More piccies to delight small minds (and large ones if you have one)

All these images are nothing put dicking around with Photoshop, manipulating snaps I took. I like them as I like a lot of abstract stuff, whether images or music, but they have no meaning at all. All they are is random images. You might like them in some way or not.

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So what might ‘abstract writing’ be (apart from, sadly, a little tedious the longer it went on)?

GIVEN that who was a modernist artist and what constituted a modernist work is these days unhelpfully vague, it is not an easy subject to talk about. In music and the plastic arts it might prove easier to distinguish ‘modernist’ art from what else was being produced at the time, but literature presents an additional problem: it deals with words, whether in prose or poetry.

Music — essentially a noise or, if you like, pure sound — and pigment — essentially a medium refracting light — are in themselves abstract and wholly without meaning. Whatever cultural, ritual, social, personal or emotional ‘meanings’ we attribute, for example, to a certain colour, that colour — that is the ‘light refracted through it at a certain wavelength’ — is in itself ‘meaningless’. The same is true of a note or a combination of notes — a noise or a combination of noises. It is nothing but ‘noise’ (or more genteelly ‘sound’). But words are a little different.

Words do have meaning (and leave aside, for a moment, the possibility that what you understand by a certain word is not quite what I understand by it, though often we might not know that). We use certain words because they have a certain meaning, and that makes communication, verbal and written, possible. But words have other attributes: they have a sound and they also have — well, it’s difficult to find just one word to describe it. All of the following carry elements of that somewhat elusive attribute: ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’.

For example, take the verb ‘to shrive’ or one of its various derivatives. I first came across it as a young boy reading Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur And His Knights of The Round Table and I have rarely, if ever, heard it used since, though a familiar derivation is ‘Shrove Tuesday’, the day before Ash Wednesday when in less heathen times (or better, from my point of view, the heathenism was of Roman Catholic and later Anglo Catholic variety) when believers souls were ‘shriven’ to be pure for Lent.

Were I to use the words ‘shrive’ or ‘shriven’ in everyday conversation or writing here in this blog, it would convey information quite apart from the sound of the word (whether heard or read) and its meaning.

Some of that information would be about me: the word is old-fashioned, not to say archaic, so why am I using it? Do I believe that in the context in which I am using it that it is the only possible word that could be used? Am I by using it simply some pretentious git trying to persuade you (the listener or reader) that I am ‘deep’, ‘well-read’ or ‘intellectual’?

Some of that information would be ‘external’: why is ‘shrive’ being used when a more modern alternative might be available? With its archaic overtones, it might also subtly influence the sentence in which it appears in some way or another. There are many possibilities, all of consequence over and above the sound of the word and its meaning.

Apart from what using the word might convey about the speaker or writer, there are the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ the word itself has: and these are, in fact, harder to define, so perhaps I should offer two other examples to try to elucidate those vaguer ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’.

How about ‘fealty’ and ‘loyalty’? Fealty might itself sound archaic, but it is in more common use these days than ‘to shrive’ (and using it would not necessarily make you sound like a pretentious git) but more to the point using it instead of loyalty might convey subtleties because of the varied ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of both words. I suggest that ‘fealty’, in a sense, goes over and above plain ‘loyalty’.

Loyalty might imply that under most circumstances I would offer my support to whoever or whatever I am ‘loyal’ but might, as moral being, hold back from doing something illegal or immoral. With ‘fealty’ there might be no such scruples and I would be fully prepared to demonstrate my ‘fealty’ if needs be. That’s the background, and to 

put it in context, I suggest that the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of both words help to convey more than they seem to in the following two, very similar, sentences:

His loyalty to the Conservative Party / Republicans was unquestionable

and

His fealty to the Conservative Party / Republicans was unquestionable.

Writing this, of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not those two words convey the same to you as to me (and thus whether my point stands or is pretty much nonsense).

