Note to reader:
This is LONG. Better go and have a wee before starting it.
Whenever I want to think things through and get my thoughts straight, I find either articulating them in conversation or writing something is very useful. Conversation is helpful because the other party or parties are likely to spot the flaws in your — my — thinking a lot sooner than you do — I do. Something similar happens when you I set down my thoughts, although the advantage of someone else’s mind spotting that you are talking complete crap and telling you so, is unfortunately not part of it.
However, when — as I now do (and bloody well should have been doing all my working life as a sub-editor) — you re-read and re-read and re-read what you have written, you are more likely to spot the flaws in your argument as well has any horrible literals. Reading the piece out aloud is even more useful, although I do sometimes feel like a prune doing that.
Along those lines — and this is relevant to what I want to write here, although not exactly that — I am pretty bloody certain Hemingway never did enough revision; or, more charitably, not half as much as he should have done. And for all his big talk about re-writing his stories up to 50 times and insisting he took the utmost care over his writing, the work itself often doesn’t bear out that claim.
For example, if he really did re-write his stories 50 times and extensively revise them, you wonder why didn’t he spot those occasions when he ignored his own ‘rules on writing’? Repeated revising, which he claimed to do, should have sorted them out, but they didn’t.
For example, despite his claim that he was taught by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to cut his prose to the bone and most certainly never use not just adverbs but adjectives and stuck to that practice, time and again he does use adverbs. In his ‘celebrated’ short story The Undefeated, which appeared in his second volume of short stories, he has his central character say say something ‘hopefully’, then something ‘reproachfully’. Later, the second main character in the story, reads a newspaper ‘laboriously’. Really? Nothing wrong with that expect, of course, if you preach to others that you shouldn’t do it.
In another celebrated story — you’ll notice I managed to resist but the word in quote marks this time — called The Capital Of The World, two priests become ‘hurriedly conscious of being the last people in the room’, a picador ‘swaggered quite steadily’ on his way out of the dining room, and in the kitchen of the
pensione the dishwasher is ‘bitter and cynical’ who watches a younger lad ‘critically and cynically’.
I’m not one to lay down laws — I’ll leave that to Hemingway who was addicted to pontificating on ‘good writing’ and two his books, Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa were written in part to allow him to pass judgment on other writers. But I was never one for the attitude of ‘it’s one rule for you and another for me’. More to the point, the man who bragged a great deal about his abilities and talents would certainly have been trying to establish himself as ‘the great and conscientious artist’ with his claims about taking infinite care when composing his story. Those claims are distinctly iffy.
The great thing about writing is that you can do write what the hell you like, about anything and in whatever style. There are no rules. The caveat is, though, whether or not what you produce ‘engages’, interests and ‘entertains’ readers (using the word as one might ‘entertain’ friends for a meal). If you want to use adverbs (though they are a tad lazy), go ahead by all means. But surely to goodness if you do lay down the law, you must yourself to abide by it.
. . .
Assuming Hemingway was as punctilious about re-writing and revising his work as he claimed he was (and he must have done a little re-reading The Capital Of The World first appeared in Esquire magazine (called The Horns Of The Bull), then, a few months later, in Winner Take Nothing, his third volume of original short stories), did not those three adverbs stand out like a sore thumb? As any sub-editor will tell you, there are many, many ways to rephrase and re-write a phrase or a sentence — that’s often their job — and here Hemingway might have tried not to tell us that the priests were ‘hurriedly conscious’, not that the dishwasher viewed his colleague ‘critically and sneeringly’ but conveyed the same information without using adverbs. I mean ‘show don’t tell’ is probably the first bloody thing they tell you at writing school.
NB I have to admit I’m a little sniffy about ‘creative writing courses’, but there you go. I suppose there are one or two hints you can pass on to eager-beaver would-be novelists and techniques they can learn to help them get out of a corner, but when push comes to shove . . . And as I being more than a bit sniffy, I might as well add that whenever I hear some young lad or lass proclaim that he or she ‘wants to be creative’, I have to bite my tongue hard to stop myself telling them ‘well, what’s stopping you? Be creative or shut the fuck up. And if you can’t think of a way of being creative, you never will be’. I hope I haven’t bruised too many egos with that one. Oh dear, I’ll probably not sleep tonight now.. . .
