Three more entries (well, one entry split into three as it was very long) on my interminable ‘Hemingway project’ if you are interested (though the resounding echo I hear when I write those words does not make me sanguine)

If you are interested, here are three more entries for my Hemingway project blog. In fact, this particular essay, called The theology of evaluating Hemingway is quite long, so I split it into three entries. Here is Part I, Part II and Part II.

A gentle night’s reading?

I could bang on about what a dickhead ‘Boris’ Johnson is and who — without actually intending to — is selling Britain down the river, but the chances are you’ve not heard of ‘Boris’, and anyway I’m not feeling in a sounding off mood. Then there’s China and how soon war will break out, Trump and whether the stories about the gay porn films he acted in when he was in his teens are about to surface, England — specifically it’s national football (‘soccer’) side and that it’s high time the penny dropped that it is not God’s gift to humanity, and finally covid, bloody, sodding covid.


But enough trivialities: here are the most recent stories I’ve submitted to the deadlines website and also posted on a website I run where I can keep all my stories and poems. If you are interested in reading them — after all, they are written to be read and there’s bugger all else a story can get up to once written than to be read — here, in no particular, are the last ten I’ve written. If you want to read more, you can find them here.

Mrs Hotchkiss

My Year Away

Dear Reader,
My Eye Was On Him

Decisions

A Tense Relationship

First Life, Then Death

The Odd Ways Of Others

Country Life

Friday Lunch With Same

The Unhappy Buccaneer

Any feedback, just . . . oh, forget it, I might as well pray for world peace.

Is there a God? Was Ernest Hemingway infallible? Do academics simply have too much bloody time on their hands? Is there any such species as an honest academic? William of Occam and I set about tackling these and other pressing issues

 

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.

Two more Hemingway posts for those keen and eager to see my literary career take off and reach stratospheric heights quite unknown to mankind. Can the Nobel Prize be that far off? If Hemingway can crack, pretty rest of us can, too.

Two more Hemingway essays (if you are interested) Yes, I have been a busy little bee. The Sun Also Rises and the ‘lost generation’ — Part I and The Sun Also Rises and the ‘lost generation’ — Part II

Exciting news! Good Lord, I can’t quite tell you how exciting! Make sure you are sitting down when you read this post!

Two more Hemingway entries, if you’re interested. Getting there I’m glad to say. Just another 2/3 ‘essays’ and 2 ‘potted biogs’ and I can start getting on with other stuff.

The first and the second.

In response to Deckard. (Who he? Oh, never mind)

Someone (‘Deckard’) left a comment on this website on a previous post and this was going to be my response. However, it got a little long, so I thought I might post it here and direct Deckard to this entry instead of leaving my response in the comment section. That also means I shall have another blog entry under my belt. It might, perhaps, help if I preceded it with Deckard’s comment but what the hell. Here is a link to the page where he left his comment.

I’ll start off by being facetious: a bus time-table ‘starts nowhere and ends nowhere’ except that it’s sequence is linear and it starts ‘in the morning’ (birth) and ends ‘in the evening; (death). Isn’t that ‘just like life’? Actually, you’ll get as many definitions of ‘life’ as there are snake oil salesmen, ‘mystics’ and self-help gurus. At the end of the day all you can do is pay your money and make your choice. None is ‘true’, none is ‘false’.

You might have argued — but you didn’t — that ‘because life is unpredictable and we can’t know what fortune or misfortune it might bring, Hemingway championed stoicism in the light of that unpredictability: deal with what life throws at you and be true to yourself, you have no other choice’. Or something. But as I say you didn’t.

I worked for newspapers all my life, as a reporter for several years, then — most pertinently —as a sub-editor / copy editor (they are the same thing), and I am very familiar with that you can do with words and ‘meaning’, how you can subtly manipulate the reader, which, face it is essentially what ‘literature’ is all about, the one variable being the ‘why’ and for what purpose you might try to manipulate the reader.

As for ‘reducing the veil between literature and life’, there are as many reasons and motivations for trying to produce ‘literature’ as there are writers trying to do so, and even more if those writers have been drinking. (NB I get very irritated by all the snoots who lay down the law on what ‘is literature’ and what ‘isn’t literature’. If you’re interested on knowing why, read this.)

