Well, that’s silly: I decided that my main blog was too public for me to record more private things, so I started this one. But I made the mistake — an odd mistake if you think about it — of giving it labels. Now as labels are intended to allow folk to use a search engine to find your blog, but as it was intended for my eyes only, that was not thought through. As it happened only one other person (or, I suppose, a bot) found it, but that person/bot returned again and again. I think he/she/it resides in Portugal or at least that’s what one aspect of the stats told me.
I began to feel a little hemmed in and unable to record private stuff, so I ended that blog, too, except that I didn’t. I started yet a third blog, amended the blog pic to say ‘adieu’, then carried on posting to the wrong blog. Most recently I’ve realised that even without all that crap the ‘private’ blog could and can be easily found by anyone viewing my ‘profile’ where all my blogs are listed. As I say, silly, so now, well what the hell.
. . .
It would be nice to write privately but it doesn’t seem I shall be able to. I can always — well, could always — come up with a new Google identity and use that to start a blog with, but, really, what the hell. There’s nothing I would put in it which would be that embarrassing.
As it is I’ve been feeling oddly low for a few weeks. It is better now, thought not completely cleared up and I think it had more to do with some kind of bug or cold or virus than anything else. I seem to think it started in the last few days at Marianne’s in Heinitzpolder, but whether it did or not, the left side of my head began hurting, but I could work out whether it was muscular or the skin or inside my head. I also had a continual low-grade headache (and still have something along those lines, but really not half as bad).
Feeling low, I also admitted to myself that I don’t, at the moment, like being 70. For that is what I am. It’s odd: at 11.59 on November 20 I was 69 and didn’t give a flying fuck and certainly didn’t feel old. A minute later I was 70 and although still didn’t feel ‘old’, I certainly felt sidelined in an odd way. It also has something to do with ‘being retired’, which, unless you, too, ‘are retired’ is almost impossible to describe to someone else. Thankfully, those who ‘are retired’ and to whom I have mentioned it know exactly what I am talking about, and it is also a certain comfort that they, too, feel it.
. . .
Been getting one with writing this Hemingway project, though it has boiled down to working at different aspects at the same time. While in Germany I was getting down a piece — I’ve decided that best format would be a series of semi-autonomous ‘essays’ covering different aspects of what interests me — on the old fraud’s personality and health, both physical and mental. Today I began reading what all the pieces I have so far written, or better all the pieces of the pieces I have so far written, just so I have an overview. And as always I sidetrack myself by re-writing as I read. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does slow down progress.
I’m also carrying on with the reading and am halfway through Carols Baker’s biography, and today Kenneth Lynn’s arrived so that will be next. I’ve also got to re-read (I’ve decided) the one about Hemingway by Leonard Jeffs. If I remember it was a good and entertaining read, but find I remember more of what I have read the second time around. Then, damn it, then I’ve finally got to get down to reading A Farewell To Arms which I am not looking forward to.
Today I read his story God Rest You Merry, Gentleman (the comma being in that place on purpose I think, although why I do no know) which was OK, though no great shakes, and then some cock-eyed commentary on it which, as far as I am concerned, typified that tendency to analyse to fuck a piece of writing for no very good reason.
This guy, some kraut called Horst Herman Kruse from the University of Münster believes there are significant allusions to The Merchant of Venice and that the piece is intended as a satire/condemnation of Christian hypocrisy and, on a personal level for Hemingway, an apologia for his anti-semitism. Well, who knows? Might well be the case. But what is noticeable is how every possible piece of ‘evidence’ to proof a particular thesis is able to be bent into place to make the case convincing. Here’s an example:
There are two doctors on duty in a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day, one, a Doc Fischer, is Jewish and the other, Doctor Wilcox, is a gentile. So far so good. But Doc Fischer, the Jew, is described as ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth’ whereas it is the other doctor, the gentile, who is short and dark. Odd you might think, but Herr Kruse is not to be outplayed and says Hemingway is making a point by going against our stereotypes. Kruse writes:
Hemingway’s description of Doc Fischer as ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth, amused eyes and gambler’s hands’, for instance, breaks up a traditional stereotype. In fact, as the story progresses and the Jewish doctor is set up as its true moral center, the portrait of his perspicacity and humanity might be viewed as an attempt on Hemingway’s part to atone for his former anti-Semitism.
Well, perhaps. And there again, perhaps not. Who knows? Did Hemingway really mean that?