But whether you do or not, it boils down to this: the fact that I might chose to use ‘fealty’ where ‘loyalty’ would seem to work perfectly well, implies that I don’t think ‘loyalty’ would work perfectly well and that ‘fealty’ carries ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ which convey better what I want to convey.

It is this facet or dimension of words, a facet or dimension over and above and apart from their ‘sound’ and ‘meaning’, which is another tool for writers (and one, I have to add, many writers don’t seem much to care for in that many seem simply to ignore it).

I feel ‘closer’ to music than the plastic arts, but I don’t believe ‘sound’ and ‘pigment’ (or whatever material an artist working in the plastic arts is using) has that facet or dimension. We often hear that a certain musical key or mode has a certain ‘quality’ (and artists might make similar claims about different colours, for example, that blue ‘is cold’), but I suggest that the ‘quality’ is not part of the essence of the sound we are hearing but simply our human perception of it.

That is not the case with words, though I have to admit that the use of ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ might fail if a listener or reader is not familiar with a word I am chosing to use specifically because of what I believe to be its ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’, Oh, well. You can’t win them all.

. . . 

The above began as part of what I am at the moment writing about Hemingway and his alleged ‘modernism’, but I switched it to this blog as it is something I wanted to write anyway. It occurred to me some time ago when I was wondering, for the umpteenth time, whether ’abstract writing’ is possible.

We have ‘abstract music’ and ‘abstract art’ and, on the face of it ‘abstract writing’ should also be possible. I have to admit that of course it is possible, but — well, I think it less likely than not to succeed, in the sense of ‘being interesting’, ‘being engaging’ or by whatever yardstick you want to judge ‘success’.

Oh, and you might also object, and not without reason or cause, that ‘achieving success’ or ‘succeeding’ is not the an appropriate measure for ‘art’. As usual, it comes down — very boringly, it has to be said — to definitions: surely simply achieving what you want to achieve when you create ‘art’ can be regarded as ‘a success’? But that aside, just what might a piece of ‘abstract writing’ consist of?

I suggest that the shorter the piece — in verse form or a short piece of prose — the greater chance it has of holder a reader or listener’s interest — that is, engaging them. But as the piece gets longer, I suspect that the prospects that readers or listeners are happy to sit through a ‘performance’ decline very fast.

The sound of words — as in ‘the music’ they might create — would be very helpful in ‘engaging’ listeners. This is most probably why verse is so attractive (when it is attractive): it is the ‘musicality’ of the piece of verse which might carry it even though we have no idea what it ‘means’ or what the writer is hoping to express (and it’s ‘musicality’ might well be one of the elements he hopes will engage a reader or listener).

Equally helpful in ‘engaging’ listeners would be the ‘import’, ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’, and ‘echoes’ of different words and their juxtaposition. I suppose in theory the ‘meanings’ of the words read or spoken might also be useful if their juxtaposition created some sort of pattern, though I’ll tell you now, I’m busking here, trying to give the idea of ‘abstract writing’ a sporting chance to exist.

And to be frank I can’t even persuade myself: I rather think readers and listeners would, despite themselves and their conscious expectations, be suckered into expecting eventually to have ‘an overall meaning’ to the piece revealed. But there is none — it’s abstract.

At this point I, who loves music of all kinds, must confess that I am forever unconvinced when some young Baltic or Persian or Scottish or Peruvian composer has a piece she or he has written performed and insists something along the lines of ‘it’s about the courtship by the ancient stone god of one of the water nymphs’ or ‘I’m examining the frugality of love and respect in a post-modern environment in which desire has become redundant’. Or some such (there’s a lot of it about).

Doesn’t do it for me. I’m firmly a man described by Sir Thomas Beecham who said ‘The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. That’s me, except that I do like music, and I really don’t care who knows. I can listen to what I’ve been told classical orchestra players often refer to as ‘squeaky gate music’ for hours and hours: I just love the sound and — for me at least — it is totally without meaning. Oh, and until I looked up the exact wording of the Beecham quote, I thought it began ‘The English don’t understand music . . .’ which would have suited me and my argument better. But there you go, you can’t have everything.

