Friday 13 March 2020
Thursday 5 March 2020
. . . the fact is, nothing much changes, and an older generation will always sooner or later get the two-fingered salute (just as they gave it to their mums and dads)
If for whatever reason — it could be frustration, simple boredom or just malice — you want to end a discussion in its tracks, the ruse to use is to announce ‘well, it really does depend on what you mean by . . .’ It works every time.
First of all, the discussion itself is immediately diverted from its original course, and from there on in it is the simplest of tasks to muddy the waters to such an extent that everyone taking part, all intent on promoting their own take on whatever is being discussed and rarely having the patience and tolerance, let alone the good manners, to listen to the views of others loses interest; and, metaphorically, they wander off.
The irony, of course, is that it is true: it really does depend on ‘what you mean by . . .’ It really does matter that what is understood by a word or idea is crucial to any discussion of that idea; and if we are all working on a different understanding, any discussion becomes more than a little pointless. Yet all too often those involved in such discussion are simply unaware that the others don’t understand that concept in the same way.
A good, though undoubtedly hoary first-year-of-philosophy example is the notion of ‘freedom’: does it mean ‘free to’ or ‘free from’? In some situations, of course, they might coincide — if I live in a society ‘free from’ tyranny, I am ‘free to’ speak my mind without concern for my safety. In others, though, the distinction is crucial.
If someone were to claim that it is crucial ‘that we all have our freedom’, you might then ask him or her whether or not that would cover the freedom of a paedophile to indulge in sexual activity with a child. The likely response to that would be ‘of course not, it must be freedom to act and behave within the bounds of our established morality’. Well, quite, but by then — within a very brief ten seconds — you have already taken a diversion from the main discussion.
Certainly, the bounds and dictates of the morality prevalent in any given culture have a bearing on what we are ‘free to do’, but by now we are no longer discussing the notion of ‘freedom’ in abstract (as we thought we were) but already limiting ourselves to the notion of ‘freedom’ in our particular culture. And that is more of a practical matter than philosophical.
I got to be thinking along those lines when, plodding on with this bloody Hemingway project (which, contrary to what you might gather from my description of it as ‘this bloody Hemingway project’, I am still enjoying although almost by the hour the task seems to get bigger and bigger) I got to a point where I decided the best and simplest way forward is to look at the man, his life and his work a little more obliquely, to consider various related matter.
So, for example . . .
Some time ago I came across the review by Virginia Woolf of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories. It is, though, more an essay by Woolf on critics and criticism. In it she makes some good points, not least that most of us, almost despite ourselves, regard ‘the critics’ as somehow better informed and more qualified to pass judgment than we are (and wonders why). You can read her piece here, but her introduction sums it up well:
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity.
Perhaps her observation rings a bell with you. It certainly did with me. And I wonder how many of us settle for simply adopting wholesale as our own the verdict of a critic (and, of course, then pontificate loudly about the book or writer in question as though we knew what we were talking about) for no good reason than that she or he is ‘the New York Times/The Observer/The Sunday Times/the Washington Post reviewer?
So in this Hemingway bollocks I decided to consider different questions in relation to Hemingway rather than just approach him and his work four-square. That approach also has the virtue of not having to plough my way through all his bloody work and just stick to the three volumes of short stories and his first three novels. Death In The Afternoon, The Green Hills Of Summer, Across The River And Into The Hills and the rest? Fuck off. I’ve read enough reviews of them to know when enough is enough.
So, in relation to Woolf’s essay, I’ve decided, for example, to consider the notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, as in ‘can there really be an “objective judgment” of a work by Hemingway (or any other writer for that matter)?’ And if we line up all the critics in their underwear and strip them of their robes and wigs, just how much more ‘valid’ are their verdicts than yours or mine?
Then there’s the question of what are we supposed to make of the fact that critics disagree with each other in their judgments of a novel, exhibition, play or film? Who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?
From there it was just a short skip and a jump to realising — or, more cautiously, coming to the conclusion — that there is no ‘objectivity’ in criticism because there simply cannot be. Each judgment is subjective, like it or not. Granted, a critic is probably better read than you or I, but her or his judgment, at the end of the day, is still a subjective one. And, strictly, no number of such ‘subjective’ judgments, however much they agree with each other, add up to one ‘objective’ judgment — ‘the critics are all agreed’ merely means ‘the critics are all agreed’. It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the critics are all right’.
A further complication, though I make this point merely by the by, is that different generations favour different styles and, furthermore, each ‘new generation’, keen to put as much clear blue water between itself and its parent generation, will favour books, music, films and fashions as different from those popular with its parent generation as possible.