Kruse also sees a connection between Doctor Wilcox, who is not a good doctor and who might well soon be responsible for a young lad’s death and is, apparently sarcastically — although this is not clear, either — referred to by Doc Fischer as ‘the good physician’ (the line is ‘‘The good physician here. Doctor Wilcox, my colleague, was on call and he was unable to find this emergency listed in his book’ and you might agree the phrase might well simply have been a conventional usage) and the Good Samaritan of Luke’s gospel.
Sorry, I hear you asking? Ah, you see, Kruse, suggests the comparison between Doctor Wilcox, who is not a Good Samaritan and who had the day before given the lad who might now die short-shrift, and the Good Samaritan is ironic. Well, again, perhaps. And perhaps not. Who knows? You can’t win.
I have come across this kind of things quite often in the past two years while tracking stuff down on the internet: academics finding all kinds of meaning and significance here, there and everywhere. For example, Hemingway begins his story by saying that Kansas City (where he was a trainee reporter for six and a half months) reminds him of Constantinople (which he visited while living in Paris and freelancing for the Toronto Star when asked to report on the Greco-Turkish war in 1922). Fair enough, you might say, but for Kruse and others, the comparison is also significant — though, dammit! they can’t quite work out why.
If you are interested (well, someone might be) here is a link to the story — don’t worry, it’s not very long — and the piece my Herr Kruse.
Me, I have to tread carefully. I really don’t want to slip into an old gammon’s ’s’all stuff ’n nonsense’ pose (I fucking 70 now, remember, and there are such banana skins everywhere) but I would very much like to take a more grounded view of Hemingway’s work than much of what I have come across. I mean, The Sun Also Rises, is still touted as a portrayal of a ‘lost generation’ who can think of no more to do with their lives than drink and shag their way through their despair. To which one can only add ‘up to a point, Lord Copper’.
But there I must end it because I have been watching Ken Burns documentary on Jazz (called, would you believe Jazz) and I want to watch the next instalment.
Tuesday, 18 February 2020
Sunday, 16 February 2020
A little treat (to keep the pot boiling and to cover my arse)
I’ve been busy with a lot of reading to get this Hemingway bollocks finished — I don’t want to start anything else until I do or it will fall by the wayside and sit on my conscience until the day I breathe my last — and also some writing.
In order to clear my head on what I am trying to do and regain some kind of oversight, I’ve slightly re-written what will become the preface to the piece I am writing. And as I am getting a little lax about posting entries here, I thought I might keep that particular pot boiling by posting that preface. It is pretty much in its final shape, though as I am a terrible tinkerer (those bloody commas!) I won’t claim that this is the final shape.
Pip, pip.
PS I get virtually no comments left on my blog except the occasional one from B. and P., but in this case, with this entry, I would very much appreciate feedback of all and every kind. I mean my view is that comments such as ‘this is a piece of unreadable, self-indulgent cack’ are, at the end of the day, far more useful (if reasons are given) than ‘brilliant!’, ‘astonishing!’, ‘I was and still am breathless with admiration!’ So don’t hold back.
THIS essay/critique/monograph/project — call it what you will — began life as an entry intended for my blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t even remember why I even thought about doing so — I had read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and when I had finished it, I was baffled that the blurb on the back of my paperback edition described it as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. It and he, I thought, seemed to be anything but.
I was, however, aware that my scepticism of Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ was definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still widely regarded by many as ‘a
leading modernist writer’, ‘a stylistic innovator’ and, most dangerously for an apostate such as me, ‘one of the greatest American writers’. Was it really likely that most of the world — several biographers, academics in their hundreds and notably the Nobel Prize committee which had awarded Hemingway the prize of literature in 1954 — were wrong in their evaluation of the man and his work, and that I was right?
Intrigued and not a little concerned that I was risking making a fool of myself, I scoured the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view, and almost immediately I came across reviews of a book published in 2016 by the New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
It was a serendipitous find: well-researched, extensively annotated, well-written and — not at all least — very entertaining, Ms Blume’s book gave a full account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris in the 1920s and of the week-long trip to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in 1925 upon which he based his novel. Pertinently it provided all the details and more for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises. Incidentally, I was amused and rather pleased to see that the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is entitled Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf.
The main title simply translates, as one might expect, as ‘Everybody Behaves Badly’; but tellingly the subtitle in English translates as ‘How Hemingway Created His Legend’, an insight by the German publisher which reflects one of the conclusions I have come to. In fact, this project is essentially about the Hemingway legend and how he
actively created it. (Although Ms Blume’s book refers to The Sun Also Rises as ‘Hemingway’s masterpiece’, I suspect that was her publisher’s choice of words, given that in her book and its account of Hemingway and the genesis of his novel, Ms Blume herself seems rather less adulatory.)
