I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.
Finished off Hemingway vs Fitzgerald today, then start on an intriguing book I only came across last week called - provocatively it has to be said and I think you get a fair idea of what angle it will take from this title - Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. It’s by some guy call Leonard J Leff.
I trust myself after reading a few pages on sussing out whether it can be taken reasonably seriously or not (e.g. I Married and Alien From Outer Space), but even if everything has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, if it’s entertaining, it’s entertaining.
Along the lines of ‘loaded titles’, in my last year at university, after having done fuck all pretty much for two years in my English and Philosophy joint honours course, I was desperate to come up with a book, any book, a pamphlet, even, any pamphlet which might (as Hemingway would say, the old phoney) give me the inside dope on aspects of my Existentialism course.
One of the guys it covered as Soren Kierkegaard, who was well-known for his scepticism in most matters and a satirical bent. Scouring the library for ‘commentaries’, most of which by that late stage in the game had been borrowed anyway, I came across the following. You can guess just what an objective commentary it might be from its title: Kierkegaard the Cripple.
I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.I’ve just looked it up and it by a Theodore Haecker. I seem to remember - this isn’t borne
out by my just recent googling - that it was published by some protestant seminary in the Mid-West. I didn’t read it, however, I didn’t bother. Maybe I should have done.
Nominally, ‘the cripple’ was based on the fact that Kierkegaard had a rather strange shape, or seemed to, and after injuring his leg walked with a limp.
So it remains to be seen how good my latest acquisition which arrived yesterday is or whether it is just a throwaway piece of fluff. By the way, I recently came up with a, for me, useful description of The Sun Also Rises which I shall use: a sad, sour, sardonic, romantic potboiler. Even after reading the bloody novel three times, the most recent last week, I still can’t see how the ‘lost generation’ angle is in it rather than grafted on by Scribners’ marketing department. And, friends, Hemingway might have started a new style of writing - though as far as I am concerned a pretty limited one - but a writing ‘genius’ he wasn’t.
PS Looked up Theodore Haecker (or Theodor) and he was a German, not a Yank and a RC convert to boot. Lord knows what that colony of Mid-West puritan godwhackers were doing publishing his book.
Sunday, 28 July 2019
Thursday, 25 July 2019
In which I confess to an ongoing bout of ‘out of sortism’ (and wonder whether Boris Johnson will come crashing down this week or next)
Since losing the puzzles (which I think I mentioned) and being aware that my annual income has plummeted by pretty much a third, I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts, though not quite in the way you might imagine. The money was handy, the work, though a bit longwinded, easy and highly manageable, but the important thing was the £8,400 it brought in every year gave me a kind of freedom.
I did not spend it profligately, but it meant I could, if I wanted, buy a flight abroad, hire a car and stay somewhere for two weeks without a second thought. Now I can’t. Now my income is down to my state pension and the money I get from the house in Birmingham. What I get is certainly a little more than some — well, pensioners — and I have ‘savings’ which I could, should I want to, spend. But I don’t want to.
The current plan is (though remember telling God your plans makes him laugh out loud) is that I shall as far as possible not touch a penny of it and give it half each to Elsie and Wesley, which sum should be very welcome as they might then be at the age when they want to invest in a house. Actually, Elsie, now married with a toddler, is already at that age.
The other thing is — and there is no reason for this except that it is self-imposed and for entirely different reasons I am trying to learn a little more discipline (the writing, if you must know, which will start once I’ve got this Hemingway bollocks out of the way), so sticking to my rule of spending a less than comes in is what I am trying to do.
This ‘out of sorts’ feeling, which I wouldn’t want to stress too much, however, means that if I don’t ‘do’ something which is not just filling in time or some kind of mindless activity, I feel a tad guilty at the end of the day. Writing counts very much as ‘doing something’. In fact, to be honest it is the only thing which counts as that. And although it is quite legitimate to do the background reading for the Hemingway bollocks — at the moment I am reading Hemingway vs Fitzgerald: the rise and fall of a literary friendship by a guy called Scott Donaldson — I have to persuade myself every day that ‘it counts’. And I don’t like that kind of introverted internal debate.
Today I might have done some reading but I frittered away about four hours making a short video by editing a BBC Michael Cockerell piece about Boris Johnson, our new Prime Minister. In a sense that is ‘doing something’ because it demands thought etc, but on the other hand I can’t deny that it is most certainly not essential and was purely done to be posted on Facebook. But then I might also now post it here, having now mentioned it. So take a look.
As for the Hemingway bollocks, well, I’m enjoying it, but the task is growing exponentially as I come across more books I might read — and then read — and as, the more I get to know about his novel The Sun Also Rises, the more I realise that my reaction cannot, as it started out, be simply ‘this is no fucking masterpiece and Hemingway is no fucking writer’. That’s essentially what I think, but it is a little more complex than that and I want to do the matter justice — after all this is about ‘learning a little more intellectual discipline.
So new angles I feel I am obliged to tackle include ‘can there be objective literary judgment’ (which will bring in the whole ‘relativity/subjectivity’ thing and that, dear friends, if not handled carefully, could be the kiss of death); taking a look at publishers’ motivation etc — after all at the end of the day they are commercial outfits hoping to turn a penny, honest or otherwise; and, well, the ‘literary scene’ overall (or what I can know about it, which isn’t much). But I have had a good idea for a novel based on H and F.
And now to bed.
PS Boris Johnson is cunt. If and when this is ever read, you will long know from your recent history how he did. I’m not optimistic, but odder things have happened at see.
I did not spend it profligately, but it meant I could, if I wanted, buy a flight abroad, hire a car and stay somewhere for two weeks without a second thought. Now I can’t. Now my income is down to my state pension and the money I get from the house in Birmingham. What I get is certainly a little more than some — well, pensioners — and I have ‘savings’ which I could, should I want to, spend. But I don’t want to.