Joyce might have thought A Clean Well-lighted Place was masterly, but I don’t. It is simply a slight take on despair and loneliness and little more. And I have read enough, often quite off-the-wall, interpretations of Hemingway’s novels and stories now to treat a great many with more than a pinch of salt. You mention the ‘lost generation’. Well, this quote might interest you on that score. It is by Frank L. Ryan in his book The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway:

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

There’s this from Hemingway’s friend John Dos Passos (who he later lampooned in To Have And Have Not) who reviewed The Sun Also Rises for the New Masses and wrote:

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight . . . When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona . . . reminds you of a travel book . . . it’s time to hold an inquest.

Think about it: after just one (for its age) ‘shocking’ volume of ‘modernist’ short stories, the novel everyone had high hopes for was already creating second thoughts. Here’s what the Times Literary Supplement said about The Sun Also Rises at the time:

Now comes Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises] . . . 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 . . . The Spanish scenes give us something of the quality of Mr Hemingway’s earlier book, but they hardly qualify the general impression of an unsuccessful experiment.

There’s this from Time magazine:

A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young author Hemingway. His short work [In Our Time] bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately . . . Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables in . . . Paris. He has chosen to immortalise the semi-humorous love tragedy of an insatiable young English war widow and an unmanned US soldier . . . The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained, quite subtle . . . But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake’s favorites, and presumably, author Hemingway’s, too, ‘Oh, what the hell.’

Then there’s this from another Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar, Matthew Brucolli in Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success:

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’

That last observation from Brucolli is pertinent: the thinking became ‘this story/novel is good because it’s by Ernest Hemingway and because it’s good, Hemingway must be a good writer.

I have spent a great deal of time on a website I have called The Hemingway Enigma and you can find it here. I’m a firm believer in the subtlety of the world — at what point in a rainbow is it ‘more red than blue’? — but if I had to reduce my take on Hemingway to ‘a soundbite’, it would be this: he was a moderately talented writer, though limited in scope, who struck very lucky for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with him, and who came to believe his own bullshit. (Tip for younger folk reading this: don’t ever do that, it’s a real no-no).

In his book Fame Became Him, John Raeburn has analysed the ‘Letters’ Hemingway wrote for Esquire (for which he was paid bloody well, far more than other contributors) and demonstrates how Hemingway came to be accepted as an authority and expert in all kinds of areas — wine and find dining, sport, warfare, travelling, hunting and

fishing and so on — simply because he told people he was. It was that simple. He was even said to have had a literary reputation in Paris long before he had published a word: he was known as ‘a good writer’ because he said he was. Hemingway talked a very good game.

In fact he was said not really to be a very good shot (his dicky left eye didn’t help) and all his talk of ‘going to war in 1918’ boils down to four weeks with the Red Cross, three of which involved driving ambulances several miles behind the front. Oh, then there’s the claim that he was the youngest commissioned officer in Italy’s Arditi (their ‘shock troops’). There was a great deal of the Walter Mitty about Hemingway.

What, you ask, Hemingway the Nobel Laureate? Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? In short, yes. These things do happen: look up ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, ‘the Hitler Diaries’, ‘The Turin Shroud’ and many more, all very good examples of how we believe what we want to believe, often merely because that’s what our peers believe.

Oscar Wilde is reputed to have remarked about the passing of Nell Trent in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop:

‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears . . . of laughter.’

Something similar might be said about the ‘passionate’ love affair of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkly in A Farewell To Arms. Anyone who can seriously accept as even halfway real the adolescent coo-cooing between the two lovers and their eternal declarations of love for the other has not matured beyond his or her teenage years.

Henry and Barkly (who strikes you as not even escaping one dimension) talk of very little else in the nine to ten months they know each other. Not one conversation between them is recorded by Hemingway which might have come from anywhere but a trashy romantic novelette. A writer of genius? Up to a point, Lord Copper.

. . .