As I read Ms Blume’s book, I realised I had a problem: she referenced the several biographies of Hemingway and other books about the man, and I increasingly felt that to do justice to both my project and the man, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway’ — notably, if rather ludicrously, proclaimed in 1950 (in a New York Times review of Across The River And Into The Hills) by a fellow novelist and a literary rival, John O’Hara, as ‘the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ — and a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize, I would do well to tread carefully. So knowing far more about the man and his work — including reading more of it — seemed not just necessary but a wise course to take.
The books I read included most of the biographies. The first of these to be published, in 1967 just six years after Hemingway’s death, was by Carlos Baker. He had been sanctioned by Hemingway as his ‘official biographer’ and he had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow. But having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword. As Baker found in his research, Hemingway, a complex character, could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and thoroughly dishonest — but, as subsequent writers have acknowledged, Baker had to tread carefully: Welsh had already taken one writer to court over his memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost) and he wanted to ensure her continued help.
Baker’s volume was the definitive work for 18 years until Jeffrey Meyers published his biography in 1985. Two years later, in 1987, came the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work and Kenneth Lynn’s take on Hemingway, and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography. By the time they were writing, Hemingway’s work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of Hemingway, both the man and his work, than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.)
I did not bother reading Philip Young’s biography, which was written while Hemingway was still alive or A. E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I gather, were distinctly hagiographic and took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ all the tall stories and lies Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway in makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is more of a coffee-table book for which he did no original research. Then there’s a curious volume by Richard Bradford, published in 2019), which is notable for its outright hostility to Hemingway (and, I have to add, extremely poor editing.
Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway’s women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied on not just the emotional support of his wives but in two cases also their money. Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparatively slim volumes on the writer by Linda Wagner-Martin and Verna Kale, books on the man and his writing by Peter Griffin and Charles
A Fenton, and The Second Flowering, Malcolm Cowley’s volume of essays (which include two on Hemingway). From my point of view, Leonard J. Leff’s rather luridly titled Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and The Making Of American Celebrity Culture was especially interesting. It examines the growth of celebrity and pop culture in 1920s ‘jazz age’ America as well as developments in advertising and marketing, and how Ernest Hemingway and his literary career benefited from them.
The more I read and, as work on my project progressed (I had by then already written just under 15,000 words, much of which, it dawned on me, was junk), I also realised that given the standing Hemingway had, and for many still has, in modern literature, I would have to do more than simply examine The Sun Also Rises and question why it was and still is hailed as ‘a masterpiece’. It seemed to me that the central conundrum was: just how and why did Hemingway, essentially a middling writer of some talent but no more than others, reach such extraordinary worldwide prominence?
. . .
In the course of his writing career, roughly just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — perhaps even, compared to other writers, surprisingly little; and despite the acclamation his early work met, even by the mid-1930s, with the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) some critics were beginning to have their doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier. It was summed up well by Matthew J. 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.’
With the exception of For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), which became a bestseller, not least because in the US it was chosen as a Book Of The Month, and 12 years later The Old Man And The Sea, another commercial success, not least because it was published in its entirety by Life magazine in an edition which sold more than five million copies, Hemingway’s scant work from the 1930 on (much of it published posthumously) was regarded as not very good at all. Writing in the New York Times in September 1950, about Across The River And Into The Trees (which, inexplicably, so impressed John O’Hara) the Times former literary editor and by now columnist J. Donald Adams, confessed:
‘To me, Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.’
Hemingway’s one-time friend the novelist John Dos Passos was even more brutal. He observed in a letter to a friend:
‘How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?’
My project took shape: it was no longer to investigate why The Sun Also Rises was and still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and, on the strength of it, Hemingway hailed as ‘a genius’; I would examine not just aspects of Hemingway, his writing and his rise to worldwide fame, but other issues which obliquely touched on them.
I suppose it would be best to view this project as a series of individual essays. One of these considers, on the back of Virginia Woolf’s pithy remarks about critics (as part of her review of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories), whether objective judgment of a piece of writing is even possible. Another looks at Hemingway’s writing ‘style’, his ‘iceberg theory’ of writing and why, exactly, it is celebrated and regarded — not
least by Hemingway — as an ‘innovation’. A third considers the commercial background and imperatives which helped to ensure Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel became success. I also wonder why Hemingway is still touted as ‘a modernist’ writer, why and how the myth took hold that The Sun Also Rises portrayed the despair of a ‘lost generation’, and I consider the force of his personality on his rise to fame.
