More reading, finishing off one and starting a promising new one (Kierkegaard, Hollywood And How He Married An Alien From Mars or something - I’ll check and get back to you)

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.

Finished off Hemingway vs Fitzgerald today, then start on an intriguing book I only came across last week called - provocatively it has to be said and I think you get a fair idea of what angle it will take from this title - Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. It’s by some guy call Leonard J Leff.

I trust myself after reading a few pages on sussing out whether it can be taken reasonably seriously or not (e.g. I Married and Alien From Outer Space), but even if everything has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, if it’s entertaining, it’s entertaining.

Along the lines of ‘loaded titles’, in my last year at university, after having done fuck all pretty much for two years in my English and Philosophy joint honours course, I was desperate to come up with a book, any book, a pamphlet, even, any pamphlet which might (as Hemingway would say, the old phoney) give me the inside dope on aspects of my Existentialism course.

One of the guys it covered as Soren Kierkegaard, who was well-known for his scepticism in most matters and a satirical bent. Scouring the library for ‘commentaries’, most of which by that late stage in the game had been borrowed anyway, I came across the following. You can guess just what an objective commentary it might be from its title: Kierkegaard the Cripple.

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.I’ve just looked it up and it by a Theodore Haecker. I seem to remember - this isn’t borne

out by my just recent googling - that it was published by some protestant seminary in the Mid-West. I didn’t read it, however, I didn’t bother. Maybe I should have done.

Nominally, ‘the cripple’ was based on the fact that Kierkegaard had a rather strange shape, or seemed to, and after injuring his leg walked with a limp.

So it remains to be seen how good my latest acquisition which arrived yesterday is or whether it is just a throwaway piece of fluff. By the way, I recently came up with a, for me, useful description of The Sun Also Rises which I shall use: a sad, sour, sardonic, romantic potboiler. Even after reading the bloody novel three times, the most recent last week, I still can’t see how the ‘lost generation’ angle is in it rather than grafted on by Scribners’ marketing department. And, friends, Hemingway might have started a new style of writing - though as far as I am concerned a pretty limited one - but a writing ‘genius’ he wasn’t.

PS Looked up Theodore Haecker (or Theodor) and he was a German, not a Yank and a RC convert to boot. Lord knows what that colony of Mid-West puritan godwhackers were doing publishing his book.

In which I confess to an ongoing bout of ‘out of sortism’ (and wonder whether Boris Johnson will come crashing down this week or next)

Since losing the puzzles (which I think I mentioned) and being aware that my annual income has plummeted by pretty much a third, I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts, though not quite in the way you might imagine. The money was handy, the work, though a bit longwinded, easy and highly manageable, but the important thing was the £8,400 it brought in every year gave me a kind of freedom.

I did not spend it profligately, but it meant I could, if I wanted, buy a flight abroad, hire a car and stay somewhere for two weeks without a second thought. Now I can’t. Now my income is down to my state pension and the money I get from the house in Birmingham. What I get is certainly a little more than some — well, pensioners — and I have ‘savings’ which I could, should I want to, spend. But I don’t want to.

The current plan is (though remember telling God your plans makes him laugh out loud) is that I shall as far as possible not touch a penny of it and give it half each to Elsie and Wesley, which sum should be very welcome as they might then be at the age when they want to invest in a house. Actually, Elsie, now married with a toddler, is already at that age.

The other thing is — and there is no reason for this except that it is self-imposed and for entirely different reasons I am trying to learn a little more discipline (the writing, if you must know, which will start once I’ve got this Hemingway bollocks out of the way), so sticking to my rule of spending a less than comes in is what I am trying to do.

This ‘out of sorts’ feeling, which I wouldn’t want to stress too much, however, means that if I don’t ‘do’ something which is not just filling in time or some kind of mindless activity, I feel a tad guilty at the end of the day. Writing counts very much as ‘doing something’. In fact, to be honest it is the only thing which counts as that. And although it is quite legitimate to do the background reading for the Hemingway bollocks — at the moment I am reading Hemingway vs Fitzgerald: the rise and fall of a literary friendship by a guy called Scott Donaldson — I have to persuade myself every day that ‘it counts’. And I don’t like that kind of introverted internal debate.

Today I might have done some reading but I frittered away about four hours making a short video by editing a BBC Michael Cockerell piece about Boris Johnson, our new Prime Minister. In a sense that is ‘doing something’ because it demands thought etc, but on the other hand I can’t deny that it is most certainly not essential and was purely done to be posted on Facebook. But then I might also now post it here, having now mentioned it. So take a look.

As for the Hemingway bollocks, well, I’m enjoying it, but the task is growing exponentially as I come across more books I might read — and then read — and as, the more I get to know about his novel The Sun Also Rises, the more I realise that my reaction cannot, as it started out, be simply ‘this is no fucking masterpiece and Hemingway is no fucking writer’. That’s essentially what I think, but it is a little more complex than that and I want to do the matter justice — after all this is about ‘learning a little more intellectual discipline.

So new angles I feel I am obliged to tackle include ‘can there be objective literary judgment’ (which will bring in the whole ‘relativity/subjectivity’ thing and that, dear friends, if not handled carefully, could be the kiss of death); taking a look at publishers’ motivation etc — after all at the end of the day they are commercial outfits hoping to turn a penny, honest or otherwise; and, well, the ‘literary scene’ overall (or what I can know about it, which isn’t much). But I have had a good idea for a novel based on H and F.

And now to bed.

PS Boris Johnson is cunt. If and when this is ever read, you will long know from your recent history how he did. I’m not optimistic, but odder things have happened at see.

Give and take? It’s has to be a two-way street. Always. And as for gentle summer evenings . . . a boy, even one batting 70, can still dream

This is also going in my main blog:

I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post it, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, at some point, still decide to publish it. First I decided to publish it in a second more private blog I keep which really is more a real diary.

The different between that and this, my main blog, is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. The other blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like this one — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.

In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.

I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.

As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.

But back to that entry: here it is.

I suppose that everyone who is married has many war stories to tell, and I am no exception. Just now, well about 20 minutes ago, my wife’s essentially childlike nature again manifested itself: in many way our house is a tip, not as bad as many, certainly, but a little worse than some, and I don’t like living this way.

The trouble is that quite apart from being farmers - who notoriously don’t throw away anything - there is, I discovered a few months ago, autism in the family and my wife keeps everything. Every cupboard is jam-packed with stuff that will never, ever be used. In one corner of our bedroom are about five or six big plastic storage boxes, the kind you can pick up at Asda and B&Q, full of stuff. Much of it is old school reports, our children’s scrapbooks, photographs, that kind of thing, and although I am equally sentimental about their childhood there comes a point when enough is enough. These things aren’t looked at and never will be. They are just kept and woe betide anyone — well, me — who suggests perhaps sifting though them and throwing some of it it.

Down here in the kitchen is a cupboard jam-packed with small plastic boxes, the kind you can put sandwiches in. Many of them are old ice-cream boxes, and, yes, they can be useful. But how many does a sane person need. Three, four, five, perhaps, but in that cupboard, stuck in any old how there must be at least 30.

I suspect a strain of mild autism runs in my wife’s family. My brother-in-law is apparently autistic - I was told this by my sister-in-law Lucy with Andrew sitting right next to her, so it’s not as though she was somehow talking out of school - and two of their children have also been diagnosed as autistic.

