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.