That, I shall be suggesting when I post my Hemingway project (are preliminary post is here, though what I have posted there has since been cut by two-thirds to make way for a prologue) is one essential factor in the rise of Hemingway to prominence. (Would the rise of ‘conceptual art’ really have occurred if its quintessence wasn’t sticking up two fingers (US ‘the middle finger) at the previous generation?
So with Hemingway, no one had before used the words ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ in print, for example, or had the novels characters getting rat-arsed and sleeping around, and the dizzy, hedonistic young folk of the Jazz Age, as keen to upset the older generation as they were to have a great time loved it. Just loved it.
Another aspect I want to take a look at is ‘modernism’ and more specifically Hemingway’s modernism. What it might be? Like many other things, we — well, more modestly, I — think we ‘know’ something, but when we begin to consider what it is we ‘know’, we realise we know close to fuck-all about it.
Hemingway is often talked of as a ‘modernist’ writer, but from where I sit (and I am really not as well-read as I might be to make such a point, but . . . ) there seems to me less ‘modernist’ about him than there was about Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and later Virginia Woolf. But what is modernism? How is it defined?
I’ve always assumed that ‘modernists’ were working from some underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory, but how true is that? Were they? Was it necessary? From what I know of Hemingway’s views, there wasn’t much theorising, and even his much-quoted ‘iceberg theory’ is, to be frank, essentially pretty threadbare and, as he states it, middlebrow Sunday supplement stuff.
One very obvious point, which has been made several times by others, is to ask why he thought his ‘theory of omission’ was so ‘new’ or even revolutionary when for many years writers had been composing their work specifically to allow and encourage their readers to ‘read between the lines’. We, the readers, read between the lines, for example, in Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants and gather a guy is trying to persuade his gal to have an abortion. But ‘writing between the lines’ (if you see what I mean), is also something writers of fiction had been doing long before that story was written.
A Hemingway freak might counter that ‘that isn’t what Hemingway meant’ by his ‘theory of omission’, to which I would counter-counter that if Hemingway did mean what he seems to have meant — that ‘you could omit anything . . . and the omitted part would strengthen the story’ — he was kidding no one but himself if he meant that he could leave out a detail completely and I mean completely (like the suicide in the oft-given example of his story Out Of Season), but that the reader would somehow still ‘pick up’ on that detail. It’s all just a tad too pseudo-metaphysical for me. Or perhaps I have got it wrong and he doesn’t quite mean that, either.
Certainly, many of his stories were not ‘about’ what they were ostensibly ‘about’, but that has been the essence of interesting and engaging fiction for many years before young Ernie first put pen to paper. Why did he think he had hit upon something new?
On the question of ‘Hemingway’s modernism’, it is also worth mentioning that he was notoriously, not to say very ostentatiously, anti-intellectual. There are suggestions that, much like his very ostentatious and increasingly unconvincing displays of machismo, the anti-intellectualism was something of a front.
One friend from on the Toronto Star, Greg Clark, who had known him when he first turned up in Toronto in 1919, remarked when he returned to the paper in 1923 for a staff job after freelancing in Paris (for what turned out to just a few months): ‘A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked this earth’. But whatever the reason for it, Hemingway was remarkably reluctant to discuss intellectual matters.
His friend in Paris (and later until, invariably and inevitably, Hemingway fell out with him) Archibald McLeish remembered many occasions when he attempted to start a discussion and tease out Hemingway’s thoughts on aesthetics and related matters, only for the great man swiftly to change the subject to hunting or fishing or boxing or bullfighting or some such topic.
For me the task is now to learn a lot more about ‘modernism’. But at least I now realise I know next to bugger all, so that’s a start of sorts.
Pip, pip.
Here’s a bit of modernism for you to keep you happy . . .
First of all, the discussion itself is immediately diverted from its original course, and from there on in it is the simplest of tasks to muddy the waters to such an extent that everyone taking part, all intent on promoting their own take on whatever is being discussed and rarely having the patience and tolerance, let alone the good manners, to listen to the views of others loses interest; and, metaphorically, they wander off.
The irony, of course, is that it is true: it really does depend on ‘what you mean by . . .’ It really does matter that what is understood by a word or idea is crucial to any discussion of that idea; and if we are all working on a different understanding, any discussion becomes more than a little pointless. Yet all too often those involved in such discussion are simply unaware that the others don’t understand that concept in the same way.
A good, though undoubtedly hoary first-year-of-philosophy example is the notion of ‘freedom’: does it mean ‘free to’ or ‘free from’? In some situations, of course, they might coincide — if I live in a society ‘free from’ tyranny, I am ‘free to’ speak my mind without concern for my safety. In others, though, the distinction is crucial.
