About critics and criticism:
[Critics] 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.
Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism, New York Herald Tribune, Oct, 1927.
It will be well to make a little more certain of these matters by reading first Mr. Hemingway’s earlier book, The Sun Also Rises, and it soon becomes clear from this that, if Mr. Hemingway is ‘advanced’, it is not in the way that is to us most interesting... nothing new is revealed about any of the characters in The Sun Also Rises. They come before us shaped, proportioned, weighed, exactly as the characters of Maupassant are shaped and proportioned. They are seen from the old angle; the old reticences, the old relations between author and character are observed.
Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism, New York Herald Tribune, Oct, 1927.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, who life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to a young poet
who had sent him some of his verse
and asked for Rilke’s judgment.
who had sent him some of his verse
and asked for Rilke’s judgment.
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well-meaning and high-minded. But they are all camp followers.
Hemingway in letter to Sherwood Anderson, May 1925.
The point is I want them all to sound as though they really happened. Then when I succeed those poor dumb pricks say they are all just skilful reporting.
Ernest Hemingway, letter to Maxwell Perkins, Nov 1933.
[Critics are] lice who crawl on literature.
Hemingway in The Green Hills Of Africa, 1935.
The reviews of Death In The Afternoon were more puzzled than disrespectful; this was, after all, Hemingway's first book after his acclaimed A Farewell To Arms, and in 1932 his reputation was still riding that wave of critical adulation
Milton Cohen, The Pull Of Politics, 2018.
The collection of stories that followed in 1933, Winner Take Nothing, also received mixed reviews. Some were now edged with impatience since it was clear from the stories that Hemingway’s indifference to the times in Death In The Afternoon was not an anomaly and that the author had not at all changed his theme and focus from the 1920s – themes such as existential despair that did not speak to the Depression 30s. Since the short story was a Hemingway specialty, the mixed reviews stung even more than those of the bullfight book, suggesting either that something was amiss with the fundamentals of Hemingway’s writing, or, as he preferred to believe, that the critics were just out to get him for not conforming to the times.
Milton Cohen, The Pull Of Politics, 2018.
He is very bitter about the critics and very bold in asserting his independence of them, so bitter and so bold that one detects signs of a bad conscience . . . Would Hemingway write better books if he wrote on different themes? ‘Who Murdered The Vets?’ suggests he would . . . In six years Hemingway has not produced a book even remotely worthy of his talents.
Granville Hicks, New Masses, 1936.
In these negative reviews, one senses not merely disapproval but exasperation with Hemingway’s assumptions that the American public of 1935 – still staggering under a worldwide economic depression, and now confronting the rise of Nazism and the aggression of Italian fashion fascism – would thrill the expensive adventures of the sportsman in a far-off land and eagerly devour his most casually delivered pontifications on American literature and letters. To the economic and issues of the day the book is serenely indifferent — except to the leftist critics who have dared to criticize the author.
Milton Cohen, The Pull Of Politics, 2018.
About In Our Time:
His language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean... his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.
New York Times review of In Our Time, Oct 18, 1925.
‘I know no American writer with a more startling ear for colloquial conversation, or a more poetic sensitiveness for the woods and hills. In Our Time has perhaps not enough energy to be a great book, but Ernest Hemingway has promises of genius.
New York Herald Tribune Books review of In Our Time, February 14, 1926.
Mr Ernest Hemingway, a young American writer living in Paris, is definitely of the moderns. It is not merely a deliberate taste for writing ungrammatically now and again which points the way to Mr Hemingway’s literary camp; it is rather his own concern for the conventional features of good writing. The short stories in the volume entitled In Our Time... achieve their affect by normal and rather puzzling means... Only one story in the book — Indian camp, the first — has anything like a straightforward appeal, and even here the actual method is as elusive as in the rest of the tales.
Review of In Our Time, Times Literary Supplement, Nov 4, 1926.
[Hemingway] is that rare bird, an intelligent man who is not introspective on paper . . . Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-’literary’ transcriber of life — a writer.
Time review of In Our time, Jan 18, 1926.
‘The flat even banal declarations in the paragraphs alternating with Mr Hemingway’s longer sketches are a criticism of the conventional dishonesty of literature. Here is neither literary inflation nor elevation, but a passionately bare telling of what happened.
Herbert J. Seligman, reviewing In Our Time
in the New York City Sun, October 17, 1925.
in the New York City Sun, October 17, 1925.
There is vigour, too, and a personal quality of observation in his stories and vignettes; but nothing that one wishes particularly to remember seems to us to emerge from them. The general atmosphere might be described as one of American adolescence — a hard, sterile, restlessness of mood conveyed in a hard, staccato sometimes brutal prose. Mr Hemingway uses his method very skilfully; we feel he is both sincere and successful in carrying out his purpose, but his purpose seems to us narrow and unfruitful — withered at the root. He is a natural writer who has not yet found an environment worthy of him.
Review of In Our Times, Yorkshire Post and
Leeds Intelligencer, December 22, 1926.
Leeds Intelligencer, December 22, 1926.
This, the war-wound interpretation of the story was established not by textual evidence, but by what the critics knew about the author’s life — or rather what they thought they knew about his life. After he was dead, they eagerly seized on his posthumously published comment in A Moveable Feast that Big Two-Hearted River was about ‘coming back from the war, but there was no mention of the war in it as clinching proof that they were right. They would have been better advised to wonder if a master manipulator was not making fools of them from beyond the grave, as he so often had in life.
Kenneth S. Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
About The Sun Also Rises:
Every sentence that [Hemingway] writes is fresh and alive. There is no one writing whose prose has more of the force and vibrancy of good, direct, natural, colloquial speech... It seems to me that Hemingway is highly successful in presenting the effect that a sensual love for the same woman might have on the temperaments of three men who are utterly different in this position and training.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, New York Sun, Nov 6, 1926.
Don Stewart was mildly amused at [sic] the caricature of himself in the figure of Bill Gorton. He recognised a few of his own quips in the talk between Bill and Jake, but the whole book struck him as a little more than a very clever reportorial tour de force.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
It requires no great measure of boldness to predict healthy success for almost any decently written roman a clef, for this particular genre excites a very special kind of interest which does not emanate exclusively from the ‘literary’ public. Even people who rarely read novels are driven by curiosity to investigate a story supposedly based on real people and events. When such a novel is additionally acclaimed by the critics and widely hailed as the Bible of a whole generation, the furore increases geometrically. Over a period of years information purported to be ‘the truth’ about the novel and its prototypes multiply and are synthesized, resulting in a confusing array of legends which not infrequently contradict each other. Thus has it been with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Bertram D. Sarason, Hemingway And The Sun Set.
In writing [The Sun Also Rises], Hemingway must have realized by the end of the first part that he was writing himself into a corner. He had concocted a bitchy roman a clef about postwar Paris ‘types’ which wasn’t going anywhere until he took his people out of the city and into the Spanish landscape. Hemingway is then able to set his characters and their intrigues against his inspired travel writing about trout fishing and the Pamplona feria. In subsequent novels Hemingway implicitly acknowledged that he did not do people or plots very well. He created stick-figure characters (Catherine Barkley, Robert Jordan) inhabiting a finely drawn, frequently exotic (especially in the time before mass tourism) landscape and acting out minimal plots drawn from the fantasies of The Boy’s Own Paper.
David Ward, The Sewanee Review, Summer 1997.
There is another kind of secular ritual experience in Brett’s flirtation with Romero and her final release of him. In these scenes... we have a drama played out in terms of the three-act tragedy of the corrida. The values of the one are matched against the character of the other; and Brett’s renunciation of Romero is a positive moral act... The Sun Also Rises is not a cheap exploitation of post-war interest in immoralities, but a perceptive portrayal of the human condition within the rigorous limits of circumstance which the post-war world had imposed. It reveals the men and women who lived in this closed, secular world isolated from tradition for what they genuinely were; above all it shows them working painfully for an adjustment, with all the problems of adjustment increased and intensified.’
Frederick J. Hoffman The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade.
“A writer named Hemingway has arisen, who writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.” His characters, [Bruce] Barton said, without morals, ideals, or religion, drank too much, but they had courage and friendship. “And they are alive. Amazingly real and alive.” Proving that he still had one foot in Oak Park, Barton, like Grace Hemingway, also hope that Ernest would one day write a book “about more respectable people.”
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming
on a review in the Atlantic Monthly by Bruce Barton,
author, ad executive and politician who partly grew up in Oak Park.
on a review in the Atlantic Monthly by Bruce Barton,
author, ad executive and politician who partly grew up in Oak Park.
The barbarity of the world is also the theme of... ‘The Sun Also Rises’... The whole interest of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ lies in the attempts of the hero and heroine to disengage themselves from this world, or rather to arrive at some method of living honorably. The real story there is the story of their attempts to do this — attempts by which, in such a world, they are always bound to lose in everything except honor.
Edmund Wilson, 1927.
Despite quite a lot of fun The Sun Also Rises is... Hemingway’s ‘Waste Land,’ and Jake is Hemingway’s Fisher King. This may be just coincidence, though the novelist had read the poem, but once again here is the protagonist gone impotent, and his land gone sterile. Eliot’s London is Hemingway’s Paris, where spiritual life in general, and Jake’s sexual life in particular, are alike impoverished. Prayer breaks down and fails, a knowledge of traditional distinctions between good and evil is largely lost, copulation is morally neutral and, cut off from the past chiefly by the spiritual disaster of the war, life has become almost meaningless.’
Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (Penn State 1952, 1966).
Hemingway writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.
The Atlantic
A Waste Land that is fun doesn’t make a great deal of sense, or, at any rate, makes a sense very different from that of Eliot’s poem and would therefore demand a different sort of reading. Indeed, what The Sun Also Rises requires — what critical responsibility requires — is that Hemingway’s novel be examined in the light of its own working, not by the alien light of another very different sensibility.
W. J. Stuckey, Purdue University, Indiana, in his essay
refuting Philip Young’s claim that The Sun Also Rises
is Hemingway’s The Waste Land.
refuting Philip Young’s claim that The Sun Also Rises
is Hemingway’s The Waste Land.
I am, I must confess, less inclined than many critics to prostrate myself in admiration before the nymphomaniac Lady Brett Ashley, when she decides to give up the bullfighter lest she should poison his youth with her corruption. The act itself was unquestionably right, but with that kind of woman one can never be too sure about motives... Nowhere in literature have I found a group of people to have sold themselves to the devil so cheaply and got so little satisfaction out of it.’
Edward Wagenknecht Cavalcade of the American Novel:
From the Birth of the Nation to the Middle of the Twentieth Century.
From the Birth of the Nation to the Middle of the Twentieth Century.
To a United States where ‘only saps work’ as the market built fortunes day after day, travel abroad, particularly at advantageous exchange rates, was easily possible. The Sun Also Rises — despite Hemingway’s claims that it was the most moral of novels — became the handbook for social, and sexual, adventure.’
Linda Wagner-Martin, ed. Introduction
A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway.
A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway.
[The Sun Also Rises] is the work of a man who, having ended his busy term of apprenticeship, was already a master at twenty-six.
Malcolm Cowley Introduction, The Sun Also Rises:
Three Novels by Ernest Hemingway.
Three Novels by Ernest Hemingway.
Cohn still upholds a romantic view of life, and since he affirms it with stubborn persistence, he acts like a goad upon his wiser contemporaries... Cohn’s romanticism explains his key position in the parable. He is the last chivalric hero, the last defender of an outworn faith, and his function is to illustrate its present folly — to show us, through the absurdity of his behavior, that romantic love is dead, that one of the great guiding codes of the past no longer operates. ‘You’re getting damned romantic,’ says Brett to Jake at one point in the novel. ‘No, bored,’ he replies... ‘
Mark Spilka, The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels.
For the war, which has unmanned Barnes and his contemporaries, has turned Brett into the freewheeling equal of any man. It has taken her first sweetheart’s life through dysentery and has sent her present husband home in a dangerous state of shock. For Brett these blows are the equivalent of Jake’s emasculation; they seem to release her from her womanly nature and expose her to the male prerogatives of drink and promiscuity.’
Mark Spilka, The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels.
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels.
Thus, in The Sun Also Rises, his protagonists are deliberately shaped as allegorical figures: Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are two lovers de-sexed by the war; Robert Cohn is the false knight who challenges their despair; while Romero, the stalwart bullfighter, personifies the good life which will survive their failure. Of course, these characters are not abstractions in the text; they are realized through the most concrete style in American fiction, and their larger meaning is implied only by their response to immediate situations. But the implications are there, the parable is at work in every scene, and its presence lends unity and depth to the whole novel.’
Mark Spilka, The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels
Twelve Original Essays on Great Novels
The design of the novel is... very beautiful. In the very first paragraph we learn that ‘in [Cohn’s] last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles... Out of this apparently casual opening there emerges the whole action of the book... The Sun Also Rises is a beautifully organized representation of the American sense of experience as Hemingway understood it, at its best and at its worst.’
Arthur Mizener The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel.
Hemingway tells us a great deal about those people, but he tells us nothing of importance about human life.
Edwin Muir, review of The Sun Also Rises, Nation & Athaeneum.
In short, Hemingway enjoyed an extraordinarily good press during the years of ‘trying out’. It might be said that, generally, people took the writing for what it was... In only a few cases was there a doubt whether the talent was large enough to sustain a brittle novelistic world. Unlike Fitzgerald, whose early work was spotted for its youthful errors, for the fragile excellence that it had, Hemingway critics were at first respectful, polite, even hopeful, and sometimes enthusiastic. Of course there already existed a sense of his importance for his ‘times’; the spareness of the style was sometimes suspected as being somehow symptomatic.
Frederick J. Hoffman ‘Ernest Hemingway’
Sixteen Modern American Authors:
A Survey of Research and Criticism
Sixteen Modern American Authors:
A Survey of Research and Criticism
Many critics agree... that The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s most written about novel not only because it is arguably his best, but also because it is his most popular classroom novel, included on more high school and college syllabi than any other of his works. Since scholars write about what they know well, such familiarity with The Sun Also Rises quite naturally leads to increased critical attention as scholars share their ideas with others via publication. Thus the cycle of critical debate begins anew with the opening of each semester and attests most clearly to Hemingway’s ‘re-readability’ down through the years.’
Kelli A. Larson, Lies, Damned Lies, and Hemingway Criticism.
