Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

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.

List of posts

THIS is the concluding part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

USEFULLY for the various academics analysing the text of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Hemingway wrote several drafts for the beginning of his story before settling on the version which was published. In the first two drafts, Kansas City, where the story occurs, is compared with Constantinople in some detail, but in his final version Hemingway cuts out almost all the references to the Turkish city. All that remains are the — in context cryptic — opening three sentences

In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.

There is no further reference to Constantinople or any explanation as to what relevance mentioning that city might have except, as Kruse tells us,

The published story retains and highlights only those details that help to make up the allusive subtext with its critical thrust

and he insists that this is not a ‘loose end’ but simply

represent the author’s typical process of foreshortening along with a gradual sharpening of the story’s focus.

Possibly. But given that that opening left rather a lot of commentators, critics and readers wondering what Constantinople had to do with anything, ‘focus’ was perhaps not quite as ‘sharpened’ as it might have been.

The two original drafts held by the JFK Library in Boston indicate the story was likely to have begun life as a quasi-autobiographical piece, with Hemingway (who had lived and worked in Kansas City for eight months) reminiscing about how the city had changed; then in the third draft, which appeared in print, he changed his mind, cut out such memories and left the reader with the bald three sentences quoted above, They were intended, says Kruse, to highlight allusions to the New Testament. He adds that the

sequence shows Hemingway moving towards a sentence that combines the formulaic opening of the Biblical Christmas story — ‘Indiebus illis…,’ according to the Vulgate; ‘In those days…,’ according to the King James Version — with deliberate alliteration, carefully chosen words, and fine cadences. By quietly evoking a foil that will grow in significance as the story moves along, the sentence, in both wording and tone, points to the legendary quality of what follows and, together with the quotation in the title, introduces the author’s own contemporary version of the Christmas story.

This is plausible enough — though we might again reflect that there’s often rather less to ‘plausibility’ than meets the eye — and especially so given the title of the story which indicates ‘a Christmas theme’; but it would also serve as a good example of a putative Rorschach effect: why apart from Kruse did other academic analysts and commentators not seem to have picked up on that and other allusions highlighted by Kruse?

More fundamentally, given the essence of the Nativity story — for Christians an ‘inspiring’ and ‘joyous’ story of the birth of their ‘Saviour’ — quite what relevance might it have to a unhappy teenage boy plagued by impure thoughts mutilating himself and possibly dying from a loss of blood?

Yet Kruse is determined to interpret all aspects of the story as meaningful allusions either to the New Testament or Shakespeare’s Merchant Of Venice and to demonstrate that Hemingway’s tale has a religious dimension. Thus the ‘confréres’ with whom ‘Horace’ shared a free Christmas turkey lunch are not his colleagues (possibly on the local newspapers), but highlight a

parallel between doctors and Christian ministers. The doctors are called ‘confrères,’ and their sharing the dinner is described formally as ‘partaking’ in a meal.

Kruse goes on that this

parallel is strengthened by Doctor Wilcox’s carrying with him a conveniently cross-indexed volume called The Young Doctor’s Friend And Guide, a booklet ‘bound in limp leather’ that fits into his coat pocket and serves him as an indispensable vade mecum, just as a prayer book of similar appearance will serve a minister in his quotidian routine. After these suggestions, it emerges that Fischer’s account of how the two doctors dealt with the case of the young boy and his presumed lust actually dramatises the responses of two ministers with differing interpretations of their duties.

He tells us that

Fischer’s reference to [the incompetent and uncharitable] Wilcox as ‘the good physician’ would seem to point to the Good Samaritan of Luke 10: 30–37, but Wilcox — in a typical inversion of most of such references throughout the story — is the very opposite of a compassionate person and anything but generous or ready to help people in distress.

This passage also demonstrates Kruse’s zeal to parade instances of Hemingway’s ‘challenging complexity’ and the ‘story’s artistry’, and he resorts to insisting there is even significance when — possibly even because —Hemingway ‘inverts’ conventions. Thus

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.

. . .

More recently Shannon Whitlock Livitzke, who confirms that scholars have exposed

the story’s mythic substructure and [unearthed] its complex negotiation of religion, music, and ethical engagement

returns to the story’s opening that

In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that have now been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople

and suggests that the reference to distance is part of the story’s theme of ‘alienation’. She takes Robert Paul Lamb’s lead about ‘semiotic confusion’ to work up her analysis that each of the story’s four protagonists — the narrator, the two doctors and the teenage boy who mutilates himself — forever ‘misunderstand’ each other and don’t ‘hear’ what they other three protagonists are saying. She says

That the boy’s panic is rooted in a misguided moralism is less significant than the revelation that the characters are all walled off by private barriers that prohibit true communication, incapacitated by the great ‘distances’ that leave them isolated from one another.

Warming to her purpose, she then works in the cryptic reference to Constantinople and writes (perhaps slipping into intellectual overkill) that

An increasing emphasis on alienation, evident in the Constantinople allusion and the reconfigurations of Kansas City’s landscape, suggests that the tragedy is not solely the result of adolescent insecurities or medical malfeasance, but is, rather, symptomatic of a more universal despair.

A sceptical reader might query that if ‘alienation’ is so ‘evident’, why had other commentators not picked up on it: Lamb had reminded us that Peter Hays read the story as a modern take on the Fisher King legend, Julian Smith saw it as an analeptic tale told by Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, and George Monteiro believed it shed on Hemingway’s attitude toward Christianity and the medical profession. None had anything to say about ‘alienation’.

Livitzke goes on to observe that

The story begins with a definitive declaration about the nature of space (‘In those days the distances were all very different’) and grammatically connects it to specific geographic locales (‘Kansas City was very like Constantinople’), suggesting, on one level, a physical connection between the cities mentioned. The mileage between Kansas City and Constantinople has obviously remained unchanged from the time of the boy’s tragedy, though, so the opening line also functions metaphorically as a commentary on the state of humanity, on the way people communicated with one another when the events took place. . . While the Kansas City-Constantinople pairing is admittedly unusual, it also encompasses East and West, youth and historicity. Given Hemingway’s reworking of the introduction and knowledge of both places, it is likely that the cities serve as points of reference that indicate the distressing extent of modern despondency.

She concludes that

The ultimate tragedy in God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen then, is not only that the doctors cannot save the youth from self-mutilation, but, more broadly, that the fundamental impossibility of human connection leaves one human unable to save another.

Some might be convinced by her reasoning, others less so. So there you have it: several different and often distinct interpretations of the same story, all of which are ‘plausible’.

. . .

I have previously appealed to the advice of the 14th-century friar William of Occam (or Ockham) that

of all possible explanations, the simplest is the most likely.

This view is also referred to as ‘Occam’s Razor’ and ‘the Principle (or Law) of Parsimony, in Latin ‘novacula Occami’ and ‘lex parsimoniae’. It is a simple and useful rule of thumb, and does not preclude that the ‘real’ explanation could well be revealed as more complex; but it might work as a useful departure point when trying to understand anything.

Applying Occam’s Razor to the various readings of Hemingway’s story would tell us that we can’t, in fact, be sure of much, especially when one analysis contradicts another. For example, Kruse confidently tells us that Doc Fischer’s cheery greeting to Horace ‘What news along the rialto?’ is a deliberate allusion to Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice because Fischer is quoting from the play ; Lamb, who is keen to demonstrate that the theme of the story is ‘semiotic confusion’, tells us it is, in fact,

a jocular reference that further defamiliarizes the Kansas City street.

So which is it? Some will point out that it is perfectly feasible for the accounts to work on both levels and that Kruse and Lamb could both be ‘right’. Friar William of Occam — and I — might, though, opt for a simpler, more likely explanation: the greeting by Doc Fischer (‘What news along the rialto?’) is simply and example of the quite common practice of folk to use a phrase which originated with Shakespeare but which has over the years bedded into common usage (with, most probably, most users having no idea of its origin).

Other examples might be (from Macbeth) ‘Lay on Macduff’ (when encouraging someone to action), ‘What’s done is done’, ‘Come what [come] may’; (from Hamlet) ‘Clothes make the man’ and ‘The lady doth protest too much’; (and from The Tempest) ‘Fair play’, ‘In a pickle’ and ‘Such stuff as dreams are made on [of]’. There are many more. Doc Fischer might well have ‘deliberately’ been quoting Shylock, but Occam’s Razor suggests initially we might opt for the simplest explanation.

William of Occam might also raise an eyebrow at Kruse’s claim that

whereas Shakespeare’s Jew is characterised by his business acumen, his greed, his thirst for revenge, and his insistence on the principles of his religion, Hemingway’s counterpart is the exact opposite: Fischer has never given his Jewishness ‘its proper importance’, as he himself remarks. All of Shylock’s negative and supposedly Jewish traits are shown to be those of Fischer’s Christian antagonists rather than his own.