If someone were to claim that it is crucial ‘that we all have our freedom’, you might then ask him or her whether or not that would cover the freedom of a paedophile to indulge in sexual activity with a child. The likely response to that would be ‘of course not, it must be freedom to act and behave within the bounds of our established morality’. Well, quite, but by then — within a very brief ten seconds — you have already taken a diversion from the main discussion.
Certainly, the bounds and dictates of the morality prevalent in any given culture have a bearing on what we are ‘free to do’, but by now we are no longer discussing the notion of ‘freedom’ in abstract (as we thought we were) but already limiting ourselves to the notion of ‘freedom’ in our particular culture. And that is more of a practical matter than philosophical.
I got to be thinking along those lines when, plodding on with this bloody Hemingway project (which, contrary to what you might gather from my description of it as ‘this bloody Hemingway project’, I am still enjoying although almost by the hour the task seems to get bigger and bigger) I got to a point where I decided the best and simplest way forward is to look at the man, his life and his work a little more obliquely, to consider various related matter.
So, for example . . .
Some time ago I came across the review by Virginia Woolf of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories. It is, though, more an essay by Woolf on critics and criticism. In it she makes some good points, not least that most of us, almost despite ourselves, regard ‘the critics’ as somehow better informed and more qualified to pass judgment than we are (and wonders why). You can read her piece here, but her introduction sums it up well:
Human credulity is indeed wonderful. There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity.
Perhaps her observation rings a bell with you. It certainly did with me. And I wonder how many of us settle for simply adopting wholesale as our own the verdict of a critic (and, of course, then pontificate loudly about the book or writer in question as though we knew what we were talking about) for no good reason than that she or he is ‘the New York Times/The Observer/The Sunday Times/the Washington Post reviewer?
So in this Hemingway bollocks I decided to consider different questions in relation to Hemingway rather than just approach him and his work four-square. That approach also has the virtue of not having to plough my way through all his bloody work and just stick to the three volumes of short stories and his first three novels. Death In The Afternoon, The Green Hills Of Summer, Across The River And Into The Hills and the rest? Fuck off. I’ve read enough reviews of them to know when enough is enough.
So, in relation to Woolf’s essay, I’ve decided, for example, to consider the notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, as in ‘can there really be an “objective judgment” of a work by Hemingway (or any other writer for that matter)?’ And if we line up all the critics in their underwear and strip them of their robes and wigs, just how much more ‘valid’ are their verdicts than yours or mine?
Then there’s the question of what are we supposed to make of the fact that critics disagree with each other in their judgments of a novel, exhibition, play or film? Who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?
From there it was just a short skip and a jump to realising — or, more cautiously, coming to the conclusion — that there is no ‘objectivity’ in criticism because there simply cannot be. Each judgment is subjective, like it or not. Granted, a critic is probably better read than you or I, but her or his judgment, at the end of the day, is still a subjective one. And, strictly, no number of such ‘subjective’ judgments, however much they agree with each other, add up to one ‘objective’ judgment — ‘the critics are all agreed’ merely means ‘the critics are all agreed’. It doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the critics are all right’.
A further complication, though I make this point merely by the by, is that different generations favour different styles and, furthermore, each ‘new generation’, keen to put as much clear blue water between itself and its parent generation, will favour books, music, films and fashions as different from those popular with its parent generation as possible.
That, I shall be suggesting when I post my Hemingway project (are preliminary post is here, though what I have posted there has since been cut by two-thirds to make way for a prologue) is one essential factor in the rise of Hemingway to prominence. (Would the rise of ‘conceptual art’ really have occurred if its quintessence wasn’t sticking up two fingers (US ‘the middle finger) at the previous generation?
So with Hemingway, no one had before used the words ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ in print, for example, or had the novels characters getting rat-arsed and sleeping around, and the dizzy, hedonistic young folk of the Jazz Age, as keen to upset the older generation as they were to have a great time loved it. Just loved it.
Another aspect I want to take a look at is ‘modernism’ and more specifically Hemingway’s modernism. What it might be? Like many other things, we — well, more modestly, I — think we ‘know’ something, but when we begin to consider what it is we ‘know’, we realise we know close to fuck-all about it.
Hemingway is often talked of as a ‘modernist’ writer, but from where I sit (and I am really not as well-read as I might be to make such a point, but . . . ) there seems to me less ‘modernist’ about him than there was about Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and later Virginia Woolf. But what is modernism? How is it defined?