The current plan is (though remember telling God your plans makes him laugh out loud) is that I shall as far as possible not touch a penny of it and give it half each to Elsie and Wesley, which sum should be very welcome as they might then be at the age when they want to invest in a house. Actually, Elsie, now married with a toddler, is already at that age.
The other thing is — and there is no reason for this except that it is self-imposed and for entirely different reasons I am trying to learn a little more discipline (the writing, if you must know, which will start once I’ve got this Hemingway bollocks out of the way), so sticking to my rule of spending a less than comes in is what I am trying to do.
This ‘out of sorts’ feeling, which I wouldn’t want to stress too much, however, means that if I don’t ‘do’ something which is not just filling in time or some kind of mindless activity, I feel a tad guilty at the end of the day. Writing counts very much as ‘doing something’. In fact, to be honest it is the only thing which counts as that. And although it is quite legitimate to do the background reading for the Hemingway bollocks — at the moment I am reading Hemingway vs Fitzgerald: the rise and fall of a literary friendship by a guy called Scott Donaldson — I have to persuade myself every day that ‘it counts’. And I don’t like that kind of introverted internal debate.
Today I might have done some reading but I frittered away about four hours making a short video by editing a BBC Michael Cockerell piece about Boris Johnson, our new Prime Minister. In a sense that is ‘doing something’ because it demands thought etc, but on the other hand I can’t deny that it is most certainly not essential and was purely done to be posted on Facebook. But then I might also now post it here, having now mentioned it. So take a look.
As for the Hemingway bollocks, well, I’m enjoying it, but the task is growing exponentially as I come across more books I might read — and then read — and as, the more I get to know about his novel The Sun Also Rises, the more I realise that my reaction cannot, as it started out, be simply ‘this is no fucking masterpiece and Hemingway is no fucking writer’. That’s essentially what I think, but it is a little more complex than that and I want to do the matter justice — after all this is about ‘learning a little more intellectual discipline.
So new angles I feel I am obliged to tackle include ‘can there be objective literary judgment’ (which will bring in the whole ‘relativity/subjectivity’ thing and that, dear friends, if not handled carefully, could be the kiss of death); taking a look at publishers’ motivation etc — after all at the end of the day they are commercial outfits hoping to turn a penny, honest or otherwise; and, well, the ‘literary scene’ overall (or what I can know about it, which isn’t much). But I have had a good idea for a novel based on H and F.
And now to bed.
PS Boris Johnson is cunt. If and when this is ever read, you will long know from your recent history how he did. I’m not optimistic, but odder things have happened at see.
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Give and take? It’s has to be a two-way street. Always. And as for gentle summer evenings . . . a boy, even one batting 70, can still dream
This is also going in my main blog:
I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post it, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, at some point, still decide to publish it. First I decided to publish it in a second more private blog I keep which really is more a real diary.
The different between that and this, my main blog, is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. The other blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like this one — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.
In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.
I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.
As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.
But back to that entry: here it is.
I suppose that everyone who is married has many war stories to tell, and I am no exception. Just now, well about 20 minutes ago, my wife’s essentially childlike nature again manifested itself: in many way our house is a tip, not as bad as many, certainly, but a little worse than some, and I don’t like living this way.
The trouble is that quite apart from being farmers - who notoriously don’t throw away anything - there is, I discovered a few months ago, autism in the family and my wife keeps everything. Every cupboard is jam-packed with stuff that will never, ever be used. In one corner of our bedroom are about five or six big plastic storage boxes, the kind you can pick up at Asda and B&Q, full of stuff. Much of it is old school reports, our children’s scrapbooks, photographs, that kind of thing, and although I am equally sentimental about their childhood there comes a point when enough is enough. These things aren’t looked at and never will be. They are just kept and woe betide anyone — well, me — who suggests perhaps sifting though them and throwing some of it it.
Down here in the kitchen is a cupboard jam-packed with small plastic boxes, the kind you can put sandwiches in. Many of them are old ice-cream boxes, and, yes, they can be useful. But how many does a sane person need. Three, four, five, perhaps, but in that cupboard, stuck in any old how there must be at least 30.
I suspect a strain of mild autism runs in my wife’s family. My brother-in-law is apparently autistic - I was told this by my sister-in-law Lucy with Andrew sitting right next to her, so it’s not as though she was somehow talking out of school - and two of their children have also been diagnosed as autistic.
I realise that autism is on a spectrum and that it can range from being mild to severe, but it does most certainly affect behaviour. I mention this because I think it’s highly likely my wife is also autistic to a certain extent and that would explain a great deal about what I have so far seen as extremely irritating quirks in her behaviour.
To describe it in one way - and I don’t mean this in any way unpleasantly but merely descriptively - her behaviour can quite often seem to resemble that of an eight-year-old child in a school playground. In arguments she always resorts to simply talking over you (well, me) and repeating the same phrase over and over and over again. As that kind of discussion leads absolutely nowhere, invariably I give in, though by no means gracefully. I have relaxed a little since I retired, but in the past I could quite often lose my rag and I have something of a sharp tongue.
There was an instance of my wife’s odd behaviour earlier. Every single cupboard and drawer in the house is jam-packed. In many you can’t get anything more in, and here in the kitchen one cupboard is jam-packed with small, plastic boxes, some bought, some old ice-cream boxes and that kind of thing. There must be at least two dozen knocking around. Occasionally one is use for food. One, occasionally.