You mention the ‘masterly’ short story (in James Joyce's opinion, though not mine) A Clean, Well-lighted Place. Well, here is a story for you, a true story:

On Christmas Day 1973, I was working as a barman in public bar of The Galleon in Dock Street, Dundee (and I have no idea now why the pubs were open but they were). The pub had two other lounge bars, but they were empty. It was just me, the manager and a man of about 60 getting steadily drunker and talking about killing himself.

With nothing better to do, except every now than then to get him one more of what he was drinking every, I outlined to him why he shouldn’t bother topping himself and that, don’t worry, things will get better. In those days in Scotland bars shut at 10pm, so at 10pm we kicked him out and shut up.

Then on my way home up the Perth Road, through completely empty streets, I encountered another drunk. He was well away, steaming. He was wearing a flat cap and I took this off, stuck a £10 note inside it and put it back on his head. Why? Because 450 odd miles away from my family, I thought it would be nice to give a least someone a present, and it tickled me pink to imagine his astonishment the following day, or the day after that, or the day after that to discover that £10 in his cap.

He would, not doubt, believe it ‘a miracle’. I knew and know better (and that £10 would now be worth just under £100 ($126) today). He, too, might, like you, suggest that ‘life is absurd’. Actually, life ‘is’ merely what we choose to make of it at the time. It is no one fixed thing.

In the picture above, ‘X’ marks the spot where my good deed took place and I gave a Scottish drunk £10 for Christmas at about 11pm on December 25, 1973, as I made my way home. I can remember the occasion as though it took place just 48 years ago! It was just opposite the building where the Students’ Union then was (they have long had a spanking new one). I have reproduced the picture in B&W because this was another era and things were different then.

Two more stories (if you’re interested)

Today I posted two more stories in the Deadlines for Writers website, and you can read them if you are interested. One is called A Tense Relationship and the other Friday Lunch With Sam. 2 Both are very short because the word count — sticking to it is a feature of the site — was only 750.

If you have any comments — if, but, as usual, I’m not holding my breath — please make them.

As always what a reader thinks is ‘wrong’ with a story, where a reader thinks a story doesn’t work if far more helpful than ‘that was just fab! Utterly, brilliant!’ You can tell me that if you like, but I won’t believe you and will lose some respect for you into the bargain.

So, beware!

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What do Edward Gibbon, tomatoes and peanuts, paedophiles, Ernest Hemingway and bullshit have in common? Nothing. They just all feature in today’s 1,000 words (well, actually 1,499, but let’s not quibble, eh? It’s spring

One thing which puzzles me a little about writing fiction is the widespread use of the ‘first-person narrator’. I say ‘puzzled’, but it really doesn’t puzzle me as such. I see it more as technique many writers resort to (‘to which writers resort’ Ed) because, in a sense, it is ‘easier’. I know that because I have also adopted it in one or two of the comparatively few short stories I’ve written (as, of course, does Hemingway in his first two novels, which is pertinent to this entry).

For those of us with, to put it bluntly, the gift of the gab, that is those of us who can apparently bullshit at the drop of a hat, the ‘first-person narrator’ is a god-send. It becomes almost like day-dreaming, you get those day-dreams down on paper and your laughing. Well, I admit it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to get away from the ‘universal narrator who is all-seeing, all-knowing and a total pain in the butt, ‘first-person narration’ is the obvious way to go. But, as I say, I, at least, regard it as something of a cop-out.

As for ‘getting it all down on paper’, I should write ‘on paper’ as everything is now digitised. And the emergence of word-processing software is, for me at least, another god-send. I re-write a hell of a lot, and the prospect of writing, even a short short story, on a typewriter, then having to re-write it again and again as you revise it for however many times you want to do so to get it as you want is not a happy one.

Yet that’s what writers did until computers came along. In fact, take it back even further, to the late 18th and 19th centuries: writers wrote by hand and each subsequent draft was also handwritten. I suspect, though, that they weren’t too fussed either and all the scribbling must have been a pain (‘Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon’, the Duke of Gloucester, King George III’s brother, is said to have told the historian when he was presented with the latest volume of Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the writer, right).

I also suspect that, just as I believe the ‘writing’ pretty much always first takes place in the mind, those writers who had to write by hand spent a great deal more time actually thinking about what they were going to write. I mean you don’t want to get several thousand words down on paper, only to realise somewhere down the line you had fucked up (or, more politely, taken a wrong turn and written yourself into a corner).