This — another example of ‘inversion’ being usefully adopted by Hemingway according to several analysts — might strike William of Occam as nothing but attempted legerdemain by Kruse to allow him to pursue

his theme (according to what Debra Moddelmog might describe as his ‘ideological consistency’). Why would Hemingway sometimes make a straight comparison, but at others make an ‘inverted’ comparison for no very apparent reason?

A similar inconsistency is pointed out above where Baker has ‘the mountains’ symbolising what is ‘beautiful and natural’ and the valley and plains what is ‘ugly’ and ‘unnatural’ in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, but ‘inverts’ the symbolism in his short story Alpine Idyll for no apparent reason. This is frankly very close to playing with a marked deck of cards.

Those who come across analyses such as the above can certainly subscribe to whichever ‘explanation’ they like; but each faces the obvious questions: is this what Ernest Hemingway intended? And if the answer is ‘yes’, we can then inquire: how do we know?

Those questions remind us of the insistence on ‘verifiability’ in the sciences. In the presentation of each analysis, the affirmative response — ‘yes, this is what Hemingway intended’ — is implicit; it has to be or why else has a particular analysis been put forward?

Then we might ask: how do we verify that was the intention? At this point an English literature academic might perhaps lose patience and again invoke the useful escape clause: ‘I’ll think you’ll find it’s a little more complex than that’. To this there is, of course, no adequate response: in simpler language the sceptic is being told to make her or himself scarce and stop being a nuisance.

In fact, the suspicion is the sceptic is possibly getting uncomfortably close to revealing the circular logic implicit in many academic studies: that ‘Hemingway was a great writer so this is excellent writing’ and ‘this is excellent writing so Hemingway was a great writer’.

. . .

What might William of Occam make of Hemingway’s story God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen? He might suggest there is, in fact, less to it than the assortment of academic analysts have claimed. Basing his story on the account passed on by his friend Dr Logan Clendening of a 16-year-old who mutilates himself, Hemingway (suggests William) composed a small, ironic tale of how on Christmas Day, a major festival which Christians celebrate as a day of goodwill to all, it was not the Christian doctor who behaved charitably and with compassion, but Doc Fischer, a member of the outcast Jewish race which does not even celebrate Christmas.

William of Occam might even stick his neck out and suggests the irony is further underlined by the ‘inversion’ of stereotypes: the Jew is presented as a white, Anglo-Saxon — ‘thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth’ — whereas the incompetent Doctor Wilcox is portrayed as a stereotypical Jew — ‘short, dark’.

As for other elements in the story, the reputed loose ends such as comparing Kansas City to Constantinople, the free turkey dinner with ‘confréres’ at Woolf’s saloon, the silver car in the showroom, Doc Fischer referring to the narrator as Horace, William of Occam would choose to remain silent. They are indeed loose ends for which there is no obvious explanation despite the disparate ingenuity of the assorted academics.

If pressed, William might cite Hemingway’s self-declared method of composition of starting a story without a plan to see where it might take him — he wrote, then discarded two openings to his story before drastically cutting them and proceeding to the essence of his story.

What about the comparison of Kansas City and Constantinople? one might inquire of William. At first tactfully disinclined to comment, he might eventually be coaxed to give his view that Hemingway, himself by now familiar with the genesis of his story, believed that, according to his ‘theory of omission’, the reader would pick up on whatever he, a writer writing ‘truly’, knew. It had, though, (William might declare, sotto voce) just not come off, and Hemingway had perhaps not shown the care expected of a great writer.

. . .

At the end of the day, whatever one makes of this or that interpretation and analysis by this or that academic is irrelevant. What is relevant is that academia had nominated Hemingway as a writer worthy if its attention, and this was an important — perhaps the most important — staging post in his progress from famous, best-selling author to his status as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’. From there on there was no going back.

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

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.

List of posts

THIS is the fifth part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

MOST of Hemingway’s short stories and all novels have been subjected to concentrated textual analysis, but some of the stories less so than others. The story God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, that was first published in 1933 in a standalone edition limited of 300 copies, then later that year included in Hemingway’s third collection of original short stories, Winner Take Nothing, initially received less attention. When it appeared, it did not find much favour — contemporary critics were less impressed by the collection of stories in which it was included than its two predecessors. Reviewing the volume in the New York Times, John Chamberlain wrote that Hemingway had

evidently reached a point in writing where the sterile, the hollow, the desiccated emotions of the post-war generation cannot make him feel disgusted; he is simply weary of contemplation. He feels sorry for himself, but he has lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.

As for God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Britain’s Times Literary Supplement described it as

a really terrible story. . . 

Several decades on, a handful of academics have analysed the story again and agreed the Times Literary Supplement was wrong; but that was as much as they could agree upon: their disparate conclusions and readings serve well to illustrate a ‘Rorschach effect’ at work, as well has highlight that shared compulsion to detect meaning and significance in Hemingway’s fiction come what may.

Like One Reader Writes, another story in Winner Takes Nothing, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen had an unusual genesis. While briefly living in Kansas City in 1931 awaiting the birth of his third son, Gregory, Hemingway had met and befriended a Dr Logan Clendening, who had written several popular books on

medicine and wrote a medical advice column that was syndicated in more than 380 US newspapers. Dr Clendening (right) passed on six of the hundreds of letters he received from readers seeking advice, and Hemingway worked two of them up into short stories.

One Reader Writes was based on a letter from a woman who discovers her husband had contracted syphilis while away for a year stationed as a soldier in China and wonders whether it is still safe for them to have sex (she describes it as ‘being with him’). Apart from two brief paragraphs, one opening the story, the other concluding it, Hemingway quotes the woman’s letter to Dr Clendening verbatim. 

The second letter Hemingway utilised was from a devout teenage boy distressed by his sexual urges which lead him to masturbate and which made him feel guilty as it was a ‘sin against purity’. These circumstances were fictionalised by Hemingway into God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.

The story is unusual in that despite being told by a first-person narrator (who appears to be recalling an incident that occurred when he was younger), unlike in many Hemingway stories, notably those featuring his alter ego Nick Adams, that narrator would seem to be irrelevant. Even the guilt-ridden teenager only appears in reference. Central to it are two ‘ambulance doctors’ manning a hospital reception room over Christmas, one of whom is competent, compassionate and Jewish, and the other incompetent, dismissive of the teenager and his woes, and Christian.

Briefly, the narrator, referred to as ‘Horace’ by one doctor — this seems to have been a jokey nickname — makes his way to the hospital. A usual assumption is that he’s a local newspaper reporter doing his calls for the following day’s paper. His occupation is not stated in the published version, but according to the commentator, the academic Horst Herman Kruse, it was stated in one of the two early drafts but which Hemingway deleted as, Kruse believes, he did not want the story to be regarded as autobiographical.

After enjoying a free Christmas Day turkey lunch at a local saloon with his colleagues (‘confréres’), then admiring a silver car in a showroom on his way, he arrives at the hospital where he is reminded of the distressed teenager he had witnessed turning up the previous afternoon appealing to be castrated to rid him of his ‘impure’ urges. The boy had been sent packing by the Christian doctor, though the Jew had tried to comfort him by telling him his ‘urges’ were wholly natural.

Later, in the early hours, the boy had been re-admitted, bleeding badly after mutilating his penis with a razor; he had almost died from loss of blood because the Christian doctor was too incompetent to treat him. The rest of the story, which at just under 1,350 words is not long, is taken up by the Jewish doctor teasing his colleague about his incompetence and his lack of compassion, particularly on Christmas Day.

Robert Paul Lamb believes the key to the story is that all four protagonists — the narrator, the two doctors and the 16-year-old — ‘misread’ everything about the situation and each other. Lamb begins by noting that at the time of composing his own analysis the story had so far attracted scant attention. He lists three previous analyses:

Peter Hays reads the story as a modern revision of the legend of the Fisher King; Julian Smith sees it as an analeptic tale told by Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises with the narrator’s identity withheld; and George Monteiro believes that its main interest lies in the light it sheds on Hemingway’s attitude toward Christianity and the medical profession but faults it for having an unnecessary and insubstantial first-person narrator who is not meaningfully connected to the plot.

All three are on the wrong trail, Lamb tells us. The story is, in fact, specifically

about semiotic confusion, a confusion caused by the failure of signifiers to point to appropriate signifieds (not merely the subtle forms of slippage that concern deconstructionists, but the sorts of wholesale aberrations that would bother most folks), and about characters who employ the wrong inter-texts or misapply sign systems in their efforts to interpret signifiers.

