The boy stood on the burning deck — did he really? Good Lord. Was he poet? A creative? Well!

As some of you who return here every now and then might know, I’m ploughing on with my Hemingway project and still keeping my head above water. The end, if not yet in sight, is now closer than the beginning. Ironically, I don’t like Hemingway’s writing, I think his writing was too inconsistent, technically some of his stories just don’t stand up, there was bugger all ‘modernist’ about him, his characters are two-dimensional, he has little imagination and — well, that should do.

But I mention that because my reason for starting — and, crucially, eventually concluding — the project was, in no particular order’ to ‘learn to write’ and ‘to learn discipline’ and to learn how to complete an undertaking’. So it could have been anything about anyone. And I feel so far it has been successful.

My point about ‘learning to write’ needs explication: ‘writing’ can mean many different things. We can write a shopping list, a letter, a news story, a feature, a piece of verse, a short story, a novel, an essay, a thesis or dissertation, and all those and much more that we can ‘write’ have different demands and require different skills and abilities.

NB I prefer talking about ‘verse’ rather than ‘poetry’ as I have no idea what ‘poetry’ might be, and, for me, talking about ‘poetry’ leaves rather to much room for spouting vacuous bull and pretentiousness than I am comfortable with. That last point might well have more to do with my own hang-ups and status as a recovering inferiority complex sufferer, but be that as it may.

Once, when I was still living in Cardiff (between 1986 and 1990 working as a sub-editor for the South Wales Echo), I screwed up my courage and went along to a poetry group due to meet ‘upstairs’ at to some pub or other (probably in Cathays, though I couldn’t tell you why I suggest that). I was feeling rather shy and self-conscious (which is why I had to screw up my courage) and when I got there at about 7p, I had no idea who was who.

Sitting downstairs with a drink and waiting for whatever time the group was due to meet to come around, a middle-aged woman on the table next to me suddenly lent over and asked: ‘Are you a poet?’

Well, it’s a straightforward question, of course, and writing this now I can’t think why I disliked and dislike it, only to say that oddly — and I shall repeat my point about my own hang-ups and still lingering inferiority complex possibly coming into play — thinking of oneself as ‘a poet’ strikes me as a tad self-regarding. I feel the same when (usually on Radio 4) folk call themselves ‘a creative’. Yes, I know what they mean, but . . .

I shall never refer to myself as ‘a creative’, although I can’t deny that I wouldn’t at all be displeased if someone else did.

Although I have written one or two poems since (and now have a fair idea of what I am trying to do, which is pretty straightforward) and you can read them here and a few more here. I hadn’t then written anything, and I don’t doubt my verse would have been shite if I had. But several people had — there were about seven or eight of us and as often happens I can still see the scene in my mind’s eye — but I remember only two pieces, though not in detail.

The first was a long, rambling piece by some artistic herbert or other who would undoubtedly have referred to himself as ‘a poet’ and ‘a creative’, and it was distressing and dull me, me, me self-indulgent bollocks. The second piece of verse I remember was from a black African, quite possibly a post-grad student at Cardiff University, and I distinctly remember thinking ‘well, this is interesting’. It certainly wasn’t at all me, me, me, but about his country and its people.

But most of all I remember the rather stunned silence which greeted it after he had finished and the distinct impression I got from the other — white — ‘poets’ in our circle. Their attitude to it — as I say a piece of verse which stood out was and please forgive me, I don’t mean to be offensive, but I can only put it this way — was ‘Good Lord, the black sambo can write bloody well’. Sorry, but that was the impression I got, and the rather offensive term I use is pertinent. But that’s all by the by. Back to more mainstream bollocks.

. . . 

What I mean about ‘learning to write’ (and I’m sure my good mate Pete, who I think still reads this blog now and then will understand) is making damn sure ‘what is written’ ‘hangs together’. And to achieve that, thought is involved. So when I say ‘learning to write’, I also mean ‘learning to think’: ‘thought’ usually comes before ‘writing’, even if it’s just a shopping list. If you find you can’t ‘write’, the reason is almost always that you haven’t actually thought through what you want to write.

Thought need not be particularly detailed. It could, for example, be ‘thinking about what kind of tone you want to strike’, ‘what impression you want to give’.

A second facet (for me) of ‘learning to write’ is to ensure that — at least in what I want to do — what is written ‘follows on’, is ‘of a piece’. That’s especially true in this Hemingway bollocks, though practising keeping on top of what you write will, I hope, pay off in the future (which is why I’m doing it. Fuck Hemingway, the self-important, conceited toad). That’s why I re-write so much, because going over what I have written, I realise ‘this doesn’t quite follow that’.

Naturally, there are no rules in writing, except those you set f0r yourself. In fact, as far as I am concerned, there are no rules, either at all when you paint, play an instrument, sculpt, compose — you can do just what he hell you want. It is one of our last freedoms.

However, when finally you present ‘your work’, what you have created’, to the outside world, you might find that not as many are engaged by your 1,000-word ‘poem’ which consists of the word ‘it’ written 999 times and the word ‘was’ as you hoped. You might also find that not too many folk are engaged by your four by four canvas of nothing but black paint with a single red circle in the top left corner, however much you talk it up in the exhibition catalogue. (‘Patrick Powell’s “Black with red circle” wittily sums up and succinctly explicates the dilemma of a self isolated in a non-existent community of bleak absence’). Remember, we might like the smell of our own farts, but others are usually not quite as delighted.

I suppose it comes down to why we are ‘creating’. If you wan to ‘make a name for yourself’, ‘earn you living from your work’ etc, fair enough. Many might do it ‘for themselves’. To be honest, I have reached that point in that, at 71 (sob, sob, but there’s no getting away from it) I am simply writing because I enjoy it and to prove to myself that I’m not quite the bullshitter I have long feared I was. And that is another reason for actually eventually concluding this Hemingway project. And not just concluding it, but doing it as best I can.

I am learning along the way. And I have to say: thank the bloody Lord for word processing apps, such as Word and Bean, the two I use. They make re-rewriting (and I do a lot of re-writing) a doddle. The more I used Word, the more respect I get for all those bods who wrote longhand with pen/quill and paper. Think of bloody Middlemarch: it is a big book and I’m sure Eliot did re-write parts of it. But to save herself too much re-writing she thought before she put pen to paper (or quill — I have no idea when nibbed pens and inkwells came in). Still.

. . .

Manchester United against Manchester City is on in a minute and if you think there is any sort of contest between going upstairs to watch the game or blethering one here . . .

Urging you all to take a look and another few bits and bobs

I’ve just posted the latest entry on my Hemingway project website. Getting there if you’re interested, though sadly few are: I keep an eye on the stats as to visits and there are some though my Hemingway site (and what I have to say doesn’t seem likely to set the world alight for another few hundred years. But for what it’s worth, take a look. 

Apart from that, what’s new? Not a lot. Like everyone else, I’m now getting a little ticked off ‘the lockdown’, although as someone suggested it might be as much the cold and miserable weather we are having and will have now for at least another 11 weeks. Not for us Brits the glories of vistas of pristine snow and mountains, with lovable St Bernard dogs dispensing brandy from cute little barrels hanging from their necks. (And where did that one start? Probably in some addled advertising agency copywriters brain).

As for covid there’s only one point I’d like to make: the Thirty Years War lasted — you’ve way ahead of me — 30 years. I’m not saying it’s all doom, doom, doom. What I’m saying is: take nothing for granted. And I say that because we do, all of us, even smug ol’ me writing this. We assume ‘it will all work out’. Well, it doesn’t always, does it? Here in Britain the government is being cheerily upbeat and repeating ‘well, we’ve got a vaccine now, two in fact’, but were it that simple.

For one thing we, as has every other country, have our gangs or morons who are all insisting ‘covid is all just a hoax to take away our civil liberties’, although as far as I know no one has yet even tried to explain just why ‘they’ are so keen to take away our civil liberties and to what end. I mean, if they are, surely there’s some ‘plan’? But I shan’t be trying to find out: long ago I learned the truth of the useful advice ‘never get into a debate with a moron’. I mean would you really bother to try to set straight some bod who insisted that ‘the Moon is mad of cheese’? If so, you deserve all the grief you will get.