A few days ago I took one out and filled it with all the little odds and sods of mine which clutter up the bench in our kitchen. This is an old-fashioned farmhouse bench just. This morning all the stuff had been taken out again, stuffed into a plastic shopping bag and the box removed. I asked why: it’s her box, she said, and it’s for food. You have about two dozen boxes in the cupboard I said, can’t you spare one? No, she said. And that was it.
Everything, and I mean everything has to stay in the place she has allocated it. If something is even slightly moved, she notices immediately and moves it back.
I don’t for a second imagine I am blameless and don’t also have my quirks. But I do like to think they are a little more mainstream. More to the point, not only do I believe in that hoary old cliche about marriage ‘give and take’, but I also practice it. Even more to the point I pay for everything, I pay every bill and then some.
For example, my wife has fallen out with her sister-in-law and her brother who since I’ve been married have employed her, both on the farm and in the house (my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business). So now she has not income and no job.
Part of the make-up of her character (and I supposed, if I am right, her mild autism) is that in situations in which she is comfortable she is self-confident. In all other situations she completely lacks confidence, and so, for example, is shit-scared of going out into the world - Bodmin, say - and working.
She says she is keeping her ears open for anyone wanting someone to do with farm work (fruit-picking, for example, though I pointed out that that would provided employment for just a few weeks a year) and heard that the pub/restaurant in St Tudy wanted someone to keep the outside tidy, the verges, bushes etc. She went along and got the gig, but there was one slight complication: she needed a strimmer. So far when strimming work was necessary around our cottage, she borrowed her brother’s, but - well, see above. I offered to buy her one and a few hours later we went out to Mole Valley farmers in St Columb and I bought one for her. It costs, with a few odds and sods, the best part of £185.
What is relevant here is that the freelance work I have been doing for the Daily Mail for the past ten years, laying on the puzzles, which brought in a very handy sum every month, has ended. (I looked up what the original weekly fee was worth ten yours on after inflation had taken its toll and was surprised to find it had been devalued by 25%. So I informed the managing editor of that and told him I would be upping what I had been charging a month.
I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post in on my main blog, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, instead want to publish it here.
The different between here and my main blog is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. This blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like the other — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.
In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.
I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.
As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.
But back to that entry: here it is.The upshot is the Mail (like all newspapers preternatually penny-wise and pound-foolish) decided to take the work in-house and my annual income has dropped by almost a third. (I might, perhaps, have handled it better, although I do suspect even more schmoozing wouldn’t have saved the situation and the work would have been taken in-house anyway.)
I mention that because £185 less means a lot more to me now than it did three weeks ago. I also mention that because it’s the kind of detail my wife simply forgets when it comes to my ‘using her plastic boxes’. The whole fucking point about ‘give and take’ is that it has to be a two-way street.
I have in the past thought of moving out and going to live on my own again now both our children are pretty much independent - our daughter is now married and our son will start his second year at university in September - and financially that would put my wife so far up shit creek there would be no coming back. But it would also be unbelievably petty however much it might provide a very brief satisfaction of ‘I’ll show you!’ so I shan’t do it. But by Christ the temptation is huge.
I will do anything for anyone as long as I am not taken for granted. I firmly believe that he who has should share it with he who hasn’t, especially in a partnership like marriage. You can believe that or you can think I am just bullshitting, but it is true. I also believe in trying as best as possible to live in a harmonious, peaceful and happy atmosphere for the benefit of everyone. But I also firmly believe that ‘give and take’ should be a two-way street and time and again I feel I am simply taken for granted. And it fucks me off.
Having written the above, I have got a bit of the irritation out of my system, but this time I shall post this in my blog. Why not? If it is read by someone in my immediate family, well, perhaps they will realise which way the wind is blowing. Fuck it, I am getting to the point where I really do feel I have had enough.
I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post it, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, at some point, still decide to publish it. First I decided to publish it in a second more private blog I keep which really is more a real diary.
The different between that and this, my main blog, is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. The other blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like this one — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.
In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.
I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.
As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.
But back to that entry: here it is.
The trouble is that quite apart from being farmers - who notoriously don’t throw away anything - there is, I discovered a few months ago, autism in the family and my wife keeps everything. Every cupboard is jam-packed with stuff that will never, ever be used. In one corner of our bedroom are about five or six big plastic storage boxes, the kind you can pick up at Asda and B&Q, full of stuff. Much of it is old school reports, our children’s scrapbooks, photographs, that kind of thing, and although I am equally sentimental about their childhood there comes a point when enough is enough. These things aren’t looked at and never will be. They are just kept and woe betide anyone — well, me — who suggests perhaps sifting though them and throwing some of it it.
Down here in the kitchen is a cupboard jam-packed with small plastic boxes, the kind you can put sandwiches in. Many of them are old ice-cream boxes, and, yes, they can be useful. But how many does a sane person need. Three, four, five, perhaps, but in that cupboard, stuck in any old how there must be at least 30.
I suspect a strain of mild autism runs in my wife’s family. My brother-in-law is apparently autistic - I was told this by my sister-in-law Lucy with Andrew sitting right next to her, so it’s not as though she was somehow talking out of school - and two of their children have also been diagnosed as autistic.
I realise that autism is on a spectrum and that it can range from being mild to severe, but it does most certainly affect behaviour. I mention this because I think it’s highly likely my wife is also autistic to a certain extent and that would explain a great deal about what I have so far seen as extremely irritating quirks in her behaviour.
To describe it in one way - and I don’t mean this in any way unpleasantly but merely descriptively - her behaviour can quite often seem to resemble that of an eight-year-old child in a school playground. In arguments she always resorts to simply talking over you (well, me) and repeating the same phrase over and over and over again. As that kind of discussion leads absolutely nowhere, invariably I give in, though by no means gracefully. I have relaxed a little since I retired, but in the past I could quite often lose my rag and I have something of a sharp tongue.