Here might be a good point to mention Anthony Trollope’s novel Lady Anna. I haven’t read an extraordinary amount of Trollope, but I have read some, and it can be pleasant and entertaining reading. But Lady Anna was odd: it didn’t flow as it might (and as the prose I like should) and was oddly disjointed, even occasionally a little dull. A little later I discovered why that might have been: Trollope wrote the novel on board the ship on his long voyage to Australia to visit his son.

He was in the habit of writing, more or less strictly, 1,000 words every day, and once that had been done, he simply knocked off for, I suppose a glass of claret. Furthermore, he didn’t bother re-reading what he had previously read before getting down to that day’s 1,000 words, which might account not just for the oddly disjointed nature, but all manner of, often dull, repetition. Bet you didn’t know that, but to be fair, nor did I until I found out. But where was I? Oh, yes, ‘first-person narration’.

Perhaps I’m being more than a tad purist when I say that as far as I am concerned there should be ‘a reason’ why some bod is tell her or his story, and it would follow that reason would be an intricate part of the story. So, for example, in Lolita, the paedophile Humber Humbert has written a memoir by way of ‘explaining’ and possibly even trying to ‘justify’ what he did, including the usual bull from paedos that he was somehow ‘led on’ by Dolores Haze. After completing the memoir, Humbert dies of a heart attack and the memoir is then given up for publication by a psychologist.

Overall that makes sense. But what about, for example — chosen because I have read them comparatively recently, the ‘first-person narrators’ of Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms? Why exactly did Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry tell their stories? Well, I know why: because Hemingway is almost always writing about himself (he does seem to have been extraordinarily self-centred in the literal meaning of the word, as well as its usual meaning) and those to main characters were more or less proxies for him. I suggest a better writer would have gone the extra mile and given her or his first-person narration context, as Nabokov did in Lolita. It could be anything, bloody anything, but whatever is was would serve as a frame for the narrative voice.

Another point to make is the element of sequence in a first-person narration (which, as I point out) usually hang about in mid-air for not much of a good reason. Say I went to the local Chinese restaurant for a meal and halfway through a cook burst out from the kitchen fleeing another cook with a meat cleaver and trying to chop the first cook in half. I meet you the following day and tell you all about it (and by the way, the murder did not take place as the manager and his son managed to pin down the second cook, who immediately burst into tears. It seems he had just had news from back home in Shanghai that his father had been killed in a car crash and took exception to a dismissive remark the first cook made. Thought I might tell you in case you were getting worried).

‘Jim,’ I say (and you are Jim, obviously, although that most probably is not your name, but it will have to do for you as part of this example), ‘guess what happened last night! We saw a Chinese cook trying to kill his mate with a meat cleaver!’ I might then carry on and give more details, but by bit, filling in the story which you (Jim) has a nosey fucker want to get.

What I would not do is nab you and say: ‘Well, it was towards evening on a dull day when my partner, who is eight months pregnant, got it into her head that she wanted — no, needed! — a plate of sweet and sour pork. Naturally, I agreed that we shouldn’t just get a takeaway Chinese meal, but actually go for a sit-down as we hadn’t done so for a while. Well, as we were looking though the menu and considering whether to have starters . . .’ That is not going to happen. But that is pretty much always what happens in first-person narratives.

Here’s another good example where it works: Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. One point of the novel is that the narrator is ‘unreliable’ — very modern and even more modern as Ford was one of the first to do that kind of thing. And not only does he tell his story, he tells different versions of it and his mendacity is crucial to the novel. Thus the ‘first person narration’ works.

Thought I’d get that off my chest. And as, elsewhere, I have promised my self to write every day (to stay in the swing of it all) I have now done my duty:

To come: why peanuts really jack me off, masquerading as ‘nuts’. And no they are not ‘a legume’ — you read that recently didn’t you. They are, in fact, a fruit! And along those lines, tomatoes are not ‘a fruit’ as you also read in that ‘interesting’ piece in the Daily Mail/Readers Digest/the White Canyon Bugle/New York Times kiddies’s section or wherever else you get your ‘knowledge’: they are — hold on to your hats! — actually ‘a nut’. Bet you didn’t know that, either. And neither did I until I made it up just a few moments ago. Bullshit? You bet and then some!