. . . 

Might as well fill you in on some news. My stepmother died at the end of last July, and I inherited her cottage. There then followed a laborious three or four weeks as I cleared the house of all the shite that has been accumulating over the years. Every room also needed a new lick of paint, so my wife got down to business. That was not to help me, mind, or save me money, but because I offered to allow my daughter and husband and child to live there rent-free so they can save up for a home of their own.

I was going to put the extra money I would have had as income towards doing a bit of travelling — I’ve always wanted to spend a month or two mooching around the US as so much of our culture comes from there — but that is now all on hold. And what with covid, which I suspect will be around in one way or another for pretty much the rest of 2021, not having the spare moolah for jaunts around the world is not such a pain.

That’s about it, really. Not a lot of news. I’m now keen to get this Hemingway bollocks out of the way and I am getting there, so I can get on with other things. So all I’ll do now is to wish you all a happy New Year and hope this virus crap ends sooner rather than later.

Pip, pip.

Bah humbug (or something). And if you aren't happy with that, let me instead wish your all a Merry Christmas and a trouble-free and happy New Year

Before I get on to the main bit of this post, here’s an ad for those intent on Old Blighty ‘seizing its destiny’ — I think that was the phrase — and who are now deciding how best each week to spend the £350 million promised them each by assorted destiny seizers and other charlatans.

Well, it’s Christmas again, and again I reflect how much more I liked the German Christmases of my childhood, both in England when I was younger and later, and in Berlin when we lived there. I mentioned this to my son (who is 21) yesterday and he said that we all look back on our childhood with nostalgia, but it isn’t that.

Although ethnically I am half-English and half-German, different aspects of me tend to the one side of my ethnicity more than the other. There are some aspects to German life I like less than others — it is true that they prefer, largely, doing things in organised groups (call it ‘being regimented’ if you like, though I would hate here to stray into Cliche Country) whereas the Brits, generally rather dislike being so organised. In that respect I am more British. I hate being organised by someone else. If there is any organising of me to be done, I’ll do it myself, thank you very much.

Certainly, the Teuton approach has its advantages in that things do tend to work like clockwork and thus some aspects of life are less of a hassle. The downside is — and don’t take this too literally but more as a suggestive observation — the Germans often lack imagination: if things gum up and the routine is disrupted, they find themselves at a loss. The Brits on the other hand are rather adept at ‘making do and mending’, coming up with ingenious solutions to whatever problem comes along, although that approach falls down when rather than regard such solutions as temporary, the Brits stick with them for far too long until the tried and tested solution becomes a problem.

I don’t know whether this is relevant or not, but what the above brings to mind is a comparison between Germany’s federal make-up and Britain’s — there’s no other phrase for it — current higgledy-piggledy constitutional arrangement. Germany has its federal system of 16 Länder which (I believe) have a certain amount of autonomy and sovereignty, but which all are loyal constituents of the Federal Republic. Each Land is equal to each other land and has the same constitutional make-up although its own state constitution. And it works.

Britain meanwhile, in 2020, is made up of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and consists of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each — except England — has its own ‘parliament’ or ‘assembly’ but the powers of each assembly are not equal. Scotland has tax-raising power, Wales and Northern Ireland do not. And as I’ve already pointed out, England doesn’t even have it’s own parliament. Why not?

Well, that’s how the whole silly system evolved. And bringing this piece back to what I was originally writing about the evolution of the system as it now stands began when the government led by Tony Blair — yes, that Blair, Tony ‘Boo Hiss’ Blair who took Britain to war with Iraq for no good reason I can see — became alarmed by the, almost sudden, rise in popularity of the Scottish Nationalist Party which hitherto had been regarded as a gang of no-hopers and nationalist deadbeats. Blair’s solution was to try kill off the nationalist sentiment by granting Scotland limited autonomy. He called it ‘devolution’ as in ‘devolving various powers’ to Scotland.

It worked for a while, but now, post Brexit, is no longer really working: the beast Scotland, which voted for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union, doesn’t just want more meat, it wants the whole carcass. Well done, Tony.

That is all by way of trying to illuminate who the Brits often half-arsed way of dealing with problems usually backfires in the long run. But back to Christmas, and how the bloody hell did I manage to stray so far away?

My mother was a Roman Catholic and my father a convert (though I suspect his was the kind of romantic conversion undertaken by many young men and women in the mid-20th century because in my recollection he was never a regular attender of mass (and not the lower-case ‘m’, I’m not about to play the stupid RC game of given it a capital ‘M’. But more on that for another time).

So our family Christmases, apart from following the German tradition of Heiligabend and celebrated on Christmas Eve, also had a religious dimension. I’m not saying it is that I miss, though, but a rather more festive approach to it all: over the course of Christmas Eve everything worked up to the Bescherung. This started with a family meal, then lighting the Christmas candles on the tree (and bloody dangerous it must have been, too) and then handing out of presents.

Finally, we all buggered off to midnight mass which saw in Christmas Day proper. But the British Christmas on the other hand . . . I could and still can not get used to it. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’m just repeating that we all have a greater fondness for what we are accustomed to. But the sad thing is that I’ll probably never again be able to celebrate such a ‘German’ Christmas. Oh, well.

. . .

As I’ve said before, I’m very conscious that my regular posting of entries in this blog has tailed off. It’s not that I’ve lost interest, though. For one thing I want to get this bloody Hemingway project out of the way (more here), so when I write, it’s getting stuck into writing that. And as the whole bloody point of undertaking it in the first place was to ‘do something and try to do it as best I could and, most important, bloody finish it’, it would be wholly daft to throw in the towel and turning to writing all those fabulous novels I have longe planned to write.

Ironically, no one but no one would know. Only I would know that I didn’t have the wherewithal to complete it. But ‘I’ am the important one in this: only ‘I’ would know. There will certainly be no street demos in Kuala Lumpur or Stockholm or New York because I didn’t finish it. But none would be needed: I would know I hadn’t finished it and that would be bad enough. Ergo: finish it. It doesn’t help that I have allowed the project to grow over the past few years, but — well, take the rough with the smooth.

And on the note I’ll end because I’ve been asked to clear the kitchen table so my wife can lay it for our Christmas meal.

And finally, a parting thought.

Happy Christmas to you all. xxx

Well, hello there. Yes, I’m still around. Getting worried?

One reason why I haven’t been posting here of late is that us that I’m trying to complete this Hemingway project sooner rather than later. Most recently I have been posting ‘essays’ and bits and pieces I already more or less completed on the website I’ve created for it. If anyone wants to take a look, it’s slowly coming together.

I’ve got loads more to post on the site, but it all needs to be read again and re-written as I do repeat myself a lot, and much of that repetition is not very relevant to the particular topic of the ‘essay’. Suggestions of any kind are very welcome, though that’s a tad forlorn request as such request are always ignored. Why I can’t think. Time

and again I’ve plugged, plugged, plugged the only novel I have written so far (and don’t be out off by the cover, left, — that’s part of it and it isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem) and a book of short stories (below left) but has anyone bothered to buy a copy (and all you pay is the production cost, for Lord’s sake)? Have they hell.

As it happens I’m not at all put out because at my late age (it was my birthday yesterday, and I’ll not see 30 again) I expected nothing more form people. As someone once pointed out ‘the great thing about being terminally cynical is that you are never disappointed’.

But I do want to get this Hemingway bollocks out of the way, simply because I want to get on with something else and it hangs over me to such and extent that if I spend part of the day not reading or writing about the old fraud, I feel vaguely guilty, the sort of guilt you feel when you take a sickie and just can’t enjoy the buckshee time off. Well, I couldn’t anyway.