I realise that autism is on a spectrum and that it can range from being mild to severe, but it does most certainly affect behaviour. I mention this because I think it’s highly likely my wife is also autistic to a certain extent and that would explain a great deal about what I have so far seen as extremely irritating quirks in her behaviour.

To describe it in one way - and I don’t mean this in any way unpleasantly but merely descriptively - her behaviour can quite often seem to resemble that of an eight-year-old child in a school playground. In arguments she always resorts to simply talking over you (well, me) and repeating the same phrase over and over and over again. As that kind of discussion leads absolutely nowhere, invariably I give in, though by no means gracefully. I have relaxed a little since I retired, but in the past I could quite often lose my rag and I have something of a sharp tongue.

There was an instance of my wife’s odd behaviour earlier. Every single cupboard and drawer in the house is jam-packed. In many you can’t get anything more in, and here in the kitchen one cupboard is jam-packed with small, plastic boxes, some bought, some old ice-cream boxes and that kind of thing. There must be at least two dozen knocking around. Occasionally one is use for food. One, occasionally.

A few days ago I took one out and filled it with all the little odds and sods of mine which clutter up the bench in our kitchen. This is an old-fashioned farmhouse bench just. This morning all the stuff had been taken out again, stuffed into a plastic shopping bag and the box removed. I asked why: it’s her box, she said, and it’s for food. You have about two dozen boxes in the cupboard I said, can’t you spare one? No, she said. And that was it.

Everything, and I mean everything has to stay in the place she has allocated it. If something is even slightly moved, she notices immediately and moves it back.

I don’t for a second imagine I am blameless and don’t also have my quirks. But I do like to think they are a little more mainstream. More to the point, not only do I believe in that hoary old cliche about marriage ‘give and take’, but I also practice it. Even more to the point I pay for everything, I pay every bill and then some.

For example, my wife has fallen out with her sister-in-law and her brother who since I’ve been married have employed her, both on the farm and in the house (my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business). So now she has not income and no job.

Part of the make-up of her character (and I supposed, if I am right, her mild autism) is that in situations in which she is comfortable she is self-confident. In all other situations she completely lacks confidence, and so, for example, is shit-scared of going out into the world - Bodmin, say - and working.

She says she is keeping her ears open for anyone wanting someone to do with farm work (fruit-picking, for example, though I pointed out that that would provided employment for just a few weeks a year) and heard that the pub/restaurant in St Tudy wanted someone to keep the outside tidy, the verges, bushes etc. She went along and got the gig, but there was one slight complication: she needed a strimmer. So far when strimming work was necessary around our cottage, she borrowed her brother’s, but - well, see above. I offered to buy her one and a few hours later we went out to Mole Valley farmers in St Columb and I bought one for her. It costs, with a few odds and sods, the best part of £185.

What is relevant here is that the freelance work I have been doing for the Daily Mail for the past ten years, laying on the puzzles, which brought in a very handy sum every month, has ended. (I looked up what the original weekly fee was worth ten yours on after inflation had taken its toll and was surprised to find it had been devalued by 25%. So I informed the managing editor of that and told him I would be upping what I had been charging a month.

I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post in on my main blog, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, instead want to publish it here.

The different between here and my main blog is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. This blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like the other — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.

In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.

I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.

As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.

But back to that entry: here it is.The upshot is the Mail (like all newspapers preternatually penny-wise and pound-foolish) decided to take the work in-house and my annual income has dropped by almost a third. (I might, perhaps, have handled it better, although I do suspect even more schmoozing wouldn’t have saved the situation and the work would have been taken in-house anyway.)

I mention that because £185 less means a lot more to me now than it did three weeks ago. I also mention that because it’s the kind of detail my wife simply forgets when it comes to my ‘using her plastic boxes’. The whole fucking point about ‘give and take’ is that it has to be a two-way street.

I have in the past thought of moving out and going to live on my own again now both our children are pretty much independent - our daughter is now married and our son will start his second year at university in September - and financially that would put my wife so far up shit creek there would be no coming back. But it would also be unbelievably petty however much it might provide a very brief satisfaction of ‘I’ll show you!’ so I shan’t do it. But by Christ the temptation is huge.

I will do anything for anyone as long as I am not taken for granted. I firmly believe that he who has should share it with he who hasn’t, especially in a partnership like marriage. You can believe that or you can think I am just bullshitting, but it is true. I also believe in trying as best as possible to live in a harmonious, peaceful and happy atmosphere for the benefit of everyone. But I also firmly believe that ‘give and take’ should be a two-way street and time and again I feel I am simply taken for granted. And it fucks me off.

Having written the above, I have got a bit of the irritation out of my system, but this time I shall post this in my blog. Why not? If it is read by someone in my immediate family, well, perhaps they will realise which way the wind is blowing. Fuck it, I am getting to the point where I really do feel I have had enough.

Ain’t nothing going to do it except doing it. So why am I still pfaffing around?

OK, I know exactly what I should be doing but I’m not doing it. It’s not rocket science. There is not great shakes about it: I should be getting up - not early, doesn’t have to be at the crack of dawn - and sitting down in my ‘shed’, which is what this place has been called, and doing nothing until I am so bloody bored I start writing.

It doesn’t matter what I fucking write, but as long as I write, that is fine. Jesus there’s enough shite out there as it is and a little more, courtesy of me, isn’t going to bring the world to its end. But I don’t. I have no idea was stops me. Laziness isn’t the word, because it isn’t laziness. I mean if it were laziness I wouldn’t even be writing these bloody words which, so far, these included, make up 745.

It’s not even ‘dread of failure’ because I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I ‘fail’. But for some reason when I wake up I am in a kind of torpor which lasts until 10.30 in the morning.

BUT - I am going do it! So far in my life I have three times been disciplined enough to sit down and write something over a prolonged period. The real irony is that ONCE you sit down, you wonder what all the agony is about. I did it with one ‘novel’, which was not a bad idea and could be re-written though what I did produce (which is the Lord knows where) I don’t imagine was very good. That was in Birmingham while I was still working for the CEGB staff newspaper.

The routine was simple: get a litre of Strongbow (or whatever) from around the corner, a packet of ‘skins’, ten ciggies, then get back home and write for four hours until I was so knackered I slumped off to bed. That routine, at least, produced a novel, however shite that novel was (and I think I still have it, but if I don’t, oh well, not the world’s greatest loss).

Later, while living and working in London but staying down here in St Breward at Terry’s, I used to get up early, about 6am and type away for several hours, this time sustained by nothing more dangerous than tea and fags. And I did get something done.

And even though I say so myself, it was possibly a cut above what I had previously produced at Norlan Drive (which, as of writing, I still have somewhere).

Most recently there was ‘Love: A Fiction’, previously called ‘Letters Never Sent’ which I wrote in two stints in London in the early 1990s. Pertinently the same ‘secret’ was applied: just get if fucking done! In - as I say - two stints, I sat down regularly twice a week at 7pm to write after telling myself that I had no other choice but to fucking do it. And do you know, sweethearts, it worked a treat. And THAT is the one piece of work so far I would not in the slightest be ashamed of showing anyone.

It might not be ‘what people want’ at present but who gives a fuck. I’m almost 70. If not I were still to care about ‘being accepted’ and producing ‘what people want’, I am pretty much dead. Getting older, not being able to get it up - not that I have had any know that in practice, though after two heart attacks and the occasional wank I’ve to a pretty good idea - does have it’s compensations, not to say rewards. Not giving a fuck about what ‘I’m supposed to be doing’ is one of them.