The dialogue is brilliant. If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it. It is alive with the rhythms and idioms, the pauses and suspensions and innuendos and shorthands, of living speech. It is in the dialogue almost entirely Mr Hemingway tells his story and makes the people live and act.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, New York Herald Tribune, Oct 31, 1926.
Like other men in Hemingway’s early fiction, he is an embodiment of male passivity. In other words, Brett resembles a traditional man in her sexual expectations, and Jake resembles a traditional woman in his sexual unavailability and his uncomplaining tolerance of others’ inconsiderations. The reversal, both over and implied, in their gender roles signals that something has gone awry between the sexes.
Rena Sanderson ‘Hemingway and Gender History’
The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway.
The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway.
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of the Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame... It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, New York Times
book review, October 31, 1926.
book review, October 31, 1926.
Now The Sun Also Rises was as “starkly” written as Mr. Hemingway’s short stories; it dealt with subjects as “unpleasant”. Why it should have been taken to the slightly damp bosom of the public while the (as it seems to me) superb In Our Time should have been disregarded will always be a puzzle to me. As I see it... Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.
Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker, October 27, 1927.
No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.
Frank L. Ryan, The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway.
In the context of American literary history, Brett Ashley is thus not a dramatically new character, nor is she the most socially radical of these New Woman figures. Indeed, in some senses, she is more conservative than the norm of these characters... Brett has married, intends to be married again, and would quickly marry Jake if his condition permitted them to live together... Brett confesses that she is a ‘goner,’ passionately in love with Pedro [Romero]. Because Brett has only spoken to Pedro once, and then in the most superficial of circumstances, her concept of love seems pathetically juvenile for a twice-married woman of thirty-four, a point she acknowledges when she says she has lost her self-respect and calls herself a ‘bitch’.’
James Nagel, Brett and the Other Women in
The Sun Also Rises, The Cambridge
Companion to Hemingway.
The Sun Also Rises, The Cambridge
Companion to Hemingway.
Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises is] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight... When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona... reminds you of a travel book... it’s time to hold an inquest.
John Dos Passos, reviewing The Sun Also Rises for New Masses, Dec 1926.
The war... gave them the feeling of having lived in two eras, almost on two different planets. The second era seemed tawdrier in many ways, but still it had become their own world or century.
Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering.
A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young author Hemingway. His short work [In Our Time] bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly, tersely, accurately... Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy café tables in... Paris. He has chosen to immortalise the semi-humorous love tragedy of an insatiable young English war widow and an unmanned US soldier... The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained, quite subtle... But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake’s favorites, and presumably, author Hemingway’s, too, ‘Oh, what the hell.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, Time, Nov 1, 1926.
Here, at last, is a writer who can assume (or, at least, appear to assume) an entirely impartial attitude towards his characters, drawing them with a surprising clarity through which no shadow of the author falls... The sentences are cold and direct. They are always statements. The characters themselves are evolved from the conversations mainly, and it is a tribute to the uncanny skill of Hemingway to note that these people live with them almost painful reality.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, New York World, Nov 14, 1926
The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry, not for the obvious reason that it is about utterly degraded people, but for the reason that it shows an immense skill, a very honest and unimpassioned conviction about how writing should be done, a remarkably restrained style, and is done in an amusing and clever modern technique, a sketching in with conversations and few modelings of description and none of rumination... Ernest Hemingway can be a distinguished writer if he wishes to be. He is, even in this book, but it is a distinction hidden under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 27, 1926
Mr Hemingway... writes with a swinging, effortless precision that puts him in the first flight of American stylists... it is a mannerism of Hemingway’s to recount exactly his characters’ physical evolutions, through doors, up and down stairs, in and out of bed, as though establishing alibis... He savours the taste and feel and smell of living with the sort of hard-boiled gusto.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, Kansas City Star, Dec 4, 1926
Dr Hemingway mailed Ernest a copy of the Literary Digest Book Review magazine. In red and blue pencil, he had underscored an editorial which said that there was now a strong public reaction against the ‘sex novel and the highbrow realistic novel’... Grace was a good deal more forthright, as was her custom. She was glad to know that his book was selling even though it seemed to her a ‘doubtful honor’ to have produced ‘one of the filthiest books of the year’.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
Malcolm discovered that winter that Hemingway’s ‘influence’ was spreading far beyond the circle of those who had known him in Paris’. Girls from Smith College, coming to New York, ‘were modeling themselves after Lady Brett... Hundreds of bright young men from the Middle West were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the on the side of their mouths’.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
His characters are as shallow as the sources in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material – or even challenging — he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant service of life in Paris.
Review of The Sun Also Rises, Dial, Jan 1927.
Mr Hemingway is a writer of quite unusual talent... His dialogue is by turns extraordinarily natural and brilliant, and impossibly melodramatic; when he has to describe anything he has a sureness and economy which recall Maupassant; he neither turns away from unpleasant details, nor does he stress them... The original merits of the book on striking; its fault equally apparent... is a lack of artistic significance. We see the lives of a group of people laid bare and we feel that it does not matter to us... But he is still a young writer; his gifts are original; and his first novel raises hopes of remarkable achievement.
Review The Sun Also Rises, Nation & Athenaeum, July 2, 1927.
95 per cent of The Sun Also [Rises] was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did. I made it all up.
Ernest Hemingway, letter to Maxwell Perkins, Nov 1933.
Mr Hemingway began brilliantly, with a set of short stories called In Our Time. But Fiesta as [The Sun Also Rises was entitled in Britain] gives us neither people nor atmosphere; the maudlin, staccato conversations — evidently meant to be realistic in their brokenness and boringness — convey no impression of reality; and the characters, both men and women, in Paris and in Spain, are so consistently soaking themselves with alcohol as to lose all human interest... O that wearisome, drenching deluge of drink!... Why does Mr Hemingway, who can draw flesh-and-blood, waste his time on the bibulous shadows?
Observer, June 12, 1927.
Mr Hemingway and Mr [Thornton] Wilder have made huge successes of late, and received a great deal of uncritical homage. I believe that both are too sagacious to let it fool them. It is technical virtuosity that has won them attention; it is hard and fundamental thinking that must get them on, if they are to make good their high promise.
H.L. Mencken, American Mercury, May 1928.
Now comes Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises]... more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different... The Spanish scenes give us something of the quality of Mr Hemingway’s earlier book, but they hardly qualify the general impression of an unsuccessful experiment.
Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 1927.
Written in terse, precise and aggressively fresh prose, and containing some of the finest dialogue yet written in this country, the story achieves a vividness and a sustained tension that makes it unquestionably one of the events of a year rich in interesting books... There is truly a Shakesperian absoluteness about his writing... It is an interesting fact that neither in his short stories nor in this novel does Hemingway make use of a single simile.
Cleveland B. Chase, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec 11, 1926.
About Men Without Women:
Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water. The words form a tesselation, each in order beside the other.
Ford Madox Ford, 1932.
Men Without Women consists of short stories in the French rather than in the Russian manner... There is never a thread left hanging: indeed so contracted are they that when the last sentence over the last page flares up, as it so often does, you see by its flight the whole circumference and significance of story revealed... Mr Hemingway, then, is courageous; he is candid; he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes; he has moments of bare and nervous duty; he is modern in manner but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent has contracted rather than expanded; compared with his novel, his stories are a little dry and sterile.
Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism, New York Herald Tribune, Oct , 1927.
The movements and words and sensations are recorded; the emotions are left to be inferred... [Hemingway] conjures up, by repetition of apparently insignificant remarks, a feel of tension and emotional import which is both dramatic and satisfying to the esthetic sense... Mere simplicity, when it is deliberate and artful, can be a most telling feature of “style”.
Joseph Warren Beach, 1932.
Hemingway’s is the art of the reporter carried to the highest degree... His facts may be from experience, and they may be compounded solely of imagination; but he so presents them that they stand out with all the clearness and sharpness (and also the coldness) of pinnacles of ice in clear, frosty air. To sum up in a figure, Hemingway’s is a stark naked style.
Percy Hutchison, New York Times, Oct 16, 1927.
... a truly magnificent work... I do not know where a greater collection of stories can be found... Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection... His is, as any reader knows, a dangerous influence. The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.
New Yorker, Oct 29, 1927.
About A Farewell To Arms:
Superlatively favourable reviews in American channels by Malcolm Cowley, Clifton Fadiman, Henry Seidel and T S Matthews among many others plus equally enthusiastic comments in England by Arnold Bennett, JB Priestley and the anonymous reviewers for the Times literary supplement help to create a demand for the book and to spread the authors fame more widely than ever before. Indeed, in New York a profile by Dorothy Parker on November 30, 1929, may be said to have marked the point at which Hemingway passed beyond mere fame into living legend.
Kenneth S Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
In Mr Ernest Hemingway’s new novel a Farewell to Arms landscapes, persons and events are brought to such vividness as to make the reader become a participating witness. This astonishing book is in places so poignant and moving as to touch the limit that human nature can stand when love and parting are the point... And he, like Defoe, is lucky to be writing in an age that will not stop its ears at the unmuted resonance of a masculine voice.
Publicity blurb written for Scribner’s by novelist Owen Wister
(The Virginian) for A Farewell To Arms.
(The Virginian) for A Farewell To Arms.
In a separate statement to Perkins, Wister voice his concerns about Hemingway’s use of the first-person narrator and the novel’s conclusion, suggesting that the nurse’s death be softened and that the ending bring together to two themes of love and war. Perkins agrees completely. The book’s flaw, he tells Wister, is that the war story and the love do not combine.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s
The novel [A Farewell To Arms] exemplifies Hemingway’s theory of inventing from knowledge, his belief that an author must have some actual experience, though not necessarily the precise experience of what he writes about. To illustrate this idea, he contrasted Tolstoy’s memoir of the Crimean War with his fictional description of Napoleonic battles in War And Peace. ‘Dr Tolstoi [sic] was at Sevastopol. But not at Borodino. He wasn’t in business in those days. But he could invent from knowledge. We were all at some damned Sevastopol.’
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography.
[Gertrude Stein] also passed on Ernest the judgment that she had heard said about the artist Andre Derain: ‘He looks like a modern and he smells of the museum.’ Here it is a little easier to see what she was getting at: that for all he had said about getting past such old, hollow terms (and concepts) as ‘valor’ and ‘glory’ in pared-down, minimal language, A Farewell To Arms was a highly romantic war novel.
Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway.
Frederic Henry in A Farewell To Arm sharply aware about the outer world and has vague but powerful emotions about personal integrity, love and death. The clarity of his surface perceptions is in remarkable contrast to the vagueness of his emotional understanding. He lives by his emotions and he steadfastly refused to put his two worlds together by taking thought. The story has a kind of unreality because Frederic Henry, who tells it, is more ignorant of himself than a man of his gifts normally is.
Dan Norton, University of Virginia, reviewing
Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Hemingway,
New York Times, Oct 1944.
Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Hemingway,
New York Times, Oct 1944.
I think we will understand Hemingway better if we understand his romantic temperament. His attitudes are defined by any textbook discussion of 19th-century romanticism. Like Byron, for example, he revolts against the artificial rules of society and finds romantic despair a permanent valid mode. Like Keats he is half in love with easeful death; like Wordsworth he thinks the simple peasant lives closest to the truth. He feels the romantic’s desire to escape from the present, but, unlike most of them, he does not retreat into the past. He goes behind history to find the truth of primitive instinct, yet this truth is valid for him only as it survives for men of today. And here again he shows a basic romantic attitude: he believes in instincts and emotions and he distrusts the mind.
Dan Norton, University of Virginia, reviewing
Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Hemingway,
New York Times, Oct 1944.
Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Hemingway,
New York Times, Oct 1944.
The Sun Also Rises plucked him out of the bush leagues of the small literary magazines and made him a talent worth watching. A Farewell To Arms will take him into the major league of best-selling authors where soon an entourage — lawyer, agent, editor, publisher — will be continually looking after his and their professional best interests... In ten year of continuous work he has transformed himself from the precocious, war-wounded teenager writing clichéd imitations into one of the best young writers of is generation.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s
About Green Hills Of Africa:
Who Murdered the Vets? suggested that Hemingway was going somewhere and I hoped to find further evidence in Green Hills of Africa. [Hemingway’s] autobiographical preface is advisable, for what I have to say about Green Hills of Africa is that it is the dullest book I have read since Anthony Adverse. There are perhaps ten pages that are interesting, and of these I shall speak later on. The rest of the book is just plain dull.
Granville Hicks, review of Green Hills Of Africa in New Masses, Nov 1935.
He delivers a self-confident lecture on the high possibilities of prose writing, with the implication that he himself, Hemingway, has realized or hopes to realize these possibilities; and then writes what are certainly, from the point of view of prose, the very worst pages of his life. There is one passage which is hardly even intelligible — the most serious possible fault for a writer who is always insisting on the supreme importance of lucidity. He inveighs with much scorn against the literary life and against the professional literary man of the cities; and then manages to give the impression that he himself is a professional literary man of the most touchy and self-conscious kind.
Edmund Wilson, review of Green Hills Of Africa in New Republic.
He has produced what must be one of the only books ever written which make Africa and it’s animals seem dull. Almost the only thing we learned about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them. And as for the natives . . . the principal impression we get of them is that they were simple and inferior people who enormously admired Hemingway.
Edmund Wilson, on Green Hills Of Africa in
The Wound And The Bow, 1939.
The Wound And The Bow, 1939.
Why then does our iron advocate of straight talk about what things are, our full-sized man, our ferocious realist, go blind and wrap himself up in clouds of juvenile romanticism the moment he crosses the border on his way to a Spanish bullfight?
Max Eastman, review of Death In The Afternoon, New Republic.
The writing is the thing; that way he has of getting down with beautiful precision the exact way things look, smell, taste, feel, sound.
Charles Poore, New York Times, Oct 1935.
Some of his sentences in Green Hills of Africa would make Henry James take a breath. There’s one that starts on page 148, swings the length of 149 and lands on 150, forty lines or so from tip to tip. It’s been a gradual development, but it shows at its best in this book.
Charles Poore, New York Times, Oct 1935.
In Green Hills of Africa his writing is better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full power. There should soon be rousing calls demanding that he go to work on a novel of vast and striking scope instead of wasting time calling shots on the kudu. There’s a lot in that. He should. Maybe he plans to. If so he’s taking his time about it, and spending part of that time wing-shooting some of the most eminent eagles (they were lions a minute ago) in the American literary sky.
Charles Poore, New York Times, Oct 1935.