There was an instance of my wife’s odd behaviour earlier. Every single cupboard and drawer in the house is jam-packed. In many you can’t get anything more in, and here in the kitchen one cupboard is jam-packed with small, plastic boxes, some bought, some old ice-cream boxes and that kind of thing. There must be at least two dozen knocking around. Occasionally one is use for food. One, occasionally.
A few days ago I took one out and filled it with all the little odds and sods of mine which clutter up the bench in our kitchen. This is an old-fashioned farmhouse bench just. This morning all the stuff had been taken out again, stuffed into a plastic shopping bag and the box removed. I asked why: it’s her box, she said, and it’s for food. You have about two dozen boxes in the cupboard I said, can’t you spare one? No, she said. And that was it.
Everything, and I mean everything has to stay in the place she has allocated it. If something is even slightly moved, she notices immediately and moves it back.
I don’t for a second imagine I am blameless and don’t also have my quirks. But I do like to think they are a little more mainstream. More to the point, not only do I believe in that hoary old cliche about marriage ‘give and take’, but I also practice it. Even more to the point I pay for everything, I pay every bill and then some.
For example, my wife has fallen out with her sister-in-law and her brother who since I’ve been married have employed her, both on the farm and in the house (my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business). So now she has not income and no job.
Part of the make-up of her character (and I supposed, if I am right, her mild autism) is that in situations in which she is comfortable she is self-confident. In all other situations she completely lacks confidence, and so, for example, is shit-scared of going out into the world - Bodmin, say - and working.
She says she is keeping her ears open for anyone wanting someone to do with farm work (fruit-picking, for example, though I pointed out that that would provided employment for just a few weeks a year) and heard that the pub/restaurant in St Tudy wanted someone to keep the outside tidy, the verges, bushes etc. She went along and got the gig, but there was one slight complication: she needed a strimmer. So far when strimming work was necessary around our cottage, she borrowed her brother’s, but - well, see above. I offered to buy her one and a few hours later we went out to Mole Valley farmers in St Columb and I bought one for her. It costs, with a few odds and sods, the best part of £185.
What is relevant here is that the freelance work I have been doing for the Daily Mail for the past ten years, laying on the puzzles, which brought in a very handy sum every month, has ended. (I looked up what the original weekly fee was worth ten yours on after inflation had taken its toll and was surprised to find it had been devalued by 25%. So I informed the managing editor of that and told him I would be upping what I had been charging a month.
I wrote this piece in a fit of irritation going on anger a week or two ago. If you read it, you will understand why. I was going to post in on my main blog, but as always a wise voice inside me cautioned to hold fast and give it a day or two and leave it in draft form. I did, and yesterday I deleted the draft, but kept the words. I reasoned that I might, instead want to publish it here.
The different between here and my main blog is that I don’t mind the other being read. In fact, I like it and hold to the view that if you write something down, the chances are that you would like it to be read, whether or not you are aware of that. This blog, on the other hand, is private, somewhere I can let my hair down. Perhaps in time it will be discovered and read — I don’t ‘market’ it like the other — but by then I shall be long dead and if someone is hurt or offended by what I write here, well, tough titties: you should have been a little nicer in the first place.
In fact while writing that last sentence I decided ‘what the hell’. Only two friends read this blog and one is fully aware of the threadbare state of my marriage, and I really don’t care whether or not the other one knows. I’m pretty sure he won’t be shocked. I believe my sister also read this occasionally, and she, too, is not unaware that my marriage has long lost its sheen.
I came to think about it all (and sit down and write this preamble) because it is a pleasant evening and I am sitting outside in the fresh air with a glass of wine and chilling. And it occurred to me that in an ideal world I would be sitting next to a woman, call her a wife, call her a partner, but someone I both loved and felt easy with and we would be chatting, about this, that and t’other, it wouldn’t matter. I do know that some marriages reach that stage, a few (although I suspect the majority reach the kind of desiccated state mine is now in, and some, a minority are simply sheer hell). And I’m not starry-eyed, believe me. If a marriage is ‘good’ you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of effort and work and selflessness went into making it ‘good’.
As it is, I have no woman of that kind with whom to share my life and pleasant evenings in the summer air. Don’t get me wrong: my life is certainly not one of unmitigated gloom and despondency. It’s just that a tiny part of me, even at my stage in life, is still a little romantic.
But back to that entry: here it is.The upshot is the Mail (like all newspapers preternatually penny-wise and pound-foolish) decided to take the work in-house and my annual income has dropped by almost a third. (I might, perhaps, have handled it better, although I do suspect even more schmoozing wouldn’t have saved the situation and the work would have been taken in-house anyway.)
I mention that because £185 less means a lot more to me now than it did three weeks ago. I also mention that because it’s the kind of detail my wife simply forgets when it comes to my ‘using her plastic boxes’. The whole fucking point about ‘give and take’ is that it has to be a two-way street.
I have in the past thought of moving out and going to live on my own again now both our children are pretty much independent - our daughter is now married and our son will start his second year at university in September - and financially that would put my wife so far up shit creek there would be no coming back. But it would also be unbelievably petty however much it might provide a very brief satisfaction of ‘I’ll show you!’ so I shan’t do it. But by Christ the temptation is huge.
I will do anything for anyone as long as I am not taken for granted. I firmly believe that he who has should share it with he who hasn’t, especially in a partnership like marriage. You can believe that or you can think I am just bullshitting, but it is true. I also believe in trying as best as possible to live in a harmonious, peaceful and happy atmosphere for the benefit of everyone. But I also firmly believe that ‘give and take’ should be a two-way street and time and again I feel I am simply taken for granted. And it fucks me off.