That brings me on to what I intended this entry to be about. I am writing, I hope, the last ‘essay’ (or possibly the last-but-one) for my Was Hemingway A Twat Or Am I Just A Sour Philistine Who Doesn’t Know Shit From Sausages? website.
With all the reading about the old git I have done, it seems to me that Hemingway and others like him enter a kind of magic circle. He is now, still by many, spoken of as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’. How such a ‘middling writer’ managed it is what interests me, not the man himself. It’s hell’s own business to get into that magic circle, but once you are in, you seem your’e likely to get a pass at every turn.
That’s one of the points I make but here I’ll simply reprint part of what I have written so far (i.e. copy and paste it) to save myself the trouble):
In all monotheistic theologies, of whatever faith, two immutable facts are that ‘God exists’ and that ‘God is always right and without fault’. They are, if you are a believer, the sine qua non of every theological debate. Indeed, they have to be: what would be the point of basing moral strictures on the ‘word of God’ and debating the various arcana of ‘His’ existence and laws if God, too, were flawed and imperfect and no better than us mortals?
Given ‘His’ unimpeachability, it is axiomatic that if there are some aspects of God, ‘His’ existence’, ‘His laws’ and ‘His word’ we do not yet comprehend (or to put it less delicately on the face of it sound like complete rubbish), it is necessarily and most certainly our fault: we are ‘too insignificant in the face of God’ and we must try far harder to understand what ‘He’ means. All too often aspects of ‘God’ and ‘His word’ which we find incomprehensible, such as the Roman Catholic doctrine of ‘three persons in one God’, are rationalised as being ‘a mystery’ (or its first cousin ‘a miracle’), ones we pitiful, sinful folk cannot be expected to understand.
Such a concept of an unimpeachable, all-powerful and all-knowing God leads to a distressing circularity when it comes to ‘proving’ or demonstrating to a non-believer ‘His’ existence: how do we know God exists? Because he tell us he does (with the elegant variation that ‘it is though His grace that we are able to believe’). How do we know we can accept that assurance? Because he’s God and as he’s God he’s always right. How do we know God is always right? Because he tells us he is. Why should we accept ‘His word’ and obey ‘Him’ without question? Because he tells us we must. And why must we accept that imperative? Because he’s God. And so on and on and on.
I know the world has moved on in the past two centuries and become far more secular and atheistic, but the essence of our thinking has remained the same: we might no longer hold that the ‘will of God’ cannot and should not be questioned, but many grant the same sacred, unimpeachable status to, for example, ‘human rights’: it is axiomatic that every man, woman and child alive has inalienable human rights which must be respected. Human rights inalienable? Discuss.
A similar circularity appears to plague academics, eager post-grads, scholars and literary critics when they examine and analyse the work of Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, there is something quasi-theological about such analyses, interpretations and exegeses of his work. All too often the logic is that ‘this an excellent story and superb writing because it is by Ernest Hemingway’. Its twin is ‘Ernest Hemingway was one of our greatest writers because he wrote this excellent story, and his writing is superb’. And once you are caught in that loop, it’s really difficult to escape it.
(NB I must point out here I am solely talking about the various cack-handed philosophical and intellectual attempts to ‘prove’ why human rights are inalienable, not those rights themselves. I fully support the notion that everyone must be respected and has several ‘inalienable’ human rights. Many a philosopher, 1,000 brighter than me, has shattered on the various hidden rocks in moral philosophy.
It’s all very well trying to move on from placing ‘God’ at the centre of your moral system with something else and attempting to ‘prove’ ‘why we should be good’, but it never works. We usually end up simply awarding the same status to some notion as we once awarded to ‘God’ and are then stuck in the same bloody circularity. But all that, perhaps, for another time. End of Lesson.)
. . .
What got me thinking along those lines were several analyses of Hemingway stories which seek to explain and rationalise apparent anomalies. In one case one academic ties himself in knots to ‘prove’ that what is now assumed — even by Scribner’s, Hemingway’s publishers — to have been a careless error in one of his stories was nothing on the kind.
On the contrary, he argues, it is a superb demonstration of Hemingway’s exquisite artistry and demonstrates an existentialist dimension to the story and Hemingway’s thinking. I’ll try to keep my outline of it brief, but if you want to read his full paper which appeared in the US journal College English in 1961 and others I shall mention, you can read or download copies here and here and here.
