Constructing ‘Papa’ Hemingway: What will it be — ‘pure artist’ or ‘national celebrity’?

This is the latest piece I have written for my blog about that old phoney Ernest Hemingway, looking at why folk think he was such a good writer and had worldwide fame. I’m also publishing it here because I haven’t posted for at least ten minutes, I’m hoping — rather forlornly, to be honest — for a bit of feedback, and finally to publicise that other bloody blog. If you can find it in your hearts to give me your thoughts on what I have written below (or even any of the other entries on the other blog) I would be pleased.

 

Mediated ideology persists to such an extent that the myth becomes absorbed as legend, and thus the realism behind the figures becomes distorted. This is particularly evident in the case of American author Ernest Hemingway, whose celebrity image eclipsed the man and thereby created a culturally fruitful myth.

Siobhan Lyons, Remembering Hemingway:
The Endurance of the Hemingway Myth.

. . . he radiated personality and cultivated publicity even as he pretended to scorn it. In his first letter to Perkins he mentioned — not wholly facetiously — that it would be ‘worthwhile to get into Who’s Who’. In short he wanted fame in both the Renaissance and the contemporary sense.

Leonard Leff, Hemingway and his Co-conspirators.

Far from being either the unwitting or unwilling recipient of this personal attention as he liked to intimate he was, Hemingway was the architect of his public reputation. Early in his career, he began to shape a public personality which quickly became one of his most famous creations, during his lifetime perhaps the most famous one.’

John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.

THE ‘Hemingway enigma’ is simple to define: he was neither ‘a genius’ and nor were his works ‘masterpieces’. Yet to this day that is the view of many around the world, and Hemingway is still routinely described as ‘America’s greatest writer’ and ‘a leading modernist’. So the question is: how were ‘the facts’ of his ‘genius’ and his ‘masterpieces’ so comprehensively established and why was it so widely accepted? How did he achieve a global literary and public prominence that was, especially for a writer, extraordinary?

I suggest it was essentially a concatenation of various disparate forces, of which not the least were Hemingway’s overweening, ruthless ambition, his bulldozing personality and his unstinting efforts to publicise himself.

Hemingway worked hard to become famous, and eventually a great many identified — and still identify — his literary reputation with his status as a celebrity. His work was viewed through the prism of his global fame, and the equation is simplistically straightforward: ‘this work is by the world-famous Nobel Prize winner Hemingway, so it must be good’. 

Those of his champions who will acknowledge that his talent and work did decline in the last 30 years of his life might insist that his status as ‘a great writer’ was based on the works with which he made his name — his first two novels and the first two volumes of short stories. These were completed, they will say, before he embarked on his campaign to ‘become famous’ and lost his way. Possibly.

But one might also argue those early works were notable because in style and subject matter they stood out from what else was being produced at the time, and that almost a century on only a few of the short stories and neither of the two novels have stood the test of time as ‘literature’.

. . .

There is no denying that Hemingway had a facility with words, but it was no greater or even as great as that of many other writers (and journalists) past and present; and after bursting onto the literary scene in 1925 with In Our Time, his first — commercially published — book of short stories, he did not develop in any significant way as a writer.

Because of its — for the age — ‘shocking’ content and distinctive style, In Our Time attracted considerable interest: Hemingway’s work was notably ‘different’, although he was not quite the original he thought he was and was irritated by suggestions that he owed a great deal to the style of his one-time mentor, Sherwood Anderson.

In Our Time received excellent reviews. The, then newly founded, Time magazine told its readers — thereby substantiating the persona Hemingway went on to adopt — that

[Hemingway] is that rare bird, an intelligent man who is not introspective on paper . . . Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-‘literary’ transcriber of life — a writer.

In New York’s The Sun, Herbert Seligman’s commented — and demonstrated just how distressingly airy and arcane many book reviews can be — that

The flat even banal declarations in the paragraphs alternating with Mr Hemingway’s longer sketches are a criticism of the conventional dishonesty of literature. Here is neither literary inflation nor elevation, but a passionately bare telling of what happened.

