Preface

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

 

You can find more background reading — reviews of Hemingway’s works, commentaries, other papers to which I refer as well as a list of quotations about Hemingway the writer and man here.

List of posts

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(ironically a fictional character).

Why the life of this rich libertine and destroyer of wildlife should be of such great and continuing public interest a decade following his suicide, we cannot and need not say.

Judge Charles L Brieant Jr, Aug 3, 1979 in his judgment
against an appeal by Doubleday over a libel
suit brought by A E Hotchner.

I DON’T doubt that many reading what follows will react with disbelief and scorn, and some diehard Hemingway champions possibly even with horror. More than 50 years after his death, the name Ernest Hemingway is perhaps not as popularly known as once it was, but I suspect that most who hear it will still pronounce him to have been ‘a great writer’ or even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’, mainly, perhaps, because that’s what they were taught at school.

One does come across readers who think he was little more a boorish braggart and who regard his style as dull, flat and often banal. That they have probably not read much of his work is because what they had read did not encourage them to read much more of it. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote off Hemingway as ‘a writer for boys’ and added that

I read [Hemingway] for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it.

He did though concede that

Later I read his admirable The Killers and the wonderful fish story.

At the extreme was a comment by the American novelist and wit Gore Vidal, a man who loved to shock and delighted in taking a contrarian view. Talking about his home nation he asked

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Yet these were, and perhaps still are, decidedly minority views. In 1941 the Pulitzer Prize jurors unanimously wanted to honour Hemingway for his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and that he didn’t get the award was down to the lobbying by a very influential pro-Franco and ring-wing Pulitzer board member.

The jurors responded and made their feelings known by not awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to anyone else.

Twelve years later they were able to honour Hemingway and awarded him the Fiction prize for The Old Man And The Sea. Then, in 1954, came an even greater distinction when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So who is ‘right’: the champions or the sceptics? Frankly, no one is – the excellence or otherwise of Hemingway’s writing and the greatness or otherwise of his literary status is a matter of opinion not fact.

In fairness it should be pointed out that there was – at least at first – a little more to Hemingway’s fiction. Yet in hindsight there was also less to his writing, and in time a great deal less, than his champions – and Hemingway himself – insist.

It would be a sweeping generalisation, but not untrue, to suggest that he began at the top and worked his way down. The print, broadcast and online media are often accused of working on the principle (advice given to his young journalists by a long-standing editor of the Economist, Geoffrey Crowther) of

first simplify, then exaggerate

and adopting it one might even suggest – no doubt to the outrage of many – that Hemingway’s literary success was something of a fluke.

In response, the champions might choose to repeat their mantra that ‘but Ernest Hemingway was a leading modernist and one of our/America’s/the English-speaking world’s greatest writers!’ Unfortunately, continual repetition doesn’t necessarily make it true. Yet having established their devotion, the devotees are will never, but never, allow themselves to be gainsaid: those who disagree either don’t ‘get’ Hemingway and are obviously philistine or quite possibly just being malicious. If only.

The reason this collection of essays is subtitled ‘How did a middling writing achieve such global literary fame?’ is simple: that is the enigma which has interested me ever since I came back to reading Hemingway’s work. I had previously — many years ago — read the early novels, Death In The Afternoon and many short stories, but to be frank I was not intellectually equipped to deal with any of them.

. . . 

As a young man at college, I had accepted without question — as did and do many others at that age when they first encounter ‘Hemingway’ — that he was ‘one of our greatest writers’. Thus if I did not ‘get’ him or was not as engaged and impressed by the work as I believed I should have been, it was necessarily and certainly my fault. This, too, might be true of others of that younger age.

Hemingway did have a certain gift, but it is — ironically, as many commentators and reviewers have pointed out — for descriptive writing, especially about nature. Discussing Across The River And Into The Trees which Hemingway published in 1950, the New York Times’ columnist and former books reviews editor J. Donald Adams writes

My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood — most perfectly displayed in some of the short stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is not, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of human life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to great fiction.

Other commentators and reviewers also pointed out that — fatally one might think for a writer of fiction — he was not at all good at characterisation.

It often seems that Hemingway’s main gift, one which drove his career far more than any putative excellence in writing, were his remorseless and competitive ambition fuelled by a bombastic talent for self-promotion. His one real and main achievement was, as pointed out by the scholar Matthew J Brucolli, that

More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.

Over the millennia that men and women have been writing, there have been many turning points in literature — though as with many such changes they came and come in fits and starts — and as a young man publishing his first volume of short stories, Hemingway was the catalyst for one such change. The irony was that other writers took his techniques, attitude and subject matter and turned out rather more interesting work than he did.

Dare I even claim ‘better’ work? No, I dare not, but that is not because I might be strung up from the nearest lamppost by Hemingway champions. It’s because in many discussions, the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — and thus ‘better’ and ‘worse’ — are not just inappropriate but pretty damn useless. They tell us nothing.

Over the intervening years, my confidence has become more robust, and I am less inclined to accept wholesale and without question. I have also read more widely and, crucially, developed more sceptical instincts, largely, I suspect, because I once worked as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor [copy editor].

I have also come to appreciate the virtues of an ‘open mind’, and it is a quasi-theistic devotion to Hemingway and his work which has increasingly come to worry me. All too often articles about the man and his work in specialist publications and discussions in webinars strike a curious note of adulation, as though one were at a Britney Spears convention. A curious campfire cosiness permeates Hemingway far too many of the studies I have read.

