of the site — was only 750.

If you have any comments — if, but, as usual, I’m not holding my breath — please make them.

As always what a reader thinks is ‘wrong’ with a story, where a reader thinks a story doesn’t work if far more helpful than ‘that was just fab! Utterly, brilliant!’ You can tell me that if you like, but I won’t believe you and will lose some respect for you into the bargain.

So, beware!

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What do Edward Gibbon, tomatoes and peanuts, paedophiles, Ernest Hemingway and bullshit have in common? Nothing. They just all feature in today’s 1,000 words (well, actually 1,499, but let’s not quibble, eh? It’s spring

One thing which puzzles me a little about writing fiction is the widespread use of the ‘first-person narrator’. I say ‘puzzled’, but it really doesn’t puzzle me as such. I see it more as technique many writers resort to (‘to which writers resort’ Ed) because, in a sense, it is ‘easier’. I know that because I have also adopted it in one or two of the comparatively few short stories I’ve written (as, of course, does Hemingway in his first two novels, which is pertinent to this entry).

For those of us with, to put it bluntly, the gift of the gab, that is those of us who can apparently bullshit at the drop of a hat, the ‘first-person narrator’ is a god-send. It becomes almost like day-dreaming, you get those day-dreams down on paper and your laughing. Well, I admit it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to get away from the ‘universal narrator who is all-seeing, all-knowing and a total pain in the butt, ‘first-person narration’ is the obvious way to go. But, as I say, I, at least, regard it as something of a cop-out.

As for ‘getting it all down on paper’, I should write ‘on paper’ as everything is now digitised. And the emergence of word-processing software is, for me at least, another god-send. I re-write a hell of a lot, and the prospect of writing, even a short short story, on a typewriter, then having to re-write it again and again as you revise it for however many times you want to do so to get it as you want is not a happy one.

Yet that’s what writers did until computers came along. In fact, take it back even further, to the late 18th and 19th centuries: writers wrote by hand and each subsequent draft was also handwritten. I suspect, though, that they weren’t too fussed either and all the scribbling must have been a pain (‘Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon’, the Duke of Gloucester, King George III’s brother, is said to have told the historian when he was presented with the latest volume of Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the writer, right).

I also suspect that, just as I believe the ‘writing’ pretty much always first takes place in the mind, those writers who had to write by hand spent a great deal more time actually thinking about what they were going to write. I mean you don’t want to get several thousand words down on paper, only to realise somewhere down the line you had fucked up (or, more politely, taken a wrong turn and written yourself into a corner).

Here might be a good point to mention Anthony Trollope’s novel Lady Anna. I haven’t read an extraordinary amount of Trollope, but I have read some, and it can be pleasant and entertaining reading. But Lady Anna was odd: it didn’t flow as it might (and as the prose I like should) and was oddly disjointed, even occasionally a little dull. A little later I discovered why that might have been: Trollope wrote the novel on board the ship on his long voyage to Australia to visit his son.

He was in the habit of writing, more or less strictly, 1,000 words every day, and once that had been done, he simply knocked off for, I suppose a glass of claret. Furthermore, he didn’t bother re-reading what he had previously read before getting down to that day’s 1,000 words, which might account not just for the oddly disjointed nature, but all manner of, often dull, repetition. Bet you didn’t know that, but to be fair, nor did I until I found out. But where was I? Oh, yes, ‘first-person narration’.

Perhaps I’m being more than a tad purist when I say that as far as I am concerned there should be ‘a reason’ why some bod is tell her or his story, and it would follow that reason would be an intricate part of the story. So, for example, in Lolita, the paedophile Humber Humbert has written a memoir by way of ‘explaining’ and possibly even trying to ‘justify’ what he did, including the usual bull from paedos that he was somehow ‘led on’ by Dolores Haze. After completing the memoir, Humbert dies of a heart attack and the memoir is then given up for publication by a psychologist.

Overall that makes sense. But what about, for example — chosen because I have read them comparatively recently, the ‘first-person narrators’ of Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms? Why exactly did Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry tell their stories? Well, I know why: because Hemingway is almost always writing about himself (he does seem to have been extraordinarily self-centred in the literal meaning of the word, as well as its usual meaning) and those to main characters were more or less proxies for him. I suggest a better writer would have gone the extra mile and given her or his first-person narration context, as Nabokov did in Lolita. It could be anything, bloody anything, but whatever is was would serve as a frame for the narrative voice.

Another point to make is the element of sequence in a first-person narration (which, as I point out) usually hang about in mid-air for not much of a good reason. Say I went to the local Chinese restaurant for a meal and halfway through a cook burst out from the kitchen fleeing another cook with a meat cleaver and trying to chop the first cook in half. I meet you the following day and tell you all about it (and by the way, the murder did not take place as the manager and his son managed to pin down the second cook, who immediately burst into tears. It seems he had just had news from back home in Shanghai that his father had been killed in a car crash and took exception to a dismissive remark the first cook made. Thought I might tell you in case you were getting worried).

‘Jim,’ I say (and you are Jim, obviously, although that most probably is not your name, but it will have to do for you as part of this example), ‘guess what happened last night! We saw a Chinese cook trying to kill his mate with a meat cleaver!’ I might then carry on and give more details, but by bit, filling in the story which you (Jim) has a nosey fucker want to get.

What I would not do is nab you and say: ‘Well, it was towards evening on a dull day when my partner, who is eight months pregnant, got it into her head that she wanted — no, needed! — a plate of sweet and sour pork. Naturally, I agreed that we shouldn’t just get a takeaway Chinese meal, but actually go for a sit-down as we hadn’t done so for a while. Well, as we were looking though the menu and considering whether to have starters . . .’ That is not going to happen. But that is pretty much always what happens in first-person narratives.

Here’s another good example where it works: Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. One point of the novel is that the narrator is ‘unreliable’ — very modern and even more modern as Ford was one of the first to do that kind of thing. And not only does he tell his story, he tells different versions of it and his mendacity is crucial to the novel. Thus the ‘first person narration’ works.

Thought I’d get that off my chest. And as, elsewhere, I have promised my self to write every day (to stay in the swing of it all) I have now done my duty:

To come: why peanuts really jack me off, masquerading as ‘nuts’. And no they are not ‘a legume’ — you read that recently didn’t you. They are, in fact, a fruit! And along those lines, tomatoes are not ‘a fruit’ as you also read in that ‘interesting’ piece in the Daily Mail/Readers Digest/the White Canyon Bugle/New York Times kiddies’s section or wherever else you get your ‘knowledge’: they are — hold on to your hats! — actually ‘a nut’. Bet you didn’t know that, either. And neither did I until I made it up just a few moments ago. Bullshit? You bet and then some!

PS Here’s another interesting ‘fact’: an astonishing 87 per cent of people who could be bothered to fill in the questionnaire, in fact, have a full 33 per cent less knowledge that they assumed. Stick that in your pipe!