Mr Seligman’s contribution does rather beg the question as to why stouthearted book lovers such as he seem hitherto to have tolerated literature’s ‘conventional dishonesty’. It would also help if we knew just how that ‘conventional dishonesty’ had been expressing itself.

The New York Times enthused that Hemingway’s

language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean . . . his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.

Like Mr Seligman, the New York Herald Tribune reviewer was also not shy of indulging in hyperbole. He wrote

I know no American writer with a more startling ear for colloquial conversation, or a more poetic sensitiveness for the woods and hills. In Our Time has perhaps not enough energy to be a great book, but Ernest Hemingway has promises of genius.

After such glowing reviews, much was expected of Hemingway’s ‘breakthrough novel’, The Sun Also Rises, when it was published the following year, and indeed many of the critics were impressed. The New York Times extravagantly insisted that

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of the Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame . . . This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature

and New York’s The Sun informed its readers that

Every sentence that [Hemingway] writes is fresh and alive. There is no one writing whose prose has more of the force and vibrancy of good, direct, natural, colloquial speech. . . It seems to me that Hemingway is highly successful in presenting the effect that a sensual love for the same woman might have on the temperaments of three men who are utterly different in this position and training.

Yet in hindsight and from a different perspective, perhaps The Sun Also Rises seems to be more of a sad and sardonic romantic potboiler than the ground-breaking modernist work it was long said to be. Although the majority of the critics praised it, it did leave other critics less impressed than they had hoped to be after Hemingway’s startling debut. The Observer in London commented that

Mr Hemingway began brilliantly, with a set of short stories called In Our Times. But Fiesta [as The Sun Also Rises was entitled in Britain]
 gives us neither people nor atmosphere; the maudlin, staccato conversations — evidently meant to be realistic in their brokenness and boringness — convey no impression of reality.

The Times Literary Supplement observed

Now comes Fiesta . . . more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different . . .

Even Dorothy Parker, who had been much taken with Hemingway when she first met him in New York in early 1925 and whose profile of him in the New Yorker two years later gushed about the writer unashamedly, had hoped for more. Reviewing the novel in the New Yorker she wrote

Why [The Sun Also Rises] should have been taken to the slightly damp bosom of the public while the (as it seems to me) superb In Our Time should have been disregarded will always be a puzzle to me. As I see it . . . Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.

. . .

Like In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises also ‘shocked’ a great many in America, and in Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds reminds us of why:

Those were the days when Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple MacPherson led Bible thumpers down the fundamentalist trail that Americans periodically seemed compelled to travel. We remember the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, but forget that the school teacher lost, that the law forbidding Darwin’s presence in the classroom was upheld. We forget . . . that the meanest sort of reactionary spirit resulted in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan . . . We all remember Lindbergh's daring 1927 flight across the Atlantic, but forget that he later admired Hitler’s well-oiled military machine.

Equally as ‘different’, according to the publicity material disseminated by his publisher Scribner’s in the run-up to the publication in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises, was the writer himself. Hemingway was, Scribner’s marketing department informed would-be readers, as much an ‘action man’ as ‘a writer’ and was as unlike the stereotype of the sensitive artist beavering away alone in his garret as it was possible to be. In Everybody Behaved Badly, Lesley M M Blume’s account of the genesis of The Sun Also Rises, she writes that Scribner’s managed to convey that Hemingway was

a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald

and, crucially, the line the marketing department took in its strategy to build up and distinguish Hemingway from contemporary authors set the tone of what was to come over the next 35 years.

Hemingway’s first novel (which, confusingly, was actually his second) was well-received, the younger reading public loved it and it sold well, as did his second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, when it was published a year later. But it was A Farewell To Arms, published in 1929, which cemented his position as a leading young American writer and placed him firmly in the public eye.