As far as Lamb is concerned the theme of ‘semiotic confusion’ was certainly fully intended by Hemingway who, he argues, begins his story

[by employing] a narrative strategy of presenting a description that describes nothing: ‘In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that have now been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople’. This sentence presents a non-map with which to locate the story by informing the reader that a present-day sense of spatial relations is unhelpful; that the one concrete image in the sentence no longer exists; and that Kansas City can best be imagined through an inter-text, Constantinople, which – even if the reader has seen it – would be of no use since the narrator does not say, aside from the dirt, how the two cities are alike. As if this were not frustrating enough, the reader is immediately told: ‘You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.’

Once the narrator arrives at the hospital and meets the two doctors

the theme of semiotic confusion is further advanced by the problematizing of cultural stereotypes. Fischer is Jewish, but has sand-blond hair and ‘gambler’s hands’; Wilcox is gentile, dark, and carries a book. The book, a medical guide, gives symptoms and treatment on any subject, and is also ‘cross-indexed so that being consulted on symptoms it gave diagnoses’. The incompetent Wilcox is sensitive about the book but cannot get along without it. Fischer, who holds Wilcox in contempt, has sarcastically suggested that future editions of the book ‘be further cross-indexed so that if consulted as to the treatments being given, it would reveal ailments and symptoms’. This would serve, he says, ‘as an aid to memory’. Wilcox’s dependence on the book reveals his inability to read the physical symptoms of the body on his own. Memory (competence within the sign system) enables Fischer to read these physical symptoms, but what if the illness is emotional and cultural rather than physical? This takes us into the heart of the tale.

Lamb warms to his theme of ‘semiotic confusion’, with all involved misunderstanding everyone else which, additionally, explains other ‘oddities’ in the story: the narrator on his way to the hospital after his free turkey dinner who spots a silver car in a showroom windows ‘misreading’ the sign ‘Dans Argent’ (‘in silver’). These are all (says Lamb)

the failure of signifiers to connect with proper signifieds, the faulty mastery of sign systems, the employment of inappropriate sign systems, and the triumph of a false sign system

and

this answers the questions of those critics who have seen the story as scant and/or pointless.

. . .

When the Jewish doctor Fischer asks the narrator for ‘news along the rialto’, this is, for Lamb, merely

a jocular reference that further defamiliarizes the Kansas City street.

But in a piece entitled Allusions To The Merchant Of Venice And the New Testament In God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, Horst Herman Kruse, disagrees. That reference is, in fact, to the put-upon Jew Shylock in the Merchant Of Venice. And although Kruse (left) concedes that the

loose ends that remain have nearly always induced scholars to call the story a failure

he insists that there are, in fact, no ‘loose ends’ in the story, and he is determined to show that

Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice and the New Testament thus would seem to combine — and ingeniously to complement each other — in Hemingway’s effort to transform the ‘raw stuff’ of experience into a highly complex story in which an incident at the Kansas City General Hospital carries the burden of an outright attack on puritanical attitudes in contemporary America.

Not only can the alleged oddities be accounted for, but Kruse insists that what some critics found incongruous, in fact, demonstrated Hemingway’s artistry. He is convinced the story is essentially a religious tale, and he finds relevant allusions everywhere and also believes he ‘proves’ that Hemingway was not the anti-Semite he was charged with being.

Like Baker and other commentators, Kruse will, metaphorically, not take no for an answer, and he is determined to discover significance everywhere. In his analysis of the story, Kruse begins by attempting to show that the alleged ‘loose ends’ are nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he says, the story is one

of challenging complexity with a well-developed allusive subtext that accounts for most of its seeming disparities.

In view of that claim, it might be worth quoting the story’s opening paragraph in full:

In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true. On this afternoon it was snowing and inside an automobile dealer’s show window, lighted against the early dark, there was a racing motor car finished entirely in silver with Dans Argent lettered on the hood. This I believed to mean the silver dance or the silver dancer, and, slightly puzzled which it meant but happy in the sight of the car and pleased by my knowledge of a foreign language, I went along the street in the snow. I was walking from the Woolf Brothers’ saloon where, on Christmas and Thanksgiving Day, a free turkey dinner was served, toward the city hospital which was on a high hill that overlooked the smoke, the buildings and the streets of the town.

Part VI: William of Occam writes

 

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

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.

List of posts

THIS is the fourth part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

CARLOS BAKER discovers symbolism everywhere in the Hemingway’s fiction. Inconveniently, though, Hemingway himself was decidedly ambiguous on the matter: was there symbolism in his work, were his stories as Baker suggests ‘built with a different kind of precision — that of the poet-symbolist’?

Seven years after Baker first published his book, Hemingway was ‘interviewed’ for the Paris Review by its co-founder and editor George Plimpton (right). In fact, the ‘interview’ consisted of Hemingway providing written responses compiled over a number of months to a list of questions Plimpton had sent him. In the ‘interview’ and revisiting the matter of mooted symbolism in his work, Hemingway says

I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them . . . If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

This is a rather clever response by the ‘self-promoter’ Hemingway — I use that description in keeping with the ‘narrative unity and ideological consistency’ of these essays — and he seems to be playing both ends against the middle.

He neither kills off the suggestion that his work contains symbolism, nor does he confirm that was what it habitually contained, and thus stokes the fire a little more, presumably to ensure he remained centre-stage.

A few years earlier, commenting on analyses and interpretations in reviews of his 1953 novella The Old Man And The Sea in which many detected decidedly Christian symbolism, Hemingway observes, again ambiguously, that

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.

Adopting Baker’s practice of ‘close reading’, there’s far less to what Hemingway says than meets the eye. He simply sets up his own aunt sally in order to be able to knock it down again.

It is certainly likely that a writer, when creating her or his fiction, might come to believe that including this or that symbol or set of symbols could prove to be technically and artistically useful to her or his theme. Thus, according to Hemingway, the symbols will have been ‘arrived at beforehand’.

Conversely, in the somewhat murky, mysterious and poorly understood act of creation, the writer might not have have realised that certain ‘elements’ in what has so far been written — it is impossible and would be misleading to try to define those ‘elements’ — somehow stand out and underscore this or that theme in the story. Though they came about ad hoc — and were not ‘arrived at beforehand’ — she or he might perhaps bear them in mind when carrying on with the composition; when later revising and editing the work, she or he might choose to highlight or underscore that ‘symbolism’ a little more in some way or other.

It is even possible that the writer was simply unaware of any symbols in her or his work which readers think they detect. Were those symbols ‘arrived at beforehand and stuck in’? Bearing in mind how analysing the process of creation is rarely straightforward, the question is impossible to answer: in a café a lait what is the milk and what is the coffee?

But note, Hemingway is only commenting on ‘symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in’, and that, presumably, would distinguish them from ‘symbols’ created during the act of creation. He is certainly right when he says

that kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread

because the Christian symbolism in The Old Man And The Sea is ham-fisted in the extreme and does stick out noticeably. As for his observation that

raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better

it begs the question — to adopt his own metaphor — as to why Hemingway didn’t stick to producing plain bread when he wrote his novella?

. . .

A related, often intractable, problem when dealing with academic work is that it is sometimes impossible to understand what the analyst is hoping to convey. Admittedly, this might be the reader’s fault, but it would be unwise always to opt for that explanation. At one point Baker comes up with the following ‘insight’: he has just remarked that in writing both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway had somehow ‘purged’ himself and adds

There was much more to [The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms], of course, than an act of personal exorcism, however complicated. For to destroy by embodying is also to create by arranging. The artist’s special blessing exists in an impulse to destroy an aspect of the thing he creates, and to render permanent what for him, in another and internal dimension, must be permanently destroyed.

Does Baker mean that Hemingway was ‘destroying’ what he wanted to exorcise from his life by ‘embodying’ it into his novel? Possibly, but is that the same as the rather vague ‘creating by arranging’? Well, yes, it could be, though it is not at all clear. Even less clear is what an artist might be doing when his

special blessing exists in an impulse to destroy an aspect of the thing he creates

thus rendering

permanent what for him, in another and internal dimension, must be permanently destroyed.

Like staring intently into thick fog and persuading yourself you can more or less make out the shape of something, you think you know what Baker means, but your are not quite sure; then you have to admit to yourself you really don’t have a clue — but there again . . .

It might simply be that Baker has expressed himself badly, although if that is the case, we should remind ourselves of the adage that ‘confused writing betrays confused thought’.

I have no doubt some reading that passage will tell themselves that ‘of course, they understand what Baker is saying’. Others who are a little less certain might decided to give Baker, a Princeton professor of English literature well suited to the virtual wigs and robes in which we see him, a pass; yielding to the power of human credulity identified by Virginia Woolf, they might feel it is their fault they don’t ‘get’ what Baker is saying and assume they must simply try harder to understand him.