The prize sentence in the book runs forty-six lines, the one I should like to quote as typical... though less than half that long is still too long, and a comparatively straightforward one must serve. ‘Going downhill steeply made these Spanish shooting boots short in the toe and there was an old argument, about this length of boot and whether the boot-maker, whose part I had taken, unwittingly, first, only as interpreter, and finally embraced his theory patriotically as a whole and, I believed, by logic, had overcome it by adding onto the heel.’ This is simpler than most, but it shows the new phase. Usually the material is not so factual as this and we are supposed to get, besides the sense, some muscular effort or some effect of color or movement that is latent in pace and rhythm rather than in words. But, however earnest the intention, the result is a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing.
Bernard de Voto, Green Hills Of Africa,
Saturday Review Of Literature, October 26, 1935.
Saturday Review Of Literature, October 26, 1935.
About Winner Take Nothing:
... [Hemingway] has 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.
John Chamberlain, review of Winner Take Nothing,
New York Times, Oct 27, 1933.
New York Times, Oct 27, 1933.
The old waiter, on the other hand, knows very well why the old patron comes often, gets drunk, stays late and leaves only when he must. For the old waiter, like the old patron, belongs to the great brotherhood ‘who like to stay late in the café . . . all those who do not want to go to bed . . . all those who need a light at night’ . . . The unspoken brotherly relationship between the old waiter and the old patron is dramatized in the opening dialogue, where the the two waiters discuss the drinker of brandy as he sits quietly at one of the tables. The key notion is that the young and rather stupid waiter has not the slightest conception of the special significance which the old waiter attaches to his young confrère careless and unspecialized use of the word nothing . . . They are speaking Spanish. For the old waiter, the word nothing (or nada) contains a huge actuality. The great skill displayed in the story is the development, through the most carefully controlled understatement, of the young waiter’s mere nothing into the old waiter’s something — a Something called Nothing, which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable and omnipresent that, once experienced, it can never be forgotten.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer As Artist.
About writing and his style:
The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins.
A significant feature of modern American literature is the inability of many of the writers to get beyond the world of their adolescence and youth, so as to add to it and develop it. The American writer often starts off splendidly, with courage, candour, curiosity, a sense of adventure, and a thirst for experience. But unfortunately a maximum charge of vitality is matched by a minimum of cultural equipment. In other words, faith in life is accompanied by a lack of faith in the resources of culture, which the American writer sees as cramping and weighing down the immediacy and authenticity of direct experience. . . the American writer for the most part confines himself to recounting the story of his youth. For him it is an inspirational capital that must be spent without delay and without thinking about profitable investments to assure him a tranquil old age. . . After he has made his début with a couple of books, the American writer tends to restrict himself to re-writing them, and so increasingly falls into imitating himself and his own particular mannerisms. . . In these observations we are aware that we have involuntarily drawn almost a portrait of Ernest Hemingway.
Alberto Moravia, L’Espresso, 20 August 1961.
[Hemingway] was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote (speaking like an uncertified critic) as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language. All writers, after him, owe Hemingway a debt for their freedom whether the debt is acknowledged or not.
Martha Gellhorn, the Paris Review, Spring 1981.
I shall try to demonstrate that God Rest You Merry Gentlemen is a story of challenging complexity with a well-developed allusive subtext that accounts for most of its seeming disparities. In addition to re-examining the text, I shall consider its genesis, sources, and publication history as well as its surviving manuscript versions. All of these contribute to a surprising reassessment of the story’s artistry and of its significance as a biographical document shedding new light on Hemingway’s alleged anti-Semitism.
Hemingway’s Anti-semitism Reconsidered by Horst H. Kruse,
University of Münster, Germany, the Hemingway Review, Spring 2006.
University of Münster, Germany, the Hemingway Review, Spring 2006.
A month after arriving in Havana [in August 1934], he has added less than three thousand words to his manuscript [of Green Hills Of Africa], but he knows where he is going and how to get there. Working from memory, photographs and his own notes, he began with only a ragged notion for a good story — the kudu hunt. What is developing is the story of the hunt, a meditation tour, a semi-fictional autobiography and a discourse on aesthetics. Like so many modernists — Joyce, Pound, Stein, Yeats — Hemingway is consciously creating a handbook for his readers, explaining how to read his texts. He is also creating a prose more complicated than any of his earlier writing, a prose that stops time, twists time, escapes outside time. If Einstein could imagine more dimensions than three, just maybe a writer can work through the fourth dimension of time and into a timeless fifth dimension, a continuous present tense both now and then, here and elsewhere simultaneously.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s.
It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Max Perkins, 1945.
The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. It’s too easy. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.
Ernest Hemingway, introduction to Men At War.
Reviewing Hemingway’s statements of the theory of omission in their different contexts suggests that a rather commonplace idea was used on various occasions to serve various ends, until it became for him the theory of his fiction. It began almost as an afterthought in the letter to Fitzgerald in 1925. But 1932 [in Death In The Afternoon] it was his version of the conventional notion of a writer’s responsibility both to follow and to depart from the tradition of his craft. Finally in the retrospective view of 1958 [in his Paris Review ‘interview’], it was transformed into an evaluative system for his short fiction implying a putative theory of the genre. That theory, however, has a different and more complex history in the manuscripts of his fiction of the early 1920s.
Paul Smith, Trinity College, Hartford, Hemingway’s
Early Manuscript: The Theory And Practice of Omission.
Early Manuscript: The Theory And Practice of Omission.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon.
What Hemingway sought, finally, was more than the facts, more even than the empirical truth itself: ‘And things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing sure than anything true and alive and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.’
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will:
The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
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.
Ernest Hemingway.
We can, for instance, regard Jake Barnes as an incarnation of the Fisher King awaiting the question. Both were sexually impotent. The probability that Hemingway had never read the Grail Legend and thus would be unaware of the correspondence would not destroy the moral significance of Fiesta [The Sun Also Rises], which is what critics like [Maxwell] Geismar imply. But there is an important difference between the two, and it is the difference that makes Fiesta more than a mere re-statement of an old myth in modern terms. The impotence of the Fisher King was curable but there was no question and no operation that could have cured Jake. If we like we can red into this Hemingway’s conviction at that time that the condition of our society was beyond remedy.
John Atkins, The Art Of Ernest Hemingway (1952).
[Hemingway’s] short stories are deceptive somewhat in the manner of an iceberg. 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 crystalisations, compact and buoyant enough to carry considerable weight.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer As Artist.
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.
Ernest Hemingway, on The Old Man And The Sea.
There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse.
Ernest Hemingway, on The Old Man And The Sea.
I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. 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.
Ernest Hemingway, in George Plimpton Paris Review
interview, spring ed. 1958.
interview, spring ed. 1958.
It is a remarkedly unintellectual style. Events are described in the sequence in which they occurred; no mind reorders or analyses them, and perceptions come to the reader unmixed with comment from the author. The impression, therefore, is one of intense objectivity, The writer provides nothing but stimuli.
Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway, 1959.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway.
The discrepancy between eloquence and maudlin self-indulgence was often visible on a single page; I never knew when he would soar and when he would lapse into the fabled macho pose that has proved so irresistible to parody.
James Atlas, associate editor The Atlantic, Oct 1983
on re-reading Hemingway’s novels.
on re-reading Hemingway’s novels.
The style remains as surely as the fame. It has been praised, imitated and derided for 30 years, but it endures: the one intrinsic style our century has produced. And yet Hemingway was the last man to wish to be remembered as a stylist, and none of his critics, however much he has admired the style or detested it, has been able or willing to leave his judgment at that.
Archibald MacLeish, Life magazine, July 14, 1961.
Mr Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.
Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker, October 29, 1927.
A master miniatuarist, a poet essentially, Hemingway was not accustomed to the amplitude of the novel form, and he partially lost control of his materials.
Kenneth S Lynn, Hemingway (commenting on The Sun Also Rises).
Most modern writers are literary... but Hemingway wasn’t literary. He read as much as most English professors and he remembered what he read, remembered it usefully, and its relevance to himself — but he rarely talked about writing.
Archibald MacLeish, Life magazine, July 14, 1961
One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem — for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.’
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, The Swanee Review, 1946
The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it).
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, The Swanee Review, 1946
We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, The Swanee Review, 1946
My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood — most perfectly displayed in some of the short stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is not, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of human life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to great fiction
J. Donald Adams, Speaking Of Books, New York Times,
discussing Across The River And Into The Trees, Sept 24, 1950.
discussing Across The River And Into The Trees, Sept 24, 1950.
‘... the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art...
Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, The Swanee Review, 1949.
This was part of Lewis’s point. He was drawing attention to the power (not just the simplicity) of Hemingway’s use of language. Lewis recognized that Hemingway’s significance, his political significance, was in giving a voice and a language to a new American generation and class.
Andrew Scragg in Wyndham Lewis and Ernest
Hemingway: Beyond the ‘Unsuccessful Rapist’ and the ‘Dumb Ox
Hemingway: Beyond the ‘Unsuccessful Rapist’ and the ‘Dumb Ox
... all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Roland Barthes, The Death Of The Author, 1967.
The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; 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’.
Roland Barthes, The Death Of The Author, 1967.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.
Perhaps this is how we feel about Hemingway: we do not feel that we are in the presence of one of the greatest stylists in literature (as we feel, say, when reading Flaubert, Joyce or Proust), but rather that what is great in him is that, as it were, he preceded his own bad influence. He was, at least, the master of his wake.
James Wood, in a New York Times Books review, Nov 17, 1985.
Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms did a few nice descriptions, but his book, too, is a work of ambition, in which can be seen the beginning of the careful, artful, immaculate idiocy of tone that since has marked both his prose and his legend as he has declined into that sort of fame which, at moments I hope are weak, [Norman] Mailer stems to crave.
Gore Vidal reviewing Norman Mailer, The Nation, January 2, 1960.
‘A re-reading of his first collection of stories, ‘In Our Time’ (1925) or his early novel, ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (1929), makes it easy to understand the impact upon the post-World War I period of a new style and a singular vision of contemporary experience.
Maxwell Geismar, New York Times, July 1, 1962.
The best writer in America at this moment (though for the moment he happens to be in Paris), the most conscientious, the most master of his craft, the most consummate, is my young friend Ernest Hemingway.
Ford Madox Ford in the New York Evening
Post Literary Review, describing Hemingway,
a quote reproduced on the dust jacket
of the first edition of In Our Time in 1925.
Post Literary Review, describing Hemingway,
a quote reproduced on the dust jacket
of the first edition of In Our Time in 1925.
Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.
Damon Runyon on Hemingway.
[Hemingway] had an evangelistic streak that made him work to convert his friends to whatever mania he was encouraging at the time.
John Dos Passos, quoted by Lesley M. M. Blume
in Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind
Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
in Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind
Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway, by contrast, had very early trapped himself into the stereotype of the romantic and virile literary ‘man of action,’ so American in essence, and so little conducive to either intellectual or emotional development.
Maxwell Geismar, New York Times, July 1, 1962.
It’s not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of the trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars too, it would cheer them up... A liar in full flower... is as beautiful as cherry trees, or apple trees, when they are in blossom. Who should ever discourage a liar?
Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin quoting Hemingway
(from his papers) in The Mystery of the Ritz-Hotel Papers.
It’s not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of the trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars too, it would cheer them up... Lying when drinking is a good exercise for their powers of invention and is very helpful in the making up of a story. It is no more wicked or reprehensible in a writer than it is to have strange and marvelous experiences in his dreams. Lying to themselves is harmful but this is cleansed away by the writing of a true book which in its invention is truer than any true thing that ever happened.
Item 845, JFK Library Hemingway Collection.
... a writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.’
Ernest Hemingway, introduction to Men At War
A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.’
Ernest Hemingway, introduction to Men At War.
Embedded in an already curious letter [to screenwriter and novelist Peter Viertel, trying to persuade him to collaborate on a novel] was an even stranger, unsubstantiated account of Ernest’s activity during the Spanish Civil War. Helping others to execute a camp of war prisoners, he claimed he spent the night pulling a trigger that left water blisters on his finger and murder on his conscience. Two months later he told Archie MacLeish that he personally killed twenty-six Germans and extended his World War II combat time from five months to eight. The truth was never enough.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
He might not be a professional like Chink [Dorman-O’Gowan], but Ernest implied that he had soldiered for six months in China; two years and three months at sea with his command; a fling with the RAF; and the rest of 1944 and 1945 with Lanham’s 22nd Regiment. Three times he was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC). He had been in all these places but not soldiering as he implied. The DSC was not an honor conferred on civilians.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.’
Ernest Hemingway, introduction to Men At War.
[Imagination] is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have.’
Ernest Hemingway, Monologue To A Maestro, Esquire, 1935
I do not know why Hemingway told [A. E.] Hotchner he was so poor that he often fed the family on pigeons captured in the park. I don’t know why Hotchner relates the story as if it were true. With corn or bread for bait and tremendous patience, it might be possible now and again to grab and hold a city pigeon. But then to wring its neck and kill it in the Luxembourg Gardens with hundreds of people walking around, and to do this repeatedly without being noticed seems to me quite incredible... To my mind, Hem was clearly spoofing. Yet Hotchner repeats the anecdote in all seriousness. I do not remember that Hem was much of a spoofer as a young man.
Harold Loeb on Hemingway’s Bitterness, 1967.
Actually, Hemingway was not as poor, in my opinion, as he makes himself out to be in A Moveable Feast... For Hem in those days did not stint himself except in the matter of clothes. On one occasion he bought and paid for a Miro, and on many others we drank Pouilly Fuisse and ate oysters, Portugaises when we felt poor, Marennes when we were flush. Hem always paid for his share or tried to. Pouilly Fuisse is a costly wine and French oysters even then were more expensive than their American counterparts.
Harold Loeb on Hemingway’s Bitterness in his memoir The Way It Was, 1959.
Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. . . His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers.
Ernest Hemingway, from Soldier’s Home, In Our Time.
As soon as Hemingway begins speaking in the first person, he seems to lose his bearings, not merely as a critic of life but even as a craftsman.
Edmund Wilson, writer, editor and critic, Atlantic Monthly, July 1939.
His loathing for [his mother] exceeded the purely utilitarian dislike Marx felt for his mother and was emotionally akin to Marx’s attitude to the capitalist system itself. For Hemingway mother-hatred attain the status of a philosophical system
Paul Johnson on Hemingway in Intellectuals.
Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.