Readers were primed on what to expect from the work in a publicity piece the novelist Owen Wister offered to write for Scribner’s after reading the manuscript. Wister, who had made his name with his novel The Virginian and had been sought out by Hemingway at his home in Shell, Wyoming, on the younger man’s hunting trip in 1928, wrote that in Hemingway’s ‘astonishing’ new novel

landscapes, persons and events are brought to such vividness as to make the reader become a participating witness. This astonishing book is in places so poignant and moving as to touch the limit that human nature can stand when love and parting are the point . . . [Hemingway] like Defoe, is lucky to be writing in an age that will not stop its ears at the unmuted resonance of a masculine voice.

Privately, however (according to Michael Reynolds), Wister told Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, that the novel’s two themes — the war and the love affair the story portrays — never came together. Perkins, says Reynolds, agreed that was the novel’s flaw. These were, though, aesthetic and technical concerns by two professionals and had no bearing on how A Farewell To Arms was received: it was a huge success.

The first print run of 30,000 copies sold out within three weeks and within three months another 50,000 copies had been sold. No writer might hope for a better start to his career — two best-selling novels and two well-received collections of short stories: Hemingway had arrived and became a household name. Yet ironically even as his prominence took off, his writing career was peaking.

. . .

The critics increasingly began to have their doubts that Hemingway was not quite the writer they once thought he was with the publication of Death In The Afternoon in 1932. Winner Take Nothing, his third — and last — collection of original short stories, which appeared in 1933 didn’t win them over, either. In the New York Times, John Chamberlain noted that

[Hemingway] has evidently reached a point in writing where the sterile, the hollow, the desiccated emotions of the post-war generation cannot make him feel disgusted; he is simply weary of contemplation . . . . he has lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.

In 1935, Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway’s account of going on safari in East Africa made many critics wonder out aloud what made Hemingway think that a country in the depths of the Great Depression in which one in five of the potential labour force was out of work would be interested in hearing about the exploits of a rich man out hunting big game. A few years later (in 1939) an inimpressed Edmund Wilson, one of Hemingway’s high-profile champions not many years earlier, commented that in Green Hills Of Africa Hemingway had

produced what must be one of the only books ever written which make Africa and it’s animals seem dull. Almost the only thing we learned about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them. And as for the natives . . . the principal impression we get of them is that they were simple and inferior people who enormously admired Hemingway.

In Scott And Ernest: The Authority of Failure And The Authority Of Success, Matthew J. Brucolli brutally and succinctly describes that

Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty [in 1929] and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success.

Crucially, Brucolli adds (and neatly highlights the central irony of the enigma of Hemingway’s fame)

everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.

The critics — Hemingway always hated the critics — didn’t much like To Have And Have Not, which he published in 1937, either. But the public did, and it sold well, although when today we hear the title To Have And Have Not, we are more likely to be recalling the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film of that name, which was ‘based’ on the novel but had very little in common with Hemingway’s work.

His only play, The Fifth Column, written while he was in Spain covering the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, was directed by the celebrated Lee Strassberg (although the script had first to be rewritten by a screenwriter). It’s Broadway run lasted for only 87 performances and a planned national tour was cancelled.

The publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 undoubtedly saved Hemingway’s literary career, and it did so spectacularly. Broadly, the critics liked and praised it — the New York Times called it ‘a tremendous piece of work’ in which the ‘superb’ story

was packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy.

Yet the praise was not universal, and even the gushing New York Times review, which stated that

Mr. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The dialogue, handled as though in translation from the Spanish, is incomparable

also observed that although

A few of the scenes are perfect . . . others [are] gentle and almost pastoral, if here and there a trifle sweet-noted.

The attitude of those critics who were not entirely bowled over by Hemingway’s new novel was summed up by Maxwell Geismar when he re-evaluated it for the New York Times in 1962. He described For Whom The Bell Tolls as

a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbable or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.

Yet where it counted for Scribner’s — with the readers — For Whom The Bell Tolls was a runaway success. Being chosen as a Book of the Month substantially boosted sales and helped make Hemingway a very wealthy man, although, ironically, as a younger man Hemingway had mocked the institution and despised — or claimed to despise — writers who chose to allow their work to be thus promoted.

. . .