I think because for all of us words are so closely wedded to meaning of some kind, ‘abstract writing’ or rather attempting to create it faces an additional hurdle. I mean would you really want to read or listen to 80,000 words of gobbledegook however nice they sounded?

Right, that’s me shriven. And here are two pieces of music along the lines of the above, the first by Stockhausen more abstract than the other, the second by Schoenberg and finally a piece by Anton Webern. I have no idea what any of these pieces ‘mean’(as some might argue — me, I don’t think the ‘mean’ anything), but I do know I enjoy listening to them and others like them a great deal.

NB I was told a great anecdote about Stockhausen which might be apocryphal or it might be true. He was once rehearsing an orchestra in a new piece and informed one player he did not want him (or her) to come in with his/her part until he/she felt she was in communion with the music of the the universe.

 

‘But, Herr Stockhausen,’ the player asked, ‘how will I know when I'm in communion with the music of the the universe?’

‘I shall tell you,’ said Stockhausen. 

Here is a Stockhausen piece:

The Schoenberg:

And finally the Webern: 

PS And just because I like this style of drawing

A few piccies

A few more piccies, taken on a dog walk today, then dicked around with in Photoshop. The idea is to produce (I hope) interesting and attractive ‘images’ rather than true-to-life photos.

How do you get from ‘devil dogs’, the red tops and keeping in with Fleet Street news desks to EC president Ursula von der Leyen, her cock-ups, EU tardiness, Brexit and covid and the vaccines to a pointless, drunken spat I had with my sister? Er, I don’t know. So just read on. Once you’ve found out — if you find out — get in touch, ’cos I like to know myself

PS I had, as my next post, intended to post loads of semi-inarticulate images and pose the question ‘When is art art and when is it just a load of idiots quite possibly talking bollocks? A meditation’. Well, this latest post (which I bloody hope you’ll read, you ligging wasters) superseded it, so that will have to wait for another time. But you can view the images here.

Doing my ‘Hemingway: Wanker or not? You decide’ blog, I discovered ‘pages’, which is now proving useful as you can see those images on a dedicated page. The post and whatever related words I can think up to go with them will eventually appear.

I haven’t pontificated about the EU here for a while, so the time has come to rectify that appalling state of affairs. Like everyone else (and that means you, too, none of us is special), I can only judge what’s going on by what I’m able to pick up from the media, and all too often the coverage isn’t at all comprehensive because newsdesks follow their own agenda and we don’t even get half of what is happening. On that last point, let me explain a little.

Several years ago, there was a spate of attacks by Rottweilers on their owners and often on their owners’ young children, some of which ended in death. The first time it happened, it was, of course, very sad news and was reported nationwide. So ever-alert news agencies around Britain kept an eye out for similar attacks.

This was when the world was still in black and white and before the internet and email and ‘social media’ and all the rest and in those days, I believe, such news agencies would make a decent living. They scoured every last local paper, evenings and weeklies, scavenging it for any news they thought the nationals up in The Smoke thought would interest their readers.

Thus after that first attack, popping up pretty much every day for several weeks was a report of another attack by yet another ‘devil dog’ (as some astute Fleet Street sub-editor nicknamed the Rottweilers). In fact, thinking about it now, I don’t believe it was primarily Rottweilers who did most of the attacking, but some hybrid dog — a pit bull terrier? — bred specifically to be fierce, dangerous, ruthless, appeal to Nazi skinheads and look particularly menacing in a red-top photograph.

Over those few weeks, it seems, somehow, in the manner we saw in the film 101 Dalmatians, word had spread among the ‘dog community’ that it was time to attack, attack, attack, kill, kill, kill, and if you could get at a babe in arms being suckled by a young mother, so much the better. Then it all stopped.