Thus the benefit of doubt is invariably with ‘the experts’, the academics. If Baker, Young and Atkins tell us that Hemingway was ‘an artist’ — thus reinforcing his reputation as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’ — many will conclude, given their ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status, that Baker, Young and Atkins must certainly know what they are talking about, and that it is best to ignore the apostates and doubters. Academic attention certainly was the icing on the cake for Hemingway.

Academics are very likely to disagree with the unkind observation by one Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a statistician, mathematician, former ‘options trader’ and ‘risk engineer’ and a writer, that

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love

but those who have come across passages like the above from Baker and similar, or who have tried to read article after essay after book after dissertation of what often appeared to be incomprehensible waffle might give Taleb’s jibe a quiet cheer.

We should again remind ourselves of the respect (which often unwittingly shades off into reverence) we accord academics; and we might again distinguish between academics active in the sciences and those working in the arts, particularly in the field of English literature. One fundamental distinction is made clear by Declan Hiberd in his book on Joyce, Ulysses And Us when he writes

Too often the papers of academic experts are addressed only to their peers in a jargon that seeks to mimic the rigorous discourse of the sciences: such criticism is published only in the expensive volumes destined for purchase by libraries and not by the common reader.

Arts academics are, of course, certainly entitled to use their own ‘jargon’, and there is, per se, nothing reprehensible in choosing to write papers which might ultimately prove intelligible only to the initiated. There is, though, something of a teenagers’ fan club about that arrangement, whose members eagerly exchange obscure and arcane details about their idol.

That point might be illuminated by a list of the titles of pieces that have appeared in the Hemingway Review over these past few years: The Elephant’s Eye And The Maji-Maji War — A Non-Anthropocentric Reading of David’s African Story In The Garden Of Eden; Hemingway’s Dialectic With American Whiteness: Oak Park, Edward Said, And The Location Of Authority; Hemingway’s ‘Now I Lay Me’, Prayer and The Fisher King; and Behind The Scenes With Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway And Jane Kendall Mason. (Mason was a rich young American living in Cuba with whom Hemingway began an affair in the early 1930s after Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic, would for medical reasons only consent to sex if Hemingway practised coitus interruptus).

Then there’s a particularly telling title, A Never-Before-Published Essay About Growing Up With Hemingway, Written By His Unrequited High School Crush. (Dear reader, she was Frances Elizabeth Coates (right) and was reluctant to talk about Hemingway with his first biographer, Carlos Baker, because she was ‘seeing’ another guy while at high school and didn’t want to complicate things. But it seems she and Hemingway were corresponding intermittently until the mid-1930s and he partially immortalised the girl by adopting her name for his heroine Liz Coates in Up In Michigan.)

. . .

Those academics publishing less fluffy pieces might assume their ‘readers’ are most probably academic colleagues and fellow initiates, but the assumption does seem to promote a tendency to ‘over-intellectualise’ (a practice that might well further intimidate many a layperson who comes across such pieces and is already in awe of the ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ experts).

A good example is an analysis of the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Emperor’s New Clothes by the academic Hollis Robbins (below), written for the publication New Literary History when she was still teaching at Princeton. In fact, describing her article, The Emperor’s New Critique, as ‘an analysis’ of

Andersen’s tale is misleading: Robbins is not so much analysing the tale itself as commenting on a commentary by the French philosopher and ‘deconstructionist’ Jacques Derrida who was himself commenting on a commentary by Sigmund Freud on Andersen’s tale.

Ostensibly — and most probably — Andersen intended his tale as a satire on vanity (that of the emperor for whom dressing well is more important than taking care of matters of state) and on pusillanimity (that of his counsellors and, according to Robbins, by extension of Denmark’s civil servants and their ilk in general). But Robbins insists there is far more to it than that: Andersen’s tale, she assures us, is a

critique of criticism . . . [a] tale, teller, interpreter and critical case study all in one . . . Yet if it is true that the tale’s very transparency is a critique of the desire to critique — or rather, the exhibitionistic desire to unveil publicly — Derrida’s privileging of the themes of analysis, truth, and unveiling in his (albeit brief) reading of The Emperor’s New Clothes provides evidence that the awareness of this desire does not reduce its influence. The desire to read The Emperor’s New Clothes as either a fantasy of critique or a new literary history critique of the fantasy of critique is symptomatic of our assumptions about what it means to be a reader-analyst.

So there you have it (or not as the case might be). Individual phrases in the above might ‘be understood’ in themselves (or not), but in relation to one another and overall they do seem to conspire to defy comprehension.

It might be thought unfair to quote an extract from Robbins’s article out of context, though supplying that context would certainly not make the extract any more comprehensible.

Doubtless some of Robbins’s audience did understand — or, more probably, persuaded themselves they understood — what she was writing and trying to convey; but it is certainly fair to suggest Robbins and Derrida were ‘over-intellectualising’ to an alarming degree. It is equally fair to note that Robbins is, as Hiberd charges, certainly

[mimicking] the rigorous discourse of the sciences.

Many academics working in English literature departments, adopting the role of ‘the expert’ whose experience and qualifications allows them greater insight, might here protest ‘sorry, but if you don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to comprehend what we are saying, you can’t blame us’. Again, if only it were that simple. Though many articles, essays and books do deserve and reward slow, careful reading, thoughtful attention and patient consideration, many do not. And it’s never clear which might and which might not.

It would also help if some English literature academics paid more attention to clarity: even a complex thought should allow the reader a sporting chance of eventually being comprehended (and here the observation that ‘confused writing betrays confused thought’ might again be appropriate).

The whole point of ‘setting down in writing’ is to communicate — to pass on a new theory, to suggest a different interpretation or a refutation of a previous analysis — and if the reader is left floundering, still puzzled by what she or he has read or even all at sea (and assuming the reader has given it her or his best shot), the attempt at communication has failed.

Furthermore, given the nature of the subjects scientists deal with — and we might note that ‘verifiability’ is a cornerstone of scientific work and research – it is reasonably straightforward for them to evaluate work by their peers. In English literature such ‘verifiability’ is nigh-on impossible, as the variety of different, often contradictory ‘readings’ show.

Furthermore, even slow, careful reading and thoughtful attention don’t guarantee that what is being stated — or better what is being claimed — is true. All too often what might be regarded as a ‘Rorschach effect’ occurs when academics read fiction and verse: they gaze intently at a passage and see what they want to see.

Debra Moddelmog might even concede that what they ‘see’ will be what best suits the ‘narrative unity and ideological consistency’ they favour. Thus Carlos Baker, who has decided to regard Hemingway as a ‘poet-symbolist’ detects symbols everywhere in Hemingway’s work; Philip Young insists that Hemingway’s fiction reveals the impact the great and small childhood and teenage wounds had on him; John Atkins highlights how Hemingway made a point of distinguishing between the ‘natural man’ and the ‘unnatural man’, and the ‘political’ and the ‘apolitical’ man.

Yet there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers in a Rorschach test: the very point of the test is for others to gain an insight into ‘the psyche’ of the subject being tested by noting what she or he ‘sees’. Nothing is definitively or not ‘shown’ by the inkblots. At best the findings and claims of Baker, Young and Atkins might provide an added dimension to, and another point view of, a piece of fiction and thereby enrich our reading. But such analyses and interpretations are not —and cannot be — in the same class of thinking as work in scientific disciplines and mathematics.

Arguably, it gets even less convincing: at the heart of many analyses by academics is what is I have elsewhere described as the ‘theology of dealing with Hemingway’. Thinking and writing about him and his work seems often to fall prey to a marked circularity of logic. The logic is that ‘Hemingway was a great writer and a consummate artist, so this seemingly straightforward — or, possibly, this rather confusing — passage must have a deeper meaning than is at first apparent’.

So the analytic sleuthing gets underway, and once the elusive ‘deeper’ meanings are eventually located (as of course they must and will be), the logic dictates: ‘Well! Here is even more proof of what a great and consummate artist Hemingway was!’ It was in this manner – taking the useful von Däniken route of ‘possibility, then probability, then fact’ — that Baker ‘established’ and informed readers of his book that Brett Ashley was

the reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire.

Part V: The Rorschach effect 

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

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.