PS Here’s another interesting ‘fact’: an astonishing 87 per cent of people who could be bothered to fill in the questionnaire, in fact, have a full 33 per cent less knowledge that they assumed. Stick that in your pipe!

For once, an entry more personal than usual

I had a horrific night from Sunday to Monday, acid reflux again, and I slept for about 40 minutes all night, in something like five-minute naps. If you’ve ever had it you know not just how painful but how irritating it can be: there is no way you can get comfortable. You lie down, you sit up, you lie on your right, then on your left and on and on. Was on God’s telephone all night, too, and as I hadn’t eaten much, I was soon just retching, retching, retching.

I think I know what caused it: sorting out the house and various other things I cleared out my dad’s wine cellar and took home a bottle of Gewürztraminer which I opened on Sunday afternoon for a barbecue at my daughter’s. Uncorking it, the cork broke and where it broke there was a lot of red disfigurement. The small remnant of the cork dropped into the wine, but I sniffed the wine and it did not seem off.

So I drank it, over the next four hours about three-quarters of the bottle. I must admit it wasn’t as pleasant as I expected a Gewürztraminer to be (and had been when I had previously had a glass or three). It had an oddly, out-of-character bland dimension to it. I did not, though, taste ‘off’.

The retching had made my chest really painful and what with also being super-tired, I stayed in bed, slept, read, slept and read a little more. And, to get to the point of this entry, I brooded (as one does when you are below par, which I most certainly was).

I have racked my brain for how I might improve things between myself and my wife. For a few weeks we got on well, in as far as the atmosphere was fine, mainly because I’d settled on a strict policy of keeping my mouth shut, not reacting and generally turning the other cheek. (I can be sarcastic, which doesn’t help, and I do have to watch my tongue. I read years ago that sarcasm can be a hurtful as physical violence. Something for you to ponder if you, too, tend to sarcasm.)

All that came to and end, however, while I was cleaning out the garage of the cottage I inherited, in which my daughter now lives. She and he husband need it to store stuff in and it was full of shite. (Getting there, by the way, will finish the job today, so I can get back to concluding this Hemingway bollocks, the irresolution of which has also been hanging over me.)

You see, my wife, has a tendency, a very marked tendency, to interfere, stick her oar in, insist you do things her way and other equally bloody awful traits. And I reacted. I couldn’t stop it. She also has to have the last word, though I long ago solved that one by deciding never to have the last word. It does put an end to the bickering but it can also irritate.

So there I was in bed, brooding, and wondering just how, how, how I might find some way to make peace, harmony and quiet the norm in this house rather than an occasional treat. And then I realised: I can’t. And the reason is my wife’s personality and character.

I realise that this will now come across as a neat, nasty and wholly unfair piece of character assassination, but that, honestly, is not what is intended. I have been wanting to write this entry, publicly, for many years but found I couldn’t. What I have found, though, is that articulating something, whether in speech or here in written word, can sometimes unlog a jam and, perhaps, that is what might happen now.

My wife’s family is strange. I suppose that might be said about every family, but if every family is strange, at least they are strange in greater or lesser ways. A little background might help.

My wife’s grandfather, Wesley after whom our son is named, grew up on the moor and only child. I know nothing about his parents or my wife’s grandmother. Wesley was a Methodist and a religious fanatic. I was told — and cannot verify this — that one day when after his son, Roy, my wife’s father was born, he believed he got a revelation from God instructing him to abstain from sex for the rest of his life. How his wife felt about God’s message I don’t know, but she died at 42.

At some point in the 1930s the farm where my wife grew up, another farm and two cottages (one of which I know live in) went up for sale for a comparatively low price. In fact, they were said to be a bargain. Wesley bought them and he, his wife and Roy moved down from the moor into the farm.

Wesley lived, it seems, for ever. I think he was 100 when he died about 15 years ago. After he retired he stayed on at the farm, I imagine as something of a brooding presence. That might seem on my part to be romantic speculation, but in fact it isn’t. His rapid Methodism was now really given rein, and he wrote letters to all and sundry denouncing people and their immoral behaviour.