I’ve always assumed that ‘modernists’ were working from some underlying philosophy or aesthetic theory, but how true is that? Were they? Was it necessary? From what I know of Hemingway’s views, there wasn’t much theorising, and even his much-quoted ‘iceberg theory’ is, to be frank, essentially pretty threadbare and, as he states it, middlebrow Sunday supplement stuff.
One very obvious point, which has been made several times by others, is to ask why he thought his ‘theory of omission’ was so ‘new’ or even revolutionary when for many years writers had been composing their work specifically to allow and encourage their readers to ‘read between the lines’. We, the readers, read between the lines, for example, in Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants and gather a guy is trying to persuade his gal to have an abortion. But ‘writing between the lines’ (if you see what I mean), is also something writers of fiction had been doing long before that story was written.
A Hemingway freak might counter that ‘that isn’t what Hemingway meant’ by his ‘theory of omission’, to which I would counter-counter that if Hemingway did mean what he seems to have meant — that ‘you could omit anything . . . and the omitted part would strengthen the story’ — he was kidding no one but himself if he meant that he could leave out a detail completely and I mean completely (like the suicide in the oft-given example of his story Out Of Season), but that the reader would somehow still ‘pick up’ on that detail. It’s all just a tad too pseudo-metaphysical for me. Or perhaps I have got it wrong and he doesn’t quite mean that, either.
Certainly, many of his stories were not ‘about’ what they were ostensibly ‘about’, but that has been the essence of interesting and engaging fiction for many years before young Ernie first put pen to paper. Why did he think he had hit upon something new?
On the question of ‘Hemingway’s modernism’, it is also worth mentioning that he was notoriously, not to say very ostentatiously, anti-intellectual. There are suggestions that, much like his very ostentatious and increasingly unconvincing displays of machismo, the anti-intellectualism was something of a front.
One friend from on the Toronto Star, Greg Clark, who had known him when he first turned up in Toronto in 1919, remarked when he returned to the paper in 1923 for a staff job after freelancing in Paris (for what turned out to just a few months): ‘A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked this earth’. But whatever the reason for it, Hemingway was remarkably reluctant to discuss intellectual matters.
His friend in Paris (and later until, invariably and inevitably, Hemingway fell out with him) Archibald McLeish remembered many occasions when he attempted to start a discussion and tease out Hemingway’s thoughts on aesthetics and related matters, only for the great man swiftly to change the subject to hunting or fishing or boxing or bullfighting or some such topic.
For me the task is now to learn a lot more about ‘modernism’. But at least I now realise I know next to bugger all, so that’s a start of sorts.
Pip, pip.
Here’s a bit of modernism for you to keep you happy . . .
Tuesday 18 February 2020
Roll up, roll up and thrill to the spectacle of Hemingway academics — possibly (be careful, dear boy) — disappearing up their own arses. Moral of the tale: a little exegesis goes a very long way indeed
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.
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.
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.
Saturday 11 January 2020
Building guitars in the back of beyond, in Esterwegen (a nice spot now, but not so nice for some in 1933)
Heinitzpolder, East Frisia, Germany
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, potter around, drink coffee, read (and write a little), have supper, go to bed, read a little more and watch Cheers, get off to sleep. As they say (whoever ‘they’ are) it’s not rocket science.
My sister and brother-in-law aren’t due back until February 4 and we (my brother and I) will probably not leave until February 10. Got a couple of duty visits to make (which I never look forward to, though they are no great deal) but apart from that it is just: do as you please. Might get into a bit of walking, but I’ll leave that at ‘might’ as I’m often a great one for plans which remain unrealised. The only thing I must bloody do — and I mean — must is get as much of this Hemingway bollocks done as I can, to get it out of the way. Still reading and — a little — re-writing, but it’s got to be more writing and re-writing.
. . .
Repaired my nephew’s guitar so I have a guitar (a metal acoustic) to play while I am here. The only thing which was wrong with it was that the handle of one of the machine heads had long ago broken off, so the guitar couldn’t be tuned properly. The head which had snapped off was the one with which you tuned the top E string, so all the other strings had to be tuned to that string. The guitar wasn’t particularly out-of-tune when you did do that, just a little, but I prefer a guitar to be as in-tune as it should be.
I had bought a set of machine heads in Bodmin and brought them with me, and set about replacing the old ones on Wednesday (we arrived on Tuesday night), but what should have been a straightforward job got a little more difficult when one of the guitar pegs (which hold the strings at the bridge) bust as I was easing it out. By the look of it it had previously been broken, then repaired, but by now it was in two pieces and useless.