Having written the above, I have got a bit of the irritation out of my system, but this time I shall post this in my blog. Why not? If it is read by someone in my immediate family, well, perhaps they will realise which way the wind is blowing. Fuck it, I am getting to the point where I really do feel I have had enough.
Sunday, 14 July 2019
Ain’t nothing going to do it except doing it. So why am I still pfaffing around?
OK, I know exactly what I should be doing but I’m not doing it. It’s not rocket science. There is not great shakes about it: I should be getting up - not early, doesn’t have to be at the crack of dawn - and sitting down in my ‘shed’, which is what this place has been called, and doing nothing until I am so bloody bored I start writing.
It doesn’t matter what I fucking write, but as long as I write, that is fine. Jesus there’s enough shite out there as it is and a little more, courtesy of me, isn’t going to bring the world to its end. But I don’t. I have no idea was stops me. Laziness isn’t the word, because it isn’t laziness. I mean if it were laziness I wouldn’t even be writing these bloody words which, so far, these included, make up 745.
It’s not even ‘dread of failure’ because I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I ‘fail’. But for some reason when I wake up I am in a kind of torpor which lasts until 10.30 in the morning.
BUT - I am going do it! So far in my life I have three times been disciplined enough to sit down and write something over a prolonged period. The real irony is that ONCE you sit down, you wonder what all the agony is about. I did it with one ‘novel’, which was not a bad idea and could be re-written though what I did produce (which is the Lord knows where) I don’t imagine was very good. That was in Birmingham while I was still working for the CEGB staff newspaper.
The routine was simple: get a litre of Strongbow (or whatever) from around the corner, a packet of ‘skins’, ten ciggies, then get back home and write for four hours until I was so knackered I slumped off to bed. That routine, at least, produced a novel, however shite that novel was (and I think I still have it, but if I don’t, oh well, not the world’s greatest loss).
Later, while living and working in London but staying down here in St Breward at Terry’s, I used to get up early, about 6am and type away for several hours, this time sustained by nothing more dangerous than tea and fags. And I did get something done.
And even though I say so myself, it was possibly a cut above what I had previously produced at Norlan Drive (which, as of writing, I still have somewhere).
Most recently there was ‘Love: A Fiction’, previously called ‘Letters Never Sent’ which I wrote in two stints in London in the early 1990s. Pertinently the same ‘secret’ was applied: just get if fucking done! In - as I say - two stints, I sat down regularly twice a week at 7pm to write after telling myself that I had no other choice but to fucking do it. And do you know, sweethearts, it worked a treat. And THAT is the one piece of work so far I would not in the slightest be ashamed of showing anyone.
It might not be ‘what people want’ at present but who gives a fuck. I’m almost 70. If not I were still to care about ‘being accepted’ and producing ‘what people want’, I am pretty much dead. Getting older, not being able to get it up - not that I have had any know that in practice, though after two heart attacks and the occasional wank I’ve to a pretty good idea - does have it’s compensations, not to say rewards. Not giving a fuck about what ‘I’m supposed to be doing’ is one of them.
To be blunt, I’m not going to starve, so fuck money from now on and fuck ‘playing the game’ (which I rather think I never did anyway, though I’m sure when I was younger I wasn’t quite as cocky or sanguine about not doing so.
Pip, pip
PS I have been indulging in a rather lovely concoction: brandy and alcoholic lovage, 50/50. I can recommend it. Helps to let you shout your mouth off (‘shoot off your mouth’? Subs please check).
PPS This is going both in my official blog and my unofficial blog (which you can find here).
It doesn’t matter what I fucking write, but as long as I write, that is fine. Jesus there’s enough shite out there as it is and a little more, courtesy of me, isn’t going to bring the world to its end. But I don’t. I have no idea was stops me. Laziness isn’t the word, because it isn’t laziness. I mean if it were laziness I wouldn’t even be writing these bloody words which, so far, these included, make up 745.
It’s not even ‘dread of failure’ because I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I ‘fail’. But for some reason when I wake up I am in a kind of torpor which lasts until 10.30 in the morning.
BUT - I am going do it! So far in my life I have three times been disciplined enough to sit down and write something over a prolonged period. The real irony is that ONCE you sit down, you wonder what all the agony is about. I did it with one ‘novel’, which was not a bad idea and could be re-written though what I did produce (which is the Lord knows where) I don’t imagine was very good. That was in Birmingham while I was still working for the CEGB staff newspaper.
The routine was simple: get a litre of Strongbow (or whatever) from around the corner, a packet of ‘skins’, ten ciggies, then get back home and write for four hours until I was so knackered I slumped off to bed. That routine, at least, produced a novel, however shite that novel was (and I think I still have it, but if I don’t, oh well, not the world’s greatest loss).
Later, while living and working in London but staying down here in St Breward at Terry’s, I used to get up early, about 6am and type away for several hours, this time sustained by nothing more dangerous than tea and fags. And I did get something done.
And even though I say so myself, it was possibly a cut above what I had previously produced at Norlan Drive (which, as of writing, I still have somewhere).
Most recently there was ‘Love: A Fiction’, previously called ‘Letters Never Sent’ which I wrote in two stints in London in the early 1990s. Pertinently the same ‘secret’ was applied: just get if fucking done! In - as I say - two stints, I sat down regularly twice a week at 7pm to write after telling myself that I had no other choice but to fucking do it. And do you know, sweethearts, it worked a treat. And THAT is the one piece of work so far I would not in the slightest be ashamed of showing anyone.
It might not be ‘what people want’ at present but who gives a fuck. I’m almost 70. If not I were still to care about ‘being accepted’ and producing ‘what people want’, I am pretty much dead. Getting older, not being able to get it up - not that I have had any know that in practice, though after two heart attacks and the occasional wank I’ve to a pretty good idea - does have it’s compensations, not to say rewards. Not giving a fuck about what ‘I’m supposed to be doing’ is one of them.