The cottage in which I live is literally just a stone’s throw from the farm and a family called Saundery were living in it during the war. Just down the road, at Hengar Manor, was a large camp of American GIs and it seems Mrs Saundery liked to go down there and distribute here favours (whether for free or for money I don’t know). When Wesley found out — and nothing stays secret for long here in St Breward, a fact of life I deal with by not event trying to keep anything secret) — he evicted Mrs Saundery and her family. That can’t have been easy for them, especially during the war. Ruthless, was Wesley. And he did — forgive the cliche — rule the household with a rod of iron. No alcohol was allowed at all, worship and Sunday school for the children.

My sister-in-law, who also married into the family, tells me that when she went for Sunday lunch with the the family, there was complete silence. Not a word was spoken. And that silence has been adopted by my wife and other’s in the family. And boy is it disconcerting! She, too, has not got used to her husband (my wife’s brother) saying nothing for hours, sometimes days on end. And after 25 years of marriage I haven’t got used to it either. And nor do I!

I am sociable, gregarious, chatty, indiscreet, at meals at home we were always chatting, latterly as my older brother and I became teenagers about less trivial matters. And I miss conversation. When I visit my sister in Germany, it’s just the same: the company talks! And I find it exceedingly odd that people don’t. Well, in my wife’s case, I do believe the atmosphere in which she grew up shaped her character. But that’s all fine and well, but she isn’t just someone I am talking about, but the woman I share this house with. And I am fed up! That’s what I was brooding about.

I have long thought of moving out, especially now that neither of our children is dependent on me. It would be easy as I inherited my stepmother’s cottage (where my daughter is living for the moment — she lives there rent-free on the assumption that the money she and her husband are saving will go, they say that’s the plan, on buying their own home. I suspect it won’t be that simple, though, but I shan’t go into details here).

What is stopping me — I could always find somewhere nearby to rent — is that I don’t much like living on my own. I got very lonely in London in the early 1990s when I had just turned 40 and believe me that kind of loneliness can almost become physical. And it is well known that loneliness is widespread. 

The second reason is that if I moved out, my wife would be fucked: I pay all the bills, every last one. She doesn’t have a job as such and over the years worked for her younger brother on the farm and latterly for her sister-in-law in the B&B business. But she has fallen out with both of them, though I suspect more her brother than her sister-in-law. But then falling and and feuding with others in the family is common.

For many years about 15 years ago there was a terrible split down the middle (which I kept well out of), and in the proudest tradition of the Kremlin individuals — it was then her father and older brother — were erased from existence. I’m not easily shocked, but at the time my jaw dropped at how it all proceeded. Just how to you deal with that kind of mindset. I’m buggered if I know.

So there you have it. I think I’m obliged to admit that I’m no saint, but I can honestly say that sharp tongue and all, I get on — and far, far, far prefer getting on — with people than not. And as for being no saint, I doubt whether many grand faults would be laid at my door. Possibly they could, but off-hand I can’t think of any.

Right, now I shall publish this. It was going to go on my ‘secret’ blog, but what they hell, stand up and be honest. Other men and women might find themselves in my position and by proclaiming my problem maybe they will be helped a little with insight. And maybe they have some good advice to give me.

Pip, pip.

Later . . .

I was going to add something which occurred to me yesterday while ill in bed — well, sort of ‘ill’ in that I was recovering and catching up on a lost night’s sleep, but since then something else might offer itself to be mentioned. But first things first.

When I consider my own situation, I’m bound to be honest and admit that apart from being half of an appalling marriage, I’m perhaps luckier than many. When I hear, especially now in lockdown, of the situation some find themselves in, I do realise — cliche alert — that one must be thankful for small mercies.

OK, I’ve had two heart attacks, the first on May 2, 2006, and the second on November 15, 2018. But apart from that, I believe my health is better than not, and not many can say that.