Interspersed with these short pieces are accounts of Hemingway’s life, mainly of the early years in Paris and a little later in the 1930s when his fame was consolidated and he began to play the part of ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the celebrated hard-drinking, hard-living, action man writer. Incidentally, the sobriquet ‘Papa’ was self-awarded by Hemingway by the mid-1920s and he encouraged everyone to address him with the name, but no one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it. I have not done any original research, but I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have any of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth. All the views expressed here are my own.
When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following two observations. The first is from Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers:
‘No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.’
Then there is the comment by Michael Reynolds made in Hemingway: The Paris Years, the second volume of his five-volume biography:
‘Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
In order to clear my head on what I am trying to do and regain some kind of oversight, I’ve slightly re-written what will become the preface to the piece I am writing. And as I am getting a little lax about posting entries here, I thought I might keep that particular pot boiling by posting that preface. It is pretty much in its final shape, though as I am a terrible tinkerer (those bloody commas!) I won’t claim that this is the final shape.
Pip, pip.
PS I get virtually no comments left on my blog except the occasional one from B. and P., but in this case, with this entry, I would very much appreciate feedback of all and every kind. I mean my view is that comments such as ‘this is a piece of unreadable, self-indulgent cack’ are, at the end of the day, far more useful (if reasons are given) than ‘brilliant!’, ‘astonishing!’, ‘I was and still am breathless with admiration!’ So don’t hold back.
PREFACE
THIS essay/critique/monograph/project — call it what you will — began life as an entry intended for my blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t even remember why I even thought about doing so — I had read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and when I had finished it, I was baffled that the blurb on the back of my paperback edition described it as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’. It and he, I thought, seemed to be anything but.
Certainly the novel wasn’t bad and, certainly, the claim owed a great deal to publishers’ hyperbole, puffing up a product to ensure greater sales. But that notwithstanding, it was certainly, in my view, no ‘masterpiece’, and to describe Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’ was and is frankly ridiculous.
I was, however, aware that my scepticism of Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ was definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still widely regarded by many as ‘a
Intrigued and not a little concerned that I was risking making a fool of myself, I scoured the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view, and almost immediately I came across reviews of a book published in 2016 by the New York writer and journalist Lesley M. M. Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
It was a serendipitous find: well-researched, extensively annotated, well-written and — not at all least — very entertaining, Ms Blume’s book gave a full account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris in the 1920s and of the week-long trip to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in 1925 upon which he based his novel. Pertinently it provided all the details and more for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises. Incidentally, I was amused and rather pleased to see that the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is entitled Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf.
The main title simply translates, as one might expect, as ‘Everybody Behaves Badly’; but tellingly the subtitle in English translates as ‘How Hemingway Created His Legend’, an insight by the German publisher which reflects one of the conclusions I have come to. In fact, this project is essentially about the Hemingway legend and how he
As I read Ms Blume’s book, I realised I had a problem: she referenced the several biographies of Hemingway and other books about the man, and I increasingly felt that to do justice to both my project and the man, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway’ — notably, if rather ludicrously, proclaimed in 1950 (in a New York Times review of Across The River And Into The Hills) by a fellow novelist and a literary rival, John O’Hara, as ‘the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ — and a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize, I would do well to tread carefully. So knowing far more about the man and his work — including reading more of it — seemed not just necessary but a wise course to take.
The books I read included most of the biographies. The first of these to be published, in 1967 just six years after Hemingway’s death, was by Carlos Baker. He had been sanctioned by Hemingway as his ‘official biographer’ and he had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow. But having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword. As Baker found in his research, Hemingway, a complex character, could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and thoroughly dishonest — but, as subsequent writers have acknowledged, Baker had to tread carefully: Welsh had already taken one writer to court over his memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost) and he wanted to ensure her continued help.
Baker’s volume was the definitive work for 18 years until Jeffrey Meyers published his biography in 1985. Two years later, in 1987, came the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work and Kenneth Lynn’s take on Hemingway, and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography. By the time they were writing, Hemingway’s work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of Hemingway, both the man and his work, than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.)
I did not bother reading Philip Young’s biography, which was written while Hemingway was still alive or A. E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I gather, were distinctly hagiographic and took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ all the tall stories and lies Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway in makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is more of a coffee-table book for which he did no original research. Then there’s a curious volume by Richard Bradford, published in 2019), which is notable for its outright hostility to Hemingway (and, I have to add, extremely poor editing.
Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway’s women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied on not just the emotional support of his wives but in two cases also their money. Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparatively slim volumes on the writer by Linda Wagner-Martin and Verna Kale, books on the man and his writing by Peter Griffin and Charles
The more I read and, as work on my project progressed (I had by then already written just under 15,000 words, much of which, it dawned on me, was junk), I also realised that given the standing Hemingway had, and for many still has, in modern literature, I would have to do more than simply examine The Sun Also Rises and question why it was and still is hailed as ‘a masterpiece’. It seemed to me that the central conundrum was: just how and why did Hemingway, essentially a middling writer of some talent but no more than others, reach such extraordinary worldwide prominence?
. . .
In the course of his writing career, roughly just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — perhaps even, compared to other writers, surprisingly little; and despite the acclamation his early work met, even by the mid-1930s, with the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) some critics were beginning to have their doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier. It was summed up well by Matthew J. 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.’
With the exception of For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), which became a bestseller, not least because in the US it was chosen as a Book Of The Month, and 12 years later The Old Man And The Sea, another commercial success, not least because it was published in its entirety by Life magazine in an edition which sold more than five million copies, Hemingway’s scant work from the 1930 on (much of it published posthumously) was regarded as not very good at all. Writing in the New York Times in September 1950, about Across The River And Into The Trees (which, inexplicably, so impressed John O’Hara) the Times former literary editor and by now columnist J. Donald Adams, confessed:
‘To me, Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.’
Hemingway’s one-time friend the novelist John Dos Passos was even more brutal. He observed in a letter to a friend:
‘How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?’
My project took shape: it was no longer to investigate why The Sun Also Rises was and still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and, on the strength of it, Hemingway hailed as ‘a genius’; I would examine not just aspects of Hemingway, his writing and his rise to worldwide fame, but other issues which obliquely touched on them.
I suppose it would be best to view this project as a series of individual essays. One of these considers, on the back of Virginia Woolf’s pithy remarks about critics (as part of her review of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories), whether objective judgment of a piece of writing is even possible. Another looks at Hemingway’s writing ‘style’, his ‘iceberg theory’ of writing and why, exactly, it is celebrated and regarded — not
Interspersed with these short pieces are accounts of Hemingway’s life, mainly of the early years in Paris and a little later in the 1930s when his fame was consolidated and he began to play the part of ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the celebrated hard-drinking, hard-living, action man writer. Incidentally, the sobriquet ‘Papa’ was self-awarded by Hemingway by the mid-1920s and he encouraged everyone to address him with the name, but no one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it. I have not done any original research, but I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have any of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth. All the views expressed here are my own.
When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following two observations. The first is from Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers:
‘No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.’
Then there is the comment by Michael Reynolds made in Hemingway: The Paris Years, the second volume of his five-volume biography:
‘Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
Saturday, 8 February 2020
To be blunt, I'm a bit put out. I don't do this for fun, you know, or rarely. OK, sometimes, but just sometimes . . . OK, quite often, but don’t take me for granted. Roll up, roll up and get your friends to do the same
And that includes all the spooks or whoever who regularly drop from Turkey, Russia and North Korea, undoubtedly because the far distant pass I made a few uncomplimentary remarks about Erdogan, Putin and Kim Whatever. They, or perhaps their bots, still drop by and although their visits aren’t recorded in the stats, that they visited is recorded under the ‘audience’ figure. But apart from that, hardly no one.
You might think it odd that I should be put out that this blog is not attracting as many readers as once it seems to
Perhaps you guys would be queuing up to read my latest pontifications if I bothered to pass on my take on coronavirus, or the latest Brexit situation, or Philip Schofield coming out as gay, or tawdry political set-up in Thuringia, or why does the Mail hate ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ so much?
But, sadly, I don’t have a take on coronavirus, Brexit must now be left to fester in peace for at least six months until the ‘trade’ negotiations get underway in anger, I don’t give a flying fuck about Philip Schofield, I don’t understand the political shenanigans in Thuringia so can’t really comment (who said ‘never before stopped you laying it on with a trowel?) and the campaign against ‘Harry ’n Meghan’, otherwise a huge yawn as are ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ is down to one thing: Meghan is taking the Mail on Sunday to court over a breach of copyright (‘alleged’ breach of copyright? A fuck it). The word is — I read somewhere — that Associated Newspapers who publish the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have been told by their lawyers that they don’t have a leg to stand on and are resorting to getting ‘their retaliation in first’. Also ‘the Royals’ sell papers and as that is the game AN are in . . .