Matthew J. Brucolli, in Scott and Ernest:
The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.
The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.
But for reasons I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in his own person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations that obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense, and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin.
Edmund Wilson, Letter To The Russians About Hemingway, 1935.
The Hemingway tune wasn’t an original contribution to world literature. It is in the ears all young people who set out to write. And the Hemingway code of courage, the Hemingway hero and his stoic holding on against odds, have exerted an influence beyond literature. Though the insufficiencies of the man eventually maimed his work, Hemingway at his best is a seminal force as considerable as that Joyce or Faulkner or Scott Fitzgerald. And even at his worst he reminds us that to engage literature one has first to engage life.
Anthony Burgess, from Ernest Hemingway And His World.
‘... Mr. Hemingway is not modern in the sense given; and it would appear from his first novel that this rumour of modernity must have sprung from his subject matter and from his treatment of it rather than from any fundamental novelty in his conception of the art of fiction.
Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism,
New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927.
New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927.
In his writing, there is no reliable boundary between fact and fiction, and that’s the way he wanted it. He was particularly annoyed when critics accused him of simply converting his own experiences into stories and novels.
Scott Donaldson in The Paris Husband.
In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them. I won’t be sad and I will not read what they say. They say? What do they say? Let them say.
Ernest Hemingway interviewed by Harvey Breit,
New York Times, Sept 17, 1950
New York Times, Sept 17, 1950
In the 1930s, when Hemingway moved into non-fiction with ‘Death in the Afternoon’ (1932) and ‘Green Hills of Africa’ (1935), neither his established audience nor the New York Times knew quite what to make of his new direction. His style, once so ‘lean,’ was in ‘Death in the Afternoon’ sometimes so complex that it was difficult to ‘distinguish the subordinate verbs from the principal one,’ according to the Times reviewer (who compared the style to Henry James)...
from Hemingway In Our Times, Biographer Michael Reynolds
in the New York Times, July 11, 1999
... we sometimes forgot that this was a writer who had in his time made the English language new, changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would speak and write and think.
Joan Didion, The New Yorker, October 25, 1998.
The American reading public, in the midst of the Depression, was unenthusiastic about Hemingway’s non-fiction — ‘Death in the Afternoon’ and ‘Green Hills of Africa’ did not sell well, barely making back the money Hemingway had received as an advance. Both books seemed a bit precious: who could afford to go to Spain for the bull fights or to Africa for a ‘spot’ of lion hunting?’
from Hemingway In Our Times, Biographer Michael Reynolds
in the New York Times, July 11, 1999.
in the New York Times, July 11, 1999.
In Our Time, the capitalised version, was to be Hemingway’s most experimental book. Hemingway, however, would never be the formalist that Joyce was — or Proust, the earlier hero of vanguard Paris. His tough, ironic style certainly would speak for a new generation of writers and influence many who followed. But his later novels, following In Our Time, would revert to the narrative techniques of the 19th century. There was some justice to Gertrude Stein’s biting remark that Hemingway ‘looks like a modernist and he smells of the museums.
James R. Mellow in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences.
The pretence that is boyhood had been rough and dirty, the threatening stance of the tough guy in the face of those who had crossed him, and the assumption of the role of the maturing artist who had lost his early bloom was now as worn as old saddle leather were all facets of the public image that Ernest wish to project. It was a kind of tribute to his powers of self-dramatisation had almost everybody, Pauline included, took him at his word. There were probably many times when you believed it himself. ‘
Carlos Baker, Hemingway, A Life.
Hemingway always embroidered the events of his life. His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humour that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them. He felt he could write only about what he had actually experienced and his literary credo was to tell it as it was. But he combined scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life. Given his predisposition to mythomania, his reluctance to disappoint either his own expectations or those of his audience, and the difficulty of refuting and verifying certain facts of his life, he felt virtually forced to invent an and imaginative alternative to commonplace reality.
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography, 1985.
With Hemingway there was no such thing as non-fiction; there are simply degrees of fiction, with some events more fictional than others.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
In Paris and later, he would, on the slightest provocation trot out the old cliche that a good dose of syphilis or the clap improved the creative mind, implying he had contracted his share of venereal disease. Some in Paris thought that he earned side-money giving boxing lessons; others were sure he was buried four days at the front before being rescued. Several were certain he ran away from home early, spending his teen years on the road. Tough talk is only talk, a product of Hemingway’s imagined version of himself, the man he wanted to be. He went to many wars, but was never a soldier; saw so many bullfights, but never killed a single bull. If he ever fathered an illegitimate child, neither mother nor child has ever pressed claims.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
‘There would be no road signs directing traffic in his newly discovered country.
from Hemingway The Paris Years, by Michael Reynolds.
on Hemingway finding his style in Paris 1923.
on Hemingway finding his style in Paris 1923.
For those readers who are coming to Hemingway for the first time or with less familiarity, this is an omission from the text of overt descriptions of some crucial matter around which the emotions or themes of the text pivot ‘With Hemingway there is no such thing as non-fiction; there are simply degrees of fiction, some events more fictional from others.
James Gifford, introduction to University of
Victoria Modernist Versions Project edition of in our time
Victoria Modernist Versions Project edition of in our time
Those were the days when Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple MacPherson led Bible thumpers down the fundamentalist trail that Americans periodically seemed compelled to travel. We remember the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, but forget that the school teacher lost, that the law forbidding Darwin’s presence in the classroom was upheld. We forget about the Anti-Saloon league and the Clean Books Bill. We forget that the Little Review lost its case in the first Ulysses trial and that the meanest sort of reactionary spirit resulted in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. American voters filled their presidency with conservative men determined to keep America isolated from the world, pretending that an inflated dollar was good for business. We all remember Lindbergh’s daring 1927 flight across the Atlantic, but forget that he later admired Hitler’s well-oiled military machine.
from Hemingway The Paris Years, by Michael Reynolds.
Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.
Ernest Hemingway, in Monologue To The Maestro, Esquire, October 1935.
With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. But even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.
‘I did only what I thought Hemingway would have done,’ says Jenks, eager to talk but afraid the book will be seen as his rather than Hemingway’s.
Tom Jenks, the editor at Scribner’s who cut The Garden
Of Eden for publication on his website.
Of Eden for publication on his website.
About the posthumous works, critics are divided and scholars are largely silent. The Garden of Eden was so badly edited that the present text is like reading A Tale of Two Cities with London left out. A Moveable Feast, a curious kind of fiction, is only marginally better in its editing. Two chapters were cut, most of the others were re-sequenced, and his foreword was pieced together by his editors from several different manuscripts.
Michael Reynolds in a piece on For Whom The Bell Tolls
50 years on, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Winter 1991.
50 years on, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Winter 1991.
A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.
Ernest Hemingway, preface to Men At War, 1942, edited 1955.
There is no left or right in writing. There is only good writing and bad writing.
Hemingway in a letter to the Chicago bookseller Paul Romaine, 1932.
It’s fashionable to knock Hemingway, but risible as certain aspects of his life and work may be, the influence of his best writing seems to be underestimated not because of its lack of relevance, but its ubiquity.
Chris Power, The Guardian, July 15, 2011.
‘ “The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches. Like guns and samples they were all the better becoming slightly worn. When a blooming this writer got his flashes of the old juice, he knew enough to get results with them.” As always with Fitzgerald Ernest managed to sound like a good old veteran of fifty rather than a comparative young thirty whose second novel was not yet published.
Carlos Baker quoting Hemingway in a letter
to Fitzgerald in Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
to Fitzgerald in Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
Quotes on Modernism:
[Hemingway ] is modern in manner but not in vision.
Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism, New York Herald Tribune, Oct , 1927.
One of the word’s associations is with the coming of a new era of high-aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation, towards style, technique and spatial forms in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane on
the word ‘modernism’ in The Name And Nature Of
Modernism, from Modernism: A Guide To
European Literature 1890-1930.
the word ‘modernism’ in The Name And Nature Of
Modernism, from Modernism: A Guide To
European Literature 1890-1930.
... modernism is less a style than a search for a style in a highly individualistic sense; indeed the style of one work is no guarantee for the next. This, perhaps, is what [the American literary and social critic] Irving Howe means when he remarks that ‘modernism does not establish a prevalent style of its own; if it does it denies itself, thereby ceasing to be modern’.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane on
the word ‘modernism’ in The Name And Nature Of
Modernism, from Modernism: A Guide To
European Literature 1890-1930.
the word ‘modernism’ in The Name And Nature Of
Modernism, from Modernism: A Guide To
European Literature 1890-1930.
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not to just depict life — or criticize it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides, three dimensions and if possible four that you can write the way I want to.
Ernest Hemingway.
About Hemingway the man and the legend:
‘Ernest liked to dramatise himself,’ wrote [Col David Bruce OSS Commander in the European Theatre and later US ambassador to France, West Germany, Britain and Nato] ‘and indeed he had good reason to do so. In military affairs he was a real expert, especially in regard to guerilla activities and intelligence collection. Although entirely brave, he was cautious enough to imagine and to take precautions against unexpected and an orthodox manners in which an enemy might behave. He had a true scout’s instinct.
Carlos Baker in a passage describing Hemingway in France in August 1944.
Most people think of Ernest as being a publicity seeker, and I’m afraid Carlos [Baker, Hemingway’s official biographer] sometimes gives that impression in the book, too. It just could hardly be less true. For example, when we were in hotels here in Manhattan, we sometimes went out side doors or back doors. Ernest didn’t want to waste time with the press.
Mary Welsh Hemingway, talking to Denis Brian in The True Gen.
Ever since he first appeared, grinning devilishly, and waving a crutch from his hospital ward during World War I, in an early newsreel shown on movie screens across the country, Hemingway captured the public imagination. Yeah always, it seemed, a different Hemingway. The callow lanky chronicler of the lost generation gave way to the moustachioed and Viral Hemingway of the 1930s, as people read of his exploits in the boring, on the DCs, and in the African bush. He moved yet again, into the politically engaged reporter of the Spanish Civil War, into the intrepid fighting journalist of World War II, and finally into papa, the bearded white haired living legend of the postwar Cuban years.
Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway.
A lot of his toughness was real, but a lot was put on to cover his sensitivity. Ernest was one of the most sensitive people I have ever heard of and easily hurt. Most people thought he was too sure of himself, but I believe he had a great inferiority complex which he didn’t show.
Hadley (Richardson Hemingway) Mowrer, quoted be Denis Brian, The True Gen.
Ernest seemed to find it difficult to give and receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, perhaps most tragically, to tell the truth, even to himself. By the end of World War II, and while still in his 40s, he done him self out of many of the rewards of the good life: he had three failed marriages behind him, a few good friends, was not writing well, I had surrounded himself for flunkies and se
Mary Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway.
It is not uncommon for a famous writer to produce one thoroughly bad book.
Cyril Connolly.
At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety — or so one would have thought — and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?
John Banville, The Nation, Oct 2017.
When younger it was one book at a time: write, revise and publish. These later books were being written under far different circumstances. Afterward many would say that because he left them unfinished, he was no longer able to make the revisions they needed. But to make that judgment the talent and diversity at work in The Old Man And The Sea, Across The River, and the posthumous A Moveable Feast. One must also ignore the massive revisions he made to the Bimini novel, and completely disregard the possibility that these ‘unfinished’ novels were linked in ways that made their endings interdependent.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
During two manic periods of writing — 1947-1950 and 1955-1958 — he published two novels and laid aside four other books all but finished. In his Cuban safety deposit box he had stored the three-part book which would become Island In The Stream and the 200,000 words written on the African novel, True At First Light. With him at the Finca he had forty-two chapters of The Garden Of Eden ready to photostat for safekeeping and the all-but-finished Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. The plan was to publish the Paris memoir in 1960, the following year Scribner’s would publish a new edition of Death In The Afternoon with a lengthy appendix of material Hemingway would gather the coming summer of 1959.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
In New York, Charles Scribner Jnr was trying his diplomatic best to draft his response to Ernest’s preface which was clearly inappropriate for almost any audience. He agreed with Ernest’s list of stories to be included, but wanted to do some judicious editing of the preface. . . After digesting Scribner’s response and weighing it in the same basket with Mary’s less than enthusiastic critique, Ernest sent Scribner a brusque telegram to stop not only the preface but the entire short story project . . . It was the first time that anyone at Scribner’s had told him a piece of his writing was unpublishable.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
On that night, after the U.S. Army reconnaissance units were withdrawn, the force defending Rambouillet was composed of mixed patrols of regulars and guerrillas, armed with anti-tank grenades and small arms. It rained hard during the night and there was a part of the night, between 2am and 6am that was the loneliest I ever spent. I do not know if you understand what it means to have troops out ahead of you and then have them withdrawn and be left with a town, a large and beautiful town, completely undamaged and full of fine people, on your hands. There was nothing in the book issued to correspondents for their guidance through the intricacies of military affairs which dealt with this situation; so it was decided to screen the town as well as possible and, if the Germans, observing the withdrawal of the American force, advanced to make contact, to provide them with the necessary contact. This was done.
Ernest Hemingway, Battle For Paris, Collier’s magazine,
September 30, 1944.
September 30, 1944.
His pre-1946 depressions usually followed the completion of a book when he did not know what to write next. His post-1946 depressions were different. Because he was leaving work largely completed but not quite finished, one or more books for always begging for attention. As a result, he would move back and forth among them, even during his depressed periods, and unfinished work was always look at the back of his mind.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
Apparently the lifestyle and experiences of Ernest Hemingway, and his classic works of fiction, remain a matter of great interest to students and the public generally. He seems to be regarded as a latter-day Kipling, whose India is Spain. . . Why the life of this rich libertine and destroyer of wildlife should he of such great and continuing public interest a decade following his suicide, we cannot and need not say.
Judge Charles L Brieant Jr, Aug 3, 1979 in his
judgment against an appeal by Doubleday
over a libel |suit brought by A E Hotchner.
judgment against an appeal by Doubleday
over a libel |suit brought by A E Hotchner.
It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his own odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible that he carried a weight of anxiety with him which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.
Norman Mailer, interview with Christopher
Dorman-O’Gowan, quoted by James Michener,
Iberia, 1968.
Dorman-O’Gowan, quoted by James Michener,
Iberia, 1968.
Don’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened in the night in Paschendale [sic] or in the first wave working up the slope in Vimy, do not go back to verify them. It is not good . . . it is like going into the empty gloom of a theater where the charwomen are scrubbing.