List of posts

THIS is the third part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

CARLOS BAKER compounds his inconsistency when he analyses one of those stories, Alpine Idyll (which appeared in Hemingway’s collection Men Without Women): the ‘psychological symbol-building’ is turned on its head (and it is more than puzzling that Baker did not seem to realise what he had done). The mountains, in The Sun Also Rises and a Farewell To Arms the ‘beautiful’ ‘natural’ place, now become the ‘unnatural’ place: up in the mountains (writes Baker) the Swiss peasant at the centre of the story had ‘lived too long in an unnatural situation’ and ‘his sense of human dignity and decency [had] temporarily atrophied’. When

he gets down into the valley, where it is spring and the people are living naturally and wholesomely, he sees how far he has strayed from the natural and the wholesome, for spring has been established in the [narrator’s] internal monologue as the ‘natural’ place. In the carefully wrought terms of the story, the valley stands in opposition to the unnatural high mountain spring.

The Sun Also Rises and the later short story, Alpine Idyll, described by Baker as an ‘apparently simple tale’, are admittedly two separate works, and Hemingway was under no obligation to adopt and repeat the ‘psychological symbol-building’ of his first novel and applying the ‘different kind of precision . . . of the poet-symbolist’ (if that was what he was doing) when writing his short story. But it is unusual, if Baker’s analysis holds, that he should reverse the symbolism of the first novel in the subsequent short story, only to revert to the original symbolism when composing his second novel.

In fact, the suggestion is not that Hemingway is at fault, but that Baker is: once Baker had elevated Hemingway to the status of ‘artist’, one suspects he felt he was obliged to find significance, meaning and artistry in every corner and aspect of Hemingway’s work and does so with verve, at the expense, it would seem, of consistency.

Thus he also detects — flatly contradicting his claim that Hemingway did not follow Eliot’s and Joyce’s ‘mythological method’ — supposed correlations between elements in The Sun Also Rises and Homer’s Odyssey and Greek and other myths. Mike Campbell quotes Robert Cohn comparing Brett Ashley to Circe (who turned men into swine), with Campbell adding ‘I wish I were one of those literary chaps’. Baker comments

Was not Brett Ashley, on her low-lying island in the Seine, just such a fascinating peril as Circe on Aeaea? Did she not open her doors to all the modern Achaean chaps? When they drank her special potion of French applejack or Spanish wine, did they not become as swine, or in the modern idiom, wolves? Did not Jake Barnes, that wily Odysseus, resist the shameful doom which befell certain of his less wary comrades who became snarling beasts?

Baker also chooses to hear echoes of Homer when a miserable Jake Barnes wakes at night and weeps a little over the impotence which denies him union with Brett Ashley; and he hears echoes of Homer when Robert Cohn falls asleep among the casks in the back room of a Pamplona wine shop.

All this is convincing enough for those who intend to be convinced and, proclaims Baker, it all adds up to Hemingway’s artistry. He goes further: before the fiesta week has begun, Jake Barnes, a Roman Catholic, wants to make his confession and Brett Ashley wants to go with him to hear it; Barnes tells her that would not be possible, that it would not be as interesting as she thought it might be and it would be in a language she did not understand (which, says Baker, pursuing more possible significance, is ‘the Christian language’ not Spanish or Latin). Later, as the image of San Fermin is taken from church to church and Brett and Jake go to follow it into one chapel, she is denied entrance

. . . ostensibly [writes Baker] because she has no hat. But for one sufficiently awake to ulterior meaning of the incident it strikingly resembles the attempt of a witch to gain entry into a Christian sanctum. Brett’s witch-hood is immediately underscored. Back in the street she is encircled by the chanting pagan dancers who prevent her from joining their figure: ‘They wanted her as an image to dance around.’ When the song ends, she is rushed to a wine-shop and seated on an up-ended wine-cask. The shop is dark and full of men singing — ‘hard-voiced singing’.

Baker continues

The intent of this episode is quite plain. Brett would not understand the language used in a Christian confessional. She is forbidden to follow the religious procession into the chapel. The dancers adopt her as a pagan image. She is perfectly at home on a wine-cask amidst the hard-voiced singing of the non-religious celebrants. Later in fiesta week, the point is re-emphasised. Jake and Brett enter the San Fermin chapel so that Brett can pray for Romero’s success in the final bullfight of the celebration. ‘After a little [says Jake] I felt Brett stiffen beside me and saw she was looking straight ahead.’ Outside the chapel Brett explains what Jake had already guess: ‘I’m damned bad for religious atmosphere. I’ve got the wrong type of face.’

Brett, says Baker,

in her own way is a lamia with a British accent, a Morgana le Fay of Paris and Pamplona, the reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire [i.e. Jake Barnes].

Well, perhaps, and perhaps not; and one should also note that despite the seeming plausibility and apparent neatness of Baker’s analysis, those readers who are ‘sufficiently awake’ might also spot that he is rather sloppy: he conveniently chooses to gloss over — or, worse, it did not even register with Baker — that at her second attempt to enter a chapel, Brett — a quasi ‘witch’ and ‘lamia with a British accent’ — is not denied entry and has no trouble getting in.

As for his insights, for example when outlining a

reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire

is Baker onto something? Or is he, conversely, badly over-egging his pudding? Far more fundamentally, did Hemingway ‘the artist’ actually intend to make these allusions? We just don’t know simply because there is no way of knowing.

The central point is that although for some readers Baker’s analysis might well add to the enjoyment and appreciation of Hemingway’s novel, he is neither ‘right’ nor ‘wrong’ because there can be neither a ‘right’ nor a ‘wrong’ reading.

Pertinently, though, and recalling Virginia Woolf’s astonishment at the ‘power of human credulity’, most of us might be more inclined than not to accept the dicta of Carlos Baker, and from there it is an easy step to treat his findings as established ‘fact’ — that he is ‘right’. After all Baker was a Princeton professor of English and he surely possessed more virtual wigs, robes and outriders than you or I could shake a stick at. But we are still obliged to tread carefully.

. . .

Then there is the dilemma the reader faces when one analysis wholly contradicts another: both might be equally plausible, but they can’t both be right.

For example, Baker also makes a great deal of Bill Gorton, while up in the hills above Burguete on his fishing trip with Jake Barnes, castigating his Paris-based friend for ‘being an expatriate’ and thus turning his back on his home country and rejecting its values; after World War I and throughout the 1920s, an ever greater number of young Americans — in their tens of thousands — left uptight, puritan, Prohibition-era America to settle in Paris, attracted by an extremely favourable exchange rate as much as the promise of a more hedonistic, less constricted lifestyle.

Their parents’ generation did not approve at all, and newspaper editorials and think-pieces in learned journals portrayed their ex-patriate lifestyle as unwholesome and unnatural. They accused the young ex-patriates as betraying America and it values as much as, Baker suggests, Bill Gorton castigates Jake Barnes, and he finds tragic significance in Gorton’s condemnation of Jake Barnes: his analysis is plausible.

Unfortunately, several biographers read the scene (as well as when Gorton riffs on ‘irony and pity’ while on the fishing trip) as tongue-in-cheek and have suggested that Hemingway, who prided himself on being able to write humorously, was satirising the outrage and preoccupations of contemporary America’s more respectable men and women.

Such an analysis is equally as plausible — but it is wholly at odds with Baker’s take. So who is ‘right’: the biographers or Baker? Who knows, but more to the point, it doesn’t matter: despite the impression academia, casting envious eyes on the sciences, likes to give of being conclusive and informed, there is once again no such definitive analysis or interpretation — call it what you like — because there cannot be.

When considering what Baker and some of his academic colleagues have to say, circumspection is always advisable despite their apparent ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status: some of academics seem to stray perilously close to the method of one Erich von Däniken and his many, equally intellectually dubious, imitators.

Von Däniken (below) was a Swiss writer (and a convicted thief and fraudster) who made a great deal of money with a series of books positing that extra-terrestrial aliens had repeatedly visited Earth; while here,

writes von Däniken, the aliens were, among other things, responsible for building the Egyptian pyramids, England’s Stonehenge, the Easter Islands statues and constructing Peru’s Nazca Lines.

Von Däniken’s method was simple: first, he asks questions and suggests explanations (‘Is it possible that . . . ?’); then a little later treats the ‘possibilities’ he has posited as ‘probabilities’ (‘As we have seen, it is quite likely that . . .’); finally, a little later still, those ‘probabilities’ are presented to the —  gullible — reader as ‘established facts’ (‘We’ve seen that . . .’). Academics would certainly recoil in horror and be outraged at the suggestion that they might be thought to be adopting von Däniken’s method, even unconsciously, but all too often it certainly looks like it.

. . . 

Elsewhere, I’ve highlighted the ‘insoluble problem’ presented in Hemingway’s short story A Clean, Well-lighted Place in which what might simply be — and most probably was — just a piece of carelessness by Hemingway leads to confusion. Yet rather than concede that Hemingway — ‘one of America’s greatest writers’ — might be at fault, the ‘apparent’ confusion is rationalised this way and that in an ongoing debate between academics until one academic, a Joseph Gabriel, insisted it was, in fact, deliberate.