What else is new? The covid stuff is getting a little long in the tooth, about time we had a new crisis. This one has outstayed its welcome, and the public are remarkably fickle about such matters. Sad to say our

crises are like fashion: they go out of date very quickly. Remember Aids and how we ‘were all going to die’ (that memorable headline in the then Daily Mirror which cleverly did not claim we would all ‘die of Aids’, and so was on to a winner — we are all going to die. 

As for covid, it’s really getting impossible to know what to believe. My view is that it is better to be safe than sorry, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the doomsters are all correct in their assessment. Then there’s the mystery about why some groups are more at risk than others: black and Asians (who make up a substantial proportion of our British national health service staff are said to be particularly at risk. Young children on the other hand — are told — are not. Also very confusing is just how much at risk of dying we are if we contract it, why some people who have the virus are asymptomatic, and on and on.

I have been amusing myself arguing the toss with various state-registered idiots in the Daily Telegraph comments section, the vast majority of whom are convinced ‘it’s all a hoax’ and a plot to ‘rob us of our freedoms’. When asked directly just why a government — pretty much all governments around the world — seem to be so keen of ‘robbing us of our freedoms’ answers come none. One idiot I was ‘debating with’ — I was debating, he was slagging me off — insisted it is all just a scam for politicians to ‘make money’. It doesn’t help on that score that, at least here in Britain, public funds have been badly spent on personal protective equipment (PPE).

But anyway, time for the rugby or football. I can’t make up my mind whether to watch France hammer the Scots in the ‘Autumn Nations Cup’ (on now, France already 3-0 up) or watch Leicester and Liverpool try to get the better of each other. Decisions, decisions . . .

Now take a quick look at the Hemingway site and tell me whether it is shite or shite.

Mainly for Anonymous (but others are just as welcome as long as you wipe your feet on the way in and keep your hands off the spoons)

This is appearing on my ‘private’ blog, but I gather it isn’t quite as private as I thought. So what they hell. This entry is specifically for Anonymous who kindly left a comment on August 26 earlier this year.

Thank you for your comment. Things still not brilliant between myself and my wife. Believe it or not one of the main things which bothers me is (a la JC's 'look to the beam in your own eye' etc and though I'm a signed up atheist, it is good advice all-round) is how much I might be two blame. Who knows?

We rarely see ourselves in true focus, either pitching ourselves too high or too low. At the risk of being laughed at (by you) for quoting a song, there's a good one by Leon Russell called Magic Mirror, and about a year ago I set it to images and posted it on YouTube.

It was just by chance that I came across your comment (and thank you for it, it's cheering to know that something you've written has at least been read) so please forgive the delay. These last few days have been a particular piss-off for one reason or another, but it would bore you to go into details. However, I keep reminding myself that in the grand scheme of things, I am better off than many. I won't have to give you examples as I'm sure you can come up with your own.

As for Hemingway, he has gone on the back-burner these past few weeks: my stepmother died in July and I was tied up doing all sorts, registering death etc, organising her funeral. I have inherited her cottage (which might reinforce my admission that I am most certainly not as deep in the shit as many when you think of all those living in crap conditions or who are homeless) and I have spent at least a month clearing it out so that my daughter can move in with her husband and two-year-old - they have been living with his parents for the past four years, not renting as they could to save up for a house of their own. I'm letting her live there for £1 a year, plus paying their own bills.

But I have a lot more written about Hemingway than has so far appeared on the website. In fact if you are interested and wouldn't mind doing me a favour, I can post pdfs of what I have so far written for you to read and comment (and ‘I don’t think this bit works’ or ‘this bit is confusing’ is 1,000 more useful to me than ‘I think this is brilliant!’). If you were interested it would not take long for me to post them as I have so far posted a reviews and commentaries I’ve come across and used. If you are interested, leave another comment or email me.

By the way, what’s your name. It might be ‘Barry’ (a friend who sometimes reads my main blog) or it could be someone entirely different.

Take care, P.

More or less just a placeholder (but with benefits — a piccy of morons with lethal rifles and less sense than a broken brick)

I promised myself I would try to post here more regularly, but that was an empty pledge, the alternative word for ‘promise’ in newspaper circles used here because, in newspaper circles we didn’t like using the same word twice in close proximity.

Astute readers will notice that I have already used the words ‘newspaper’ and ‘circles’ three times overall (including just now), so they might wonder why I am not bending over backwards to find alternative words for ‘newspaper’ and ‘circles’ (four). Well, I’ll tell you why: if I did, I would not have been able to make the cheap and silly joke I’ve just made (i.e. using the words ‘newspaper’ and ‘circles’ (five) several times in contradiction to my revelation that in ‘newspaper’ ‘circles’ (six) the practice is abhorred. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

The fact is that I’ve been busy, busy enough even to put my ‘Hemingway project’ on the back burner for now (which might not be such a bad thing: eventually I intend to have one long spurt of writing and get it done sooner rather than later because I want to get on with other things. And having a break might freshen me up a little, and there isn’t really that much to do).

In the past, I think I’ve mentioned my stepmother, possibly not in quite adulatory terms (her affair with father, begun 17 years before my mother died caused some unhappiness in our family). She had a severe stroke over 13 years ago and has been disabled since then. She had two more less severe strokes a few years ago and more recently doctors discovered she was growing a small tumour on her brain. Well, she died at the end of July and we buried her at the beginning of August.

More to the point I inherited her granite Cornish cottage, just down the road from where I live, and for many weeks now I’ve been clearing it out. And boy was there a lot to clear out. I’ve pretty much done it all now, but it still needs to be thoroughly cleaned.

It was in no way ‘dirty’, it’s just that when you get rid of a lot of stuff you uncover corners which have been left unattended for years and where grime has accumulated. NB ‘Grime’ is not quite as distressing as ‘filth’ — ‘filth’ is horrible, ‘grime’ is simply unpleasant. Once it has been cleaned, it could well do with redecorating. The last decorating it had was in the early Eighties after my mother died and my father married my stepmother.

So there you have it: my excuse for not pontificating here as regularly as I believe I promised I would.

. . .

I find that I can sort out my own thoughts better when in conversation or when writing them down rather than thinking. In fact, I’ve quite bad I conscious rational thinking. My mind wanders a great deal — I was a hell of a day-dreamer when I was younger, in fact, I probably still am one, though no longer young. There was one question which I do want to examine: the attitude of men of my generation and perhaps the one younger towards women. It is such a large topic that I shan’t launch into it here, but I shall say that I have become aware of several things, none of which are unknown.

The first is that as children and young adults we seem to ‘absorb’ attitudes. These are rarely ‘taught’ directly, but we acquire them by some kind of social osmosis. And one such attitude — which, let me be very clear from the start I wholly abhor and completely reject — is that the women are somehow inferior, at a level beneath men and all that entails.

I suspect in my case it was made even more pernicious in that I was raised as a practising Roman Catholic — ‘strict’ might give the wrong impression, but it was certainly the full fun show: mass every Sunday, regular confession and taking communion, attending RC schools etc. And very unfortunately — even more unfortunately for women — the RC church has a thoroughly misogynistic attitude to women, which pretty much permeates every aspect of an RC’s life. The trouble is that at an intellectual level I will believe one thing but those deep, deep, deep attitude still linger in my bones. Here’s an example: I might hear a professor, a businesswoman, an ambassador or some such on the radio, and invariably I catch myself thinking ‘well, hasn’t she done well for herself!’

The obvious implication is that ‘she’s “just” a woman so really, well done!’ And if that irritates any woman reading this, believe me it irritates me ten, twenty, one hundred times as much. Certainly, I can rationalise it and — as I’ve pointed out above — assure myself it’s just an echo of a period of RC ‘brainwashing’, and that, crucially, that is wholly opposed to how I think now and what I believe. But . . .

That is one topic I’ve promised myself I’d like to look at at length and to into a lot deeper. As I say I find I can ‘think’ more clearly when I write.

. . .