To be blunt, I’m not going to starve, so fuck money from now on and fuck ‘playing the game’ (which I rather think I never did anyway, though I’m sure when I was younger I wasn’t quite as cocky or sanguine about not doing so.
Pip, pip
PS I have been indulging in a rather lovely concoction: brandy and alcoholic lovage, 50/50. I can recommend it. Helps to let you shout your mouth off (‘shoot off your mouth’? Subs please check).
PPS This is going both in my official blog and my unofficial blog (which you can find here).
Friday, 12 July 2019
Sorry about this, but — completely unplanned — I began jotting down a few comments and being the sort who really can’t shut up . . .
Oh, what have I let myself in for? Just read the introduction to a book of five essays on Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel (it was his second, in fact, but like much about the man, nothing is straightforward) called New Essays On The Sun Also Rises in a series called The American Novel, and despite the hi-falutin’ talk of ‘New Critics’, ‘new criticism’ and modern perspectives and modernism, I still think the guy is a nine-bob note who had the luck of old nick.
But — a huge ‘but’ — is it really likely that yours truly, a snotty-nosed cynic cast aside in deepest North Cornwall is right and an assortment of academics and critical literary types are wrong? Really? Come on, let’s get real. And yet, and yet...
I’ve just finished the introduction and will continue with the rest of the essays tomorrow, but let me cite just one passage which makes me wonder whether, however unlikely it might be, the world really is capable of disappearing up it own arse. Remember: my background is in newspapers, mainly as a sub, and I know — I know! — the kind of bullshit which can be produced to make white seem black and black seem like a stroll in the park. So let me cite this, from the end of Ms Linda Wagner-Martin’s introduction:
‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’
Sounds real doesn’t it? But is it? This is the same novel about which Hemingway’s sometime friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote (in a review of the novel when it came out):
‘Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [the novel] is a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.’
He also noted in that review that ‘it had been a mistake to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectation which were not met by the story that followed’. He is referring to the quote from Ecclesiastes which is used as a second epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’ quote.
Then there’s the verdict of Donald Ogden Stewart, who was of the party in the visit to Pamplona in 1925 who along with Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith, Hemingway based the fictioal character of Bill Gorton. Stewart was also no opinionated snotty-nosed cynic: he had published several books by the time he got to know Hemingway in Paris, had hinterland and became an Oscar-winning screenwriter (he wrote the script for The Philadelphia Story). After reading the novel, Stewart commented that ‘It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’ and added that ‘it didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’
So might be going in?
. . .
Putting forward my explanation — OK, putting forward a possible explanation — lays me wide open. I am no academic, not literary critic, no published author or poet, in fact, I have no obvious qualification at all for adding my two ha’porth worth. But I’m going to do so anyway (which is partly what writing this whole bloody thing — the ‘thing’ being how The Sun is not a masterpiece and Hemingway is not ‘a writer of genius’ — is all about). I think what happened is quite simple: Hemingway’s initial success and his subsequent reputation was the result of the confluence of a variety of often quite disparate factors: there was Hemingway himself, a complex man who believed himself to be something of a literary genius, who was ruthlessly ambitious bordering on being a sociopath, and who believed his own bullshit.
There were his various champions, who promoted him at difference times and for very different reasons and who each in some way or other furthered his career: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, most notably Scott Fitzgerald (who almost hero-worshipped Hemingway) and eventually his editor at his publishers Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins. Pertinently, Perkins had entered publishing through Scribner’s advertising department and seems to have had a healthy commercial instinct. That is a vital part of the Hemingway success story.
Then there was the time at which Hemingway (born in 1899) appeared on the literary scene: the post-World War I era (not, of course, then known as World War I — I thought I might alert one or two younger readers to that fact) when pretty much everything was up in the air and ‘modernism’ was all the rage. The ‘Great War’ (which, kiddiwinks, is what it was called at the time) was a watershed, possibly the mother of all watersheds to adopt a current cliche, and what folk wanted was ‘something different’. And they wanted it desperately.
The established authors — Henry James, John Galsworthy, DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton (who didn’t in fact pop her clogs until 1937) were very much ‘out’ and what the young folk wanted — as always — something ‘new’ and ‘different’. And Hemingway was certainly that. Different? Try reading some of his ‘lean, muscular prose’. It’s different all right, though — in my very humble view — not at all very good.
Perkins, he at Scribner’s with the commercial head who had already championed Fitzgerald by publishing Scott’s first novel This Side Of Paradise and his subsequent work (which, believe it or not were at the time regarded as ‘shocking’ — this was, remember, in only the second decade after the end of the Victorian Age and whatever it is called in the US) was more than ready to take a punt on Hemingway, and boy did it take off.
The Sun Also Rises sold steadily more and more copies, not least because Hemingway was marketed by Scribner’s as a new kind of author, a writer who was not some airy-fairy pale artistic pansy (the mention of which allows me
to post a picture of Reginald Bunthorne) but who was a wholesome he-man who could not only write (so the story went) but who also boxed, enjoyed bullfighting and eventually shot big game and all the other things which get you wondering what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. In marketing terms it was genius: his style and the writer were new, and new sells, sells, sells, and then sells, sells, sells some more (until something newer comes along, of course).
Here’s another taste of the kind of bull The Sun Also Rises elicited — this is from a review of the book in the New York Times in 1926:
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.
Surely after reading that, which on the face of it seems, well, fair enough, it is legitimate to ask: what exactly does ‘more literary English’ have to feel ashamed about? Well, nothing, really. That quote is just a snippet of the acres of newspaper bullshit churned out daily which, in Hemingway’s case, did him a great favour.