It was as though the word out on the streets in dog land was ‘no more attacking, lads, no more killing’. Actually, what had happened was straightforward: after a couple of weeks of appalling, frightening, what is the world coming to, questions in Parliament, advice on Radio 2 ‘devil dog’ deaths, Fleet Street’s newsdesks decided — and

these guys are pros (in both senses) and really do know what they are doing — that Joe Public had had enough of those particular tragedies and was keen for some new kind of tragedy. So en masse the papers moved on to a new, sexier story.

You can be very sure that the incidence of deadly ‘devil dog’ attacks before that first deadly attack hit the headlines was by no means lower and suddenly shot up. And you can be surer that after all those ‘devil dogs’ had suddenly decided to call it a day for the incidence of such attacks did not fall.

It was just — well, newsdesks were no longer interested in ‘devil dog’ stories, so news agencies throughout the land no longer kept an eye out for them and didn’t bother trying to flog them. Thought you might like to know. So just because it’s not ‘in the papers/on the telly news’ doesn’t mean it’s not important or not happening. Might be an idea to get that clear.

. . . 

As I say, I can only write about what I read and hear (and, possibly, to which I might add my wise two ha’porth, though I shouldn’t bank on it); and as far as the EU is concerned, there are just two stories current. I’m sure there are more, but I’ve not heard much.

Those two stories are that the EU — apparently — has made a complete balls-up of trying to end the covid pandemic by getting everyone vaccinated. I say apparently, but it is far more likely not to have been the fault of ‘the EU, but of one Ursula von der Leyen and her style of leadership. And she’s a piece of bother, it seems.

As a minister in the German government, she was accused, though subsequently acquitted, of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. Though she was cleared — an investigation concluded that although just over 40% of the thesis had been plagiarised, there had been ‘no intention to deceive’ (and I can’t quite get my head around that last bit — von der Leyen couldn’t have been that attentive while writing her thesis if she didn’t realise she was copying someone else’s work). It’s not a particularly useful to have noted on your CV that you were accused of plagiarism but go off — people talk and, more to the point, your enemies make sure it is not forgotten.

The highest post she reached in the German government was a pretty high one — she was appointed defence minister in 2013 — and by all accounts she didn’t shine, although we should always be aware of the malign influence and gossip spread by whatever are the opposite of ‘well-wishers’. Though again, you have to ask yourself why someone acquired a coven which did not like to see her flourish.

Equally less impressive is the fact that she only got the job last December of European Commission president because neither of the two favoured candidates could win enough support and von der Leyen was a ‘compromise candidate’. A rather unkind way of putting it that she was no one’s first choice (and there were whispers, probably from those who are the opposite of ‘well-wishers’ — I’ll look it up later — that many in the German government promoted her as the compromise candidate for the job because they were glad to see the back of her.)

. . . 

It might well have been in keeping with her allegedly less than proficient stewardship of the German government’s defence ministry that when a mini crisis developed over the EU-wide acquisition of anti-coronavirus vaccine, it was von der Leyen who made a drama out of a crisis.

The EU had first-off all persuaded (probably for the best of reasons) that the vaccine acquisition and roll-out should be handled centrally. But it was very slow getting started and began to look very silly when those bastard Brexit British, unexpectedly it has to be said given their handling of the pandemic was otherwise less than spectacularly good, got a very good march on them. Then AstraZeneca which was producing one of the vaccines, announced that one of its factories Belgium producing was having problems and informed the EU that its order would be delayed.

What put von der Leyen’s nose out of joint was the same company was still able to produce and deliver to the Brits (who had, to be fair long got their order in). What did she do? She briefly sanctioned what can only be seen as a smash-and-grab raid on a deliveries of the vaccine as it crossed the border from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. This — it is important to note — was dead against the advice of her diplomats who are not dumb. She reversed ferret very soon, but by then the damage had been done.

This, though, led to highlighting the second piece of EU news which has come my way: the dog’s dinner that is the ‘protocol’ on how to handle trade between the EU and the UK when it passes through the island of Ireland.