Although Hemingway says he was writing regularly after he returned from Europe to Cuba in 1945 — throughout his life he liked to purvey an image of the consummate professional writer by stressing how ‘hard’ he was always toiling on ‘difficult’ work — he did not publish any original fiction until Across The River And Into The Trees appeared in 1950. That novel’s reception by the critics on the one hand and the coverage its publication was given in the media on the other confirmed how much his literary reputation and his public prominence had markedly diverged. It spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list, but the critics loathed it. Apart from the odd claim by writer and journalist John O’Hara in his New York Times review in September 1950 that Hemingway was

the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare

almost every other critic thought the book was awful. Their attitude is best summed up by John Dos Passos in a letter to a friend. Dos Passos, Hemingway’s one-time close confidant, wondered

how can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?

In his regular New York Times column, Speaking of Books, J Donald Adams declared that Across The River And Into The Trees was

one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.

The public disagreed and the novel sold well, again underling the widening discrepancy between Hemingway’s literary standing and his status as what by then could only be described as ‘a celebrity’.

The critics, though not the public, were also divided on the worth of final piece of original work published by Hemingway during his lifetime. The Old Man And The Sea, more a novella or a long short story than a full-length novel, had an initial print run of 50,000 and sold well. Its sales were substantially boosted after it was chosen as a Book Of The Month and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But crucially the complete story was published in the September 1, 1952, edition of Life Magazine, and all five million copies sold out in just two days.

Some critics praised The Old Man And The Sea as a return to form for Hemingway. In the New York Times Robert Gorham Davie described it as

a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him

and he declared that Hemingway had

got back to something good and true in himself, that has always been there.

He detected

new indications of humility and maturity and a deeper sense of being at home in life which promise well for the novel in the making.

and added that Hemingway was

still a great writer, with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones.

Other critics, though, were not entirely convinced by the work. In the New York Times Orville Prescott confirmed that

The Old Man and the Sea . . . is much simpler and enormously better than Mr. Hemingway’s last book, Across the River And Into the Trees

and that

within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.

But he added that as

good as The Old Man and the Sea is, it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially.

Some critics were harsher and felt there was something artificial in the prose Hemingway was now producing. In the Spring 1953 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review John Aldridge wrote that

In the best of the early Hemingway, one always felt that the prose had been forced out under great pressure through a tight screen of opposing psychic tensions; and one read it with the same taut apprehensiveness, the same premonition of hugely impending catastrophe, as that with which it was written . . . But now the prose [in The Old Man And The Sea] — to change the figure once again — has a fabricated quality, as if it had been shipped into the book by some manufacturer of standardized Hemingway parts.

Thirty years later in an Atlantic Monthly retrospective of Hemingway’s work James Atlas was equally unimpressed by that final work. He declared that

The end of Hemingway’s career was a sad business. The last novels were self-parodies, none more so than The Old Man And The Sea. The internal monologues of Hemingway’s crusty fisherman are unwittingly comical (‘My head is not that clear. But I think the great Dimaggio would be proud of me today’); and the message, that fish are ‘more noble and more able‘ than men, is fine if you’re a seventh grader.

 

. . .

When Hemingway was an unknown trying to make his mark, his gradual advance in the world of literature proceeded essentially because of his fierce ambition, his talent for what we would now call ‘networking’ and his bulldozing personality. He certainly impressed many, could be very charming, talked a good game and, crucially, his work was new and different. But as Michael Reynolds comments in Hemingway: The Paris Years

As Hemingway was obviously learning, writing well was only half the game; making sure that influential people knew you were writing well was the other half. Before another year was out his game would be impeccable, the two complementing each other perfectly.

As for his ‘networking’, F Scott Fitzgerald, who was close to Hemingway in the mid-1920s and had actively promoted his new friend before he found success, later remarked that

Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.

That Hemingway’s career took off was also partly because he was the right man in right place. World War I (or the Great War as it was then known) had been a watershed in many ways, not least culturally and technologically. In the 1920s silent films evolved into ‘talkies’; jazz was evolving and gaining an audience, and the sales of records were soaring; radio stations were being established throughout the United States; Prohibition and illegal drinking in speakeasies made life exciting for the young and, growing in self-consciousness, they were demanding a new kind of celebrity.