Ernest Hemingway, Toronto Daily Star, 1921.
Even Juanito Quintana, hotelkeeper and model for Montoya in The Sun Also Rises, had mixed memories of Hemingway and his friends. He said they were ‘big drunks’ who misbehaved and were so disrespectful that he once had an employee serve some of the Hemingway crew lobster water as if it were consommé. When asked if Ernest’s behavior made him angry, the ever-polite Quintana replied ‘close to it’ and went on, ‘when he was too drunk he would disturb the other guests and I couldn’t put up with that’. Perhaps the most compelling of Quintana’s memories concerns Hemingway as a person: ‘Hemingway was strange, very strange. He was a strange man’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico,
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
This is the West, sir. When the legend become fact, print the legend.
Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
According to José Castillo-Puche, Hemingway’s friend and biographer, by the end of his life, ‘Ernesto was no longer a fascinating figure to people in Spain; he had become a sort of joke, in fact’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico,
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
Interested about Ernest [Hemingway]. Tenderness is a new quality in him; but people do luckily change all their lives and the luckiest ones get better as they grow older. His main appalling lack was tenderness for anyone. I longed for it in him, for myself and for others. I’d almost have settled for others. I do not remember his voice as being anything much, but I always was thrilled by his memory. He was interested in everyone but there was a bad side. It was like flirting. (Like you, in fact, he has the excessive need to be loved by everyone, and specially by all the strange passing people whom he ensnares with that interest, as do you with your charm, though in fact he didn’t give a fart for them.) So he would take people into camp; they became his adoring slaves (he likes adoring slaves) and suddenly, without warming, he would turn on them. That was always terrible to see; it made me feel cold and sick and I wanted to warn each new conquest of what lay in wait for him. But one couldn’t; they wouldn’t believe; they were on the heights of joy—for he can be a great life-enhancer and great fun, and his attention is very flattering. By the time I did marry him (driving home from Sun Valley) I did not want to, but it had gone too far in every way. I wept, secretly, silently, on the night before my wedding and my wedding night; I felt absolutely trapped. When I fell in love with him was in Spain, where for once he did have tenderness for others (not me, he was regularly bloody to me, lustful or possessive, and only nice when he was teaching me, as if I were a young man, the arts of self defense in war. And also he liked being the only man in Spain who took his woman around with him, and I was blonde, very helpful in brunette countries, raises one’s value.) I loved him then for his generosity to others and for his selfless concern for the Cause. That was all gone by the time I married him. I think I was afraid of him though I certainly never admitted it to myself or showed it to him. You will also be surprised to hear that I have never been more bored in my life than during the long long months when we lived alone in Cuba. I thought I would die of boredom. But it was very good for me. I wrote more with him than ever before or since in my life, and read more. There were no distractions; I lived beside him and entirely and completely alone, as never before or since. I am very glad he now speaks pleasantly of me. I never speak of him one way or the other with anyone. The whole thing is a distant dream, not very true and curiously embarrassing. It has almost nothing to do with me. What I write you here is, as you can understand, secret and between us only and forever. He ought to be happy and he ought to be gentle; because life has showered gifts and blessings on him; and I hope he is.
Martha Gellhorn in a letter to her friend Leonard Bernstein, Jan 14, 1959.
Arturo Barea’s review of For Whom the Bell Tolls, titled ‘Not Spain but Hemingway,’ expounds on why some Spaniards may feel that Hemingway’s foreignness impaired his understanding of the country: ‘I think he had once taken Spain, the Spain of toreros, wealthy young señoritos, gypsies, tarts, tipsters, and so on, rather as one takes on drugs’, and continues, ‘the inner failure of Hemingway’s novel — its failure to render the reality of the Spanish war in imaginative writing — seems to me to stem from the fact that he was always a spectator who wanted to be an actor and who wanted to write as if he were an actor’.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico,
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
Hemingway Review, Spring 2012.
I met Ernest Hemingway at Sun Valley last week, and was taken totally by surprise. I had not been prepared by talk, photos, or interviews for a) that charm, and b) that beauty.
Leonard Bernstein in a letter to Martha Gellhorn, Jan 7, 1959.
Martha misunderstood Ernest’s lack of interest in going to another war as a journalist, but then she misunderstood the Pilar patrols also. Having spent six [six] weeks as a Red Cross man in World War I and having covered the Greco-Turkish War (1922) as a reporter for the Torontos Daily Star and the Spanish Civil War (1937-38) a journalist for the NANA (North American News Alliance), Ernest was loath to repeat the frustrations of watching the action without being able to participate, and not since his brief experience as a reporter in Toronto (1023-24) had he written news stories. He was a feature writer whose personal perspective was always a key ingredient in the story.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
Despite his tough-guy image, Hemingway was a soft-hearted man. He was apparently persuaded to grant Cowley’s interview in Cuba after the critic pleaded that his son’s education was at stake.
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography on Malcolm Cowley’s profile in Life.
As a war correspondent in the Hitler war I would rate him as very poor, but he didn’t try to be good then. I remember him telling me about a wonderful episode concerning a man jumping out of a burning tank after his return from the invasion and when I said ‘But you have to put that in your Collier’s piece,’ he answered, ‘you don't think I'm going to give them that do you? I’m keeping it for a book.’
Jefferey Meyers, in Hemingway, A Biography quoting
author Roald Dahl who knew Hemingway in World War II.
author Roald Dahl who knew Hemingway in World War II.
Lanham, like Mary [Welsh] accepted [Hemingway’s] faults and adored him. Lanham, with some exaggeration (Hemingway never carried a canteen of vermouth and did not drink heavily in war) told the New York Times correspondent C L Sulzberger: ‘Hemingway has the heart of the lion and is first class in war, but horrible in peace. Hemingway used to wander around with two canteens strapped to his belt. One was filled with gin and the other with vermouth. Whenever there was a quiet moment, he would haul out a battered tin cup and suggest: ‘Let’s have a martini’ he was a good fighter with all weapons, although strictly speaking he was not permitted to bear arms . . . He is entirely fearless.
Jefferey Meyers, in Hemingway, A Biography
quoting Charles ‘Buck’ Lanham who commanded
the 22nd Infantry Regiment.
quoting Charles ‘Buck’ Lanham who commanded
the 22nd Infantry Regiment.
Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize. No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience. It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
read out in Stockholm on Dec 10, 1954.
read out in Stockholm on Dec 10, 1954.
Ernest wanted to command troops in battle, but with the freedom that independent ventures like the Pilar patrols allowed. . . He did not want an honorary commission to feed the US propaganda machine, nor did he want to become a cog in some huge operation over which he had no control. In May 1942, he explained to Max Perkins that he was willing to go to the war, send his sons to the war, and give his money to the war effort. The one thing he could not do was write propaganda.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
[Hemingway had] a Tom Sawyerish way of getting money from people and then saying they had embarrassed him by forcing it on him.
Kitty Cannell, quoted by Scott Donaldson.
[Fellow war correspondent] Bill Walton described [Charles ‘Buck’] Lanham as ‘small, delicate and very neurotic’. . . Though a gallant soldier, he was also old-fashioned, straitlaced, thoroughly conventional, personally unimpressive and surprisingly dull. . . It would not be an exaggeration to say that Lanham, Hemingway’s alter ego, was one of his greatest fictional creations. He was idealized to heroic proportions to match Hemingway’s urgent need for a wartime comrade who would reflect, confirm, exalt and perpetuate his own martial expertise and daring adventures.
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway, A Biography.
Hemingway has the heart of a lion and is first-class in war, but horrible in peace. Hemingway used to wander around with two canteens strapped to his belt. One was filled with gin and the other with vermouth. Whenever there was a quiet moment, he would haul out a battered tin cup and suggest: ‘Let’s have a Martini’ He was a good fighter with all weapons, although strictly speaking he was not permitted to bear arms . . . He is entirely fearless.
Thomas ‘Buck’ Lanham quoted by New York Times
correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in 1969.
correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in 1969.
Having had plenty of time at sea to review their relationship, Martha entered the room half-sure their marriage was over; when she left she had no doubt. ‘If he really had concussion, he could hardly have been drinking with his pals or even receiving them. He did not look in the least ill anyway.’ The concussion was real enough, and drinking was a sure way to make it worse. Ernest, garrulous and full of male-bonding jokes . . . was [now] with Martha in the war zone she so fervently desired, but it was a husband she hardly recognised. . . Before the ground war began on the beaches of Normandy, the private war between Martha and Ernest was finished. There was no acknowledgement of defeat by either party, but that was only a formality.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years
In fact, Ernest’s dark moods were becoming more erratic and unpredictable. As one friend remembered, ‘Those were the days when he was an absolutely malevolent bastard, full of self-loathing. But the awfulness would leave him after a couple of hours. Generally, before he lost the black mood someone caught hell for it.’
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s.
She was smiling and cordial until Ernest asked her whether he should tell the columnist [Earl Wilson interviewing Hemingway in January 1940] how he was busted and she went to Finland to make some more money to he could go on writing his book. Her expression darkened and she said curtly not to believe him, that that was just one of his jokes. Wilson was puzzled and Martha did not elaborate. What irritated her was that Ernest interpreted everything in terms of himself. The simple fact that she supported herself, that journalism was her job, was not satisfactory to his ego. He preferred to believe that she was doing it for him.
Bernice Kert, on Martha Gellhorn in The Hemingway Women.
Such fluctuating moods were typical of Martha’s feelings for Ernest. When she was away, she longed for him. When she was home she found it difficult to put up with his exasperating habits. At he same time that she scolded him for not bathing or for drinking too much or for telling some silly lie about his exploits, she would make an impressive effort with his sons, his cats, his parties, his guests. When nothing changed, she boiled up with frustration and knew only one way out, to get away for a while.
Bernice Kert, on Martha Gellhorn in The Hemingway Women.
Deeply unhappy with his writing career, angry with critics and under pressure to produce a successful novel to redeem himself, Hemingway was not made less bitter by Dos Passos’s spending his time in Havana [where he was visiting with his wife Katy and Sara Murphy] correcting galleys for his new novel The Big Money. Ernest’s genetic inheritance of cyclical depression and insidious paranoia that led to his father’s suicide was surfacing in his own life, most obviously in disturbing mood shifts.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s.
If he was fatally susceptible to the temper of the times, it was mainly because of his lack of political sophistication. Only at rare moments in his life had he taken an interest in politics, yet he proposed to make his way through the Spanish labyrinth. The results were foreordained. Although he presented himself to the readers as an unfoolable ‘Papa’, he in fact was easily fooled and the Communists were well-served by him until the outcome of the war as in no doubt.
Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway.
Pauline, whose antennae were as finely tuned as Sara’s [Sara Murphy], must have recognised that Ernest moodiness was similar to his behaviour in 1926-27 when he was caught between herself as lover and Hadley as wife. This time the only other woman in sight was Jane Mason, whom Pauline at one time saw as a threat, but no longer. . . More than one of the Hemingway’s friends though Ernest was having an affair with Grant’s lovely wife, but Pauline knew them both too well to be overly worried. When Hemingway had an affair, it did not take a private detective to discover the evidence.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s.
I invented her complete with handles from the worst bitch I knew (then) and when I first knew her she’d been lovely. Not my dish, not my pigeon, not my cup of tea, but lovely for what she was, and I was her all of the above, which is whatever you make of it.
Ernest Hemingway, The Art Of The Short Story
writing about Jane Mason being his
model for Margot Macomber.
model for Margot Macomber.
For a thirty-seven-year-old man at the height of his physical and mental powers, Hemingway was inordinately drawn to the contemplation of his own demise. A few days earlier, he had written Pauline’s mother that the Pfeiffer bloodline was what his children needed ‘to try to breed some of the suicide streak’ out of them. Tommy Shevlin, remembering that fall at the ranch, said: ‘It’s extraordinary the number of times he mentioned suicide.’ Six weeks after his letter to [novelist Marjorie] Rawlings, he told MacLeish: ‘Me I like life ver much. So much it will be a big disgust when I have to shoot myself.
Michael Reynolds on Hemingway’s mental state in the summer
and fall of 1936, Hemingway: The 1930s.
and fall of 1936, Hemingway: The 1930s.
Entangled and inseparable, all of these motives drove Hemingway to Spain full: the idealistic (saving Spain and opposing fascism), the careerist *winning over leftist critics), the personal (getting away from the soft Key West life, courting danger), even the romantic in pursuing his interest in Martha Gellhorn. Even if he had wanted to, it's doubtful that Hemingway could have sorted out these reasons.
Milton Cohen, The Pull Of Politics, 2018.
Ernest may have commanded more money for his journalism, which he often viewed as a means of support while gathering experience for his fiction, but Martha was the more dedicated journalist.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
The Matecumbe Hurricane, coming after the bankruptcy of Monroe County and the exhortations of Left-wing critics for him to interest himself in public issues, brought out one of Hemingway’s most admirable characteristics: his generosity with money. Hemingway — who was soft-hearted and made an easy touch — justly claimed: ‘The only thing in life I’ve had any luck being decent about is money, so am very splendid and punctilious about that.’ Even when poor in Paris, he was the only one who ever repaid his debts to Don Stewart. After his marriage to Pauline, he usually insisted on picking up everyone’s check. He supported his mother and younger siblings after his father’s death. . . made generous contributions to the Loyalist cause during the Civil War; supported a number of Spanish refugees and Cuban hard-timers after he moved to Havana in 1940. . . Though well-off, Hemingway was not materialistic; apart from his house, boat, paintings and guns, he owned little of value.
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A biography.
The loss of literary friends, remoteness from cultural life and lack of intellectual stimulation were increased by the move to Cuba, which put him out of touch with social and political reality in America. At the same time his estrangement from his family and separation from his children increased his sense of isolation. The dolce far niente life in the tropics made it more difficult for him to discipline himself. When Martha was away, he missed his immediate audience, became lonely and lacked the orderly household and attention to his needs that he had become accustomed to with Hadley and Pauline. When Martha was home, their domestic quarrels upset him. As his third marriage headed towards disaster, he found it more and more difficult to concentrate on his fiction.
Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A biography.