To be blunt, I’m not going to starve, so fuck money from now on and fuck ‘playing the game’ (which I rather think I never did anyway, though I’m sure when I was younger I wasn’t quite as cocky or sanguine about not doing so.

Pip, pip

PS I have been indulging in a rather lovely concoction: brandy and alcoholic lovage, 50/50. I can recommend it. Helps to let you shout your mouth off (‘shoot off your mouth’? Subs please check).

PPS This is going both in my official blog and my unofficial blog (which you can find here).

Sorry about this, but — completely unplanned — I began jotting down a few comments and being the sort who really can’t shut up . . .

Oh, what have I let myself in for? Just read the introduction to a book of five essays on Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel (it was his second, in fact, but like much about the man, nothing is straightforward) called New Essays On The Sun Also Rises in a series called The American Novel, and despite the hi-falutin’ talk of ‘New Critics’, ‘new criticism’ and modern perspectives and modernism, I still think the guy is a nine-bob note who had the luck of old nick.

But — a huge ‘but’ — is it really likely that yours truly, a snotty-nosed cynic cast aside in deepest North Cornwall is right and an assortment of academics and critical literary types are wrong? Really? Come on, let’s get real. And yet, and yet...

I’ve just finished the introduction and will continue with the rest of the essays tomorrow, but let me cite just one passage which makes me wonder whether, however unlikely it might be, the world really is capable of disappearing up it own arse. Remember: my background is in newspapers, mainly as a sub, and I know — I know! — the kind of bullshit which can be produced to make white seem black and black seem like a stroll in the park. So let me cite this, from the end of Ms Linda Wagner-Martin’s introduction:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Sounds real doesn’t it? But is it? This is the same novel about which Hemingway’s sometime friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote (in a review of the novel when it came out):

‘Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [the novel] is a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.’

He also noted in that review that ‘it had been a mistake to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectation which were not met by the story that followed’. He is referring to the quote from Ecclesiastes which is used as a second epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’ quote.

Then there’s the verdict of Donald Ogden Stewart, who was of the party in the visit to Pamplona in 1925 who along with Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith, Hemingway based the fictioal character of Bill Gorton. Stewart was also no opinionated snotty-nosed cynic: he had published several books by the time he got to know Hemingway in Paris, had hinterland and became an Oscar-winning screenwriter (he wrote the script for The Philadelphia Story). After reading the novel, Stewart commented that ‘It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’ and added that ‘it didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’

So might be going in?

. . .

Putting forward my explanation — OK, putting forward a possible explanation — lays me wide open. I am no academic, not literary critic, no published author or poet, in fact, I have no obvious qualification at all for adding my two ha’porth worth. But I’m going to do so anyway (which is partly what writing this whole bloody thing — the ‘thing’ being how The Sun is not a masterpiece and Hemingway is not ‘a writer of genius’ — is all about). I think what happened is quite simple: Hemingway’s initial success and his subsequent reputation was the result of the confluence of a variety of often quite disparate factors: there was Hemingway himself, a complex man who believed himself to be something of a literary genius, who was ruthlessly ambitious bordering on being a sociopath, and who believed his own bullshit.

There were his various champions, who promoted him at difference times and for very different reasons and who each in some way or other furthered his career: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, most notably Scott Fitzgerald (who almost hero-worshipped Hemingway) and eventually his editor at his publishers Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins. Pertinently, Perkins had entered publishing through Scribner’s advertising department and seems to have had a healthy commercial instinct. That is a vital part of the Hemingway success story.

Then there was the time at which Hemingway (born in 1899) appeared on the literary scene: the post-World War I era (not, of course, then known as World War I — I thought I might alert one or two younger readers to that fact) when pretty much everything was up in the air and ‘modernism’ was all the rage. The ‘Great War’ (which, kiddiwinks, is what it was called at the time) was a watershed, possibly the mother of all watersheds to adopt a current cliche, and what folk wanted was ‘something different’. And they wanted it desperately.

The established authors — Henry James, John Galsworthy, DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton (who didn’t in fact pop her clogs until 1937) were very much ‘out’ and what the young folk wanted — as always — something ‘new’ and ‘different’. And Hemingway was certainly that. Different? Try reading some of his ‘lean, muscular prose’. It’s different all right, though — in my very humble view — not at all very good.

Perkins, he at Scribner’s with the commercial head who had already championed Fitzgerald by publishing Scott’s first novel This Side Of Paradise and his subsequent work (which, believe it or not were at the time regarded as ‘shocking’ — this was, remember, in only the second decade after the end of the Victorian Age and whatever it is called in the US) was more than ready to take a punt on Hemingway, and boy did it take off.

The Sun Also Rises sold steadily more and more copies, not least because Hemingway was marketed by Scribner’s as a new kind of author, a writer who was not some airy-fairy pale artistic pansy (the mention of which allows me

to post a picture of Reginald Bunthorne) but who was a wholesome he-man who could not only write (so the story went) but who also boxed, enjoyed bullfighting and eventually shot big game and all the other things which get you wondering what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. In marketing terms it was genius: his style and the writer were new, and new sells, sells, sells, and then sells, sells, sells some more (until something newer comes along, of course).

Here’s another taste of the kind of bull The Sun Also Rises elicited — this is from a review of the book in the New York Times in 1926:

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.

Surely after reading that, which on the face of it seems, well, fair enough, it is legitimate to ask: what exactly does ‘more literary English’ have to feel ashamed about? Well, nothing, really. That quote is just a snippet of the acres of newspaper bullshit churned out daily which, in Hemingway’s case, did him a great favour.

Three years later Hemingway published his second (third) novel, A Farewell To Arms and that, too, sold like hotcakes. But although he carried on selling stories to some magazines, to be blunt that was the sum of his novelistic output. What about To Have And Have Not? you ask, and For Whom The Bell Tolls? Well, yes and no. To Have And Have Not (1937) was more a novella, a short story on steroids and didn’t sell particularly well at all. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) was done a favour by Hollywood who turned it into a film starring Gary Cooper and I would bet my bottom dollar that those who still remember the work, remember the film not the novel.

Then, again to be blunt, Hemingway really dried up. In fact he had pretty much dried up at the beginning of the 1930s after A Farewell To Arms. Much of his work published in that decade was collections of previously published

short stories, but he kept his name aflame by using his reputation and ‘name’ and negotiating a deal with a US magazine group to ‘cover the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda Vaill makes clear in her book Hotel Florida, Hemingway was getting a little desperate to keep his name in the lights. Here is a taste of his ‘war reporting’:

‘It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming into Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.’

Hmm. Doesn’t quite do it for me.

Ten years later, in 1950, he published another novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which — I haven’t myself read it and really don’t want to — was pretty much panned and is today, I imagine, only read by keen Phd students and nerds. Then, two year later, came The Old Man And The Sea, another ‘short novel’ — long short story is more accurate, but that, too, I haven’t read and really — well, you’re ahead of me.

And that, dear friends, was it. Oh, there’s the matter of his ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’, which is pretty inexplicable until you remember that one Bob Dylan was also awarded a ‘Nobel Prize of Literature’ which might indicate that the whole Nobel Prize thing is something of a racket.