Another thing which has been preoccupying me, but which I’m sure I’ve posted on before is ‘the seemingly global rise of the Right’. And I suspect that Trump and his moronic stupidity are not, as many seem to think, a cause but a symptom of something far more deep-rooted and egregious. For example, the central concern on Trump — memorably described by his then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as ‘a fucking moron’ after he and others had tried for hours and failed to get Trump to comprehend the importance of diplomacy in foreign affairs — is not the man himself but the size of the number who support him.

Many are men (and, I supposed women) who are quite prepared to go out on to the streets carrying heavy and lethal weapons and armoury and make it clear they would not be adverse to using it. Quite why carrying a large,

 

semi-automatic rifle is thought necessary when you take part in a protest against covid-19 lockdown regulations is beyond my comprehension and you’ll have to ask those who do so. But whatever their reasons, it is not encouraging.

That is especially true given the coming, though not yet arrived global economic slump which will have been caused by the covid-19 epidemic. Most people are friends in good times and when the sun shines, but when it gets distinctly colder and resources become scarce the temptation to think ‘every man and woman for themselves’ grows large. And if, as is not at all impossible the Western world experiences a period of unemployment like that of the Thirties Great Depression, it is even more dangerous that many men (and women) will have time on their hands and have become accustomed to carrying a semi-automatic rifle to make their various points.

I can’t write a great deal on that topic because I have nothing original to say (Do you ever? — Ed) and at this point it would be nothing but speculation. In three weeks, when the US elect their next president, we’ll either know how bad it might get or that our fears were a little groundless.

Pip, pip!

To be honest, I’m too knackered to try to think up some clever-clever ‘isn’t he such a smart cookie’ title, so this will have to do. If you’re really interested, you can regard it as a ‘companion piece’ to my ‘entry’ on art a few weeks ago. If you’re not really interested, what the hell, just read this anyway

I was getting one with this Hemingway bollocks when I decided, for one reason or another to post it here as my latest blog entry. (Note to foreign readers i.e. non-British readers: ‘bollocks’ is a semi-technical term we use in the production of newspapers to indicate ‘the matter in hand’, ‘the latest piece of turgid shite from our star columnist who in a more honest world wouldn’t be paid in washers’, ‘this crap’ etc. It is a word extensively used by working sub-editors/copy editors.) For one thing I haven’t been posting as regularly as I once was. For another, it struck me as a possibly useful companion piece to the entry on art. But, hell, whatever...

There is a notable tendency most of us share which is obliquely pertinent to the prominence Hemingway achieved in the literary world in his lifetime and still broadly retains. The tendency is this: many, if not most, of us, are generally quite prepared, often almost eager, to forgive and perhaps even to justify the flaws and shortcomings in those (or that) to which we are generally well-disposed. We are ‘on their side’ and we will gladly cut them a little slack.

Conversely, if for whatever reason we have taken against someone or something, we are only too pleased to pick up on, highlight and condemn each and every flaw and shortcoming, however slight. And here, being one of the minority who are not persuaded by Hemingway’s ‘genius’ and, furthermore, puzzled as to why anyone can be, I am willing to admit that I might well be guilty of nit-picking for fault.

A similar, though certainly not the same, tendency is often at play in ‘the arts’, although unlike in our private lives, it is not driven by personal bias but by something at once both more complex and remarkably simple.

If after reading the latest ‘innovative’ and ‘ground-breaking’ novel, hearing an ultra-modern piece of music or visiting an exhibition of ‘subversive’ art, and despite being assured it is a work of genius, privately we remain unconvinced, it is a brave woman or man who will publicly announce their doubts: but it is not necessarily doubt in our own judgment which causes our reticence. 

It is more likely to be a fear of looking ridiculous: who are we to judge on the worth of a piece when the great and good in the arts have given it their blessings?

Rather than risk the scorn of our peers, we might decide to ignore those aspects of a ‘new’ work with which we feel uncomfortable and cut it a little slack. We might try to assure ourselves that such a new, unusual and ground-breaking piece ‘needs space’ and being new, unusual and ground-breaking can be judged only by new rules.

In a bout of modesty we might even tell ourselves it is no doubt our own fault that we are not immediately able to acknowledge its excellence: look at Picasso and Stravinsky or, in earlier years, the Impressionists, we might tell ourselves, and how the world had to learn to appreciate the art they produced; how we all had to discover ‘new ways of reading’, ‘new ways of looking’ and ‘new ways of listening’.

Read this:

‘In the morning it was bright and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.’ 

Were that rather flat, not to say banal, passage (the first paragraph of chapter 10 of The Sun Also Rises) not the work of a writer hitherto hailed as ‘a great writer’, but merely an excerpt from the travel diary of Rockbridge, Illinois’s Lewis Monroe, I suspect the kudos would be in shorter supply. But as it’s Hemingway, he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’ that ‘puts more literary English to shame’ (as a contemporary New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, has it), so . . .

Flat, banal? Rubbish! Hemingway? He’s a great writer, isn’t he? Nobel Prize laureate, leading modernist, one of America’s best novelist, an original voice . . . How could a man like Hemingway be thought even capable of writing flat, banal passages? Get a grip man! Oh, you’re not an academic, or a fellow published writer, or a professional literary critic? Ah, well, that explains it, doesn’t it? Now, fuck off and don’t waste our time!

It is, in fact by Hemingway (he of the ‘lean, hard and athletic narrative prose’), but had I, in fact, accomplished a double bluff and, after persuading you beyond any doubt that the piece is a passage from Hemingway’s masterful pen, then come clean and revealed that in fact this is from the travel diary of Lewis Monroe, of Rockbridge, Illinois, composed while he and a few pals, would it still be a piece of masterful writing?

Or would it — on reflection (‘well, of course, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’) — revert to being flat and banal? I believe it might well do so. I have no truck with the ‘transubstantiation’ of Roman Catholic ideology, and I similarly have not truck with any other kind of suggested transubstantiation.

Is a piece of loo paper suddenly valuable because it has been certified that the Epstein (the sculptor Jacob, not The Beatles’ manager Brian) used it to wipe his arse? No, doubt, though some clever shyster would have no trouble drumming up some schmuck willing to part with $1,000 for it. Put it in an ivory frame and you can double the price.

. . .

There are certainly those those throughout the world who are passionate about literature and ‘the arts’ (and, given half the chance, will explain to you at length just why and why they simply could not live without the arts), but in the grubbier corners of the arts world, less lofty, more commercial imperatives come into play.

A great many people make a great deal of money from selling ‘the arts’ in one way or another, and those involved in making it – publishing houses, film and recording studios, auction houses, concert promoters, upscale galleries and dealers of every stripe — are naturally ever keen to talk up the value of the merchandise they are pushing — for when all is said and done ‘merchandise’ is what it is, whether ‘it’ is a rare first edition, a napkin some famous jerk painter doodled on to settle a restaurant bill are that piece of used loo paper you have just bought for $1,000. By the way, if you think I am being unnecessarily scatological, check out Gilbert and George’s Naked Shit Pictures.

What’s good enough for Gilbert and George is certainly good enough for me, though I should point out the Gilbert and George are Turner Prize winners, have several honorary doctorates and three years ago were elected to London’s Royal Academy of Arts. On the other hand, I’m not, I’m just a knob with a loud mouth who likes writing and getting pissed on tawny port.

If a writer, painter or composer ‘has a name’ and is ‘selling’, those with a stake in maximising the profits to be made from that person’s output will try to ensure she or he continues to sell; and thus they have a vested interest in talking up her or his significance in their given field and downplaying any flaws or shortcomings that might be apparent to some. To do that they will to some extent rely on the arts’ industry’s camp followers — the film, theatre and art critics and book reviewers all of whom function as influencers and are an intricate element of the arts industry.

The upshot is that the ‘consumer’ — many might consider using that word in the context of ‘the arts’ vulgar, but to be frank there is none better — can often find it difficult to gauge the worth of a ‘work of art’, especially if the work is unusual and they are assured it is ‘fresh’ or ‘innovative’ or ‘ground-breaking’. So when the rest of the world is lauding to high heaven a new novel or film, a piece of music, play or exhibition, most of us are quite prepared to go with the flow and accept the judgment of those we assume know what they are talking about.