And I have to be specific in that rather boring way because that protocol insists that Northern Ireland is, de facto, in the EU customs union and that there will be no border checks between the Republic and NI. Instead — and this is where it gets very, very silly — there will be some kind of ‘customs checks’ on goods being transported between

 

NI and the UK mainland. Well, there will if you are the EU and there won’t if you are the British government trying to keep the loyalists in NI happy.

It was your classic fudge, but an intricate part of the ‘Brexit trade deal’ which both the EU and the UK knew was a time bomb, but had nodded through because both sides were desperate for a deal and neither side could come up with anything the other side could sanction. All this took place under von der Leyen’s watch. I suspect she won’t see out her time and when she gets her watch it will be tin-plated.

. . . 

Here’s another the $64,000 question: what can we — or anyone — do about the bloody customs checks (EU) and no customs checks (UK) fudge? That must be sorted out before various loyalist and nationalist gunmen/criminal smugglers in NI decided to sort it out the only way they know how.

Brexit is only 42 days old, but it does seem to be coming apart at the seams rather sooner than even I expected. OK, it is a done deal (and the ones responsible, the Rees-Moggs, the Farages, the Johnsons etc, will never be held to account, ever. They will retire to their stash, write their memoirs, take the ermine and command huge sums for waffling after dinners up and down the land; and it seems thoroughly pointless and a waste of time not to take stock of the situation and pragmatically investigate what can be made of a very bad job. The trouble is that when I say that to people — to Remainers — I am immediately regarded as some kind of traitor to the cause.

Along those lines, a few years ago, I had a long, animated and inebriated debate with my sister (born half-British/half-German like me, but now married to a German, living in Germany for the past 38 years and with dual nationality) about three months after the referendum. ‘The British should never have voted for Brexit’, she said — repeatedly.

‘But they have, and there’s now bugger all we can do about it,’ I answered, repeatedly. The ‘debate’ got nowhere (as we all got more drunk. You can find a fuller account of it here).

She accused me — wrongly — of being a closet Brexiter, I accused her of fighting yesterday’s battles. But fighting yesterday’s battles is still what too many are doing.

We are where we are. I suspect a toxic combination of covid and Brexit will do a great deal of damage to the UK and the next government — probably Labour — will have to deal with it. But in the meantime the world rolls on and other things happen.

For example, I believe the EU — quite apart from Brexit and the pandemic — is probably in for a rough ride. Its awful response to the pandemic has revealed that it is not the wondrous institution of its own estimation.

Quite apart from Brexit, there are forces in the EU — look no further than Hungary and the current political top dogs in Poland as well as their tacit allies (mainly former Soviet bloc states) who are more than happy to accept the goodies and the handouts, but are not in the slightest bit sold on the enlightened, liberal values the EU likes to think it represents and is keen to encourage.

On Hungary and its nasty little leader Orban and his systematic destruction of various liberties, not least Press freedom, the EU tried to at tough, then caved in. That caving in has weakened it considerably. And Orban can carry on strutting.

Over this past year, covid as rather spoiled the — well, illusion is the only word I can think of — of EU unity and solidarity. When push came to shove member states were less inclined to look to the centre than themselves. The finally agreed to allow the pandemic to be handle centrally, and then von der Leyen and I don’t know who else screwed it up. OK, she has apologised blah, blah, but that wont’ save her: her rivals will have long memories.

The EU is not von der Leyen, you might object. No, she isn’t. But such was the flawed unity of the EU that she — as I say a compromise candidate, as in no one’s first choice — got the nod.

In my book, Brexit (which, dear sister if you are reading this, I still regret) is to some extent also the fault of the EU. The way I see it British membership was not only in British interests but also in the EU’s. The UK performed a valuable role balancing Germany against France as well as giving a voice to a number of smaller members who were glad it could speak out on their behalf.

All that has now disappeared and in my view the EU will be the poorer for it. So I believe balancing a desirable outcome with its ‘principles’ (and let’s face it at the end of the day in politics principles are always negotiable) should have tried to be more accommodating to help Britain remain a member.