On top of his dresser was the signed contract, dated July 15, calling for Hemingway’s royalties to be 15% on the first 25,000 copies sold; thereafter they rose to 20%, higher rates than most authors received, but Hemingway in 1940 was not most authors. He may not have published a bestselling novel during the entire 1930s, but through his non-fiction, his Esquire articles, his Spanish Civil War journalism, and his personal exploits hunting in East Africa and marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream, he had become the most widely read male author in America.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
You are to remember that in Paris I have lived for many years buried under mountains of Middle-Westerners who there find it necessary to assume the aspects, voices, accents and behaviours of cow-boys crossed with liberal strains of prize-fighters and old-time Bowery toughs. They may have been born in Oak Park, that suburb of Chicago that is the mildest suburb in the world; but they are determined to make you and Paris think them devils of fellows who have only left Oklahoma of the movies ten months before.
Ford Madox Ford, quoted by Bernard J. Poli,
Ford Madox Ford And The Transatlantic Review.
Ford Madox Ford And The Transatlantic Review.
Some sort of YMCA show. Starry-eyed bastards spending money that somebody will have to pay. Everybody in our town quit work to go on relief. Fishermen all turned carpenters. Reverse of the Bible.
Ernest Hemingway about the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) work in Key West in the 1930s.
While most of Hemingway’s generation were moving into their midlife course with their notoriety behind them, he was just hitting his stride . . . Almost thirty-five years old, Ernest Hemingway was a newsworthy figure whose every public act was grist for the media: his broad shoulders and his round moustached face with its pronounced widow’s peak becoming as widely recognised as some movie stars. Where once his fiction drew attention to his active life, now that life drew attention to his writing.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s.
. . . you found [the vets’ bodies] high in the trees where the water had swept them. You found them everywhere and in the sun all of them were beginning to be far too big for their blues jeans and jackets that they could never fill wen they were on the bum and hungry.
Ernest Hemingway, New Masses, Sept 17, 1935.
Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger? Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths? . . . [The writer of this article] does know that wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months. Hurricane months are August, September and October, and in those months you see no yachts along the Keys. You do not see them because yacht owners know there would be great danger, inescapable danger, to their property if a storm should come . . . But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans are not property, they are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have is to lose their lives.
Ernest Hemingway, New Masses, Sept 17, 1935.
He has become the legendary Hemingway. He appears to have turned into a composite of all those photographs he has been sending for years: sunburned from snows, on skis; in fishing get-up, burned dark from the hot Caribbean; the handsome, stalwart hunter crouched smiling over the carcass of some dead beast. Such a man could not have written Hemingway’s early books . . . It is hard not to wonder whether he has not, hunting, brought down an even greater victim.
John Peale Bishop, Homage To Hemingway, New Republic, November 1936.
Ford never understood Hemingway’s animosity, and Ernest never understood the walrus-like Ford of the wheezing voice. The man could never tell the truth, Ernest said. Perhaps he saw something of himself in Ford, something he did not like but could not control any more than could Ford.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
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 it is 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.
Debra Moddelmog, New Essays On Hemingway’s Fiction.
The break with Dos Passos was an important turning point in Hemingway’s life. He had quarrelled with Anderson, Stein, Ford, Lewis, Fitzgerald and MacLeish; with Robert McAlmon, Ernest Walsh, Harold Loeb, Don Stewart, Dorothy Parker, Morley Callaghan and Max Eastman. He was still on good terms with Pound and Joyce, but they lived in Europe and had taken different paths, into the Cantos and Finnegans Wake. After 1937, Hemingway had no close writer-friends: jealousy, bitterness, arrogance, ambition, pride, and politics knocked them all out of his life. In the 1940s and 1950s he knew soldiers, sportsmen, cronies, millionaires, hangers-on, actors and parasites — but he had no friends who were artists. Their absence coincided with the emergence of Papa Hemingway, his last public persona.
Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography.
[Hemingway] is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine towards melancholy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway got away with his braggadocio because his readers wanted to believe him. Why they wanted to believe him is unclear.
Matthew J Bruccoli, introduction to Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame.
‘. . . a great, awkward boy falling over his long feet . . . in life, a disturbing person with very dark hair, very red lips. Very white teeth, very fair skin under which the blood seemed to race, emerging frequently in an all-enveloping blush. What a help his beard, later was to be, protecting and covering this sensitivity . . . The inferiority complex remained to the end and with it came the braggadocio and the need to become somebody to himself . . . a quick and deadly jealousy of his own prestige and a constant . . . and consuming need for applause.
Frances Coates, on whom Hemingway had a high
school crush, from an unpublished memoir
she wrote, now in the hands of her
granddaughter Betsy Fermano.
school crush, from an unpublished memoir
she wrote, now in the hands of her
granddaughter Betsy Fermano.
These memoirs [of Hemingway] allow us to trace the origin and evolution of the Hemingway legend but are a minefield rather than a path through the tangled woods of Hemingway’s life. The scholar concerned with the truth finds himself lost in rumor and half-proved fact, in conflicting statements and pure fantasy. His study of these exercises in egoism requires the utmost scepticism and vigilance.
Jeffery Meyers, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Autumn 1984.
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. When his writing slacked off and he attempted to live up to and feed on the legend, his exploits seemed increasingly empty. His shotgun blast shattered the heroic myth — and led to a different persona. After his death, he became either the genius destroyed by accidents and doctors or a failed writer who had never achieved artistic greatness.
Jeffery Meyers, Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), Autumn 1984.
All his life he bent women to his will, either by romantic intensity in the courtship or by sullen and/or sarcastic treatment in the parting. All his life he fell in love with the emotional impact of a heart attack, undeniable and all-consuming. All his life he wanted a wife to whom he gave the responsibility for the order and discipline of his household. Once a wife, the woman quickly became a mother figure whom he quickly came to resent just as he resented his own mother’s control of the Oak Park home.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years.
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.
Matthew J Bruccoli, introduction to Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame.
But personal columnists, and this is getting to read a little like a column, are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him. [Walter] Winchell kills his own meat and so do a few others. But they have news in their columns and are the most working of working newspaper men. So let us return to the ex-favorite who projects his personality rather than goes for the facts.
Ernest Hemingway, Esquire Letter ‘A newsman writes’, Dec 1934.
It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald’.
Lesley M M Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly:
The True Story Behind Hemingway’s
Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
The True Story Behind Hemingway’s
Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway and Leopoldina were kindred spirits . . . who had both been unlucky in love, found each other and formed a pact that gave them reciprocal comfort, affection, and loyalty. It would be misleading to reduce their lasting friendship to a business transaction: Leopoldina could never attain happiness, but more than with any other, with Hemingway she had known friendship, a comforting, tender, and attentive, and often paternal relationship.
Andrew Feldman, Leopoldina Rodríguez: Hemingway’s
Cuban Lover? Hemingway Review, Autumn 2011.
Cuban Lover? Hemingway Review, Autumn 2011.
Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer level, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway’s reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways.
Paul Theroux, review of Islands In The Stream, Encounter, February 1971.
[Islands In The Stream] has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: ‘This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it’ . . . These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, ‘This novel is bad.’
Paul Theroux, review of Islands In The Stream, Encounter, February 1971.
In one way or another Hemingway told almost everything one would wish to know about him. His parents are in essence Nick’s and Jordan’s, as was his boyhood. His first war was Nick’s and Lt. Henry’s and Col. Cantwell’s. The effects of that experience were given in the image of Nick again, and of Jake Barnes. Two works of nonfiction, plus Mr Frazer in Montana, brought the story into the bitter Thirties. Then there is the purge of Kilimanjaro, the conversion announce by Morgan and the fights against fascism of Philip and Robert. Subtract the silver eagle, and Col. Cantwell presents a picture of the writer at fifty which matched the picture we had of himself. Hemingway’s dependence upon the therapeutic value of what he wrote practically guaranteed that we know or will know at least most of the really significant things about himself that he knew.
Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration.
[Hemingway’s] the original Limelight Kid, just you watch him for a few months... Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay... He’s going places, he’s got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy.’
Robert McAlmon who published Three Stories And Ten Poems.
. . . he qualified as the first genuine celebrity among American authors, though there were public writers before him who were ‘known to and honored by far more people’ than those who read their books . . . Twain succeeded Longfellow as the ‘beloved’ public writer of his generation, and there have been others since. But only with the development of mass communication has it been possible for the public writer to be transformed into a celebrity.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The Life And Art Of Ernest Hemingway.
Unlike other writers, as producer David O Selznick recognized, ‘Hemingway [was] himself a start. He [had] box office. So the press agents went to work exploiting their star. They understood that his mass appeal derived largely from the contradiction he apparently embodied between the rugged man of action and the effete man of letters — a contradiction nicely summed up in the New Yorker drawing of a muscular, hairy-armed Ernest gentling a rose in his hand . . . As the press release for Selznick’s version of A Farewell To Arms asserted, Hemingway represented ‘a sort of demi-god of American manhood’.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
But the most pernicious danger of Hemingway’s celebrity lay in the overpowering temptation to assess the writing in terms of the writer’s lief and legend.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
All April [1927] he stayed away from Montparnasse where sidewalk cafes were crowded noon and midnight with American tourists, some looking for a glimpse of characters out of [The Sun Also Rises], others behaving as if they were auditioning for the parts.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
He was a risk taker both in the way he lived and what he wrote about, being among the first writers to focus on such hitherto risqué subjects as nymphomania, adultery, homosexuality, impotence, and the very thin line that exists between courage and cowardice.
Gay Talese, Esquire, June 1986.
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early Forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Vladimir Nabokov, The Contemporary Writer:
Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets (1972)
Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets (1972)
In neither of [Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad] can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students...
Valdimir Naobokov
American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
Gore Vidal (1992)
I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, The New York Time.
People always think that the reason [Hemingway is] easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t... The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.
Tom Wolfe, Conversations with Tom Wolfe (1990)
But what he truly invented, if not the word ‘truly’ that he excessively used, was a clear, clean style of writing that communicated itself to a vast world of readers in ways never since duplicated; for Hemingway was one of a kind.
Gay Talese, Esquire, June 1986.
The manner in which a man lies, and what he lies about — these things and the form of his lies — are the main things to investigate in a poet’s life and work.
Poet, essayist and author James Dickey.
Now, in the warm streets of summer, Paris was less lovely for Ernest than she had ever been in winter rain. Five years earlier, he and Hadley, unknown and in love, delighted in discovering the city... When the franc was at twelve to the dollar, they were tourists; as it rose to eighteen, they became old hands in the neighbourhood, recognised at the Dôme by painters and writers. Now [in 1927] with the franc at twenty-five, Hadley was in California and he, having become legendary along Monparnasse, took no joy on the boulevard.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
‘The boy who boasted in infancy that he was “ ‘fraid a nothing,” that he had once caught a runaway horse, began to establish his public persona while on the editorial board of his high school newspaper. He was not a great athlete or scholar but constantly reported his own minor exploits in the Oak Park Trapeze. He inflated his genuine heroism in war through newspaper interviews and public speeches while he was still in his teens. As a foreign correspondent, he learned how to create a romantic image and generate publicity. He had a literary reputation among expatriate writers before he had published a word of fiction.
Jeffrey Meyers, Memoirs of Hemingway:
the Growth of A Legend, VQR (Virginia
Quarterly Review) Autumn 1984.
the Growth of A Legend, VQR (Virginia
Quarterly Review) Autumn 1984.
Well, it’s a little sour, that book. His treatment of people like Scott Fitzgerald — the great man talking down about his contemporaries. He was always competitive and critical, overly so, but in the early days you could kid him out of it.
John Dos Passos on A Moveable Feast, Paris Review Spring 1969
It seems fair to say that Hemingway never really understood himself. His well-publicised front of bravado and he-man feats masked a nature that was somehow empty. What comes through in the huge volume of letters edited by Carlos Baker is the portrait of a man utterly deluded about the extent and sources of his pain, a malicious bully whose exploits served to fill up a life in which something — love, empathy, genuine interest in others — was missing.
James Atlas, ‘Papa lives’, The Atlantic, Oct 1983.
The Paramount effort [to get Hemingway to attend a screening of their film of A Farewell To Arms] to use [for PR purposes] Hemingway was not an isolated incident, for increasingly his private life was becoming public domain. When he invited Max Perkins to come to Arkansas for a pre-Christmas duck hunt, Ernest also asked Max to issue a statement which, in part, said: ‘Mr Ernest Hemingway has asked his publishers to disclaim the romantic and false military and personal career imputed to him he a recent film publicity release...’ Such statements, of course, merely fired the public’s curiosity to know more about his life which would never again be private. The persona he created to narrate Death In The Afternoon would, before the decade was finished displace the sometimes shy, frequently reserved and always observant private man. Recognition translate into income from book sales which allowed him the luxury of his expensive pursuits, but that same recognition came at a stiff price.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s
Grace and Clarence did not see you their first grandchild until 1927 when Hadley brought the boy to Oak Park. It was almost as if Ernest did not want anything from his Oak Park past to interact with the new persona he had fashioned for himself... Ernie Hemingway, the Oak Park boy with dirty nails whom no one remembered as particularly promising, died and was buried at sea when Hadley and Ernest first crossed to France. The new Ernest Hemingway — courageous war veteran, experimental writer, veteran newsman, skilled sportsman and European traveller — was his own creation, a persona whose early roots would not bear close examination.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
One day, on a trip to Petoskey, Ernest told Hadley he wanted her to see the women he had rejected in favour of her, and he took her to the homes of some of his old girlfriends, including Marjorie Bump and Grace Quinlan. The slight, dark-haired Grace, Hadley recalled, ‘just stood by her kitchen table the whole time we visited her. She looked so embarrassed and ill-at-ease. I think that she really had a crush on Ernest.’ Ernest thought that it would raise him in her estimation to show here these girls ‘who cannot live without me’ she recalled. But she thought it instead showed his immaturity and vanity. She was furious.
Gioia Diliberto, Paris Without End:
The True Story Of Hemingway’s First Wife.
The True Story Of Hemingway’s First Wife.
A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth.
Greg Clark, features editor of the Toronto Star.
Most modest of all American writers is Ernest Hemingway whose half-dozen published books have set a new style in contemporary literature, but who, nevertheless shuns personal publicity as an owl shuns daylight. Hemingway does not even care to have any biographical material about himself made public... Though hundreds of thousands of persons know his works, however, very few know anything about the man himself. With what amounts almost to a mania, he avoids personal publicity of every kind.
Key West Citizen, February 11, 1933.
Many critics agree... that The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s most written about novel not only because it is arguably his best, but also because it is his most popular classroom novel, included on more high school and college syllabi than any other of his works. Since scholars write about what they know well, such familiarity with The Sun Also Rises quite naturally leads to increased critical attention as scholars share their ideas with others via publication. Thus the cycle of critical debate begins anew with the opening of each semester and attests most clearly to Hemingway’s ‘re-readability’ down through the years.’