Three years later Hemingway published his second (third) novel, A Farewell To Arms and that, too, sold like hotcakes. But although he carried on selling stories to some magazines, to be blunt that was the sum of his novelistic output. What about To Have And Have Not? you ask, and For Whom The Bell Tolls? Well, yes and no. To Have And Have Not (1937) was more a novella, a short story on steroids and didn’t sell particularly well at all. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) was done a favour by Hollywood who turned it into a film starring Gary Cooper and I would bet my bottom dollar that those who still remember the work, remember the film not the novel.
Then, again to be blunt, Hemingway really dried up. In fact he had pretty much dried up at the beginning of the 1930s after A Farewell To Arms. Much of his work published in that decade was collections of previously published
short stories, but he kept his name aflame by using his reputation and ‘name’ and negotiating a deal with a US magazine group to ‘cover the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda Vaill makes clear in her book Hotel Florida, Hemingway was getting a little desperate to keep his name in the lights. Here is a taste of his ‘war reporting’:
‘It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming into Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.’
Hmm. Doesn’t quite do it for me.
Ten years later, in 1950, he published another novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which — I haven’t myself read it and really don’t want to — was pretty much panned and is today, I imagine, only read by keen Phd students and nerds. Then, two year later, came The Old Man And The Sea, another ‘short novel’ — long short story is more accurate, but that, too, I haven’t read and really — well, you’re ahead of me.
And that, dear friends, was it. Oh, there’s the matter of his ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’, which is pretty inexplicable until you remember that one Bob Dylan was also awarded a ‘Nobel Prize of Literature’ which might indicate that the whole Nobel Prize thing is something of a racket.
NB I fully believe Dylan is a true one-off and deserves a Nobel Prize or equivalent, but what makes his award so farcical is that it should be ‘for Literature’. I suspect Dylan was equally bemused which, for me, explains his initial silence on the matter and his decision not to fuck off to Stockholm to receive it in person. I think — I believe he is an honest man — he was just downright embarrassed but was buggered that he would play the game. Me, if they offer me one, I’m refusing.
. . .
But what about all the acres of academic and literary criticism? Well, first of all I should point out that Hemingway is now old hat. The collection of essays I am reading is quite recent in terms of Hemigway research, but it is more than 32 years old. There are now plenty of other ‘new’ things to be getting on with. I mean even bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is old hat in 2019. And, no, I have read his work either and don’t want to. My policy is that there is plenty of good stuff which has stood the test of time which is there for me to read, more than enough of it, in fact, to last me until well after I am dead (though I did try Oliver Twist a while back and, er, wasn’t that fussed, though it was an early work and maybe later stuff is not quite as irritating).
As for the reputation, my, admittedly left-field explanation, is that it’s all rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather as there are precious few research grants available for anyone suggesting a project to show climate change is a load of old cack, for many years after World War II there was no kudos to be had be outlining why one Ernest Miller Hemingway, star of the modernist movement, stylistic innovator, mainstay for American literature, ‘one of the greats’ (John O’Hara who could write even called him the best writer since Shakespeare) was actually a man of straw and a nine-bob note.
Let me ask of you a favour: remind yourself of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and while it is fresh in your mind, read this paragraph again from the introduction to the book of essays. And when you have finished allow step to one side, as it were, and not take this literary guff at face value. Perhaps you might then see what I am getting at:
‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’
But — a huge ‘but’ — is it really likely that yours truly, a snotty-nosed cynic cast aside in deepest North Cornwall is right and an assortment of academics and critical literary types are wrong? Really? Come on, let’s get real. And yet, and yet...
I’ve just finished the introduction and will continue with the rest of the essays tomorrow, but let me cite just one passage which makes me wonder whether, however unlikely it might be, the world really is capable of disappearing up it own arse. Remember: my background is in newspapers, mainly as a sub, and I know — I know! — the kind of bullshit which can be produced to make white seem black and black seem like a stroll in the park. So let me cite this, from the end of Ms Linda Wagner-Martin’s introduction:
‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’
Sounds real doesn’t it? But is it? This is the same novel about which Hemingway’s sometime friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote (in a review of the novel when it came out):
‘Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [the novel] is a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.’
He also noted in that review that ‘it had been a mistake to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectation which were not met by the story that followed’. He is referring to the quote from Ecclesiastes which is used as a second epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’ quote.
Then there’s the verdict of Donald Ogden Stewart, who was of the party in the visit to Pamplona in 1925 who along with Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith, Hemingway based the fictioal character of Bill Gorton. Stewart was also no opinionated snotty-nosed cynic: he had published several books by the time he got to know Hemingway in Paris, had hinterland and became an Oscar-winning screenwriter (he wrote the script for The Philadelphia Story). After reading the novel, Stewart commented that ‘It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’ and added that ‘it didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’
So might be going in?
. . .
Putting forward my explanation — OK, putting forward a possible explanation — lays me wide open. I am no academic, not literary critic, no published author or poet, in fact, I have no obvious qualification at all for adding my two ha’porth worth. But I’m going to do so anyway (which is partly what writing this whole bloody thing — the ‘thing’ being how The Sun is not a masterpiece and Hemingway is not ‘a writer of genius’ — is all about). I think what happened is quite simple: Hemingway’s initial success and his subsequent reputation was the result of the confluence of a variety of often quite disparate factors: there was Hemingway himself, a complex man who believed himself to be something of a literary genius, who was ruthlessly ambitious bordering on being a sociopath, and who believed his own bullshit.