. . .

The world has always demanded new darlings and celebrated them accordingly, and Hemingway was by no means the first when In Our Time, his first book of short stories, was published in 1926. Some are still remembered, many more have been forgotten, at least by the reading public if not by academia, as each younger generation enthusiastically espouses the latest fashion in the arts as they espouse the latest fashion in clothes. And will always regard those who question their judgment and championing of their new darlings as, at best, stuffy, uncool and old-fashioned, at worst wilfully contrary or just mad.

Unlike me, you might well believe Ernest Hemingway really was a ‘writer of genius’, but you might also agree he and his career benefited enormously from the commercial imperatives which dictated Scribner’s decision to publish The Sun Also Rises. Idealists might care to believe the house had the purest motives at heart and by choosing to publish Hemingway’s work was simply concerned with furthering ‘literature’. What is, though, undeniable is that under that guidance of Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins, the publication of The Sun Also Rises was first and foremost a business venture.

Perkins, one of the young Turks of the publishing world who had begun his career at Scribner’s in its advertising department and knew a thing or two about the business side of publishing, also wanted to ensure Scribner’s did not lose market share and would be seen as a house equally as interested in avant-garde work.

Hemingway’s literary prominence and certainly his reputation have, admittedly, declined a little since their zenith, not least because over the past century many other darlings have arrived to be championed (and sold). But with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1927 and on the back of In Our Time, Hemingway became, in more modern parlance, an overnight sensation, and this was thanks to very astute marketing by Scribner’s, and sales of the novel were astonishing. According to Ms Blume in a piece she wrote for Vanity Fair

‘ . . . thanks to [Scribner’s] public-relations machine that plugged [Hemingway] as a personality along with his breakthrough novel, which would sell 19,000 copies within the first six months of its publication. (By the time of Hemingway’s death, in 1961, an estimated one million copies had been sold.)’

Scribner’s marketing department know its job. Ms Blume continues that those

‘charged with marketing Hemingway’s work were aware of their good fortune: in a sense, they were getting two juicy stories for the price of one. It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald’.

She observes that

‘The Sun Also Rises became the guidebook to youth culture. Parisian cafés teemed with Hemingway-inspired poseurs: the hard-drinking Jake Barnes and the studiously blasé Lady Brett Ashley became role models. The reason this pioneering youth movement still shimmers with dissipated glamour has a lot to do with The Sun Also Rises’

. . .

I might be an apostate on the matter of Hemingway’s ‘genius’, but even I won’t deny that among his peers his style was distinctive, although whether being ‘distinctive’ is necessarily praiseworthy is a moot point. It was certainly an aspect of his work which Scribner’s marketing department highlighted in its campaign to launch the writer as a sensation: here was something ‘new’ and ‘fresh’, the publishers stressed, a style and attitude that was very different to that of the old-school writers.

Scribner’s was, though, obliged to tread carefully: among its other authors were both Henry James and Edith Wharton, two of the ‘old-school’ writers Hemingway was touted to be leaving behind and whose ‘more literary’ styles, according to that rather overwrought New York Times reviewer, his own put to shame. Although James had died several years before Hemingway’s rise to fame, Wharton was still alive (and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1927, 1928 and 1930). The work of both writers was still selling so well that some senior Scribner’s partners were discomfited by the tactics of Hemingway’s editor Max Perkins and had to be won over.

There is more to ‘writing’ than just prose style, but here, too, I suggest, Hemingway comes more than a little unstuck and proves to be less than the full deal. He long, and inexplicably, insisted that The Sun Also Rises was not an autobiographical novel. Strictly speaking it isn’t, much of the novel was exactly that, especially to the friends and acquaintances who accompanied him on his third trip to Pamplona and who with barely any attempt to disguise them became the protagonists in his novel. In a piece for Town & Country (about Lady Duff Twysden, Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s novel) Lesley M M Blume observes

‘In the end, The Sun Also Rises was a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that had gone down in Pamplona’.

She adds that Donald Ogden-Stewart (the humorist and later Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden-Stewart who, with Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, was transmuted in the novel into ‘Bill Gorton’ in the novel)

‘. . . was astonished that Hemingway was even passing it off as fiction: it was, in Stewart’s opinion, nothing but a report on what happened … [it was] journalism”.

This is not in itself reprehensible – many authors extrapolate into fiction events from real life. It is what you do with your material which tells, how you transmute it into something greater than what is was before you started. What is baffling is Hemingway’s continued and persistent insistence that his novel was not autobiographical.

I suspect that, as Ms Blume establishes, desperate as he was to become a ‘great writer’ — and to be acknowledged as such — he feared his novel would not be taken seriously if it was seen as according to one reviewer of Ms Blume’s book put it mere ‘gossipy reportage’, even though, uncharitably, at the end of the day in many ways that is all it was despite the high-flown claims made for it as literature.

I’m disappointed. When you tell a joke, it’s a bit of downer when no one laughs. OK, not a joke you know what you mean

About 15 months ago, I came across a very useful website called Deadlines for Writers. And that’s exactly what it is: you are provided with a monthly ‘prompt’, a strict word count and a deadline for a story and a poem (you can accept the challenge for both or either).

Crucially, it’s free. There is no charge as, for example, there is a charge, usually about $20, for entering writing competitions to win a top prize of $3,000 (and far small second and third prizes. OK, you might say, wearing your charitable ‘let’s not get too cynical’ hat: these sites have costs and have to be paid for somehow so a small charge is understandable. And anyway, what’s $20?

Well, on the face of it, yes, but just do the maths (US ‘math’ though why I really don’t know) and you will realise that first and foremost such ‘competitions’ are exceptionally nice little earners for the poor, hopeful schmuck who cough up their $20. But I have written about that before (and you can find the post here) so I won’t do so again.

The point is that Deadlines For Writers does not charge you anything. It does have a higher tier where, for a small fee, you can have your story or poem appraised (by whom I don’t know), but joining at the basis, free level, does me (and it seems many others) fine.

The benefits are learning discipline, pretty much as far as I am concerned the prerequisite for most endeavours, including writing fiction of verse. You have a month to write and revise you piece, but just a 12-hour window so submit. And although the word count is a little flexible, it’s not much.

This month 155 were submitted, which is about the average. Members are from all around the world from every continent, though for some reason women predominate.

Another benefit is that, if you are lucky, others who have submitted stories (this month well read other stories and occasionally make comments. They only do so occasionally, but these comments can sometimes be useful.

I have submitted two stories (I created second identity a few months after joining so I could do so) every month, so the discipline side of it is working. Just how engaging and interesting my stories are I don’t know. And that is cause of my disappointment.

Usually get one or two comments every month and, I don’t mind admitting, I look forward to them. But this month I have had no comment on either one of the stories I submitted.

As you can imagine subject matter and style vary. Most folk, it seems, try their hand at chick-lit, science fiction or fantasy, which are not my bag and I don’t. Also some of the stories (I read a few at random every month

and sometimes leave comments) vary in — how do I say this without coming across as snob? — quality. Of the ones I read some are engaging and interesting, many are not.

Now for the cause of my disappointment: one of the stories I submitted this month was a little different. I attempted a pastiche of the kind of rotund, wordy, often overblown style of the 19th-century. It took the form of a review of a novel by Henry James (he of the rotund, wordy, and as he got older, often overblown style).


I realised it wasn’t quite the kind of stuff most folk choose to submit, but I took care over it, a great deal of care, in fact, to make sure it was not just horribly wordy and overblown, but actually also made complete sense. And I have so far had no comment.

Well, that’s a shame, so here and now I ask any of you reading this, if you have time, to read it and tell me what you think. It’s called Yes, You Mr James! and you can read or download it here.

Pip, Pip

(Or as Henry James, he of the mysterious bicycle/fire hose incident — find out for yourselves — would put it, pip, as it were and indeed, pip.)