These essays or monographs — call them what you will — began life as an entry intended for a blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t remember why I even thought about doing so — I had re-read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.

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’. The novel and he, I thought, seemed to be anything but.

Certainly the novel isn’t bad, and it is entertaining enough; and, certainly, the two claims owe a great deal to publishers’ hyperbole, puffing up a product to ensure greater sales. But The Sun Also Rises is certainly no ‘masterpiece’ and struggles to justify the claims made for it as being in any way ‘profound’. 

To regard Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’ is frankly ridiculous. And when an academic — Philip Young in his 1952 book Ernest Hemingway — describes him as ‘very likely the finest writer of American prose to come along since [Henry] Thoreau himself’, you wonder what is going on.

I am, however, aware that my scepticism of Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ is definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still spoken of 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’.

Is it really likely that most of the world — many 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 began by scouring the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view. 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 many details and more for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises.

I was incidentally amused — and rather pleased — to learn that the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is entitled Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf. The main title 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 book is essentially about the Hemingway

legend and how he actively created it.

Although Ms Blume refers to The Sun Also Rises as ‘Hemingway’s masterpiece’, I suspect that was her publisher’s choice of words, given that Ms Blume’s account of Hemingway and the genesis of his novel is 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 writer, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway’ a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize, I should 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 first biography of Hemingway was published in 1967, six years after Hemingway’s death. It was by Carlos Baker who had been appointed by Hemingway himself as his ‘official biographer’. Baker thus had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow, although having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword.

As Baker discovered in his research, Hemingway could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and thoroughly dishonest, but he had to tread carefully in his descriptions of the writer. Welsh was litigious and had already taken one writer, A.E. Hotchner, to court over his planned memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost). To ensure her continued help, he did not want to alienate her.

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 1985 and later, 24 years after Hemingway’s suicide, his work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of Hemingway, both of the man and his work, than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.) Most recently, in 2016, James Hutchisson has published what he calls ‘A New Life’, but in truth it is simply, like Anthony Burgess’s biography, a precis of, and a general romp through, what previous biographers had written.

Despite claims made in some reviews, Hutchisson does not seem to have undertaken any new or original research. Furthermore, though nicely produced, it contains, inexplicably, several outright howlers.

Two years later, Mary Dearborn published her biography, and although she might well have undertaken additional research, it does add much to what previous biographers had written (and on one or two matters contradicts them, though who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ is impossible to establish).

I did not bother reading A. E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I gather, was distinctly hagiographic and took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ all the tall, often outrageous, stories Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is more of a coffee-table book for which he also did no original research.

Then there’s a very curious volume by Richard Bradford, The Man Who Wasn’t There, published in 2019, which is notable for its outright hostility to Hemingway and, which might warn us, was extremely badly edited.

Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied heavily on his wives, not just for emotional support, but in two cases also their money. Gioia Diliberto’s more recent work, Paris Without End, The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, provides an interesting picture of Hadley Richardson and corrects the often accepted view that she was essentially some kind of doormat who gave into her egocentric and domineering husband at every turn. Although Hadley is the main focus of her book, Diliberto also illuminates Hemingway’s character very well.

Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband which covers much the same ground, as well as his book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway Vs Fitzgerald: The Rise And Fall Of A Literary Friendship. Then there are the comparatively short volumes on the writer and the man by Verna Kale, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Griffin and Charles A Fenton. The Second Flowering, Malcolm Cowley’s volume of essays, two of which are about Hemingway, provides useful considerations on what is referred to as ‘the lost generation’.

The more I read, 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?

On that question Leonard J. Leff’s — rather luridly titled — Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s 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. Also helpful in examining his rise to prominense was Fame Became Him by John Raeburn.

In the course of his career of roughly just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — in fact, compared with his contemporary writers, surprisingly little. Despite the acclamation his early work met, by the mid-1930s, first with the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), The Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) his reputation was beginning to tail off, and some critics were beginning to have their doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier.

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 and was published in its entirety by Life magazine, Hemingway’s scant work from the 1930 on was regarded as not very good at all.

As my project took shape it’s focus changed: it was no longer to examine why The Sun Also Rises was and still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and, on the strength of it, Hemingway was and is hailed as ‘a genius’.

One essay 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 Then there is why and how the myth took hold that The Sun Also Rises portrayed the despair of a ‘lost generation’. Central to it all was I considering the force of Hemingway’s personality on his rise to fame.

My project concludes with short accounts of Hemingway’s life, culled from the various biographies of the man. They mainly recount his early years in Paris and in the 1930s when his he began to play the part of the celebrated ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the hard-drinking, hard-living, action man writer.

Incidentally, Hemingway awarded himself the sobriquet ‘Papa’ and by the mid-1920s he encouraged everyone to address him with the name. No one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it.

When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following observations. Both are pertinent to how he achieved the status of ‘one of America’s greatest writers.

The first is by Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In view of what he says, it is worth noting that he and Hemingway did not fall out as Hemingway did with many of his friends, and his comment is not intended to be hostile:

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.

I have not undertaken any original research, and the nature of these essays that would seem to make it superfluous. In fact, I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have any of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth. In fact, it is astonishing how much they all echo each other and accept as established fact much about Hemingway and his writing which is certainly contentious. All the views expressed here are my own.

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