Yes, I’m familiar with all the arguments as to why the EU could not ‘bend the rules’, and I think they are all very poor and unconvincing. In realpolitik anything and everything is possible if there is the political will. SOME solution could and should have been found. But it wasn’t.

As for the post-Brexit future for the UK, I still insist, let’s wait and see how the land lies, if only because there is sod all we can do about it now and in the immediate future.

. . . 

I’ve just posted some random images on a related page. One of them is this (below) and, looking at it, I was wondering whether I might just get away with claiming it is a lost version of The Turin Shroud. Answers please on a postcard and if you are a woman and I fancy you, I might even offer to buy you a drink.

Lockdown or no, it’s time to take a — guilt-free — day off

For well over a year, I’ve been contributing to a website called Deadlines For Writers. I know I have mentioned it before, but as some reading this now might not have read my earlier entries about it (this one of them and this is another), so I’ll briefly recap.

I came across Deadlines For Writers when I was googling for websites or magazines who might carry short stories and to which I might submit some. Having said that, I must admit my ‘output’ till then had been anything but prolific, and the whole point about finding such websites and magazines was to help me, as they say, get my shit together, get my finger out, put a rocket my arse, get bloody working — in short to become less of a talker about writing, or, in my case, a ‘thinker about writing’, and get stuff down on paper. ‘Stuff’ might not be the word folk who are ‘passionate about literature’ care to hear, but it does the job.

In fact, I rarely, if ever, talk about writing and don’t find it interesting when, occasions, others do. We are all apt very soon to be talking a grand amount of nonsense. To illustrate that point, here’s a quote from the writer A.L. Kennedy I came across when I was writing an entry for my Hemingway project, in this case mentioning his ‘rules about writing’ and his rather silly ’theory of omission’.

Kennedy tells would-be writers:

‘No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.’

Contrast this with the exceptionally airy advice to writers from Jonathan Franzen:

‘You have to love before you can be relentless’

and

‘Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

I don’t doubt Kennedy’s arty types who wear black pullovers and enjoy their self-inflicted misery would persuade themselves they know what Franzen means when he speaks ‘being relentless, and are only too eager to accept that their fiction is a ‘personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown’, but I don’t, though this easy-going liberal firmly believes in that in most matters it’s ‘each to his own’.

As for his snobbish dismissal of ‘writing for money’, I have to say only an successful author like Franzen who, I should imagine, is no longer obliged to write for money, could dismiss ‘money’ so easily. It’s notable how the notion that ‘money is unimportant’ is only adhered to by those who have it. Those on their uppers might sing a different song.

Yes, I’m sure (i.e. I’ve never sold a word of fiction and am now unlikely ever to do so, so I’m in no position to strike an attitude) ‘writing to make money’ is something of a fool’s ambition and that when you sit down to write, you might be better advised to have a loftier motivation.

On the other hand, though, ‘writers’ and would-be writers are free to write what the hell they like: and if someone sits down to produce ‘chick-lit’ or sci-fi instead of ‘serious literature’ (whatever that is though, presumably, it’s what Franzen turns out), who is anyone to dismiss them or their work? I’ve never read a work of chick-lit in my life and the last sci-fi story I read was at least 50 years ago. But I don’t doubt in their fields (as in others) there is the good, the bad and the indifferent, and surely trying to do something well, whatever you are doing, is admirable enough?

My final point though, and this is one I would put to Mr Franzen were I ever to meet him is that for all the honours, awards and prizes you are given and however much you are assured you are ‘one of today’s leading writers’, the sincerest form of flattery by far is being paid. When folk part with their money, you know they are being more honest than when they assure you ‘what a marvellous chap you are, and such a good writer’.

But there, I’ve already blown myself off-course and it’s lucky this is nothing but yet another insignificant blog entry and nothing more.

. . . 