Gabriel claimed that Hemingway, in existentialist mode, intended the confusion in the text to reflect the ‘confusion of life’ when a lonely old man who had attempted suicide and a sympathetic elderly waiter

 

are confronted by ‘nothingness’ (‘nada’). More to the point, Gabriel begins by suggesting it as a possibility and concludes by treating it as a conclusive explanation. Baker does something similar when he spins quite ordinary events — Brett Ashley being refused entry into a place of Christian worship, being surrounded by boisterous revellers, Robert Cohn falling asleep in the back room of a wine shop, an insomniac Jake Barnes weeping at night over his impotence — into significance. 

So following the method of von Däniken and his imitators, he asks questions and makes suggestions:

Was not Brett Ashley, on her low-lying island in the Seine, just such a fascinating peril as Circe on Aeaea? Did she not open her doors to all the modern Achaean chaps? When they drank her special potion of French applejack or Spanish wine, did they not become as swine, or in the modern idiom, wolves?

These are first presented as ‘possibilities’, but soon the ‘possibilities’ have evolved through ‘probabilities’ into facts:

The intent of this episode is quite plain . . . [and] in her own way [Brett] is a lamia with a British accent, a Morgana le Fay of Paris and Pamplona, the reigning queen of a paganised wasteland with a wounded fisherman as her half-cynical squire.

As far as Baker is concerned quod erat demonstrandum — it is ‘quite plain’, he writes, and readers will agree, especially those who pride themselves on having ‘sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness’.

Yet however ‘plausible’ and convincing, at the end of the day such analyses are mere hi-falutin’ speculation and nothing more; yet time and again they are tacitly represented as ‘facts’, that, crucially, are liable to be accepted as such wholesale by readers and students (and, of course, perpetuated).

Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part II: 'Proving' the artistry

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.

List of posts

THIS is the second part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

WHEN one considers, analyses and ‘interprets’ the work of any writer, it would seem desirable, as formalist theories suggest, to judge that work in isolation. In practice that is almost impossible. That Hemingway was reputedly sometimes a bully, a belligerent drunkard and a know-all, or, as his sons attested, a loving and kind father and, as some friends insisted, something of an intellectual should have no bearing on how we evaluate his work or judge it to have succeeded.

We now know that the English sculptor Eric Gill (left) was an incestuous paedophile, as revealed in a biography in 1989. (Although his predilections were known in his lifetime, there is no mention of them in an earlier biography). That knowledge might bear on whether or not, and where and how, his work should be exhibited; but should it influence our various conclusions about that work?

Do those works engage and interest us any the less, is his craftsmanship any the less impressive once we know what he got up to with his sisters and daughters? If, as many seem to believe, ‘works of art’ have an intrinsic, almost metaphysical, quality of ‘being art’ — and I don’t — did that quality in his work disappear from one moment to the next as soon as his vices were revealed? Or was it perhaps never there in the first place and we only realised our mistake when we found out about his behaviour?

In his essay The Death Of The Author, the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes observed that

. . . criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his ‘confidence’.

Barthes (below) was keen that works of art should be evaluated and judged in and of themselves, and insisted that once ‘completed’, these works become independent of ‘the author’ (and, one assumes, of the composer, painter or sculptor). This is, of course, not ‘a fact’, just another ‘opinion’, a ‘point of view’; but it

is one which, if accepted and acted upon, would severely stymy the work on Hemingway of those many academics who delve deeply into his life, the letters he wrote and his own and others’ memoirs when they interpret and evaluate his work.

For example, Philip Young’s thesis is that ‘the wounds’ Hemingway suffered in his early life, not least when he was blown up in the Italian front in 1918, largely informed his work; but it would be rendered redundant if one accepted what Barthes says. It would also give rise to an irony: Hemingway always himself insisted that his work was not autobiographical and that he had taken ‘what he knew from his own experience’ and somehow transmuted it; that would chime in with what Barthes is suggesting. So who do we believe: Hemingway or Young?

What Barthes and the formalists insist is, of course, wholly theoretical: de facto it is impossible to ignore what we know of a writer when we consider her or his work. Yet even if we decide to reject Barthes’s view and concede that referring to a writer’s biography is useful, the matter is still not straightforward — now the sticking point is: which biography, which account of her or his life? The difficulty is highlighted by Debra Moddelmog in New Essays On Hemingway’s Fiction (and Young take note). She writes

The identity of Hemingway — or of any other biographical subject including ourselves — is thus a process of articulating into being. Because this articulation takes the form of narrative, the biographer always tells a story, but the story does not come out of nowhere, nor is it implicit in the ‘facts’ of the author’s life. Rather, the biographer chooses a story from among the many that his or her culture makes available and selects the facts that will make the story cohere. Thus the biographer’s biography — like the historian’s history — always tells two stories. The first is in the text itself and is a story of inclusion: the text includes not only the plot that the biographer selects out of many, but also those particular experiences that enable this plot to come together. The other story exists only in the negative, the absent, for it is a story of exclusion: the numerous plots that the biographer rejects and those experiences that must be censored of omitted for the sake of narrative unity and ideological consistency.

Moddelmog (right) might also agree that the text of the biography itself, the descriptive words and phrases chosen and used by a biographer or commentator also add to the biographer’s ‘story’. Many words are not ‘neutral’ and convey more than just their meaning. Thus I cannot exclude myself from Moddelmog’s observation, not just in what I record in the ‘potted biographies’ which follow these essays, but in the essays themselves.

When above I describe Hemingway as ‘pontificating’ on what is and what is not ‘good writing’, not only is the word distinctly pejorative, but by using it, I reveal a great deal about my attitude to Hemingway. (I did, in fact, chose to use the word as I believe that ‘pontificating’ is here, in context, the right one to employ: even close friends became fed up with Hemingway’s insistence that he was an expert in most areas of life and remorselessly instructing those around him on all manner of matters).

This is not just true of me, of course, as I trust Moddelmog, a Hemingway admirer, would concede. The words and phrases Hemingway’s biographers and, pertinently, the many men and women commentating on and analysing his work chose to use are equally subjective. In one sense, even the titles of Carlos Baker’s book — Hemingway: The Writer As Artist — and John Atkins’s — The Art Of Ernest Hemingway — have already loaded the dice before we read a single word: we know full well where Baker and Atkins stand.

One might counter that the titles chosen by Baker and Atkins simply — merely — indicated ‘what their books were about’. That’s true, of course, yet the titles do more than just that; the still inexperienced student and lay reader might already feel judgment has been passed when presented with these books by two ‘experts’, and she or he is more than likely to accept the observations and evaluation of in both as ‘correct’ and ‘fact’ from the outset.

However, what Baker, Young and Atkins have to say is certainly not copper-bottomed and is as contentious as any other point of view, for the simple reason that by its very nature it cannot but be contentious.

Throughout his book Baker describes Hemingway as ‘a true artist’, and his insistence would certainly impress most young students and lay readers; but they would still be best advised to discount Baker’s virtual robes and wigs, and keep an open mind: at the end of the day Baker’s analyses, interpretations and claims are no more than his own views and opinions.

Perhaps to underline the point that it’s wisest to stick to the thin line between not accepting wholesale but keeping an open mind, even one or two of the details Baker provides about Hemingway’s life are at odds with what more recent biographers have found (which reinforces Moddlemog’s advice to be cautious of the narratives with which we are presented).

For example, throughout all four editions of Baker’s book (the fourth and most recent was published nine years after Hemingway’s death), he refers to Hemingway as a ‘veteran’ of the Great War; given how the word is, in this context, habitually employed, Baker’s use of it would imply that Hemingway saw active service as a fighting soldier. But he didn’t: although for the rest of his life he liked people to believe he had ‘fought in the war’ and explicitly played on the fact, his ‘war service’ lasted for less than five months in total, between early June and November 1918.

For two weeks he drove a Red Cross ambulance, but decided it wasn’t exciting enough and volunteered to work closer to the front. There his new duty was to run a rest and recreation station some distance behind the front, serving coffee, chocolate and cigarettes to Italian troops (and nor did he — as Baker also writes — help carry wounded from the trenches to a first aid post). Hemingway — unofficially — started visiting the trenches to deliver his coffee, chocolates and cigarettes, presumably because the youth not yet turned 19 felt it was more ‘exciting’.

He was on one such visit when shortly before midnight on July 8 he was blown up by an Austrian mortar bomb. He then spent several months in the Red Cross hospital in Milan, and when he was eventually discharged in November after of many operations, treatment and recuperation to return to duty, he immediately contracted jaundice and was back in care. Discharged for a second time by Christmas, he returned to the US at the beginning of January. That was the total of Hemingway’s ‘war service’.