That second heart attack, I suspect, might have been avoided had I not smoked so many cigars after that first heart attack. I kidded myself on, as we do, that ‘it’s safer than smoking cigarettes because I don’t inhale’. Well, no you don’t really inhale as such, not like you do with cigarettes, though simply by the way you smoke cigars (by the way I smoked cigars, not the passive tense), some smoke gets into your lungs.

More to the point, the nicotine in the cigar does get into your blood — through the membranes in your nose rather than your lungs — and nicotine thickens the blood, and otherwise your blood is saturated with carbon monoxide and your oxygen levels drop (writes Dr Eustace Knowall, physician to the stars, i.e. supplies them with prescription drugs and had only been struck off twice).

Apart from my health, I consider myself luckier than some in other ways. OK, you might want to live in a city — ‘He who is tired of London, is also tired of boring, self-important, self-regarding farts like Samuel Johnson’ — but I don’t. I grew up in the countryside for the first nine years of my life and far prefer it.

Yes, I know you can’t get your hair done in the next hour or so and Iranian delis are at a premium (the nearest to us here in St Breward, North Cornwall, is in Caen, and careful how you say that. OK, there are several in London, but frankly they are not as good).

Financially, I’m certainly not rich, but I get a generous state pension, the small house in Brum brings in a small, but useful sum, each month (when I’m not faced with, as over these past 18 months, having a new boiler fitted and then a whole new bathroom suite), and we manage — though as I pointed out above I pay all the bills, every last one — to live within that small income. Life is not expensive out here in the wilds of Cornwall away from the bright lights of Bodmin, Camelford and Wadebridge.

The thing is: I miss conversation and companionship, an essence of a good relationship. Boy, do I miss it! There’s a world of difference sitting out in the sun of an early evening sipping a glass of something and sitting out in the sun of an early evening sipping a glass of something with someone you like, respect, find interesting and can easily chat with and in whose company you relax, relax, relax. Boy, do I miss it. However, at this point I really am obliged to sound a good warning that — new cliche alert — the other man’s/woman’s grass is always greener.

That brings me on to the second point: I am most probably viewing the situation through my own sanctity. But am I really that great?

Well, obviously I don’t know. I can sincerely say that far more often than not I get on with people and with those who I might not much like, I still choose to be polite and diplomatic and hope they don’t cotton on that I think they are pretentious, dull fucks (or getting as close to that state as dammit).

Only others could and can give you a honest account of my character, faults, flaws, virtues and drawbacks, but as there’s is no one I can at present quickly put you in touch with, tough titties.

As for my wife, well, one thing I distinctly remember was the evening of February 20, 1996, a Tuesday. I, my brother-in-law Andrews the younger brother of above) and someone else, who I can’t offhand recall, were having a very quiet and very limited stag night at The Old Inn up the road.

In the pub, I bumped into one Jeff Hollister, who was already five sheets to the wind. Jeff, who lives just down the road, when told that the following morning I was marrying CF, merely said something along the lines of ‘bloody good luck with that’. I know what he meant.

One last time: I’m 71, 72 on November 21 — is there still a true love out there for me? Does that sound pathetic? Yes? Oh well.

PS to the previous entry: three very enjoyable pieces of music (though, perhaps, not to everyone’s taste) by Stockhausen, Schoenberg and Webern

In a previous post I spoke about ‘abstraction’ in music, painting and — possibly — writing. Just now, to make my point about how some of us, including me, ‘don’t like / understand music, but absolutely love the sound it makes’, I appened three videos of performances of music by Stockhausen, Schoenberg and Webern. Rather than go through what I previously wrote in summary form why not, dear reader, get your finger out and, if you are interested, read that entry here. Here are the three pieces again:

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 Not quite ‘abstract’ but equally as engaging. Pressure point by Duncan Lamont (new to me, too, but there you go). Just looked him up: he died two years ago at the age of 87. You can find more about him here. If I were a better guitarist and formed a band, this is the kind of music I should like to play.

Here’s a favourite of mine, Kiss That Whispers, by Dave Fiuczinski’s Headless Torsos. I might have posted this before, but as Sam Goldwyn said ‘If the like it once, they’ll love it twice’.

I actually used it in a short video I made (with my then very unsophisticated mobile phone) at an student art exhibition I went to with a friend at which his son had work on display. Here it is:

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