NB I fully believe Dylan is a true one-off and deserves a Nobel Prize or equivalent, but what makes his award so farcical is that it should be ‘for Literature’. I suspect Dylan was equally bemused which, for me, explains his initial silence on the matter and his decision not to fuck off to Stockholm to receive it in person. I think — I believe he is an honest man — he was just downright embarrassed but was buggered that he would play the game. Me, if they offer me one, I’m refusing.

. . .

But what about all the acres of academic and literary criticism? Well, first of all I should point out that Hemingway is now old hat. The collection of essays I am reading is quite recent in terms of Hemigway research, but it is more than 32 years old. There are now plenty of other ‘new’ things to be getting on with. I mean even bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is old hat in 2019. And, no, I have read his work either and don’t want to. My policy is that there is plenty of good stuff which has stood the test of time which is there for me to read, more than enough of it, in fact, to last me until well after I am dead (though I did try Oliver Twist a while back and, er, wasn’t that fussed, though it was an early work and maybe later stuff is not quite as irritating).

As for the reputation, my, admittedly left-field explanation, is that it’s all rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather as there are precious few research grants available for anyone suggesting a project to show climate change is a load of old cack, for many years after World War II there was no kudos to be had be outlining why one Ernest Miller Hemingway, star of the modernist movement, stylistic innovator, mainstay for American literature, ‘one of the greats’ (John O’Hara who could write even called him the best writer since Shakespeare) was actually a man of straw and a nine-bob note.

Let me ask of you a favour: remind yourself of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and while it is fresh in your mind, read this paragraph again from the introduction to the book of essays. And when you have finished allow step to one side, as it were, and not take this literary guff at face value. Perhaps you might then see what I am getting at:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Another damned thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Wolfe?

Well, as I’m serious about getting this Hemingway bollocks completed, and as I want to prove to myself that the reading this, that and t’other isn’t just displacement activity (about which I’ve already written a blog entry, so I can’t procrastinate any more — actually that’s unfair), I got down to adding a few more words. Mainly they were based on a few more thoughts I had after reading a book of a collection of essays by a guy called Malcolm Cowley, who knew Hemingway in Paris.

He wasn’t part of Hemingway’s crowd really, mainly because he and his wife (he tells us in his in the first piece in the book about Hemingway) live in ‘a painters’ colony’ in Giverny about 50 miles from Paris and only visited ‘the crowd’ in Montparnasse once a week. He and his wife lived off a $5,000 fellowship (which was renewed for a second year) and which, because of the fabulously cheap franc the dollar could buy, was more than enough for them to get by on.

The book of essays is called A Second Flowering and was published in 1973. I mention that in particular because by then Hemingway had only been dead for 12 years and even though he hadn’t published anything of any consequence since The Old Man And The Sea (which I haven’t read and neither intend to read or even want to and which I gather is more of a novella than a novel and when it was published Hemingway hadn’t published anything of any consequence since For Whom The Bell Tolls 11 years earlier in 1940) his reputation, courtesy of his 1954 Nobel Prize no doubt was still undented.

From my limited reading — limited because there could be an awful lot more to read if I had the stomach for it — I have gathered that since Cowley wrote his book that reputation has slowly been declining, although any number of spotty-faced adolescents — of all ages — still cream themselves over his ‘style’.

Cowley can write, however, so it didn’t surprise me that although he rated Hemingway and I get the impression seems to have quite like the man, Hemingway was something of a shit to him (or at least behind his back). In my noodling around the net I came across something or other in which Hemingway refers to Cowley along the lines of ‘that moon-face idiot’.

The other authors Cowley covers in his book are Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, a poet I had not before heard of called Hart Crane, e e cummings (apparently the lower-case spelling is compulsory and in some of the more backward and remoter US states where they do quite a bit of reading for want of anything much else to do you can still be jailed for up to a year for ignoring that convention, so I’m playing if safe in case this blog is happened upon by some busybody in Alaska, Wyoming or Montana), Thornton Wilder and — another guy I hadn’t heard of, Thomas Wolfe.

Actually, whenever I heard about ’the American novelist Wolfe’, I always thought of the Bonfires Of The Vanities chappie (I’ll look up his name in a minute and add it if I can be bothered). In fact they are two different guys. (The one I mistake him for is Tom Wolfe, so the confusion is understandable).

Cowley’s book is very good reading and after reading the two piece he has on Hemingway (and the introduction, of course) I have now started the chapter on Thomas Wolfe. And what an odd guy he was.

Like it seems rather a lot of Yankee writers Wolfe went in for writing long, long tomes. I have not read anything by him so I can’t comment on his work — sound off might be closer tot the truth — but I can’t say I am initially enthused after reading that the first book he submitted to Scribner’s, where his editor was Maxwell Perkins who did the same job for Fitzgerald and Hemingway was an astonishing 330,000 words long. Perkins edited it back to manageable form, presumably after reading the bloody lot, and there must have been something in the original manuscript which persuaded Perkins that it was worth the effort.

Wolfe had started his ‘literary life’ as a playwright, but apparently despite high praise from his tutor at Harvard, no one on Broadway wanted to buy them off him to stage one because they were just too bloody long. Apparently all Wolfe’s work was about Wolfe (pictured).

The polite way of saying that is that Wolfe was a trailblazer in ‘autobiographical fiction’. And it was when I read in Cowley’s book about how it put himself centre stage in bloody all his fiction that I decided to write this entry (‘compelled to put my thoughts to paper’).

Cowley quotes from a letter Wolfe wrote to his mother which made me shudder a little. Here is the extract: ‘I intend to wreak out my soul on paper and express it all. This is what my life means to me: I am at the mercy of this thing and I will do it or die.’

Cowley goes on: ‘The next sentence reveals the nature of the “all” that he was going to express at the risk of his life.’

‘I never forget, I have never forgotten. I have tried to make myself conscious of the whole of my life since first the baby in the basket became conscious of the warm sunlight on the porch, and saw his sister go up the hill to the girl’s school on the corner (the first thing I remember).’

This is all recorded in his first novel which, edited down by — surely a very patient and benign — Maxwell Perkins became Look Homeward, Angel.

I mention all this not to make a few snide remarks about Yank writers who can’t shut up, but to wonder what it was that Perkins saw in those 330,000 first on 1,100 pages of handwritten text which landed on his desk. For he must have seen something which persuaded him doing a mammoth job of editing — apparently the task took for ever — was worth a candle. But he did.

Perkins and Wolfe are said to have got on well and (I’ve read that Wolfe saw in Perkins a father figure, although he did have his own father) and Perkins, the father of five daughters, saw in Wolfe the son he never had. Be that as it may, apparently once the book was published and sold well, Wolfe became a bit paranoid and felt he wasn’t getting the kudos he deserved as the writer because Perkins was getting a great deal of kudos as the editor who had knocked it all into shape. So Wolfe then jumped ship and went to another publisher.

. . .

Don’t imagine that the irony isn’t lost on me that I am being a tad critical about some writer bod who wrote solely about himself in — er my blog. But whatever my failings, I do like to think that egomania or even obsessive introspection is not one of them. But, and her I must confess to a possible failing, for all my huffing and puffing about how Hemingway is not, in my view, anything close to ‘a writer of genius’, I can’t shake of the fear that possibly, perhaps possibly my judgment is at fault. That perhaps Hemingway is rather good and I’m just to thick to appreciate it. Believe me that horrible thought crosses my mind more than twice a day.