As for the coronavirus, well it’s another great story while it still only affects China and despite ‘alarming’ claims that ‘three people have been taken ill in Britain’ we are, still, very much in the clear. What is worth pointing out is that we don’t really know much about the virus or how ‘deadly it is’. Yes, some people have died, but as, in China, as of today 724 people have died from an estimated 35,000 infected (and many of those previously infected might now be better again) which makes a mortality rate of just over 2pc it’s all a tad disappointing for the British tabloids who want death, death, death to make it all worthwhile.
Now if ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ were to contract it and even die — red-top seventh heaven! That would be especially true at Northcliffe Towers, 2 Derry St., London W8 5TT if Meghan were to croak because not only would the lawsuit would bite the dust, but, additionally, it would the ‘Harry ’n Meghan’ sage legs in legions of Glenda Slaggs churning
But now, sob, she’s dead (and here’s what she was wearing on her deathbed, all shit-hot fashion items clones of which you can all pick up for around £9.99 at Next, Top Shop, Miss Seflfridge and elsewhere. (I might be a little out of date on those names, by the way, because immensely to my credit I take little interest in fashion and even less in what young gals choose to wear these days.)
As for Brexit, it has occurred to that, obliquely the coronavirus outbreak might queer things for the Johnson and the British government. Here’s why: in Hubei province where Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak sits, but also elsewhere factories have been shut down to minimise the chances of folk catching the virus. People have also been told to stay indoors. There was even a report that the lifts have been turned off in high-rise living blocks to encourage people to stay in. I mean if nipping out for 20 Benson & Hedges involves walking down 30 flights of stairs and, even worse on the way back, climbing 40 flights of stairs — there are always more when you climb stairs — you might seriously consider again trying to knock smoking on the head.
There have, here in Britain already been several reports that companies are facing severe parts supply difficulties if these are sourced in China. The larger, richer companies (as well, as I should think smaller, less rich but wiser companies) had contingency plans to obtain supplies so production could go on, but others might well also have to shut up shop until parts start arriving again.
This would not be good news at the best of times but now that Britain is gearing up to strike the trade deals of the century, it doesn’t help that it’s biggest trading partners are either doing badly or so pissed off with Britain that they are reluctant to play ball: China is in the shit and could sink deeper in the shit; and the EU and the US are
Another knock-on from a situation where the coronavirus could hit the Chinese economy is if it also affected world trade. That’s the thing with having a global trade network: we all benefit but when the shit hits the fan, we all share in that shit. That is, of course, all just speculation, being ‘just speculation’ doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
But never mind, spring is on its way, the clocks go forward in seven weeks, the weather can now only get warmer and I have been getting more writing done. As for the latest on Philip Schofield, I’m afraid you will have to look elsewhere.
Pip, pip.
Thursday, 23 January 2020
Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland
Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actually taken just two days ago. They are all of East Frisia/Ostfriesland, the part of North-West Germany I am in for the next two weeks (and have already been here for two weeks). I hope you like them. The church is in a tiny hamlet called Marienchor.
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Do we actually need writers? And here’s the question: did Wimsatt and Beardsley, and Roland Barthes (who has to be French with a name like that) work as hard was Ernest Miller Hemingway? I bet they did. And I bet they didn’t bullshit quite as much, either
A few years ago, the following occurred to me (and I shall stick to the art of writing rather than any other art to try to avoid muddying the waters, but essentially what I say I think holds true for the music and the plastic arts).
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
little? Even the greatest Hemingway aficionado might agree that the amount of work he produced for his first commercial publication In Our Time (upper case initial letters), much of which had previously appeared in in our time (lower case initial letters) was decidedly slim.
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
I can’t remember the sequence by which I came to this thought. In fact, I can’t even remember when it occurred to me. (NB Unlike so many who like to lay down the law and pronounce that ‘this is’, what I am about to write is by way of merely being a suggestion of how we might view something, a suggested different perspective as when we consider what an object is we are apt to pick it up and look at it from different angles).
It struck me that when we read fiction (and here I am talking about fiction which treats the reader as though the reader has a mind and uses that mind to engage actively with what she or he is reading, not Da Vinci Code bollocks — and, no, I haven’t read it, so, yes, I am not qualified to regard it as literary cack of the first order, so chalk up two Brownie points of the thought crossed your mind), we sometimes come across a thought or notion which is not ‘new’ to us, but which is articulated in a way we ourselves would be unable to articulate.
It’s why we recognise it: we are already familiar with it, though in ourselves it has never been a defined ‘thought’. Instead it was more of a ‘feeling’, or perhaps something in that vague middle-ground where ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ meet and are neither one nor the other. (Similarly, perhaps, like me you ‘understand’ something — what is going on in a situation or a theory you have come across, for example, but would be more than hard-pushed to pass on to anyone else your ‘understanding’, so pragmatically you assume you haven’t really ‘understood’ it though . . .