The relevant academic, a Joseph F Gabriel, wrote the
Logic of Confusion In Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place while he was completing is doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. That story concerns two waiters in a cafe ready to shut up for the night and their only customer, a lonely old man who is lingering, presumably because he doesn’t want to go home.
The two waiters, one old, one young, discuss the old man, the young waiter impatient for him to leave so he can go home to his wife, the older waiter more sympathetic. It seems a week earlier the lonely old man had tried to hang himself but was saved by his niece. The error — I’m obliged to write
‘apparent’ error or Mr Gabriel will be fearfully upset — is that there are several inconsistencies in what the two waiters say. Although at first neither waiter is immediately identified by Hemingway, each is eventually referred to as ’the young waiter’ and ‘the old waiter’; and when, once they are identified, one can work back to what each is saying about the old man. One of them ‘knows’ something about the old man’s suicide attempt and makes a comment he, if the to and fro of conversation is conventional, cannot have ‘known’. It should have been the other waiter who ‘knew’ it because of what else he says at other points.
This anomaly was first spotted in 1956, but written about in papers that appeared for the journal College English — independently — in 1959 by two other keen academics, both English professors: F. P. Kroeger, who described the anomaly as an ‘insoluble problem’, and William E. Colburn. Crucially, neither agreed with the other as to what had happened, but eventually, in 1965, after more academics added their voices, Hemingway’s publishers, Scribner’s, emended the text in a new version of the story to get rid of the anomaly. That was when the trouble started.
The Law of Parsimony (which is also known as Occam’s Razor, named after the Franciscan friar
William of Occam or Ockham) would have proved useful here if all those academics had resorted to it: Occam’s Razor states that of all possible explanations, the simplest explanation is the most likely. applying that law here, the most likely explanation is that ‘Hemingway cocked up’, didn’t keep track as well as he might have done and didn’t notice the discrepancy, and that despite his avowal that he re-wrote and revised his stories 50 times, er, didn’t always seem to do so (and on that point a little more later).
Everyone had (and I suppose, like me, has) their two ha’porth to add, especially in view of Scribner’s ‘correction’: only a few agreed that Hemingway was at fault, but the majority who might not have agreed with each other were united in the belief that ‘this is Hemingway! Surely, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century knew what he was doing and this was not an error?’ It’s the same monotheistic approach to ‘God’s existence’: you simply cannot question it.
Some claimed the error occurred when the story was typed up (presumably not by Hemingway), others when the story was typeset for print. Yet others, notably some bod called Otto Reinert, argued that there was no anomaly: he explained that although the convention when writing dialogue was usually to start a new indented line for each fictional speaker, it was only a convention and need not necessarily be observed.
Reinert suggested that because Hemingway had wanted to indicate a ‘reflective pause’ in one of the speaks, he had decided to break the convention: the problem was solved because there is no problem. Others, of course — this being the vipers’ nest that is academia — disagreed. All of them, though, tie themselves in complete knots to ‘prove’ that Hemingway, ‘one of our greatest writers who might well have been able to walk on water had he turned his mind to it’ did not ‘make a mistake’ (and had it occurred to them, they might well have added ‘bugger William of sodding Occam and his bloody razor!’)
. . .
By far the silliest explanation I’ve yet come across is Joseph F. Gabriel’s take. But a few more details are required before I launch into it, though I’ll keep my account succinct and simple: when one waiter asked the other — at this point neither is identified — what had led the old man to try to hang himself, the reply is
‘He was in despair’.
‘What about?’ the first asks.
‘Nothing,’ says the second.
‘How do you know it was about nothing?’ asks the first.
He has plenty of money,’ says the second.
Note: at this point neither waiter/speaker is identified.
Ah, ha! you can almost hear Gabriel cry, there we have it! He argues that Hemingway uses the word ‘nothing’ ambiguously: the one waiter understand it to mean he tried to hang himself ‘for no reason’, but the other — who Gabriel then identifies as the ‘older waiter’ takes ‘nothing’ to signify ‘the meaningless of existence’.
The old gent had tried to top himself because for him life no longer had a purpose. And because, later in the story, the older waiter is shown to be similarly lonely and despondent — he parodies the Lord’s Prayer, repeating the Spanish for nada (nothing), ‘nothing’ — used in two separate meanings by both waiters — as in ‘the meaningless of existence’ is partly what the story is about.