Notably, while researching and writing his book, Baker was in postal communication with Hemingway and says Hemingway corrected various of his ‘errors’. That Hemingway didn’t correct the error about his ‘war service’ was probably because he wanted to the world to accept him as a ‘World War I veteran’ who had ‘seen action’.

He maintained that fiction all his life and encouraged people not just to believe he had ‘fought’ in World War I, but even claimed he had been the youngest commissioned officer in Italy’s famous Arditi regiment and had personally been presented by the King of Italy with that nation’s highest military honour. (The medal he did receive was one awarded to all foreigners who had served with the Italian army in one way or another.)

Granted this error has no bearing on the theme of his book, but Baker’s claim is typical of the somewhat adulatory tone he adopts which also infuses his insistence on Hemingway as ‘the artist’, a description which most of us assume obliges us to genuflect. Whoever reads his book should be aware of Baker’s bias.

. . .

Being blessed with the attention of academia might well be seen not just as the catalyst of the transformation of ‘Ernest Hemingway, the famous writer’ into ‘Ernest Hemingway, the artist’ but his canonisation — over and above the public fame he had already achieved by mid-century — as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’. To substantiate his view that Hemingway was certainly more than just some famous best-selling scribbler, Carlos Baker writes

[Hemingway’s] short stories are deceptive somewhat in the manner of an iceberg [a reference to Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’]. The visible areas glint with the hard factual light of the naturalist. The supporting structure, submerged and mostly invisible except to the patient explorer, is built with a different kind of precision — that of the poet-symbolist. Once the reader has become aware of what Hemingway is doing in those parts of his work which lie below the surface, he is likely to find symbols operating everywhere, and in a series of beautiful crystallisations, compact and buoyant enough to carry considerable weight.

This sounds plausible enough and has, over the past decades, no doubt been accepted and repeated in essays and exams by many students. Yet it already falls short of its goal of distinguishing Hemingway ‘the artist’ from run-of-the-mill writers in that it begs one important question: if, as Baker claims, Hemingway ‘built’ his short stories with the ‘precision’ of ‘the poet-symbolist’, why did he not — and demonstrably he did not — apply the same ‘precision’ to the verse he wrote?

Surely verse would be particularly suited to the kind of precise artistry which Baker says Hemingway made his own? But he didn’t. His verse is banal, superficial, adolescent and obvious (and I have yet to come across any commentator who thinks any of it is worth a candle).

Similarly, other ‘facts’ ‘proving’ Hemingway’s artistry and presented as almost unassailable by Baker also don’t quite stack up. He writes

If he had wished to follow the mythological method of Eliot’s Waste Land [sic] or Joyce’s Ulysses, Hemingway could obviously have done so. But his own esthetic [sic] opinions carried him away from the literary kind of myth-adaptation and over into that deeper area of psychological symbol-building which does not require special literary equipment to be interpreted. One needs only sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness. The special virtue to this approach to the problem of literary communication is that it can be grasped by all men and women because they are human beings. None of the best writers are [sic] without it.

Thus (says Baker) in both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway symbolically distinguishes between ‘the mountains’ and ‘the plains’. The mountains are ‘home’ and ‘natural’ and thus — in Hemingway’s aesthetic, according to Baker — ‘beautiful’. They are associated with dry-cold weather, peace and quiet, love, dignity, health and happiness.

On the other hand ‘the plains’, which are ‘not-home’ and ‘unnatural’ and thus ‘ugly’, are associated with rain and fog, obscenity, indignity, disease, nervousness and war and death. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton go trout fishing in the mountains — well, the hills — north of Pamplona and find peace and solace, whereas the plains — Montparnasse in Paris and Pamplona — is where all the drunkenness, discord, jealousy and ugliness reside.

In A Farewell To Arms Frederic Henry ignores the priest’s invitation to spend his winter furlough with the priest’s family in the hilly Abruzzi region, and later Henry and his pregnant partner, Catherine Barkley, find sanctuary after escaping Italy in the Swiss mountains. The plains are where the troops are stationed and where the military police are executing officer deserters and which (says Baker) are ‘sinister’.

Yet again, this analysis is plausible enough — ‘plausibility’ plays an important role when considering the evaluations, conclusions and verdicts of literary academia — and there is a neat symmetry to Baker’s juxtaposition that might convince many. Inconveniently, however, it doesn’t quite work: ‘the mountains’ are also where the enemy is positioned and from where it will attack, where the fighting between the Italians and Austrians takes place and where Henry is blown up and might have been killed (as are many Italians). ‘The plains’ are where the retreating Italians head for to find safety from death at the enemy’s hand.

One might even add — adopting Baker’s method — that it is on the plains where Henry finds true love and is thus eventually redeemed from his habitual cynicism and where he had found a good, loyal and true friend in the Italian officer Rinaldo.

With those points in mind, it would seem Baker’s neat analysis of Hemingway’s apparent ‘psychological symbol-breaking’ breaks down (even for those lucky readers with sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness).

In fact, Baker seems to contradict his own analysis when he writes about ‘The First Forty-Five Stories’ and analyses some of them. The title of that omnibus edition of the short stories which had already been published is a tad disingenuous: yes, these were, strictly, the ‘first’ forty-five stories’ written by Hemingway; but ‘first’ tacitly implies there were many others.

There were not, only about another nine or ten. By comparison — and Hemingway did like to compare himself with other ‘great’ writers — Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories and Anton Chekhov 500.

Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

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.

List of posts

THIS is the first part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. Here are links to all six parts if you want to read the rest in sequence:

Caveat lector — Part I: Enter academia

Caveat lector — Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry

Caveat lector — Part III: The von Däniken way

Caveat lector — Part IV: Intellectual overkill

Caveat lector — Part V: The Rorschach effect

Caveat lector — Part VI: William of Occam writes

THIS collection of essays is subtitled ‘How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’, and although other related topics are considered, examining that question is its central purpose. Whether or not Hemingway was ‘a great writer’ or merely ‘a middling writer’ is, of course, a matter of opinion, and there are still more than enough cheerleaders for ‘Papa’ to ensure we apostates are rarely heard and can be ignored. What is indisputable, whether he was a ‘great’ or merely a ‘middling’ writer, is just how famous he became in the last 20 years of his life.

In this, the third decade of the 21st century, those under 60 will be less familiar with the phenomenon of Hemingway’s global fame and must simply accept that he was extremely famous. His standing in some hypothetical ‘top ten of famous people’ will have fallen over the years as the world and its media acquired new ‘heroes’ to celebrate, but he still stands out: he was not a sportsman, politician, rock, TV or film star or royalty but a writer and that was distinctly unusual. His global fame was extraordinary, and although his novels and short stories are now out of fashion as set texts in school and college classes, there are to this day more than distinct echoes of that fame.

Hemingway was not unique: a comparable ‘globally famous writer’ while he was alive was William Somerset Maugham, although he was born in 1874, 25 years before Hemingway was born, and outlived him by four years. Both were debilitated by declining mental health at the end of their lives — Maugham’s increasingly odd and unpleasant behaviour in the years before he died is thought to have been caused by ever-worsening dementia.

Both had wanted ‘to be a writer’ since they were young; both served with the Red Cross in World War I, although Maugham, who was a qualified doctor, did so for far longer than Hemingway; but the two men were otherwise as unalike as chalk and cheese. Maugham did not pontificate on what was and was not ‘good writing’ and did not preen himself and strut as ‘a great writer’, and he modestly described his — far larger — body of work as ‘in the top rank of the second-rate’.

Such modesty played no part in Hemingway’s character, and he considered himself to be ‘a great writer’ all his life. He certainly played up to the part: several biographers have suggested that doing so, ‘being Papa Hemingway’ for the world to admire and revere, became an ever greater strain and might well have helped to hasten the mental decline of his last 15 years. As biographer Jeffrey Meyers pointed out

In the last decades of his life, the Papa legend undermined the literary reputation and exposed the underlying fissure between the two Hemingways: the private artist and the public spectacle.

One notable distinction between the two writers is that although both enjoyed a similar ‘global fame’, Maugham did not attract, and has not attracted, the widespread academic scrutiny of his work as Hemingway. The attention of the academics took off in the last decade of Hemingway’s life and was the icing on the cake for a man who was not only supremely ambitious and competitive, but according to two psychologists who have written on the matter, essentially a narcissist.

Despite the almost universal critical bewilderment caused by Across The River And Into The Trees when it was published in 1950 — the critic Dwight Macdonald later described it as

an unconscious self-parody of almost unbelievable fatuity

— it became that year’s third bestselling novel in the US. Hemingway was by then routinely publicly revered, although as John Raeburn suggests in Fame Became Him, many of that reverential public might merely have been repeating what they read about Hemingway, ‘one of America’s leading writers’, in Time, Life and True magazines and the other photo publications they bought at the grocery store checkout.