So for example, I am both reading The Sun Also Rises for the third time just in case there is something in it which eludes me and might dawn on me in this third reading. And, almost from a sense of duty because I want to do this thing properly, I have also bought and have started reading A Moveable Feast. Every now and then you come across a rather good turn of phrase in Hemingway (in both books) but invariably he fucks it up within seconds by something so hamfisted that you wonder ‘where did this idiot get his reputation from’.

That question I hope to answer in the longer piece I am writing but briefly what I shall say is: his style was different, in fact very different, at exactly the right time: when the ‘literary world’ wanted something different. In a sense Hemingway scored not because he was Hemingway, but because he wasn’t Henry James or Edith Wharton or and not even Scott Fitzgerald who had a far more conventional style.

I gather, in fact, that Hemingway’s ‘new style’ wasn’t all that different to that of Ring Lardner and a one-time mentor Sherwood Anderson. But where Hemingway scored was with his almost sociopathic ambition. The man was ruthless about becoming famous and — I suspect — lived in a fantasy of his own even before he was published and became a bestseller as a ‘world-famous author’. He wouldn’t be the only one, although before the pop psychologists among you lay me down on the couch, I gave up that fantasy years and years ago. But as they say, it takes one to know one.

As for Wolfe, well the Lord knows what made him tick and why his huge tomes actually sold enough for his publisher not to boot him out of the door. I know if I were in any way ‘serious’, I would get one of his novels and read it. However, I shall be 7o in just over four months time and with a bit of luck I’ll have another 20 years on this earth, so to be frank I don’t really think I can spare the time.

Pip, pip.

Joe Bitter writes: the Golden Goose has flown

Well, the golden goose has fucked off. The puzzles work is no more. For the past ten years I have been earning extra from the Daily Mail by ‘placing their puzzles’, and it has been very handy money helping to ensure the bills were paid, especially when I started and the ‘casual rates’ at the Mail were still at Victorian levels.

Although I worked at the Mail for 28 years, I was never ‘on staff’ but ‘a casual’, one ‘employed by the day’. The ‘casual rate’ went up at some point by for many years was whittled away by inflation and by the time I began dong the puzzles - and thus earning the extra money - it was getting quite hard making ends meet, what with the extra expense of shelling out quite a bit to travel to and stay in London for four days a week.

Most recently, given the pitiful salary the Mail has taken to paying its junior employees, I was doing rather well compared to them, though not as well as several of those who were ‘on staff’ and in the case of one had been since the dawn of time. For many years staff received a percentage raise each year and that had a cumulative effect, year in, year out, so that salaries were, for many, quiet handsome. In fact for many years the ‘national papers’ were extremely generous employees, especially compared with their penny-pinching cousins in the ‘provincial press’.

(Around the time my son was born in 1999 and under pressure from my wife to ‘get a local job’, I worked as a sub-editor at the Plymouth Evening Herald and although I was paid peanuts, I was still the highest paid sub except for the chief sub and his deputy. There were two girls there who had been taken on from art school, and so were about 22/23 who were paid an abysmal £6,000 a year, but with the promise that the amount ‘would be reviewed after six months’. The promise was kept, the amount they were paid was reviewed and it was decided ‘not to pay them any more because they had never been reporters’.

It’s that kind of shit behaviour which gives newspapers a bad name. I’ve even heard the argument put forward that wages are low in the provinces ‘because working as journalist is a vocation’. The thing is when you are young, keen and impressionable and, for some odd reason, working as a reporter/for a newspaper/call it what you will is seen as the acme of a glamorous job, you can easily be persuaded to accept crap wages. A part of that hoary old ploy is the phrase ‘breaking into journalism’ which implies it is a difficult thing to do but you, my son/girl, had the wherewithal to achieve it. Congratulations, you are now part of an elite band of idiots who will now work for peanuts because what you do is ‘a vocation’. Every heard of anyone ‘breaking into accountancy’ or ‘breaking into civil engineering’? No, thought not. But don’t listen to me, I’m mad old Pat, the indiscreet cunt, a bit of a loose cannon. But back to the puzzles.

I shan’t give the amounts, but a few months ago and out of curiosity I went online to the thisismoney inflation calculator to find out what the weekly fee for doing the puzzles I had agreed with the managing editor in spring 2009 was worth now. And I was astonished - under the circumstances a very apt word - to discover its value had fallen by 25%. So I emailed the managing editor and told him so and informed him I would be charging a new few, the sum we had agreed with inflation taken into account. A day or two later he responded saying he ‘would look into it’, but then I heard nothing more. I waited for two weeks, delaying submitting my latest invoice (charging the new amount) but when I hadn’t heard anything, I submitted it and it was paid. I assumed the new fee had been accepted.

The work is not at all hard, but a bit fiddly - files have to be processed so that they are optimal for printing etc - and since I started I have done a little often (and very soon discovered the benefits of being organised) and this helped me stay on top of it. So last week as usual I logged on remotely (i.e. over the internet) to my PC at work every day to get a little bit more done. Everything was fine until the Wednesday morning when I was informed ‘your primary account has been disabled’.

I rang the IT Helpdesk but they were oddly unhelpful. I must have rung for or five times (and was simply left hanging on once or twice) when suddenly I got a call from the managing editor who had rung to give me ‘a double apology’. The first was that someone ‘had jumped the gun’ and ordered my account to be disabled prematurely so that I had not received his email asking me to call him. The second apology was for the fact that ‘doing the puzzles’ was being taken back in-house.

I assume that he expects this to be cheaper but I can’t see the chief sub and her desk being particularly happy about the new arrangement, especially when they find out all the backroom work that has to be done. Because I worked ahead, several weeks worth of puzzle pages were partly completed by by the middle of July the full extent of the task will become apparent and by the end of July when a new batch of puzzles arrive to be processed it will become even more apparent.

I must confess that it did occur to me that all this might happen once I charged a new fee to reflect how inflation had devalued the sum I was being paid weekly and wondered whether I should do so or just take it on the chin and settle for, in real terms, getting less money. Well, I decided not to. I’m not a serf and have always been bad at tugging my forelock and expressing gratitude for the scraps I am allowed from the rich man’s table and despite the inconvenience - to put it mildly - of my annual income being pretty much slashed by a third, I decided that I had no choice.

Perhaps I should have negotiated a little but even that would have been pretty much like tugging a forelock because Alex, the managing editor, would most certainly have done his best to minimise the rise to take account of inflation. So I would still have been settling for a pay cut. And who in his right mind does that?

The managing editor has held out the possibility that the new arrangement, in his words, might ‘crash and burn’ and that he might at some point be back in touch with me to get me to do it again, and as I say I don’t think the chief features sub will have been too happy being landed with the work, but to be frank I’m not holding my breath. And possibly, being such cheapskates, they might find some other sucker to do the work for less (the name Roger Wilkinson occurs to me, Pete).

Still, it was good while it lasted and life down here on the farm - so to speak - is not expensive: as long as we have enough twigs for the kitchen fire, enough candles to see us through the winter (once it arrives), frost doesn’t hit the

vegetable patch and Denzil doesn’t blow himself up making the potato spirit (he’s come close to that several times) life is tolerable even without the extra gelt I got from ‘doing the puzzles’.