Sounds familiar? I hope so, because I can’t otherwise explain it.)
Then, on paper, some writer — in whatever way she or he might — lays it out, articulates it, defines it in a way we ourselves can’t. To try to give an example, I doubt whether anyone reading or watching Othello will fully understand his irrational, green and ultimately murderous jealousy unless she or he has themselves felt such made jealousy (which I’m prepared to believe is every adult alive today).
In the sense in which I am writing, the writer is not so much an ‘originator’ but an ‘interpreter’, and ‘articulator’, even (though it’s a bloody ugly word, so don’t take me to task) a ‘conveyor’, putting into words what we, ourselves (the reader) ‘understand’ and have perhaps for some time, but can’t ourselves put into words.
Just how my suggestion might be applied to music and the plastic arts I really don’t know, so rather than make a pretentious tit of myself, I shall leave well alone and not go down that road.
. . .
The above occurred to me while I was reading Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death Of The Author — and, I now hear you say, ‘whoa, hold on, this is a common or garden blog, not a Sussex University seminar!’ Well, I hadn’t (I must admit) heard about the essay until yesterday, although I had heard of Roland Barthes. But I knew little about him, and I assumed he was just another of those tricksy Frogs who are apt to make us meat ’n potatoes Brits move smartly in the opposite direction, one of those tricksy frogs (French friends and readers look away now) who will intellectualise and analyse to death pretty much anything and everything from saying your own name to writing a shopping list and taking a dump, then publish it to great acclaim and wonder.
If we humans do it, they will obfuscate it: that’s more or less the routine, they’re built that way (and is my slip showing?). That was Barthes, I thought. (Michel Foucault is another name reliably able to strike terror into the soul of most stout-hearted Brits. What is it with these Frenchmen and women? Why can’t they simply boil all vegetables to death like the rest of us? I ask you!)
I can’t even remember what I was reading when I came across a reference to the essay, but it — especially the name, The Death Of The Author — was what caught my attention. I was (and am while her in Germany) working on this interminable project of mine about Hemingway, his pretty ordinary writing and his extraordinary rise to fame, and one thing I mention in it in several places is another essay about literature. It was — and still is — called The Intentional Fallacy and is by two US academics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and was published in 1946 as part of the then ‘new criticism’ movement in literary criticism (now no doubt old hat and superseded, as is the way, but some new movement).
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s idea repeats (what I understand to be — I’m very careful here not to pretend I know more than I do) one of the central ideas of new criticism, that an author’s ‘intent’ is irrelevant to evaluating her or his work. They were discussing poetry, but I can’t see why the view can’t be extrapolated to include prose writing.
In The Death Of The Author Barthes says, although he was writing 21 years later, more or less the same thing or, at least, something related: to the existence of a piece of writing the ‘author’ is irrelevant. The piece exists entirely on its own and has an existence wholly separate from its ‘creator’ (my word). That is not quite what Wimsatt and Beardsley were suggesting, but to me it seems essentially to be the same point: a poem, story, play or novel can only be evaluated as itself and nothing else. Details of what the author intended the work to do (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or biographical details about the author, or any other details extraneous to the work (Barthes), are irrelevant: a work stands or falls on its own.
Though my knowledge of literary criticism and its history could be written on the back of a small postage stamp (and I am careful to try not to give the impression I think otherwise), I must say that when a year or two ago I went into The Intentional Fallacy a little deeper (I first came across the term and its thesis at Dundee and vaguely knew about it and suspected it might be relevant to what I wanted to say about Hemingway and his work) I was attracted to it. Quite why I don’t know, but it might be worth admitting that temperamentally I rather take against all the ‘art is sacred’ crap and insistence that we should (it seems to me) genuflect before ‘the artist’ as something ‘greater’. Folks who do so might deny it but it does seem to happen quite a bit. So in that regard, the central thrust of The Intentional Fallacy and The Death Of The Author metaphorically solely putting the work itself on stage and leaving the ‘author’ outside in the foyer with the raincoats (or even having a crafty fag outside in the car park) is far more to my taste.
. . .
So far I have read several biographies about the old phoney (my description, other descriptions are available) and I am struck by how quite often the biographers speculate and write almost as fact what was — or, a favourite phrase they use — ‘might have been going on’ in Hemingway’s head. What is also noticeable is that once you have read more than one biography, you come across the same old anecdotes again and again. You might wonder why I mention it — surely, you ask, that is a given if these are incidents in Hemingway’s life? — but my point is that quite often, surprisingly often, in fact, the telling of those anecdotes are strangely similar.