I’ve found Deadlines For Writers to be invaluable: membership costs nothing (although you can get ‘an evaluation’ of the work you submit for if you opt for paid membership) and the routine is very simple. Every month the organiser (I think there’s only one) posts ‘a prompt’ for a short story (and there’s another for a piece of verse) and stipulates a word count. Then it is up to the member to write and submit a story (or piece of verse) every month. These are then posted on the website, and if you are lucky other members read them and comment on them. Sometimes those comments are useful (though bear in mind, judging by the kind of stories that are submitted, each member has different notions of ‘what works’ and what doesn’t. Sometimes the comments make it plain that, either you didn’t succeed in doing what you set out to do, or the commentator simply isn’t in tune with the kind of story you want to produce.

I should add that as far as I am concerned when evaluating a piece of fiction (or, for that matter, a piece of music or a work of plastic art) the most useless words are ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Quite apart from the fact that judgment is subjective, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ convey nothing. Far, far more useful are ‘interesting’, ‘boring’, ‘engaging’, ‘confusing’ and other such observations, and as far as I am concerned being told by someone (who judgment I respect) for example where I seem to have gone wrong or where the reader lost the thread or where something wasn’t convincing are far more useful than being patted on the back and schmoozed. Fuck schmoozing. I loathe schmoozing. Show me a schmoozer and I’ll show you dishonesty.

The upshot is that Deadlines For Writing has been for me a great, great motivator. OK because of the stipulated word counts, which have ranged from 2,500 words to just 500 words, my stories aren’t very long, but I’ve now written some. And what with the ‘essays’ I’ve been turning out for the Heminway project, I seem finally have got into the swing of ‘writing regularly’. And that, dear hearts, brings me to what was to be the point of this latest entry.

. . . 

Over the years (and I’ve been writing this blog for eleven years now) I’ve joked about this an that, not least my age. That, really, was just a form of defence: in some ways I haven’t liked getting older and, crucially, being regarded by the world as ‘an older man’ at all. So making jokes about ‘being 95’ or ‘being 110’ was, I think, just a way of warding it all off, pretending I didn’t really care. But the fact is that I was born in 1949 and in the late autumn I shall turn 72.

That is another, though minor reason, why literary superstardom, a perpetual round of drinkies in North London with other literary hacks and profiles in the ‘serious newspaper’ are certainly never going to come my way. And, by the way, a few months ago, I read two novels which were highly lauded by the great and good who pass judgment, and I thought both were bollocks.

One was The Sea by John Banville, and you read can my review here, and the other was Saturday by Ian McEwan, and my review is here. Both writers are getting on a little but still literary darlings of the Western World, laden with honours and regarded as all-around artistic good eggs. What does that say for my judgement? I don’t know, but I’ll repeat, both novels, for one reason or another, were in my view shite. I must remind you, though, chacun à son goût (and, yes, although I’ve long been familiar with the phrase, I did have to look up the spelling).

The point about giving my age is that I am now retired, but to this day still feel guilty if I ‘haven’t done some work’. That work is no longer sitting on the third floor of the Daily Mail office in West London and checking puzzles against hard copy, proof-reading pages and hunting down errant commas, but — well, writing of some kind.

Since I began the Hemingway bollocks in July 2019, writing more of that and slowly moving towards conclusion has been my ‘work’. And I have been getting far more disciplined about getting down to it (which was one of the essential points of undertaking the projects, though I still have some way to go). But, I’ll repeat, I somehow I fritter away the day and don’t do very much, I feel horribly guilty. That is odd, but true. There is no obligation at all do it, quite apart from finishing it: but I have to. No one will know whether I do succeed and, far more to the point, no one will give a flying fuck: but I shall know and care!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’ve come up with a solution: officially to give myself two days off a week. So on those days I wake up and do what the hell I like — piss around with Cubase in my shed and record, surf the net aimlessly, watch shite on Amazon — it doesn’t matter: this will be my time off and I shall have nothing to feel guilty about. Anyway that’s the plan.

Pip, pip.

If you are interested, there are more ‘rules on writing here’. Some are sane, some most certainly not. My favourite is the very good, one-word, advice to writers from Neil Gaiman: ‘Write.’

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’.