To be the whole ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’ mentality of the nationals into context, the Mail will think nothing of paying some rancid old cunt (like Richard Littlejohn) a million a year to, as the phrase does, fart on paper. Michael Gove’s wifey Sarah Vine is another Mail columnist who will be rolling in it and although the rates they pay ‘name contributors’ has come down a little in these past few years, it will still be around a grand for 1,000 words, though that figure is an estimate. Yet agreeing to my fee rise would only have cost the Mail another £2,600 a year.

Bitter? Me?

. . .

I have now also started a daily diary which will be easier to write because I shan’t fanny around with discretion. But that one is not public, and anyway as general reading is concerned and as it is just be a record of what I have done during the day it will be dull, dull, dull for the general reader.

Oh, and just for the crack. . .

Four short videos to keep the pot boiling . . .

One of the little things I enjoy doing is taking a track I like, then hunting down images to add to the music to make a short video.

Here are two I have done recently and two others knocked up a few years ago. The first, Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III (probably now known to most of you as ‘Rufus Wainwright’s dad’) put together on May 25 (coincidentally my son’s 20th birthday); the second, Magic Mirror by Leon Russell was completed today.

Then there’s my tribute to the gallant guys and gals beavering away keeping Putin safe from democrats and finally a piece of nonsense done to pass the time.

All four benefit from going full-screen — click the little ‘square’ thing on the bottom right.

Here they are:

Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III

Magic Mirror by Leon Russell

Back And Forth by Cameo

And a piece of nonsense knocked together using Pinnacle Pro on my iPhone on my

trip back home from the Bordeaux region to Cornwall. Shot in France and on the

plane. Steglitz is in the south-west of Berlin (but then you knew that). The piece of music

is Emotional Shirt by Bill Bruford

Want to do something instead of frittering away your life? Read. And don’t ever allow yourself to be persuaded that running around like a blue-arsed fly is actually ‘doing’ anything. When something is ‘done’ you need more than a pile of shopping to prove it

I should imagine it happens to everyone every so often, but for some reason I have been feeling very restless for these past few days and about the only thing which soothes that restlessness is to write (as I am doing now). I have no idea why I feel this, or why it began. Oddly, I suspect it has, apart from anything else, something to do with blood sugar levels as in low blood sugar levels, but that is just surmise. I do know (and this is the first time I have admitted this to anyone but myself) that another reason for the restlessness whenever I suffer from it is feeling that I haven’t ‘done’ anything.

I know exactly what I mean by having ‘done’ something but I won’t try to define it here because, to be frank I can’t be arsed and anyway there’s not much point in doing so. But to try to clarify what I mean I’ll point out that as far as I am concerned, and this is probably quite obvious’, ‘activity’ is really not the same as ‘action’.

Going shopping for a few necessities is ‘activity’, as is spending a very pointless sixty minutes — and invariably always far longer than I intend — going through the Guardian and Daily Mail websites very morning to see if there’s anything worth knowing. (NB There rarely is and I always, on the Guardian website, skip the many ‘eco pieces’ agonising over how the world is going to hell in a handcart. In tandem, on the Daily Mail website, I make a point of skipping all its gammon pieces about what load of old cack all this eco-nonsense is).

At some point I’ll look through Facebook, but there’s rarely anything there to hold my attention. Facebook then out of the way, I often — I do this particular thing quite a lot — log onto the Autotrader website to see what cars are for sale at between £500 and £2,500 locally. By locally I mean within 35 miles: much further and you start being shown cars for sale in South Wales, just 50 miles away as the crow flies but about 180 miles if you drive there, and I’m obviously not going to drive there to buy a cheap secondhand car.

The silly thing is there isn’t even any point in taking a look at what is available on Autotrader: I’m not going to, and don’t yet have to, replace my old T-reg 1600cc automatic Astra which might now have quite a few miles on the clock (LATER 118,060 as of yesterday when I filled her up), but has some life left in her yet. But it’s something I like doing, though I don’t know why.

In a nutshell, all that is just ‘activity’ — it is not ‘doing’ anything at all — and fritters away several hours, if most of the day, and the restlessness continues.

. . .

I’ve previously mentioned the piece I am slowly working on which is about what — in my view — something of a nine-bob note Ernest Hemingway was and how his ‘debut novel’ (it was actually his second novel) is anything but a masterpiece and that Hemingway is anything but a ‘writer of genius’. Getting on with writing it is, as far as I am concerned, bona fide ‘doing’ something in that it all has a definite purpose, however personal and obscure that purpose is. Ironically, doing a number on Hemingway — which is pretty much what I am doing—is not, in fact, that purpose. And I’ve already posted a few blogs along those lines — one here and another here.

Writing it long, long ago stopped being just a languid blog rant about ‘what an odd-bod tosspot Ernest Hemingway is’ and is taking longer than I thought it would. For one reason or another the task is becoming increasingly complex (although ‘complex’ is meant comparatively and I don’t want to over-egg the pudding — it’s not ‘complex’ in any sense in which the word is customarily understood, just more ‘complex’ for a simple chap like me), and as one reason for writing it — and engaging in all the reading that has now shown itself to be necessary — is to acquire more ‘intellectual discipline’, I don’t want to cut corners. In my scheme of things, cutting corners, of which I have been too often criminally guilty in the past, would be utterly pointless.

BTW My ‘comma placement’ was laboriously learned from one Peter B. with and for whom I worked on the Daily Mail (and previously in Birmingham). My view is that the only ‘rule’ in punctation is that it should make a written piece more comprehensive. A comma will briefly slow you down when reading a piece. For example, these two sentences don’t mean the same thing and using a comma is important: ‘The doctors who were fed up resigned from their jobs’ and ‘the doctors, who were fed up, resigned from their jobs’.

The first is talking about only those doctors who ‘were fed up’ and implies there were other doctors who were not fed up and who did not resign. The second sentence implies that all the doctors were fed up and all of them resigned from their jobs. Just thought I’d add that as I am very conscious that I do use a lot of commas, but, I hope, correctly. I mean that all too often you are reading a sentence, then have to re-read it because you don’t understand it, and that a well-placed comma would have saved you all that hassle.

. . .

 I began the piece last July and have steadily but slowly worked on it, but as I got deeper into it, found out more about what was going on in Paris while Hemingway was living and working there, and found out more about the convoluted process which led to the publication of The Sun Also Rises, the task has grown and evolved. And keeping true to my primary purpose of acquiring a little more, possibly a lot more, intellectual discipline, I want to go down every new avenue as one opens up, and that involves quite a bit of reading and taking note. So a few hours spent lying on my bed reading the relevant books also counts as ‘doing something’.

I started by simply reading then re-reading The Sun Also Rises (LATER and have even just started reading it for a third time, bugger it, just to be fair) then googling for whatever I could find about it and Hemingway’s life as a would-be literary star. That last might sound like a throwaway gibe, but I have learned that becoming a major figure in the literary world was a singleminded pursuit, and Hemingway’s whole being was pretty much marshalled into serving that purpose. Given the number of people he ruthlessly shat upon after they had given him a leg up, given the number of fights he picked, given his bizarre obsession with looking macho and given many other aspects of his life, there might even be a good case to be made that the man was clinically a sociopath.

My googling threw up many reviews of a book by a New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume (pictured) called Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises and finding it was like finding the motherlode. NB I have included a photography of Ms Blume on the horribly sexist grounds that not only is she an interesting (and witty) author who can write, but she is also, in my view, a strikingly handsome woman. In today’s #MeToo environment I don’t doubt this might dismay many female readers of this blog and possibly one or two men, so let me apologise in advance and assure you no offence is intended even if some is taken. And surely intention is the sin? Still, she is handsome, isn’t she?