According to Leonard J. Leff in Hemingway And His Conspirators, the young writer benefited from the demands of an age that was ripe for novelty, novelty of all and every kind:

The 1920s, the decade of the ascent of Ernest Hemingway, the decade of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, was also the era of modern advertising — bold and noisy and professionalised. Anything could be sold, even books, if only they were marketed well.

Hemingway was lucky to have Scribner’s as his publisher — with Fitzgerald’s connivance, he had jumped ship from Boni & Liveright, a livelier, more avant-garde, but less respected house. Scribner’s was well-established and eminently respectable, which as biographers point out, will have been an attraction for the young writer from middle-class Oak Park, who despite his avant garde ‘modernist’ style and shocking content was essentially quite conservative (he kept a strict and detailed account of his income and expenditure all his life).

But the house was under increasing pressure from its younger staff, notably Maxwell Perkins, who became Hemingway’s editor,  to attract a younger readers by shaking off its fusty and old-fashioned image. Hemingway, with his unusual style and subject matter, fitted the bill and was their man, and its marketing campaign for The Sun Also Rises, emphasising Hemingway the hard-boiled ‘action man’ who boxed, fought bulls and was a sportsman worked well. As Carlos Baker observed in the first full-length biography of Hemingway of the impact The Sun Also Rises had

Girls from Smith College, coming to New York, ‘were modelling themselves after Lady Brett . . . Hundreds of bright young men from the Middle West were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the on the side of their mouths.

That Hemingway’s fame carried on growing in the 1930s, despite his disappointing literary output and the public’s reaction to it, was down to that fierce ambition and bulldozing personality: he worked hard at becoming well-known. In the introduction to his book Conversations With Ernest Hemingway, Matthew J. Bruccoli gives us a good insight into what went on:

His fame was not accidentally acquired. Hemingway’s greatest character was Ernest Hemingway. From boyhood he assiduously fictionalised himself. He was a dedicated careerist who skilfully nurtured an heroic public image until the vainglorious role took over the man and it became necessary for him to live up to it.

It wasn’t even that simple: Hemingway, in fact, adopted two, distinct roles. The first was that of the dedicated writer as artist who cared nothing for fame and was purely interested in his art, the pure artist who scorned publicity and would as soon write for nothing as long as he was able to carry on writing. And although he carried on playing the role of the ‘pure artist’ until he died, it became ever more ludicrous and dishonest.

But he also revelled in ‘being Ernest Hemingway’: even as he was peddling the notion of ‘the pure artist’ at the beginning of his career, he subscribed to press cuttings services to be kept informed of what the newspapers and magazines were saying about him; he asked for regular updates from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, on sales figures and how much money he was making; he enjoyed hobnobbing with the rich (though he still liked to be seen as ‘a man of the people’). None of this is in itself at all reprehensible, but it is wholly at odds with the role of ‘pure artist’ Hemingway also chose. Leonard Leff sums it up well:

Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in [publicity] photographs, Book of the Month Club editions, and stage or movie adaptations that could bring an author fame and fortune; he wrote, in other words, ‘for the relief of [his] own mind and without thought of publication’. Certainly he wanted an audience to hear what he had to say about valour or love or the anatomy of fiction. Certainly he needed money to sustain the grand life he lad after 1929. Beyond that, however, he radiated personality and cultivated publicity even as he pretended to scorn it. In his first letter to Perkins he mentioned — not wholly facetiously — that it would be ‘worthwhile to get into Who’s Who’. In short he wanted fame in both the Renaissance and the contemporary sense.

It would be wrong to accuse Hemingway of simple hypocrisy. Both roles — the private artist who just wanted to be left alone to get on with his writing, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the roistering, hard-drinking, all-action man who would fight anyone and would gladly have a drink with you — were certainly mutually exclusive, but such was the complexity of his personality he sincerely believed he was both.

. . .