I ordered a set on Amazon (and a winder to boot) which was due to arrive yesterday, but (as usual) became impatient and wanted some pegs now, so I googled ‘guitar shops near me’ to I could visit one and buy some. The closest, in Leer, 15 miles away was Musik Bruns, and I was all set for a trippette to go there on Thursday, but luckily then noted (it wasn’t very prominent on the website) that the shop was closed for refurbishment until February 11.
It was off then to my second choice, Gitarrenbau Massen, in Esterwegen, 38 miles away, which I had found in my search, so off I went on Thursday: but it wasn’t the guitar shop I had, without thinking about it, imagined it to be
but a guitar factory. Actually, Gitarrenbau was the clue and I had picked up on that, but for some reason I thought it would be a small workshop. It wasn’t.
The guy who owns and runs it — alone now because, as he told me, at 70 he doesn’t have the energy to run a business and is winding it down — was alone with a large showroom of about 50 guitars, a warehouse with I don’t know how many more guitars in their boxes and a workshop with the bits and pieces — bodies and necks — of about 100 more. (He doesn’t make them all, but also resells brands such as Fender and Yamaha.)
I told him I was looking for guitar pegs and he sold me ten and two plectrums for €5. Then I asked what was a factory this size — not big but certainly not small and certainly not just a workshop — like this doing in the back of beyond like Esterwegen?
In fact, it isn’t even in Esterwegen, a village of about 4,500 souls, but about two miles out of town (towards the main Bundesstraße 401 (which connects Oldenburg to the Bundesautobahn 31 to the west if you are interested, though I can’t imagine many are unless, of course, you are a travelling salesman, are lost somewhere in the area and have come across this blog by chance, in which case: Hi, but back to the main narrative). What, I asked Friederich (that was his name, but in fact it is his surname. I have since discovered his full name is Hans-Günter Friederich) is a factory of this size doing in the back of beyond (ganz weit draußen, though I can’t remember if I actually used the phrase)?
Well, he told me, when he was younger, he and his family built up a thriving guitar-building business near Dortmund (which is in industrial North-Rhine Westphalia). In fact, it was doing so well, they wanted to expand their premises, but found the cost of commercial land in the area was extortionately high, and (somehow) came across the present site in Esterwegen which was just a fraction of the price. So the whole factory, with his Meister (those he employed to help build the guitars), moved 140 miles north and never looked back. Rent was cheaper (I’m assuming they rent, but perhaps they bought the land) and it was a far nicer part of the country in which to live and raise a family.
I have to say I was puzzled by why in a factory that size with several hundred guitars, some finished, some in the process of being built, he was the sole worker. Well, he said, he was winding it all down. He had been selling guitars worldwide through his website, but was simply getting tired of it all and wanted to enjoy life a bit more. That makes sense to me. And did he also play guitar? No, he said, building them ruins your fingers.
. . .
I’ve just done a Google search and found this story about Friederich and his factory which appeared two years ago in the Osnabrücker Zeitung. It seems the business was started by his father in the village of Massen, near Unna about 12 miles from Dortmund, where they lived. Here are a few piccies nicked from the Osnabrücker Zeitung of the man at work.
Hans-Günter will have been seven at the time. Eight years later, the company Gitarrenbau Massen was founded and and apart from building their own guitars, they also imported half-completed electric guitars from the United States, can finished them off. The move to Esterwegen came 15 years later, in 1980. His father knew the area because the family had a holiday home there.
PS I might seemed to have acted precipitously by not waiting for the guitar pegs I had ordered from Amazon to arrive, as promised, the following day, but in fact I’m glad I did. I was able to fit the new machine heads and put a new set of strings on the guitar — and play it — by Thursday evening.
The Amazon guitar heads did arrive on time and as planned, but 683 miles away at home in St Breward. I had given my home address as the delivery destination. Must be more careful. I couldn’t understand why I got a message from Amazon saying ‘the item has been delivered’ when so obviously it had not.
. . .
Some reading this might be familiar with the name Esterwegen or it might just ring a bell. If so the two letters ‘KZ’ will make things clearer. The Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933, and just five/six months later they had established their first prison camp. In this case it was for political opponents (and why that small detail didn’t already ring alarm bells in the rest of Europe is baffling). Three years later it became a regular prison camp, although political prisoners well also kept there. After the war, the British used it was a PoW camp.
Here’s a picture of the Esterwegen KZ memorial:
Monday 6 January 2020
Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)
Bodmin to London train:
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.
The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)
It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years — although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.
It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.
I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.
As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.
I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.
Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.
. . .
While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.
Wish me a good time.
PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.
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