OK, you might ask, but what does this have do to the ‘anomaly’ in the story, ‘the insoluble problem’? Well, Gabriel argues, there isn’t one: it was not an error at all but that Hemingway set out to confuse the reader, to make the dialogue inconsistent, for a very good reason. The confusion of who is saying what, says Gabriel, was intended by Hemingway to reflect the ‘confusion of existence’. Thus: no anomaly, no typist or typesetter’ error, and certainly no carelessness by Hemingway. This, insists Gabriel, proves the story was ‘artfully contrived’.
Hmm, as both I and, I suspect, William of Occam might have responded. And in case you missed it: hmm. Are you sure?
. . .
Unfortunately for Gabriel, Reinert and others, in January 1979 one Warren Bennett, of the University of Saskatchewan, published a paper,
The Manuscript And The Dialogue Of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in American Literature which rather makes a nonsense of all their hi-falutin’ claims. Since 1972, Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s widow had begun donating some (or perhaps all, he doesn’t say) of her husband’s manuscripts to the JFK Library in Boston. Among them was the original handwritten manuscript of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, which Bennett examined.
The manuscript (pictured below) was originally written in pencil and, says Bennett, Hemingway made slight
revisions: doing so almost immediately (that is as he was writing the story), a little later on in the day, and a day or two later. Bennett said we can distinguish between the original version first put down by Hemingway and the slight revisions for several reasons: the varying thickness of the pencil or pencils used, the space between the lines on the manuscript and the number of lines on the 11 pages of manuscript.
Comparing this manuscript and its changes to the story as originally published, Bennett concludes that a typist or a typesetter was certainly responsible for one error, but that Hemingway also confused himself and was responsible for the other inconsistency.
Finally, Bennett says he sanctions the emendation made to the published text by Scribner’s in 1965 because it did solve one of the problems.
Bennett does rather pull his punches a little when in conclusion, and tacitly acknowledging that in at least one case the writer who insisted he took immense care about his writing, weighed every word and I don’t know what else, he concludes
This pictures Hemingway not as the slow perfectionist, hovering over every word and detail, but an artist ‘fired up’, and writing at considerable speed in producing what must be regarded, in spite of the flaw in the dialogue, as classic Hemingway: expressing much by showing little.
So, Mr Bennett would still insist, there is still a God.
I’ll just add one small point: there’s nothing wrong with writing at considerable speed’ but exactly what is hindering the writer about taking as much time as needed to revise the piece at leisure to ensure it is exactly what he wants?
‘Oh, [I hear the wiseacres, cry[, he must have revised it with care (as he always did because he tells us he did) and did realise the was an anomaly, but realised it was a useful anomaly and added to the artistic impact of the piece’.
You pays your money and you makes your choice, is all I can add. That is not, however, the end of the story. Still with me? If so, well, done. If not, you’re not going know why I asked the question.
. . .
In the Sept 1998 edition of The Hemingway Review, a Ken Ryan, of the University of Alaska, published his paper
The Contentious Emendation Of Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and as you can gather from the title, after Bennett had added a little much-needed sanity to the whole ‘debate’, Ryan through returned to square one, pretty much chanting the old theological article of faith that ‘Hemingway was a genius, he knew what he was doing [all the time] and he didn’t make mistakes.’
He more or less backed up the Joseph F Gabriel line, although he softened it a little withe one, very slight concession he made: Hemingway just might had dropped a small bollock, but when he realised what had happened, he also realised it was a ‘happy accident’ and left it in. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (though, to be frank, I’m the ejit even bothering to mix it with these loons).
. . .
As this entry is becoming far too long, I had better wrap up here. I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve, to get one or two matters a little straighter in my mind, and I shall be copying and pasting this entry, though then re-writing it, for my ‘essay’ along the lines of ‘The Theology of Understanding Hemingway (and why it’s not just best, but saner to be an atheist)’.
The upshot is that academics, not just those with a hard-on for Hemingway, are far keener on arguing that ‘black might well be white — who knows?’ As for the man himself, there’s no getting away from the awful conclusion that many are still willing to settle for the line that ‘Hemingway was a genius, almost a god, and could do no wrong.
Next week: Did Jesus Christ ever take a dump (being God made Man). Discuss.
And if you have rather less time on your hands, try sorting out the Israel/Palestine problem. You might have more luck with that one.PS 3,494 words — is anyone really going to read this? Answers, please, to the usual dead letter box in Moscow on the south side of Yeltsin Park.