I haven’t bothered with Carlos Baker’s or Philip Young’s because those were written very soon after Hemingway’s death (in fact, Young’s was written while he was still alive) or A.E. Hotchner’s memoir. Hotchner seems to have been something of a hanger-on, although this was encouraged by Hemingway who couldn’t do without an audience for his increasingly tall tales (I’ve mentioned quite a few here I think). From what I gather (from reading later biogs) all three are rather to hagiographic, especially Hotchner who from most accounts comes across as something of an arse-licker, again something Hemingway will have appreciated.
The later biogs — by Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow and the five volume work by Michael Reynolds as well as Verna Kale — sound a more sceptical note and don’t, thank the Lord, take on trust all the crap Hemingway put out there about himself. (The guy was an extraordinary braggart and, as he got older, outright liar.)
Here’s a good example: in December 1922 Hemingway was in Lausanne reporting on the peace conference and, according to Hemingway, a fellow journalist had shown an interest in his fiction and wanted to see more. Hadley as due to join him there, but her departure was postponed because she had the ’flu, and when she finally went, she packed almost all the work he had so far completed (several stories and a novel in progress) into a valise to take with her. While waiting for her train to depart from the Gare de Lyon, she left her suitcase and the valise in her compartment while she went of to get a bottle of water. When she got back her suitcase was still there, but the valise was gone.
The accepted tale in most biographies simply repeats Hemingway’s account that when Hadley arrived and told him the bad news, he almost immediately took a train to Paris to see if there was some way he could track down the stolen valise and spent the next three days doing so. The visit also, he says, took in a meal with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at which they tried to console him over his loss. His search proving fruitless, however, he returned to Lausanne. All fine and dandy, and a great anecdote underlining the dedication of a single-minded writer concerned solely with ‘his art’ (the kind of image Hemingway liked to portray). Except, according to Reynolds, it just isn’t true.
Unlike the other biographers, Reynolds took the trouble to do a bit of sleuthing, comparing dates in personal diaries and letters, and discovering that not only could Hemingway not have had a meal with Stein and Toklas (because they weren’t in Paris in December and didn’t return (from their place in the country) until the spring but that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until January 1923, with Hadley.
Reynolds wrote his biography in five volumes and in the introduction to the second (Hemingway: The Paris Years), he makes a point of stressing that he chose not to include in ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life which he could not verify independently. That doesn’t necessarily imply they weren’t true, but he doesn’t include any claims made solely by Hemingway. And one such claim is that he rented a garret room in a house (some accounts say an hotel) at no 39 rue Descartes (alternatively the rue Mouffetard, depending upon your source) to do his writing because the flat in which he and Hadley lived was too cramped. A telling touch is that according to Hemingway the Decadent poet Paul Verlaine died in the same house (or the same room, again depending upon your source) 25 years earlier.
The problem is that Hemingway is the sole source for the ‘fact’ that he did rent a garret room there (and, as I say, it could well be true). He wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast but there is no other record of his doing so. Oh, and according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Verlaine-Paul Verlaine died ‘in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings’ and according to a piece in the New York Times or his ‘shabby two-room lodgings’ according to other sources.
Of course, all three could be the same building, but my point is that it all somehow simply burgeons Hemingway’s artistic credentials. And it is difficult to square that claim — that because his flat was too cramped he felt obliged to rent a room elsewhere in which to write — with his other claims that he wrote in bed of a morning and/or that he spent his time writing in cafes. All accounts sound suitably romantic, but all accounts somehow don’t gell. Call me an old cynic, but . . .
I have also wondered, although this is not a point I have come across anywhere in any biography why, for a man who spent says he spent a great deal of time ‘working hard’ in those early years in Paris he produced so bloody
As a guy who in 44 years working as a hack, first as a reporter then as a sub-editor, finds it comparatively easy to deal with words, it’s odd that Hemingway, also a hack who turned out news stories, seems to have found it such a challenge if he was obliged to re-write and re-write his fiction again. Going by what eventually appeared in print — which to my mind is no great shakes by a long stretch despite the ‘critical acclaim’ — you do wonder what all the bloody fuss was about. But then ‘the fuss’ all comes from Hemingway. And, I must add, pretty much as always. Viva Michael Reynolds, who took a more sceptical view.
But it is late and my reservoir of bile is running low. Time to go to bed to replenish it and renew attack on the idiot another time when I have more energy. Anyway, I’d now like to retire to watch an episode or two of Cheers on my iPad.
Pip, pip.
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