There were his various champions, who promoted him at difference times and for very different reasons and who each in some way or other furthered his career: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, most notably Scott Fitzgerald (who almost hero-worshipped Hemingway) and eventually his editor at his publishers Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins. Pertinently, Perkins had entered publishing through Scribner’s advertising department and seems to have had a healthy commercial instinct. That is a vital part of the Hemingway success story.
Then there was the time at which Hemingway (born in 1899) appeared on the literary scene: the post-World War I era (not, of course, then known as World War I — I thought I might alert one or two younger readers to that fact) when pretty much everything was up in the air and ‘modernism’ was all the rage. The ‘Great War’ (which, kiddiwinks, is what it was called at the time) was a watershed, possibly the mother of all watersheds to adopt a current cliche, and what folk wanted was ‘something different’. And they wanted it desperately.
The established authors — Henry James, John Galsworthy, DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton (who didn’t in fact pop her clogs until 1937) were very much ‘out’ and what the young folk wanted — as always — something ‘new’ and ‘different’. And Hemingway was certainly that. Different? Try reading some of his ‘lean, muscular prose’. It’s different all right, though — in my very humble view — not at all very good.
Perkins, he at Scribner’s with the commercial head who had already championed Fitzgerald by publishing Scott’s first novel This Side Of Paradise and his subsequent work (which, believe it or not were at the time regarded as ‘shocking’ — this was, remember, in only the second decade after the end of the Victorian Age and whatever it is called in the US) was more than ready to take a punt on Hemingway, and boy did it take off.
The Sun Also Rises sold steadily more and more copies, not least because Hemingway was marketed by Scribner’s as a new kind of author, a writer who was not some airy-fairy pale artistic pansy (the mention of which allows me
to post a picture of Reginald Bunthorne) but who was a wholesome he-man who could not only write (so the story went) but who also boxed, enjoyed bullfighting and eventually shot big game and all the other things which get you wondering what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. In marketing terms it was genius: his style and the writer were new, and new sells, sells, sells, and then sells, sells, sells some more (until something newer comes along, of course).
Here’s another taste of the kind of bull The Sun Also Rises elicited — this is from a review of the book in the New York Times in 1926:
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.
Surely after reading that, which on the face of it seems, well, fair enough, it is legitimate to ask: what exactly does ‘more literary English’ have to feel ashamed about? Well, nothing, really. That quote is just a snippet of the acres of newspaper bullshit churned out daily which, in Hemingway’s case, did him a great favour.
Three years later Hemingway published his second (third) novel, A Farewell To Arms and that, too, sold like hotcakes. But although he carried on selling stories to some magazines, to be blunt that was the sum of his novelistic output. What about To Have And Have Not? you ask, and For Whom The Bell Tolls? Well, yes and no. To Have And Have Not (1937) was more a novella, a short story on steroids and didn’t sell particularly well at all. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) was done a favour by Hollywood who turned it into a film starring Gary Cooper and I would bet my bottom dollar that those who still remember the work, remember the film not the novel.
Then, again to be blunt, Hemingway really dried up. In fact he had pretty much dried up at the beginning of the 1930s after A Farewell To Arms. Much of his work published in that decade was collections of previously published
short stories, but he kept his name aflame by using his reputation and ‘name’ and negotiating a deal with a US magazine group to ‘cover the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda Vaill makes clear in her book Hotel Florida, Hemingway was getting a little desperate to keep his name in the lights. Here is a taste of his ‘war reporting’:
‘It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming into Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.’
Hmm. Doesn’t quite do it for me.
Ten years later, in 1950, he published another novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which — I haven’t myself read it and really don’t want to — was pretty much panned and is today, I imagine, only read by keen Phd students and nerds. Then, two year later, came The Old Man And The Sea, another ‘short novel’ — long short story is more accurate, but that, too, I haven’t read and really — well, you’re ahead of me.
And that, dear friends, was it. Oh, there’s the matter of his ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’, which is pretty inexplicable until you remember that one Bob Dylan was also awarded a ‘Nobel Prize of Literature’ which might indicate that the whole Nobel Prize thing is something of a racket.
NB I fully believe Dylan is a true one-off and deserves a Nobel Prize or equivalent, but what makes his award so farcical is that it should be ‘for Literature’. I suspect Dylan was equally bemused which, for me, explains his initial silence on the matter and his decision not to fuck off to Stockholm to receive it in person. I think — I believe he is an honest man — he was just downright embarrassed but was buggered that he would play the game. Me, if they offer me one, I’m refusing.
. . .
But what about all the acres of academic and literary criticism? Well, first of all I should point out that Hemingway is now old hat. The collection of essays I am reading is quite recent in terms of Hemigway research, but it is more than 32 years old. There are now plenty of other ‘new’ things to be getting on with. I mean even bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is old hat in 2019. And, no, I have read his work either and don’t want to. My policy is that there is plenty of good stuff which has stood the test of time which is there for me to read, more than enough of it, in fact, to last me until well after I am dead (though I did try Oliver Twist a while back and, er, wasn’t that fussed, though it was an early work and maybe later stuff is not quite as irritating).
As for the reputation, my, admittedly left-field explanation, is that it’s all rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather as there are precious few research grants available for anyone suggesting a project to show climate change is a load of old cack, for many years after World War II there was no kudos to be had be outlining why one Ernest Miller Hemingway, star of the modernist movement, stylistic innovator, mainstay for American literature, ‘one of the greats’ (John O’Hara who could write even called him the best writer since Shakespeare) was actually a man of straw and a nine-bob note.
Let me ask of you a favour: remind yourself of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and while it is fresh in your mind, read this paragraph again from the introduction to the book of essays. And when you have finished allow step to one side, as it were, and not take this literary guff at face value. Perhaps you might then see what I am getting at:
‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’
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