When, why, how and where (subs: please check) using a simile is always pretty pointless, rather like driving a red car with a tennis racket or eating a sausage in Latin or (cont. P94)

No entry here for almost two months (well, seven weeks). Am I losing interest? Well, no, it’s just that pretty much all that’s been occurring to me has to do with Trump, the coming economic crash and Brexit, and how in many ways both Putin/Russia and Xi Jinping/China are running rings around ‘the free world’.

To be frank, on those matters I’ve nothing much to add to the generalities I’ve already posted in this blog (and which, as I’ve long admitted, are generalities I recycle from only papers and the media. The Economist is always a good bet. Subscribe to the Economist, pick up one or two obscure facts every week — that the housing market in New Zealand has seen better days, for example — and get ready to score Brownie points with the more gullible of your friends who don’t subscribe when you drop them — obliquely! — into conversation).

Then there’s my Hemingway project. It’s coming along OK, though slowly, and I don’t have anything new to say about that either. But one topic has presented itself which might take me away from all the doom and gloom (though the bad times are not complete — football is back on TV).

I’ve been doing a lot more reading over these past 30 months since I hung up my eyeshade and stashed away my spike and pot of glue, and although in that time the bulk of it has been about Hemingway — biographies and related books — I have also been able to read more fiction again. Over that time I’ve read and enjoyed Troubles by J G Farrell, got stuck into Middlemarch (but I’m taking is slowly) and read, but not enjoyed several other novels. In fact, I’ve not enjoyed more novels than I have enjoyed, but I have a kind of rule to finish reading what I’ve started to read as I think that’s only fair to an author.

I’ve also been working on the principle of casting my net far and wide and reading stuff I wouldn’t normally be interested in. So after hearing on the radio that the writer and ex-spy Ted Allebury was an excellent writer, I read his novel Show Me A Hero and discovered — on the basis of that book at least — that he wasn’t.

Then by chance I came across Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith, which was billed as ‘horror’ (or something) and not having read any ‘horror’ before, I read it. It was dreadful in quite a few ways, but at least I gained a little from it: how not to write.

Trickier to deal with was The Colour by Rose Tremain. She is an ‘award-winning’ author (which surely should impress us all, surely?), a ‘Dame’ to boot and I gather something of a respected fixture in contemporary English literature. All that leaves me out on a limb when I confess that I wasn’t particularly impressed by The Colour, either. In fact, I didn’t think it was at all good.

. . .

A crucial point to make, though, is that we all like different things, in this case writers and styles. Quite obviously given Ms Tremain’s reputation and her long list of awards I (who admittedly is only talking about one book here, the only one by her I have read, though did and does not encourage me to read any more) I am in a distinct minority. Some might, possibly with some justification, claim I don’t know what I am talking about. I happen to think I do, but you’ll see that no definitive answer can be given to that question.

Nor can a definitive answer be given to the question ‘is this book [whatever it is] good or bad?’ I contend that, particularly if a novel or story or poem isn’t the kind of thing we usually ‘like’, all literary judgments are subjective and can’t be anything but subjective.

You might argue that this or that critic or English literature department academic is ‘a professional who is daily immersed in literature of all kind’ and is able to evaluate a book dispassionately without letting her of his personal tastes intrude. To that I would respond ‘cobblers’, simply because there is no way at all we can be sure personal tastes has not intruded. And when it does, the particular critic or academic is very likely to be unaware that it has.

The ‘professional’ critic or academic might well agree with me that Geoff Smith’s Time Of The Beast is pants, rubbish. But I also don’t doubt Mr Smith’s novel has entertained many and they felt it is ‘quite good’.

How would you react to that? Would you insist (in a sense pulling rank on behalf of the ‘professional’ critic/academic) that in some way she or he is ‘more qualified’ to pass judgment, because they have read more etc? I’ll concede that ‘having read more’ might mean their judgment and reasons for making it are more interesting to listen and pay attention to rather than those of someone who thinks Time Of The Beast is ‘really, really brill, I mean it’s ace!’; but that still doesn’t make the one subjective judgment more objective than another, quite simply because it cannot. It simply isn’t possibly, just as 2 plus 4 will never add up to anything but 6 however hard you try.

. . . 

As it happens I am not alone in being more than a tad sceptical about the views of ‘professional’ critics and academics or rather the overly respectful attention they get and, no doubt, often demand. As part of my background reading for this — almost interminable, but not quite yet and I shall finish it — Hemingway project (which I’m thinking of subtitling ‘Was Hemingway a twat or just a pillock?’) I came across Virginia Woolf’s contemporary review of Men Without Women, his second volume of short stories, in which she is quite scathing about ‘the critics’ and the almost slavish respect we give them and their views. You can read her piece here.

I am certainly not about to claim that the judgment of the ‘ordinary reader’ is just as good as that of the better-read critic or academic. Instead I am trying to make the, rather negative and certainly more subtle point, that the judgment of the critic or academic is not per se better. I shall simply ask those who will continue to argue that it is: how then do you explain that quite often the judgment of one critic about the latest work by this year’s new darling might utterly contradict that of another.

To show you what I mean, here are two judgments by two ‘respected critics’ about John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea (it won the Booker that year). The Guardian wrote: ‘Banville’s book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) . . . And that we can mention such writers in the same breath as Banville should alert us to the fact that we can count ourselves privileged to be around at the same time as he is.’

Then there’s the view of the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani that The Sea is

‘a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale’.

So which is it? Who is right and who is wrong? Actually, neither is, because there can be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ subjective judgment.

. . . 

I happen to agree with Kakutani. Certainly, Banville does try something different and something quite interesting, but by Christ does he spoil it all by shitting on his own doorstep. As far as I am concerned for every point he scores — and he does score one or two, not least that he shares with many of his fellow Irish writers a feeling for the flow of prose, something which is all-too-often distinctly lacking in too many English novelists (are you listening, Ms Tremain?) — he loses two.

For one thing he chooses to use so many arcane words — her’s a pick of them: ‘leporine’, ‘strangury’, ‘perpetuance’, ‘finical’, ‘flocculent’, ‘anthropic’, ‘avrilaceous’, ‘anaglypta‘ and ‘assegais’ — that you get the distinct feeling he’s just showing off.

In fact and on the face of it, that would seem to be very unlikely, given his prominence etc. But that is how it comes across and that is, sadly, what I suspect Banville is doing. When he won the Booker with The Sea in 2005, he commented along the lines of ‘wasn’t it good that for a change a work of art won the Booker’. Modest, he ain’t.

In The Sea, Banville is also horribly addicted to similes and — a trait he shares with the lovely Ms Tremain — he doesn’t use just one where one might do: every burp and fart gets at least two similes, and most are so bloody forced you think you are sitting in a junior creative writing course class.

Overall — to my mind, I’ll stress that point once again — The Sea is horribly overwritten and so top-heavy with ostentatious ‘fine writing’ that it is nothing but bad writing.

The all-important arts establishment, who possibly never got around to reading The Sea, disagree. Among his honours, Banville has won (this list is from Wikipedia) the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature’.

He has also been ‘elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007’, and in 2017 ‘Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia (essentially a knighthood)’. The bottom line: he must be a fine writer, and you, Pat Powell, couldn’t tell a purse from a sow’s ear. Ho-hum.

. . . 

Another writer who has been honoured by the bods who like to do the honouring is one our English literary critics’ several darlings, Ian McEwan. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary English ‘letters’, McEwan has, as sadly always seems to happen, become an eminence grise.

He hasn’t yet been knighted as Ms Tremain — sorry Dame Rose Tremain — has been honoured, but many, many bodies, in Britain and abroad have made it clear just what a splendid, splendid writer they think he is. Nor only has McEwan, like Banville, also won a string of prizes, but among other things a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and most recently was awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal who being a splendid chap who isn’t a kraut.

Immediately after finishing Banville’s The Sea, I read, again at random, McEwan’s ‘James Tait Black Memorial Prize’ winner Saturday. This is billed by the Observer, at least on the cover of my paperback edition as ‘Dazzling . . . profound and urgent’.