Kelli A. Larson, Lies, Damned Lies, and
Hemingway Criticism, A Historical Guide to
Ernest Hemingway ed. Linda Wagner-Martin
Hemingway Criticism, A Historical Guide to
Ernest Hemingway ed. Linda Wagner-Martin
Hemingway had many grievous faults, but there was one thing he did not lack: artistic integrity. It shines like a beacon through his whole life. He set himself the task of creating a new way of writing English, and fiction, and he succeeded. It was one of the salient events in the history of our language and is now an inescapable part of it. He devoted to this task commence resources of creative skills, energy and patience. That in itself is difficult. But far more difficult, as he discovered, was to maintain a high creative standards he had set himself. This became apparent to him in the mid-1930s and added to his habitual depression. From then on his few successful stories were operations in a long downward slide.
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals.
Ernest replied [to a 1928 letter from Max Perkins with the latest news of Scott Fitzgerald] that Zelda was the source of 90 percent of Scott’s problems; if only he had married a supportive wife, Scott might have been “the best writer we’ve ever had”. This simplification was becoming a frequent Hemingway response: whatever troubles a male friend might have, they were caused by his wife. He did not care for the wives of Lincoln Steffens, John Hermann or Lewis Galantière. His own break-up with Gertrude Stein he would blame largely on Alice B. Toklas. His father’s deteriorating mental and physical condition he attributed to his mother’s selfishness. Hadley, had she not mentioned his affair with Pauline, might have saved their marriage.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
All the while looking for access to the New York publishing world, he cultivated the friendship of anyone who might help and publicised himself every chance. That was the game. All the writers is played it, some better than others, but no one better than Ford.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
What might happen was perfectly obvious. Liveright might turn his book down, letting their option lapse. In Our Time was only six weeks from being released and Hemingway was thinking seriously of ways to break his contract... Horace Liveright’s letters were full of business but no stroking of his fragile ego. He wanted to get letters from someone like Max Perkins who knew how to make a right feel secure. Perkins offered him a contract on the basis of his work, not the people he knew. Sure, Scott got his name in the door, but Max liked his stuff.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
Later, when he got the national reviews and big sales, some in Paris who did not know him well thought Hemingway sold out of the avant-garde for commercial success. Ernest laughed of the criticism. From his Oak Park beginnings his eye was always on commercial sales. His style and subject matter may have been permanently altered by reading Joyce pound and Stein, but he never intended like his models to scratch out a living among the literary poor while others took the talent to the bank.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years.
His fame was not accidentally acquired. Hemingway’s greatest character was Ernest Hemingway. From boyhood he assiduously fictionalised himself. He was a dedicated careerist who skillfully nurtured an heroic public image until the vainglorious role took over the man and it became necessary for him to live up to it. The public Papa and the private writer were eventually undifferentiable. His impersonation of Ernest Hemingway was so successful because he as having such a good time at it.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, introduction to Conversations With Ernest Hemingway.
The poet John Pudney, an RAF public relations officer, found his behaviour curiously offensive. ‘To me,’ said Pudney, ‘he was a fellow obsessed with playing the part of the Ernest Hemingway and hamming it to boot, a sentimental 19th-century actor called upon to act the part of the 20th century tough guy. Set beside ... a crowd of young men who walked so modestly and stylishly with Death he seemed a bizarre cardboard figure.
Carlos Baker in a passage describing Hemingway’s
behaviour in May 1944 in London in the run-up to D Day.
behaviour in May 1944 in London in the run-up to D Day.
‘Mediated ideology persists to such an extent that the myth becomes absorbed as legend, and thus the realism behind the figures becomes distorted. This is particularly evident in the case of American author Ernest Hemingway, whose celebrity image eclipsed the man and thereby created a culturally fruitful myth.
Siobhan Lyons, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
in Remembering Hemingway: The Endurance
of the Hemingway Myth.
in Remembering Hemingway: The Endurance
of the Hemingway Myth.
He’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is. We like him. He’s a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.
James Joyce, a friend in the Paris years.
No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.
Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s
Cuban friend in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers.
Cuban friend in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers.
As old and easy-going friends Dos and Katy did their best to keep him “kidded down to size”. In their eyes he had become a shade to conspicuously ‘the famous author the great sports-fisherman, the mighty African hunter’. Yet they willingly played up to his special brand of princeliness.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway, A Life.
As with Lord Byron’s funeral and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s posthumous publication of his The Confessions (1782), the event of an author’s death in turn and somewhat surprisingly serves to cement the author’s image as a genius as well as conditioning a cultural memory in which their life becomes both immortalised and idealised.
Siobhan Lyons, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
in Remembering Hemingway: The Endurance
of the Hemingway Myth.
in Remembering Hemingway: The Endurance
of the Hemingway Myth.
What was wrong with Hemingway? Possibly growing gloom at his failure to be his own myth; more possibly a sexual incapacity which, considering his prowess in other fields of virile action, deeply baffled him.
Anthony Burgess, from Ernest Hemingway And His World.
Another deep regret is that the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, on account of ill-health has to be absent from our celebration. We wish to express our admiration for the eagle eye with which he has observed, and for the accuracy with which he has interpreted the human existence of our turbulent times; also for the admirable restraint with which he has described their naked struggle. The human problems which he has treated are relevant to all of us, living as we do in the confused conditions of modern life; and few authors have exercised such a wide influence on contemporary literature in all countries.
Henrik Samuel Nyborg, of the Royal Swedish Academy
speaking at Hemingway’s Nobel Prize award ceremony,
December 10, 1954.
speaking at Hemingway’s Nobel Prize award ceremony,
December 10, 1954.
... most readers, when pressed, might name a slew of other authors, living and dead (Faulkner, Bellow, Cormac McCarthy) who, across the years, crafted more varied and more consistently excellent work than Hemingway’s. So... despite what countless acolytes might claim, Hemingway was not the greatest American writer of the 20th century. He was, however — and more than five decades after his death, he remains — the single most influential, most parodied, most prominent, most immense American author of the past 100 years.
Hemingway in Cuba, 1952: Portrait of a Legend
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
And yet, by the early 1950s Hemingway’s private world was one increasingly defined not by protean artistic achievements, but by rivers of booze; bewilderment at his own diminishing powers as a writer; depression and even rage at his failing, once-indomitable health. The larger-than-life figure who prized “grace under pressure” above all other attributes was besieged; in less than a decade, his demons would drive him to suicide by shotgun. All of this helps explain why, when LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt went to Cuba to photograph Hemingway for the September 1952 issue, he encountered not a gracious, if perhaps prickly, fellow artist and man of letters, but a thoroughly disagreeable, paranoid, booze-sodden lunatic.
Hemingway in Cuba, 1952: Portrait of a Legend
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
Hemingway, [Life photographer Alfred] Eisenstaedt wonderingly noted, drank from the moment he awoke until the time he went to bed, with a lackey constantly plying him with booze; obsessed over his virility (sometimes literally pounding his chest, “like King Kong,” to illustrate that, while perhaps diminished, he was still a man to whom attention must be paid); erupted into violent rages over minor slights, both real and imagined; rarely spoke a sentence, to anyone, that wasn’t peppered with obscenities; and generally behaved like a buffoon.
Hemingway in Cuba, 1952: Portrait of a Legend
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
in Decline, by Ben Cosgrove, Time magazine, June 3, 2013.
Almost all his non-fiction, starting with the pieces in transatlantic review [sic lower case], is vividly personal; very little can be described as reportage, although that is its putative purpose. The strongest impression invoked by these pieces is of the writer’s personality – his attitudes, biases, character and behaviour.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
His distrust of critics, his long-standing suspicion – to become a conviction – that they were out to get him, is consistent with his seeking a public esteem independent of the literary establishment. This general audience would not be so susceptible as the intellectuals to critical opinion, and thus it could insulate the writer’s reputation from critical disfavour. His stature as a champion would be confirmed not by a few critics by a large heterogeneous audience which felt a personal loyalty to him.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
The transatlantic review [sic lower case] articles are trivial in terms of Hemingway’s literary career, but they are significant in terms of his career as public writer. They revealed that his public personality was incipient at the outset of his professional life, and that he was willing to use it for self-aggrandisement. They were a preview of the self-advertisements that would spread his fame in the next decade beyond the limited audience provided by an intellectual elite; and they foreshadowed that in his non-fiction his great subject was to be himself.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
Of course he was recognized as a distinguished novelist, but the mass media which lionized him and were ultimately responsible for his reputation as the American writer had a keener interest in his personality. They purveyed Hemingway the sportsman, Hemingway the bon vivant, and all the other public Hemingways: the master of modern prose was of secondary interest.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
Far from being either the unwitting or unwilling recipient of this personal attention as he liked to intimate he was, Hemingway was the architect of his public reputation. Early in his career, he began to shape a public personality which quickly became one of his most famous creations, during his lifetime perhaps the most famous one.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
F0r the rest of his career he advertised his public personality in his considerable body of nonfiction, for whatever his nominal subject, he real subject was himself.
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
The public wants to believe in the existence of a phenomenal human being who fights, hunts, loves, and writes so perfectly. This heroic image satisfies the needs of the public but is irrelevant to the real Hemingway; it tempted, corrupted, and finally helped to destroy him.
Biographer Jeffery Meyers, in Memoirs Of Hemingway:
The Growth Of A Legend, VQR Vol 60, Autumn 1984.
The Growth Of A Legend, VQR Vol 60, Autumn 1984.
Another of his favorites [in Key West] was in an Irish machinist named J. B. Sullivan who had set up a machine shop two years earlier. Sully was then in his 40s a baldheaded chunky man from Brooklyn New York... Sully liked Ernest at once and thought him ‘a silent man, a deep man, who talked slowly and very positively, always determined to have his information exactly right’. Except for his brains, Sully said, he might have been a Skid Row character, but he was redeemed by his quick intelligence his probing curiosity and a warmth of personality which showed itself at once among non-literary people like Sully.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is towards megalomania and mine toward melancholy.
F Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.
As Hemingway was obviously learning, writing well was only half the game; making sure that influential people knew you were writing well was the other half. Before another year was out his game would be impeccable, the two complementing each other perfectly.’
from Hemingway The Paris Years, by Michael Reynolds.
Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
from Hemingway The Paris Years, by Michael Reynolds.
‘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. When his writing slacked off and he attempted to live up to and feed on the legend, his exploits seemed increasingly empty. His shotgun blast shattered the heroic myth — and led to a different persona.
Biographer Jeffery Meyers, in Memoirs Of Hemingway:
The Growth Of A Legend, VQR Vol 60, Autumn 1984.
The Growth Of A Legend, VQR Vol 60, Autumn 1984.
Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.
F Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.
This capacity for contempt, already shown in dozen of other ways, was apparent in his habit of accepting favours from people whom he then maligned behind their backs.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
Your attitude to Hemingway depends on how early you reach him on your reading map. It’s difficult for your feelings to stay unsoiled by the bumptious parody of the personality.
N.J. McGarrigle, the Irish Times.
That afternoon [June 7, 1927] he enclosed a check for 700 francs in his last letter to the landlord of 113 Notre Dames-des-Champs. “Because I am leaving Paris,” he said, “I shall not keep the apartment any longer. You may rent it immediately if you wish.” In part of his heart, he had already left Paris; his actuall departure was only a matter of time.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
Hemingway had begun his writing career in journalism and though he denigrated it in later life (‘Journalism, after a point has been reached, can be a daily self-destruction for a serious creative writer’), he never really left it.
William Kennedy, New York Times review of
The Dangerous Summer, June 9, 1985.
The Dangerous Summer, June 9, 1985.
James Joyce once remarked that the two men [Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway] were confused about each other. “Hemingway posing as tough and McAlmon as sensitive should swap poses and be true to life.” Joyce was noticing what Hadley and others had observed — that much of Ernest’s swagger was a protective cover for a deeply anxious nature.
Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women, those
who loved him the wives and others.
who loved him the wives and others.
Even though I am not a believer in the analysis, I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself’.
Hemingway to Ava Gardner, quoted by A.E. Hotchner
in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir.
in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir.
The reservoir of anger that may have had its origins in his early childhood seemed to have a tendency to spill over throughout his life. [Biographer Carlos] Baker pointed out that Hemingway was a man of many contradictions who was capable of alternately appearing shy or conceited, sensitive or aggressive, warm and generous, or ruthless and overbearing. It may have been that certain borderline personality traits caused him to appear erratic and dramatic.
Dr Christopher Martin, writing in Psychiatry Vol 69, Winter 2006.
Significant evidence exists to support the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable borderline and narcissistic personality traits. Late in life, Hemingway also developed symptoms of psychosis likely related to his underlying affective illness and superimposed alcoholism and traumatic brain injury. Hemingway utilized a variety of defense mechanisms, including self-medication with alcohol, a lifestyle of aggressive, risk-taking sportsmanship, and writing, in order to cope with the suffering caused by the complex co-morbidity of his interrelated psychiatric disorders. Ultimately, Hemingway’s defense mechanisms failed, overwhelmed by the burden of his complex co-morbid illness, resulting in his suicide.
Dr Christopher Martin, writing in Psychiatry Vol 69, Winter 2006.
Hemingway’s life and work interplay so closely that it has often been remarked that the author seemed to play one of his fictional characters in real life. [Husband and wife psychiatrist Irvin and Marilyn] Yalom and Yalom argued that most of Hemingway’s persona was in fact an ‘image’ he carefully built through the years to hide his deeper angst and they questioned his authenticity by wondering ‘whether a man firmly convinced of his identity would channel such a considerable proportion of his life energy into a search for masculine fulfilment’ and highlighted his ‘need to assert again and again a brute virility’.
Sebastian Dieguez, University of Fribourg/Freiburg, Switzerland
in Ernest Hemingway’s Near-Death Experience
and Declining Health, Frontiers Of Neurology And Neuroscience, April 2010.
in Ernest Hemingway’s Near-Death Experience
and Declining Health, Frontiers Of Neurology And Neuroscience, April 2010.