The accepted view is that the prominence Ernest Hemingway acquired as ‘a great writer’ did not just endure but had grew during his lifetime. But as John Raeburn makes clear in his book Fame Became Him, that was simply not the case.

Raeburn distinguishes between Hemingway’s literary reputation and his status as what can only be described as ‘a celebrity’. His literary reputation, as gauged — possibly contentiously — by his standing with the critics, began a slow decline at the beginning of the 1930s and did not rally before his suicide in Ketchum, Wyoming, in July 1961, three weeks short of his 62nd birthday. Even the commercial success of For Whom The Bells Toll in 1940 and The Old Man And The Sea in 1952 and being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1954 did little to boost Hemingway’s literary reputation, however much they raised his public profile.

Furthermore, Raeburn points out that increasingly many of those who lapped up the latest gossip about Hemingway — and ‘gossip’ is the only possible word — had quite possibly not read a word of his fiction. And increasingly, as Hemingway featured in mid-market magazines of all kinds, quite often in photospreads in which pictures far outnumbered text, there was little if any mention of his literary work: by the last two decades of his life Hemingway became famous for being famous.

Raeburn writes that America had a long tradition of honouring ‘public writers’, men and women such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Beecher Stowe, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Wendell Holmes, Whitman, Dickinson and Mark Twain. These poets and writers were known for their work, not for their private lives. Even among Hemingway’s contemporaries and — as he saw them — ‘rivals’, there were ‘public writers’: Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser and Hemingway’s erstwhile friend John Dos Passos. But there was one important distinction between them and Hemingway: their lives were private. Hemingway’s was not.

After A Farewell To Arms appeared in 1929 and sold magnificently, Scribner’s and Maxwell Perkins were expecting more fiction from the man who was becoming one of their star writers. They did not expect Death In The Afternoon and cannot have been much surprised that it did not sell well. The public were simply not interested in learning all about bullfighting, and the critics were also unenthusiastic.

Some of them were particularly baffled that in the book Hemingway, who had hitherto been celebrated for his terse, punchy, hard style and who by now was convinced he was a master of writing prose, could write such woolly English. In its review the New York Times noted that

It may be said flatly that the famous Hemingway style is neither so clear nor so forceful in most passages of ‘Death in the Afternoon’ as it is in his novels and short stories. In this book Mr Hemingway is guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear

and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote

In his enthusiasm for the art of tauromachy, Mr Hemingway has departed, sadly, in places from his usually clear and forceful style. His earnestness in trying to put over his idea apparently has caused him to neglect pruning. The result is a surprising loss of conciseness, and occasionally a deplorably cluttered syntax.

What happened? Well, as both Raeburn and biographer Kenneth S Lynn note, Hemingway happened. Lynn says the Death In The Afternoon testified

. . . to the invasion of Hemingway’s serious writing by his myth. The hero of the book is not a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway.

It is Raeburn’s contention that putting himself centre-stage in Death In The Afternoon (and a few years later in Green Hills Of Africa) was a deliberate. Hemingway was consciously building up his public image, and Raeburn suggests this had been going on even before Hemingway was first published. Many of the pieces he filed when he was freelancing for the Toronto Star were about how he, Hemingway, saw the world and he was not shy of passing judgment (on, for examples, the ex-patriate ‘phonies’ who, unlike him, had moved to Montparnasse merely to pose as artists rather than engage in real artistic work). Raeburn also notes that the few editorial pieces he wrote for Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review [sic] are also a case in point

The transatlantic review articles are trivial in terms of Hemingway‘s literary career, but they are significant in terms of his career as public writer. They revealed that his public personality was incipient at the outset of his professional life, and that he was willing to use it for self-aggrandisement. They were a preview of the self-advertisements that would spread his fame in the next decade beyond the limited audience provided by an intellectual elite; and they foreshadowed that in his non-fiction his great subject was to be himself.