Yes, as far as London’t literary luvvies are concerned it is firmly in the camp of ‘important literature’. Here’s my subjective opinion: it’s not ‘dazzling’ or ‘profound’ and what ‘urgent’ means or might mean in the context I have no idea at all.

Actually, I do have an idea as to what is going on: publishers — spoiler alert! — don’t publish books because they are ‘passionate about literature’. They publish books to make money and preferably as much of it as possible. Thus telling the constituency of readers who regard themselves as ‘passionate about literature’ that McEwan’s novel is ‘dazzling . . . profound and urgent’ should urge those on any doubters further towards the Waterstone’s till.

Like Banville, McEwan is also addicted to two similes where even one is one too many, and like Banville they are usually so bloody forced, you wonder whether the writer’s literary judgment had taken the day off at the time of writing. Perhaps you might even agree with me that supplying two similes is remarkably odd: doesn’t that second simile more or less neutralise the first? In which case why provide the first?

To be frank, why not let words you are trying to illuminate with a simile (or do whatever similes are intended to do) speak of themselves? In short, junk similes now and forever. I have not — in my more mature and enlightened reading — yet come a cross a simile which is not pointless, affected and could certainly be junked without a second thought.

We’re told — and we have to be told because I doubt the average reader would guess however ‘passionate’ they are about literature — that Saturday is (or was when it was published in 2005) a commentary on the second Iraq War and the ‘state of the world’. Well — ahem, in my view — it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it is hard to see quite what the point of McEwan’s novel is.

I love ironies, and it is a supreme irony that John Banville — yes, the same John Banville of the mainly pretentious bilge outlined above — was extremely nasty about McEwan’s Saturday when he reviewed it in My 2005 for the New York Review of Books. He wrote:

Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces — brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.’

I have to say I agree with Banville. Reading McEwan’s novel was like — oh, bloody forget it!

What is art? Quick, where's the bloody door!

My ‘project’ is as interesting as ever — to me, at least — but it is lasting a lot longer than I anticipated. Certainly that has something to do with not beavering away at it day in, day out, week in, week out, although I do work at it regularly, whether undertaking background reading or writing. And I’ve already created the website where I shall publish it once it is finished. It is also taking longer than I thought it would because I am continually redefining what I want to do.

I began it, in July 1918, after reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel (often called his ‘debut novel’, but in fact his second) The Sun Also Rises. The blurb on the back of it — the publisher’s blurb as in ‘the publisher who makes money from selling copies of it and the more copies he sells, the more dosh he rakes in’ — described the novel as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. I thought it was neither, but I was aware that Hemingway was, apparently, regarded as ‘one of our greatest writers’ and had even been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I decided to write an entry for this blog wondering out aloud quite why the publisher made his claims.

I have described the genesis of my project in earlier posts and won’t repeat it all here, except to say it very quickly became apparent to me that to do my argument justice — my argument is summed up by the title I have given the Hemingway blog (‘The Hemingway Enigma: How Did A Middling Writer Achieve Such Global Literary Fame’) — I was obliged to do more reading of his work and, for want of a better word, a little ‘research’ (which in my case is just another word for ‘reading’). And that’s what I have been doing.

In that first year I wrote about 15,000 words, possibly a little more, as I was writing several files at the same time. But when a little later I came to read what I had written, with a more critical eye (it is always worthwhile letting a little time elapse before going over what you have written), I realised it was all rather superficial, not to say quite adolescent, crap. So I started over again.

By then I was more familiar with the life of Ernest Hemingway and the man himself, and I realised it would be pointless just to rehash the various biographies and memoirs I’d read, quite apart from irrelevant to answering the question I was asking: How did a middling writer . . . ? etc. To do that, I realised, I would have to write a series of ‘essays’ (the quotation marks are suitable for conveying how nervous I still am in part about what I am doing and that I’m running a very real risk of looking quite foolish) on various aspects of his rise to fame. And one of those ‘essays’ had to be the most dangerous one of all to undertake: what is ‘art’ and what do we mean by ‘art’?

It is, though, necessary to write about it and outline just what ‘art’ might be seen as because all the books, paper, memoirs, features and dissertations I have so far read on the writer refer to ‘Hemingway’s art’. The problem is that the still widely accepted use of the word ‘art’ places it high, high, high on a pedestal and even the mere mention of ‘art’ in connection with Hemingway is inclined the reinforce and spuriously substantiate the claims for him as being a ‘writer of genius’.

Undoubtedly, Hemingway did have a certain facility when writing — his journalism, though as facile as most such journalistic pieces are — is very readable. And he easily mastered the trick of writing in such as way as to persuade the reader he didn’t just know what he was talking about, but knew a great deal more and would reveal it if, well, you know, he were able to do so . . .

It’s just that in my view the end product of ‘Hemingway’s art’ was not and is not particularly good. I grant that it is not exactly bad, either — well, not to begin with and he certainly had a greater gift for short fiction than novel-length works — but I can’t get my head around the claims made for it. So, I realised, I shall also have to write about ‘art’, or better, ‘art’ as I understood it.

. . .

As it happens I had for some time been wondering and thinking about ‘what do we mean by art’ and had already reached some conclusions. I was, and still am, also aware that minds far greater than mine have done the same and that intellectually I am simply not in the same league as they.

Yet despite that I felt and feel, my observations might, at least, be pertinent. And by way of practising, rehearsing so to speak, what I want to write on ‘Hemingway’s art’, I thought I might do so in this entry. Some of the points I shall make I’ve made before and if, by chance, you have previously dipped into this blog, they might sound familiar.

There are several jumping off points when wading into the quagmire of ‘what is art and what do we mean by art’ and none is particularly better than any other. So I shall start with this observation: we often hear the question ‘. . . but is it art?’ or hear the declaration ‘. . . but it’s not art’; and we often hear a distinction being made between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’.

To my mind — and I should like you always to keep in mind the proviso that mine is merely one point of view and that I’m not, as too many do, in any way laying down the law — the thought behind each of those first two statements excludes the third.

If, on the one hand we wish to distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘not art’ and on the other to distinguish between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’, surely that begs the question: which is better/more worth our attention — ‘bad art’ or ‘not art’? That is: is ‘bad art’ still ‘better’ than ‘not art’? Is there some kind of hierarchy, some consolation for whoever is deemed to have produced ‘bad art’ that it is, at least, ‘still art’.

Well, I’ll let you off the hook and stop demanding that these questions should be answered because in my view ‘art’ is something very, very straightforward and simple and is created by the minute the world over: it is nothing special, that the badly painted, out-of-of proportion still life produced by 64-year-old widow Daphne Rutherford in her Leek, Staffs, Women’s Institute art class is as much ‘art’ and a ‘work of art’ as Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Certainly, Holbein’s work might hold your attention for longer than Mrs Rutherford’s Bowl Of Fruit At Sunset, but that is not the point.

Granted, in the estimation of many Blinding Lights by The Weeknd can’t hold a candle to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Freddie Freeloader by Miles Davis, but I suggest there is absolutely nothing intrinsically ‘better’ about that fourth movement compared to Blinding Lights: the preference is wholly subjective.

I had to look up what in pop terms is recent and found Blinding Lights on You Tube. I’d heard of The Weeknd, though I’d never heard his music before, and in my — admittedly also subjective — view Blinding Lights is pretty bloody ordinary, pretty bloody indistinguishable from 1,001 other tracks with whom it is vying for prominence and really can’t hold a candle to either of the other the Beethoven or the Miles Davis. But that isn’t the point: I suggest again that there is nothing whatsoever intrinsically ‘better’ about Beethoven’s fourth movement than The Weeknd’s track. Both are ‘works of art’.

At this point many will think ‘the guy has lost the plot’. Actually, I haven’t done so at all. The essential issue here is that for decades, for centuries even, we have got into the habit of genuflecting before ‘art’ and insisting there is something very special about ‘works of art’, often, to make that point, referring to ‘real art’ and ‘real works of art’. It is now a convention, a tradition.