It is a very detailed — and very, very entertaining and highly recommended — account of the time and circumstances of the novel’s genesis I was interested in. I’m now re-reading it (and finding that re-reading really is worthwhile. Perhaps I’m thick and miss too much the first time around, but for me re-reading is immensely useful) and have two more books lined up.

It has occurred to me that the reading — and I am not a fast reader — might be some kind of displacement activity to put of the actual writing, but I’m sure that’s not the case as the so far I have written more than 14,000 words. They, however, now merely make up very much a first draft because the ‘shape’ of the whole piece changes by the week as I re-think my attitude to the novel and Hemingway, and despite my — well, let me be frank — antipathy to the man (‘tosspot’ is to my mind going easy on him) it is only fair to do him justice.

I mean I might not think he’s a genius and I might not think The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, but he certainly did regard himself as such, and for decades that view has been shared by many. And if I am serious about acquiring a little ‘intellectual discipline’ I am obliged — or better I am obliging myself — to check out a great deal more than I first imagined I would have to.

So, for example, after reading his bloody ‘debut’ novel twice, I am now reading it again and intend, reluctantly I have to say, to read some of his short stories. I’ve mentioned that I am re-reading Blume’s book and I have already finished Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill and the two other books I have lined up to be read are Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise And Fall Of A Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson and Being Geniuses Together by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald played a crucial, possibly the crucial role, in Hemingway being able to establish himself a novelist of renown. He was already well-established as novelist when he met Hemingway in Paris (reportedly at a café called the Dingo’s Bar, though there are several accounts of that first meeting, one from Fitzgerald and several

differing versions from Hemingway, who often played fast and loose with the truth and was something of a mythomaniac, especially about his own life).

Fitzgerald persuaded his editor, a Maxwell Perkins (pictured), at his publisher’s Charles Scribner’s Sons, to take an interest in Hemingway, and with Perkins’s backing and his eyes on the future, Hemingway’s career took of spectacularly. Here the important point to make is that Perkins, who had started his career at Scribner’s in the advertising department after spending several years working as a reporter for the New York Times and had a very good commercial eye, was for Scribner’s to move ahead and publish more modern authors.

Until then, Scribner’s, which had started in 1846 by publishing sermons before it broadened into literature, was known as being a very staid, though prestigious, house whose authors included such establishment luminaries as Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald had been one of his first successes with his debut novel This Side Of Paradise, a book which for the times was regarded as very racy and which the older folk at Scribner’s hated. But Perkins won through, after pointing out that if it was to survive as a leading house, Scribner’s had to move with the times. This argument persuaded the house’s chairman.

The attraction of Hemingway’s novel for Perkins was precisely its shock value and ‘modernity’ and that it would continue to drag Scribner’s into the 20th century and help to ensure its survival. I suggest that his motives in championing Hemingway were more commercial than literary. (Scribner’s is still thriving but was bought out by Simon & Schuster seven years ago.)

. . .

I am especially looking forward to reading Being Geniuses Together: I might well be wrong, of course, but the title of his and Boyle’s memoir of their time in Paris has a certain tongue-in-cheek quality which makes me suspect that his low and brutal opinion of Hemingway character and his work hits the mark rather truer than all the eulogising from assorted self-proclaimed modernists who thought the sun shone out of Hemingway’s arse.

In 1923 writer and poet Robert McAlmon (pictured) published Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories And Ten Poems in a 300-copy run, and he and another acquaintance, the journalist Bill Bird, who at the same time published Hemingway’s second book in our time (the initial lower case were intended, presumably, to lend the work an air of modernism, and the volume should not be confused with Hemingway’s collection of shorts stories In Our Time — upper-case initials, published by his first real publisher, Boni & Liveright) were part of the ‘the Crowd’ Hemingway with whom knocked around in Montparnasse.

I call McAlmon and Bird ‘acquaintances’ of Hemingway because I can’t say whether or not they were friends, and given what my reading has taught me about the regular and enthusiastic backstabbing which went on in ‘the Quarter’ I think ‘acquaintances’ is more to the point. McAlmon and Bird, however, did take off with Hemingway for a trip to Pamplona and McAlmon, for me gratifyingly, developed a low opinion of the man.

He and Hemingway first met when Hemingway was staying with Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy in Rappallo, Italy, where the Pounds had move, and his first impression was not complimentary. Lesley Blume writes: ‘McAlmon materialised in Rapallo during Hemingway’s winter stay. He had never heard of Hemingway before, and his early impressions of the young writer were less than favourable. He had a “small-boy, tough-guy swagger,” McAlmon recalled later. “And before strangers of whom he was uncertain a potential snarl of scorn on his large-lipped, rather loose mouth.” ’

On that visit, and despite in many ways being like chalk and cheese, the two men drank together and Hemingway showed McAlmon some of his short stories. There were fewer of these than he would have liked because his wife

Hadley (pictured with Hemingway at their wedding in 1921, a photo which also shows off Hemingway’s ‘lovable, boyish grin’ which so impressed Robert McAlmon) had a case containing pretty much all Hemingway’s work up to that point stolen from a train in the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Blume writes: ‘Even though McAlmon and Hemingway seemed socially mismatched [McAlmon was thought to be gay or bi-sexual], they got together in Rapallo and drank in the evenings. For Hemingway a potential publisher as still a publisher, no matter what his tendencies. He showed McAlmon the remains of his earlier work and his new efforts. McAlmon didn’t love the style; he deemed it the self-conscious approach of “an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child”.’

Later, once he had got to know Hemingway better and had witnessed how the putative genius slowly clawed his way up the literary ladder, his opinion did not improve. Blume writes: ‘Some in the Crowd watched Hemingway’s ascent through narrowed eyes, including those who had once happily helped build his platform. Robert McAlmon, for instance, had decided that Hemingway was an utter phoney. “He’s the original Limelight Kid, just you watch him for a few months,” he ranted one day after running into Hemingway in a Montparnasse café. “Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay . . . He’s going places, he’s got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy.” ’

. . .

So once my second reading of Blume’s book is out of the way, it is on to those two none-too-slim volumes. But my point is that although the world might see me lying on my bed with my nose in a book, apparently lazing without a care in the world, this, given the nature of my reading is ‘doing’. Chasing off to Bodmin to Asda or Morrisons, however necessary and useful, is not ‘doing’. The one is action, the other mere activity. And I find that these days unless I have actually ‘done’ something during the day and, in my own terms, have used that day productively, I feel a tad guilty.

Finally, of course, once this Hemingway piece is out of the way (and it will be published here in this blog — after all, it began its life as a blog entry) I can then get on with my next, and I have to say, far more important project, although on that matter I shall be keeping wholly schtum.

The road to salvation if you want to provide astonishing party small talk, impress those dumb enough to be impressed and want to cut a dash: read The Economist. (NB You won’t find it in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and you’ll have to buy it but there’s a downside to most things, eh?)

For several years in the 1980s and 1990s I was rather impressed by my younger brother’s knowledge - and not just his general knowledge, but his sometimes quite specific knowledge of business, politics, world affairs and I don’t know what else. If you mentioned something, he had to hand the facts and figures, the latest development, a general prognosis of how things might well develop and quite often details of a minority view, why the accepted view of matters was possibly too pessimistic or too optimistic or something. The things he knew, the obscure snippets he could - and would - come out with with startling ease was often quite astonishing. How can he know that? I would wonder, and often felt very thick.