Being thus blessed by the interest and attention of academia was tantamount to Hemingway’s canonisation as ‘a serious artist’. Critics? Those critics who crawled on literature? Who needed the critics? The academics, the intellectual heavyweights, were the real deal. Furthermore, now that the academics had sanctioned Hemingway’s writing and deemed it worthy of their study and analysis (and continue to do so), you and your judgment risked no longer being taken seriously if you did not sign up to the creed.

Once the academics got involved, it was up to the doubters and sceptics to ‘prove’ Hemingway was not a great writer: the interest and attention of academia demonstrated that was now a given and de facto inarguable. An irony was, of course, that Hemingway, who liked the world to see him as an unpretentious action man with a ‘built-in bullshit detector’ and no time for airy-fairy nonsense, had long had — or had long feigned to have — a distaste for academia.

As a bestselling author who had caused such a stir when he first published in the 1920s, Hemingway had been profiled and written about in the more serious publications throughout the 1930s and 1940s. For example, his new ‘socially engaged’ attitude in To Have And Have Not — reluctantly adopted, it has to be said, after pressure on him from ‘the left’ at the height of the Great Depression to become more political — was scrutinised and contrasted with that of his peer John Dos Passos, then still avowedly left-wing.

But in however worthy the publication, such journalistic scrutiny was not the same as being written about by the college man and women. Then in 1952, possibly rallying to Malcolm Cowley’s clarion call of a few years earlier (in his introduction to A Portable Hemingway) that Hemingway should be taken far more

seriously ‘as an artist’, two American academics and a British writer, poet and playwright published books dealing with Ernest Hemingway’s work. They were by Carlos Baker, Philip Young (left) and John Atkins.

Baker, who was later nominated by Hemingway to be his official biographer (on the curious grounds, according to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, that he and Baker had never met, although they had corresponded), published Ernest Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. John Atkins published The Art Of Ernest Hemingway; and Philip Young (eventually — for over a year Hemingway refused his publisher permission to quote from his work) came out with Ernest Hemingway, revised and re-published in 1966, five years after Hemingway’s death, as Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration.

All three books were closely argued works and more than plausible enough to persuade even the most sceptical just how special the three academics — and as, by implication, should the ‘serious reader’ — thought Hemingway’s fiction was.

Two years later, in 1954, Charles A. Fenton published The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway became an eminently respectable subject for academic work, and to this day an ever greater number of books, learned articles, theses, essays and dissertations have flowed from academic pens. The imprimatur was final: Hemingway was now officially ‘a great writer’ (with the unspoken and for many clinching sub-text that ‘and we academics wouldn’t, of course, waste our time on him if he were not’).

If only it were that simple.

. . .

Elsewhere I’ve drawn attention to Virginia Woolf’s scorn that we, the reading public, are all too eager to doff our caps and bow to the superior judgment of ‘the critics’. She wondered why and wrote

When we see [kings, judges and lord mayors] 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 . . . [the believer] begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right [and] begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.

The same seems to be even truer of academia. The lay reader is more than ready — to put it crassly — to bow low before the conclusions of ‘academic opinion’, and the academics are more than happy to bask in such reverence.

Even if we might choose to adopt a superficial scepticism about them and their work, especially when faced with a book or a paper with some convoluted title we barely understand, despite ourselves not a few of us will be intimidated. We are less than confident that our own threadbare intellectual clobber can match the intellectual robes and wigs academia seems to wear.

We decide it’s best not to mix it with those we tacitly regard as ‘experts’ and risk looking very silly: thus any ‘debate’ is over before it has even begun, the lay reader gives in and accepts academic pronouncements without question.

Now consider in particular the young men or women studying English literature at school and college, and keen to do well. As part of their studies, they will certainly encounter the analyses and judgments of the academics, some of whom will also be their teachers and tutors; and it would seem natural, when you are in your late teens and early twenties, to regard these men and women as ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’.

Young folk, on the cusp of adulthood and still less sure of themselves than they might be, perhaps deem it wisest to conceal whatever ‘sensitive, hesitating apprehensions’ they harbour about a writer and his or her work. The best and safest policy will be to repeat in class, in your essays and in exams what have become the orthodox views, especially if you hope to achieve good grades.

Then, having thus imbibed what was decreed to be the case, several of those students might after graduation take up high school and college teaching as a career; thus the orthodoxies are perpetuated. 

Admittedly, in recent decades there has been an ostentatious encouragement for students to ‘think for themselves’, and they are often urged to ‘think outside the box’ and ‘think the unthinkable’; but to some extent that is liberal window dressing rather than a sincere invitation to upset the apple cart.

A further dilemma faces those who want to examine and discuss the academics’ interest in Hemingway and his work: in might well amount to commenting on, and at times even criticising, the practices and habits of academics in general (at least those engaged in ‘the arts’ subjects rather than the sciences). Yet again the risk of looking — or being made to look — stupid is immense. A withering retort from academia along the lines of ‘I think you’ll find it’s a little more complex than that’ would be enough to convince most of those intimidated by the virtual wigs, robes and outriders that the doubter in question really is something of a wrong ’un and is best ignored.

It would be both foolish and wrong to indulge as a matter of course in wild, iconoclastic philistinism and dismiss the academics and some of their conclusions out of hand; but it is equally foolish and wrong slavishly to accept their every word. Yet such is the power of those virtual wigs, robes and outriders, though that many unthinkingly do just that.

. . .

It is important to remember when we consider the putative expertise and the conclusions and pronouncements of the academics working in ‘the arts’ that their thinking is not — and, by the nature of what it deals with, can never be — in the same class of thinking as that involved in mathematics and the sciences; yet that seems to be a point that is largely ignored, if not forgotten.

As I remark elsewhere, in mathematics you can’t ‘have an opinion’ on whether or not two and two really do equal four as you can agree or disagree on whether — as Philip Young hypothesises — Hemingway’s fiction was informed and sustained by the various ‘wounds’ big and small he suffered while growing up. Nor can Young be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, however interesting and plausible his suggestions are, as it would be ‘wrong’ to deny that adding two and two gives you four.

Put aside for now the complication that atomic physics tells us an electron is at one and the same time both a wave and a particle (an object with mass), in mathematics and the sciences there are demonstrable ‘facts’: adding an acid to an alkali results in a reaction which produces a salt and water. Time and again this has been found to be so, and we are confident it will always be so.

There are certainly also ‘facts’ which might be cited when dealing with an author and her or his work, but they are far more limited in scope. There will be biographical and other, possibly indisputable, ‘facts’: publication dates and how many editions of a work were published, whether and when it was translated into this or that language, where it was written, and so on. There will, for example, be the ‘facts’ that a great many of Charles Dickens’ novels take place in London and that Shakespeare wrote some of his plays to be performed by the theatre company he co-owned.

As far as Hemingway is concerned, it is also a ‘fact’ that For Whom The Bell Tolls takes place over three days during the Spanish civil war, and that Across The River And Into The Trees describes the brief love affair between a fifty-something army colonel with heart disease and an Venetian woman just short of her 19th birthday.

But interpretation, conclusions reached by ‘close reading’ and analysis are never as copper-bottomed: that parts of The Sun Also Rises take place in Paris, Pamplona, Burguete and Madrid are ‘facts’ about the novel; that it portrays a ‘lost generation in despair’ and that it is ‘a tragedy’ are opinions, suggestions, readings — call them what you will. But they are not ‘facts’.

Furthermore, as opinions, suggestions, conclusions they are wholly subjective (of which we become particularly aware when different interpretations contradict each other as all too often they do). Yet time and again academia will, possibly unwittingly, present its ‘conclusions’ as though they were ‘facts’, whether they are dealing with the work of Hemingway or any other writer.

For each individual academic her or his take on a novel, story or poem might well ‘be a fact’; for the rest of us, matters should not necessarily be quite as certain. But such is ‘the power of credulity’ observed by Woolf (right) and the ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status many of us accord the critics and academics, these findings might also be accepted as ‘fact’ by many, whether the student or the lay reader.

Thus, at some point — a point no doubt already reached by many reading these essays — not only does it sound odd for sceptics to disagree with the academics, but, de facto, it is thought to be up to those sceptics to prove the academics to be ‘wrong’. But Woolf’s advice to the students and lay readers is worth repeating: ignore those imaginary wigs, robes and outriders, whether worn by critic or academic, and pay rather more attention to your own judgment (though always keep an open mind).

Part II: ‘Proving’ the artistry