Raeburn identifies in Death In The Afternoon nine different aspects to the persona Hemingway offered for public consumption. There were ‘the sportsman, the manly man, the exposer of sham, the arbiter of taste, the world traveler, the bon vivant, the insider, the stoic and battle-scarred veteran and the heroic artist’. And to this day, even 60 years Hemingway’s death, it is accepted that he was all of these things. The irony is that we have only his word for it.

Hemingway’s campaign of ‘self-advertisement’ took off in earnest when he was hired by Arnold Gingrich to write for Gingrich’s newly founded men’s magazine Esquire. Hemingway had an open brief to write ‘Letters’ about anything he liked.

So in the more than two dozen, often monthly, ‘Letters’ he submitted, he wrote about hunting, fishing, fine dining, good wine, travelling and whatever took his fancy, and on each subject he presented himself as an expert, passing on his knowledge of the subject. Hemingway also wrote for other magazines along the same lines and, says Raeburn, was always centre-stage.

Even the pieces he filed for Colliers magazine from Europe in 1944 about the fighting described ‘Hemingway’s experiences’ and ‘Hemingway’s activities’ rather than what was actually going on. And some of what he wrote was pure fiction: he did not take part in the Normandy landings as he intimated, and he did not take charge of a situation during the landings which had grown chaotic — he and other journalists never left the landing craft they were in.

. . .

Raeburn’s suggests there were many reasons why Hemingway chose to construct a public persona. For one thing, a high profile boosted the sales of his work: even To Have And Have Not which was not well-received by the critics, found favour with the book-buying public. And while most of America languished in the Great Depression, the lifestyle he lived was not cheap. But facilitating making more money was just one of many reasons. Raeburn also notes that

‘[Hemingway’s] distrust of critics, his long-standing suspicion – to become a conviction – that they were out to get him, is consistent with his seeking a public esteem independent of the literary establishment. This general audience would not be so susceptible as the intellectuals to critical opinion, and thus it could insulate the writer’s reputation from critical disfavour. His stature as a champion would be confirmed not by a few critics by a large heterogeneous audience which felt a personal loyalty to him.

Then there’s Hemingway’s lifelong competitive streak: he had to win, he had to be best, so it would seem obvious that of all the professional writers he had to be the most famous. But at the end of the day all this is just supposition, and it is perhaps not possible to establish quite why Hemingway put a lot of effort into building himself up in the eyes of the public. But the fact is that he did.

In the last two decades of Hemingway’s life, but especially in his last ten years, his celebrity fame as opposed to his literary reputation continued to grow and grow. He became a perennial favourite not only of Life and Time magazines, but all the other middle-market, supermarket checkout publications took to featuring him: Hemingway was great copy and he sold.

The point must be repeated: he was of interest to the readers of True (which ironically had carried his earlier quite fictional account of taking part in the D Day landings) of Look, of Fisherman, of Parade, of This Week, of Picture Week, of Focus, of See and all the other magazines not because of the quality of his writing or his take on life or the advice he could dispense — it was merely because he was Ernest Hemingway.

In each piece all the usual anecdotes, most of them fictional and originated by Hemingway himself, were trotted out — that he was war hero and a veteran of the Italian army’s prestigious Arditi regiment (and its youngest commissioned officer no less), that he had bedded Mata Hari and the girlfriend of the notorious gangster Legs Diamond, that he had led US troops ashore on D Day — so that continual repetition promoted them to the status of ‘fact’.

In 1933, the Key West Citizen wrote this about the man who was by then the town’s best-known inhabitant

Most modest of all American writers is Ernest Hemingway whose half-dozen published books have set a new style in contemporary literature, but who, nevertheless, shuns personal publicity as an owl shuns daylight. Hemingway does not even care to have any biographical material about himself made public . . . Though hundreds of thousands of persons know his works, however, very few know anything about the man himself. With what amounts almost to a mania, he avoids personal publicity of every kind.

Many years later, Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends who also knew the writer well, told one of his biographers

No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.

As several biographers have noted, ‘Ernest Hemingway’ was most certainly Hemingway’s most famous and best creation. Even though old friends insisted that the private Hemingway they knew was nothing like that public Hemingway, it’s the public Hemingway who today is still revered as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’.

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!