Strictly he - Mark - was only my ‘younger brother’ until December 22 of a few years ago, but our older brother Ian died that day, so now my younger brother has been bumped up to ‘my brother’. And please don’t think me heartless for making such a quip in bad taste. My older brother would have rather enjoyed it, so as far as I’m concerned that’s me off the hook.

To be frank if that’s the kind of comment which makes you shudder and consider looking for your smelling salts, you don’t belong in this blog anyway. I like to think that my small blog readership is made of sterner stuff and can take a little rough-round-the-edges humour.

Oh, and speaking of my brother - the one who died a few years ago - remind me one day to recount the tale of the theft of my brother Ian’s ashes from a car in Kensington, how they were recovered within minutes of the theft and delivered to me at work, and how the legend has grown that I subsequently covered a friend and colleague sitting next to me with those ashes. I didn’t, in fact, do anything of the kind and that, in microcosm, is just one example of the kind of torrid and irresponsible exaggeration which hacks indulge in which in the past has led to war.

Yes, I did inadvertently manage to spill just a little of Ian’s ashes onto my desk, but that is not the story now told. So if you ever do get to hear the story about how I recklessly and quite bizarrely covered most Daily Mail editorial third floor with the ashes of a dead man, don’t believe a word of it. And don’t even settle for ‘there’s no smoke without fire and that Pat Powell has done some odd things in the past - just look at his collection of nine laptops’. It’s simply not true (later: well, the bit about the nine laptops is true, but don’t be too quick to rush to judgment, there is an explanation of sorts), and this is all quite some distance from my younger brother Mark’s - sorry, my brother Mark’s - quite startling general knowledge of this, that and I don’t know what else.

. . .

One day I discovered what was going on, how my brother was so startlingly well-informed. For years, especially when I was younger and had an older brother (the one who died a few years ago) who seemed to be able to excel at whatever he turned his hand to, I regarded myself as rather thick. I’m not suggesting I was entirely wrong, of course, and I have no idea how thick or bright I am, and I truly suspect that, like most people, I am somewhere right in the middle (I’ve found almost all of us are miserable at evaluating ourselves, our abilities and such).

But over the years I’ve learned that any such binary distinction - in this case between being bright and being thick - is so broadbrush as to be totally pointless. Life is a lot more subtle than that and, again in this case, there is an

infinite variety of different kinds of intelligence. The point is highlighted when someone regarded as very bright does something completely stupid, yet despite doing something very stupid is otherwise still very bright.

I, as far as I was concerned, belonged pretty much with the thickos and so, for example - and pertinently - magazines such as The Economist were ‘not for the likes of me’. And then I read the magazine (which likes to call itself ‘a newspaper) and discovered I had been missing out on a very useful and very interesting source of information and news.

Crucially - and this is important - the Economist is very well written as in written in straightforward, unpretentious and clear English and that, too, is pertinent point. It took me many years to realise that I didn’t quite understand or often did not have a clue,what a writer was trying to convey because the piece was so badly written (Observer and Independent feature writers please note). Until that penny dropped, I assumed it was my fault because I was ‘thick’ (and I wonder how many others have suffered from the same feeling of guilt).

I hold to the traditional view that the purpose of communication is to communicate successfully and that it is not to show off what superficially fancy English you can write. It’s also true that a piece is more than a tad incomprehensible not just because it is badly written but because the writer simply hasn’t thought through what he or she wants to say or simply doesn’t understand what they are attempting to write about. In fact, a very good test of whether you understand a concept, idea, political situation etc is trying to explain it to someone. If you find doing so increasingly heavy going, you will now know why.

In all these respects The Economist is a virtuous example, and I appreciate that. Certainly, it does have one or two flaws, but these pale beside its worth. It is, for example, remorselessly upbeat and positive. There’s nothing wrong with being upbeat and positive, of course, with with The Economist that is relentless. I once asked my brother, the

‘younger’ one, how he thought the first Economist leader would read after Armageddon. What he came out with does sum up up the magazine/newspaper: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can now be learnt from it all?’

The Economist, I discovered, when I started reading it regularly, was pretty much the course of my brother Mark’s apparently impressive and often quite obscured general knowledge. Where once I was baffled by how he knew about the difficulties facing suburban commuters in Indonesia or how he could confidently assert that so-and-so will face an uphill struggle to retain power in local elections in Peru, I now knew: he had read about it all in that week’s edition of The Economist.

So, for example, a quick glance at this week’s edition of The Economist (date May 11) will tell, as you might expect, you all about the Trump-inspired trade war between the US and China and the danger of war in the Middle East involving the US duking it out with Iran, as well as the latest development in Britain’s Brexit fiasco, but also that taking their lead from free public transport in Tallinn, Estonia (introduced six years ago) other European countries, impressed by the success of the scheme, are considering introducing it in their cities.

There’s also an account of how Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of Indonesia’s ‘strongman’ president Rodrigo Duterte is being groomed to succeed her father and that in France the decline of the Roman Catholic church has meant that more and more children are being given less traditional first names. From the US comes the most disturbing news that the nation’s pay-TV companies are facing an ever tougher time, recently losing a fifth of their customers, although somehow managing to make a third more profit (by the simple expedient of bunging up prices which would probably explain why one in five customers has called it a day and is turning to web-streaming services).

In Switzerland the country’s finance industry is somehow under threat. I haven’t yet read the story and so I can’t give you chapter and verse, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that the news will profoundly disturb those who are disturbed by such news.

So guess what I shall be talking about, casually dropping these and other matters into the conversation, when I next chat to someone whose horizons don’t begin and end at the village boundary? And guess who, with a bit of luck, will think - while staying resolutely schtumm to avoid betraying a growing sense of inferiority mixed with awe - will marvel at just how well-informed that Patrick Powell is? Unless, of course, whoever I’m talking to also reads The Economist every week. In that case I shall be rumbled, just as I eventually rumbled my brother (the ‘younger’ one, not the other one - he’s now dead and beyond rumbling).

. . .

After posting this, I seemed to remember a recent Economist TV advert which rubbed me up the wrong way. It ran along the lines of ‘Intelligent people like you and us have to be informed and read The Economist’. So I searched the web for it to post it here with a few catty comments, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. YouTube has a few Economist TV ads and the recent is dated January 2019. Here it is. If I do find the one I didn’t like, I’ll post it here.

I have to say I rather like the injunction to ‘question everything’ and I don’t find it in any way offensive. I am though pissed off that I didn’t find the ad I didn’t like just to post it here and ask whether others agree or disagree with me (not that any of you buggers apart from P. and B. ever bother to respond to posts, but - well, that’s life and I’ll have to live with it. At least I’ve still got my original two kidneys and fully functioning liver, so thank the Lord for small mercies.

PS On a completely different tack, finding out as I have just how easy it is to post videos here, I shall start posting a few more. I mean, why not?

NB The bloody video doesn’t yet work. Went to try it and no dice. It’s MP4 and sometimes there is trouble with that format, so I shall dick around a little and see if I can’t save the day by posting it in a different format. Tough, I know, but there you go.

. . . 

 As I have just discovered how easy it is to post videos, here are three I did a few years ago, now languishing unseen and unappreciated in dank depths of YouTube. I hope they entertain you. Sadly, I haven’t yet found out how to make them bigger.

Finally, this one . . .