Even all those, often quite self-conscious, iconoclasts and would-be iconoclasts who demand regularly something of ‘a clean sweep’ of the art world, ‘away with the old and in with the new’ are dancing to the same old tune, worshipping the same old gods. It’s just the gods have different costumes (and the young Turks inevitably become the dinosaurs a new generation of young Turks demands should ‘make way!’ And it is most certainly not the tune I am singing).

Perhaps to clarify what I have just written: both that fourth movement and The Weeknd’s latest release are ‘works of art’. But if many of us value the one — the fourth movement — more than the other, it is not because one is ‘a work of art’ (‘it is art’) and the other isn’t. It is because as a work of art the one achieves more than the other. And I am using such a vague phrase not just because I can’t think of a better one, but because quite what it achieves, the value of what it achieves and whether or not it should be given more respect are entirely separate questions.

Over the years many claims are made for ‘art’ and ‘works of art’. ‘Art’, some have declared, has a ‘moral dimension’. At other times the demand is made that ‘art must be political!’ Towards the end of the nineteenth century the cry

went up that ‘art should be for art’s sake’. Leo Tolstoy wrote that ‘Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs’.

As I understand it — I haven’t yet read the book What Is Art in which he makes that claim, but dear hearts, ever the dedicated and responsible man of integrity I have ordered it and shall read it once Amazon have delivered it next Tuesday as promised — but I gather Tolstoy, who became something of a religious nut in his later years when he put down his thoughts on art, insisted that to be regarded as ‘art’ a work must be grounded in the truths of christianity.

So he has already limited what might become ‘art’ in his definition, and ruled out as potential producers of art all those who had never heard of one Jesus of Nazareth. And what if a writer puts pen to paper, paint to canvas or quill to score sheet to do something entirely different than ‘communicating to other people a feeling he once experience’? What if she or he simply wants to entertain, to engage? Would that preclude anything she or he produced from ‘being art’?

You might or might not agree with these and the many other demands and claims made of and for ‘art’. My point is that all such demands, definitions and claims are, in one context, quite irrelevant. ‘Art’ is essentially nothing special at all. Individual ‘works of art’ might be thought of as special — the obvious examples would be that fourth movement I keep mentioning, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Miles Davis’s album Kind Of Blue and many other works you reading this can think of. But that is because of the qualities some find in them as individual pieces, not because they are works of ‘art’.

Some ‘art’ interests or engages or entertains us more than other ‘art’. Some art does have a moral dimension — Dickens’s novels are said to have tried to highlight the awful working conditions many children were forced to endure in his time. Some art might have a ‘political’ dimension — Goya’s Black Paintings and Picasso’s Guernica could be cited as examples. But, I suggest, these dimensions are particular to each work, not general attributes of ‘works of art’.

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Another, as far as I am concerned glaring, anomaly in all our talk of ‘art’ and ‘works of art’, ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ is the very inconvenient distinction we are obliged to make — if we are honest — between an ‘objective judgment’ and a ‘subjective judgment’. Crucially, the one can never be the other, and no number of subjective judgments reaching the same conclusion can transmute majority judgment into one‘objective judgment’.

Equally crucially, many works are regarded as ‘masterpieces’ simply because it is now accepted that is what they are, that is the general consensus and because ‘the critics’ say so. But it is hard to deny, because it is impossible to deny, that each and every critic’s judgment is, at the end of the day, ‘subjective’. In An Essay On Criticism which was her review of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf has some very trenchant things to say about ‘critics’ and the power they seem to wield. Thus strictly speaking they cannot say ‘Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’, but ‘I think that Bach’s St John Passion is a masterpiece’.

At this point some might point out that the judgments of ‘the critics’ is worth far more than my (or your) judgment. And to my subsequent question ‘why’, they might respond that ‘the critics have far more experience and that their judgment thus carries far more weight’. Perhaps.

Granted they have read, seen and heard more than I have (and thus their views might demand more attention than mine do), their judgment is still a ‘subjective judgment’, just one of many. And what are we to make of the fact that all too often the judgments of critics contradict each other: this is ‘a masterpiece’ one will say, to which another will respond ‘rubbish!’ In those cases, to whose wagon do we hitch our horse so that we — or those for whom these matters are important — hold ‘the right opinion’?

That last point highlights another difficulty with ‘art’: the part snobbery, money and the venal interests of the various ‘arts’ industries play in deciding what is art and what isn’t. If I have persuaded you and you have now adopted my position on ‘art’ – that ‘art’ is commonplace and than some ‘works of art’ are valued more than others not because of some intrinsic essence, but because of the work itself — that won’t trouble you at all.

But there are many folk who are desperate to be seen to have the ‘right’ opinion among their peers, who have enough money to buy ‘art’ and are desperate to buy the ‘right’ works and who rely on the folk who decide that ‘this is art’ and ‘this is not art’ to ensure they buy the right shite.

Then there are others who buy art as an investment, the essential point being that they expect what they have bought to command a price higher than what they paid if and when it comes to be sold. If they bought a piece because as ‘art’ it commanded a high price, but if it were from one week to the next to be deemed not to be ‘art’ its price would fall substantially, they are very keen to ensure ‘it is still art’ — or, at least, it is still seen as ‘art’.

Thus the arbiters of what is and what is not ‘art’ become important people who would be decidedly put out if, as I suggest, ‘art’ is commonplace and has no intrinsic value at all. Certainly, a picture by Picasso might still command a high price at auction, but now its snob value would be more important, not its status as ‘art’.

Actually, that was always the case, but remained unspoken. You do not tell a wealthy man or woman about to buy a picture (whose sale will earn you a nifty commission) that they are not women or men of taste at all but simply out-and-out snobs with more money than sense.

Auction houses, publishers, concert halls and promoters, galleries and museums also like to get in on the act: it is quite obvious why an auction house is keen that there should be something ‘special’ about this work: the price is will fetch and the 10% commission they charge (or however much they charge) will be accordingly higher. The same is true of art galleries. Museums, many of which are funded by public money, must be careful that what they purchase with that public money passes muster, and having a group of ‘art experts’ declare the unmade bed they have just purchased is ‘art’ goes a considerable way of getting them off the hook. In fact one unmade bed, Tracey’s Emin’s by now famous My Bed was sold in 2014 for just over £2.5 million. If a gallery shelled out £2.5 million on my unmade bed and, crucially, no one had yet declared it to be ‘art’, there would be hell to pay.

Incidentally, one surefire way of assuring a ‘work of art’ acquires credibility is to wash it in pseudo-intellectual verbiage: on the website artnet Emin’s My Bed was described as an ‘iconic installation’ that ‘offers an uncompromising glimpse into the life of the then 35-year-old after a traumatic relationship breakdown’ — note

the strategic use of the buzzwords ‘iconic’ and ‘uncompromising’. I doubt whether anything produced by, say, unemployed 35-year-old mother-of-five Sharon O’Connor of the Wordsworth Estate, in Ebbw Vale, to provide an ‘uncompromising’ glimpse into the traumatic breakdown of her latest relationship — the bucket of vomit she produced after guzzling too much vodka and lime to soothe her heart — would garner quite as much attention. Perhaps I’m being too cynical.

. . .

Other ‘essays’ I shall have to write for this Hemingway project include just how ‘modernist’ was Hemingway and, as I allude to above, the spurious role the subjective judgment of some plays in the advancement of many a career.

I also want to look into the role the growth and evolution of advertising and marketing played in establishing Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’, and how our need for celebrities — by no means a new craving as the Lord Byron might have testified — also helped push ‘Papa’ Hemingway ‘to the top’.

By the way, Hemingway himself invented the nickname ‘Papa’ and insisted everyone should use it. As Michael Reynolds astutely points out in the third volume of his biography of the writer, commenting on Archibald MacLeish calling him ‘Pappy’:

Archie thought it referred to Ernest’s fatherhood, but he could not have been more wrong. To be ‘Papa’ was to have authority over whatever the game happened to be.