Nothing in his subsequent conduct suggests that he returned from Italy with a subdued temper, much less a revulsion against killing or a grasp of the issues and ironies behind the war. No doubt the wounding did render him more ‘existential’, heightening both his bravado and his morbidity. What it assuredly did not do, however, was to equip him with the insight and compassion that his friendliest commentators have wished to lend him. On the contrary, it appears to have launched him on a career of braggadocio and hedonistic thrill seeking (financed by other people’s money) that would put him gravely out of touch with the social and political consciousness of later times.
Frederick C. Crewe, reviewing Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway
biography in the New York Review of Books, August 13, 1987.
biography in the New York Review of Books, August 13, 1987.
But Hemingway was hounded by the belief he was a visible commercial author; therefore, he needed to keep Scribner’s house supplied with full-length books, or else he could no longer claim to be an active writer. Without a steady stream of publications, he would appear to be a rummy Scott, or a political hack like Dos Passos, or a failure like Harry Crosby or Hart Crane. Caught in his own successful image, Hemingway continued to write with bravado and complacency — but at heart he knew he was not writing as well as he previously had.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life.
About Death In The Afternoon:
He [the matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race... Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death, he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.
Ernest Hemingway, from Death In The Afternoon.
It may be said flatly that the famous Hemingway style is neither so clear nor so forceful in most passages of ‘Death in the Afternoon’ as it is in his novels and short stories. In this book Mr Hemingway is guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear. He enters, indeed, into a stylistic phase which corresponds, for his method, to the later stages of Henry James. The fact that a sentence is usually good Anglo-Saxon, with anything but a shrinking from calling a spade a spade, does not make it a clear sentence if one cannot easily distinguish the subordinate verbs from the principal one... This is not art in the sense in which the final pages of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ were art — it is fireworks.
R.L. Duffus in a New York Times review of Death In The Afternoon.
To sum up, then: a strange book, childish, here and there, in its small-boy wickedness of vocabulary; bitter, and even morbid in its endless preoccupation with fatality. As far as momentary popularity goes, it seems almost a suicidal book in its deliberate flouting of reader and critic alike, and I feel sure that because of it Mr. Hemingway has let himself in for some hard panning from those who have been most hysterical in praise of him. But, in spite of this, I think it contains some of the most honest and some of the best writing he has done since ‘In Our Time.’
Robert Coates, New Yorker, November 1932.
That is what a bullfight is, and that is all it is. To drag in notions of honor and glory here, and take them seriously, is ungrown-up enough and rather sophomoric. But to pump words over it like tragedy and dramatic conflict is mere romantic nonsense and self-deception crying to heaven.
From Max Eastman’s New Republic review of
Death In The Afternoon, June 1933.
Death In The Afternoon, June 1933.
There are gorgeous pages in Ernest Hemingway’s book about bullfights — big humor and reckless straight talk of what things are, genuinely heavy ferocity against prattle of what they are not. Hemingway is a full-sized man hewing his way with flying strokes of the poet’s broad axe which I greatly admire. Nevertheless, there is an unconscionable quantity of bull —to put it as decorously as possible — poured and plastered all over what he writes about bullfights. By bull I mean juvenile romantic gushing and sentimentalizing of simple facts.
From Max Eastman’s New Republic review of
Death In The Afternoon, June 1933.
Death In The Afternoon, June 1933.
What surprised Scribner’s most, however, was the pallid, if not hostile, reception of Death In The Afternoon, the bullfight book published in 1932. It also received negative reviews; in fact, during the 1930s, Hemingway’s writing would collect a number of uncharitable comments. At odds with the cultural mood now dominating the States, Hemingway’s interests as a writer — intent on finding the new and the exotic as a subject matter — seemed to disregard the poverty and fear most Americans were living through as a result of economic depression.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life.
In his enthusiasm for the art of tauromachy, Mr Hemingway has departed, sadly, in places from his usually clear and forceful style. His earnestness in trying to put over his idea apparently has caused him to neglect pruning. The result is a surprising loss of conciseness, and occasionally a deplorably cluttered syntax.
Review of Death In The Afternoon,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Oct 29, 1932.
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Oct 29, 1932.
Death In The Afternoon also testifies to the invasion of Hemingway’s serious writing by his myth. The hero of the book is not a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway. While the side remarks he makes about the art of writing are indispensable to any reader interested in modern literature, is tauromachian erudition is a bore, his tough-guy posturing an embarrassment, and his cutting comments about fellow writers by and large unamusing.
Kenneth S Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
So long as the author confines himself to his proper business, which is that of describing the art and science of bullfighting, he is unfailingly clear, colorful and interesting. Unfortunately, he apparently finds it hard to so confine himself. Only too often he turns aside from his theme to prove fatuously that he is a naughty fellow, and when he does so he almost invariably falls into banality and worse. The reader he seems to keep in his mind’s eye is a sort of common denominator of all the Ladies’ Aid Societies of his native Oak Park, Ill.
H L Mencken, American Mercury, Dec 1932.
About To Have And Have Not:
Great art as he had shown in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms (and would later show in For Whom The Bell Tolls) conveyed and emotional response to the universal condition of human suffering, not to economic injustice or the artificial notion that humankind must band together in awkward political solidarity.
James M Hutchisson, Ernest Hemingway: A New Life.
He has moved steadily toward mastery of his technique, though that is by no means the perfect instrument it has been praised for being. Technique, however, is not enough to make a great writer, and that is what we have been asked to believe Mr. Hemingway was in process of becoming. The indications of such a growth are absent from this book, as they have been absent from everything Mr. Hemingway has written since A Farewell to Arms. There is evidence of no mental growth whatever; there is no better understanding of life, no increase in his power to illuminate it or even to present it. Essentially, this new novel is an empty book.
New York Times review of To Have And Have
Not by J. Donald Adams, Oct 15, 1937.
I told Hemingway I could make a picture out of his worst book and he said, rather grumpily, ‘What’s my worst book?’ I said, ‘That bunch of junk called To Have And Have Not.’ He said, ‘Well, I needed money.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t care about that part.’ He said, ‘You can’t make a picture out of that.’ ‘Yes, I can.’ So for about ten days we sat around, while we were fishing, and talked about how these characters met one another, what kind of people they were, and how they ended up. When I came back, I went over and bought the story and started in on the premise that Hemingway and I had evolved.
Peter Bogdanovich quoting Howard Hawks in Who The Devil Made It?
The famous Hemingway dialogue reveals itself as never before in its true nature. It is false to life, cut to a purely mechanized formula. You cannot separate the speech of one character from another and tell who is speaking. They all talk alike.
New York Times review of To Have And Have
Not by J. Donald Adams, Oct 15, 1937.
Not by J. Donald Adams, Oct 15, 1937.
In spite of its frequent strength as narrative writing, To Have And Have Not is a novel distinctly inferior to A Farewell to Arms. There is nothing in it comparable to the final chapter of the earlier book, or to the story of the retreat from Caporetto. Mr. Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published.
New York Times review of To Have And Have
Not by J. Donald Adams, Oct 15, 1937.
Not by J. Donald Adams, Oct 15, 1937.
About For Whom The Bell Tolls:
Sometimes called Hemingway’s best novel, too, [For Whom The Bell Tolls] is a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbably or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.
Maxwell Geismar, New York Times, July 1, 1962.
It is so to speak Ernest’s Tale Of Two Cities though the comparison isn’t apt. I mean it is a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of Rebecca.
F. Scott Fitzgerald on For Whom The Bell Tolls.
About Across The River And Into The Trees:
‘The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across The River and Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616.
John O’Hara, in the New York Times, Sept 10, 1950.
To me, the terrible thing — and I use that adjective with deliberation — about ‘Across the River And Into the Trees’ is that a writer could hold, at the center of his thinking about life, the belief that unless a man has killed he has not lived.
J. Donald Adams, writing about Across The River And
Into The Trees, New York Times, Sept 24, 1950.
Into The Trees, New York Times, Sept 24, 1950.
To me, Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel’s life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.
J. Donald Adams, writing about Across The River And
Into The Trees, New York Times, Sept 24, 1950.
Into The Trees, New York Times, Sept 24, 1950.
It is hard to say what one feels most in reading this book — pity, embarrassment that so fine and honest a writer can make such a travesty of himself, or amazement that a man can render so marvellously the beauty of the natural world and yet be so vulgar.
Alfred Kazin, New Yorker, 9 ,1950.
Critics have tried to redeem it from its own failings, praising the denseness of allusions to such writers as Dante, Thomas Mann (Death In Venice), and Gabriele D’Annunzio, the symbolic resonance of nearly every scene, every word, but none of these make the novel work.
Peter L Hays, Ernest Hemingway
It is not enough to say that ‘Across the River and into the Trees’ is a bad novel, which nearly everyone has said (the fact is, a good deal of it is trash) or to ascribe its failure to Hemingway’s playing Hemingway. Such judgments fail to go deep; they make an artificial separation between the man and the artist, and attribute to the former, as though these were superficial mistakes, shortcomings which are the very essence of Hemingway’s art. It seems to me that no writer of comparable stature has ever expressed in his work so false an attitude toward life. . . . For all these reasons, it seems to me that his reputation must soon decline, and while the excellent aspects of his style, at least in the earlier novels and some of the stories, the clear, clean writing that he does at his best, will retain their value, the deep moral significance that some critics (e.g. Cowley) have found or pretended to find in his attitude toward life has already begun to look like a hoax.
Isaac Rosenfield, Kenyon Review, Winter 1951.
In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as ‘the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ (John O’Hara’s wildly extravagant assessment in praise of ‘Across the River and Into the Trees’) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought.
Raymond Carver, in a New York Times Books review, Nov 17, 1985.
His reputation was unassailable in 1936. Then, with much trumpeting, he went to Madrid and Barcelona. Here was something greater than bullfights and bistros. The greatest modern writer was devoting his art to the greatest modern theme. Picasso had painted Guernica; Messrs. Auden and Spender had written something or other; now the great warrior-artist of the New World was going to write the Modern Epic. But it did not turn out like that. For Whom the Bell Tolls was not at all what the Socialists wanted. They had been busy denying atrocities; Mr. Hemingway described them in detail with relish. They had denied the presence of Russians; Mr. Hemingway led us straight into the front-door of the Gaylord Hotel. He made Marty and la Pasionaria as comic as any ‘New Yorker’ correspondent could have done. From then on he was on the wrong side of the barricades for the Socialists, while his pounding revolutionary heart still drove him from civilization.
Evelyn Waugh on Hemingway, reviewing Across
The River in the Tablet, Sept 1950
The River in the Tablet, Sept 1950
This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination…. The ideological background of the novel is a mixture of “True Romances,” Superman, and the Last Frontier.
Maxwell Geismar, Saturday Review of Literature
How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?
John Dos Passos in a letter to a friend on
Across The River And Into The Trees.
Across The River And Into The Trees.
In spite of Ernest’s high hopes and preliminary vauntings Across The River was received that September with boredom and dismay. The American reviews bristled with such adjectives as disappointing, embarrassing, distressing, trivial, tawdry, garrulous and tired. Many said that the book read like a parody of his former style. The reception was about the same in England... the London Observer thought that Hemingway’s implicit attitude was out of fashion. The familiar posture of his hero — ‘despair held bottom bolt upright by courage and virility’ — now looked somewhat démodé, while the author’s stature had seemingly shrunk to that of ‘an eccentric of the rustic American type, with an original though limited literary talent’.
Carlos Baker in Hemingway: A Life Story.
An earlier generation of American realists, from Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson to Ellen Glasgow, who had never dissociated themselves from their native society even when they appeared most critical of it, continued, like their European counterparts, to develop and grow. Hemingway, by contrast, simply continued to pour the romantic emotions of youth, now somewhat stereotyped and stylized, into his aging later heroes.
Maxwell Geismar, New York Times, July 1, 1962.
Most people don’t’ think of Hemingway as a poet, but obviously he is a poet and I should say, offhand, the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of EXTRAORDINARY ACTUALITY is concerned.
Poet Wallace Stevens.
Hemingway, by contrast, had very early trapped himself into the stereotype of the romantic and virile literary ‘man of action’, so American in essence, and so little conducive to either intellectual or emotional development... [he] simply continued to pour the romantic emotions of youth, now somewhat stereotyped and stylized, into his aging later heroes. In this respect, Across the River and Into the Trees was probably his worst novel.
Maxwell Geismar, New York Times, July 1, 1962.
About The Old Man And The Sea:
He had bet is sagging reputation on Across The River and he had lost, badly. He bet again on The Old Man And The Sea and the critics loved it . . . On and on the accolades rolled, until it became an inevitability that the book would at last bring Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize, and a probability that he would soon be awarded the Nobel.
Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway.
The Old Man And The Sea is a short novel, only 27,000 words. It is much simpler and enormously better than Mr Hemingway’s last book, Across The River And Into the Trees. No phony [sic] glamour girls and no bullying braggarts sentimentalized almost to parody distort its honest and elemental theme. No outbursts of spite or false theatricalism impede the smooth rush of its narrative. Within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.
Orville Prescott, New York Times, August 28, 1952.
Today, there is only one question worth asking about The Old Man. How could a book that lapses repeatedly into lachrymose sentimentality and is relentlessly pseudo-Biblical, that mixes cute talk about baseball (‘I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland’) with crucifixion symbolism of the most appalling crudity (‘he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up’) have evoked such a storm of applause from highbrows and middlebrows alike — and in such overwhelming numbers?
Kenneth Lynn, Hemingway.
But one must take care not to push these generosities too far, if only because they spill over so easily into that excess of blind charity we all tend to feel for Hemingway each time he pulls out of another slump and attains to the heroism of simply writing well once again. It should be possible for us to honor him for his amazing recuperative powers and his new talent for quasi-religious revelation and still be able to see that it is not for either of these qualities that his book must finally he valued, but for the degree of its success in meeting the standards set down by his own best previous achievement as an artist. I have these standards in mind when I say that The Old Man and the Sea seems to me a work of distinctly minor Hemingway fiction.
John Aldridge, from a review of The Old Man
And The Sea in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Spring 1953.
And The Sea in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Spring 1953.
In the best of the early Hemingway one always felt that the prose had been forced out under great pressure through a tight screen of opposing psychic tensions; and one read it with the same taut apprehensiveness, the same premonition of hugely impending catastrophe, as that with which it was written... But now the prose [in The Old Man And The Sea] — to change the figure once again — has a fabricated quality, as if it had been shipped into the book by some manufacturer of standardized Hemingway parts.
John Aldridge, from a review of The Old Man
And The Sea in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Spring 1953.
And The Sea in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Spring 1953.
The end of Hemingway’s career was a sad business. The last novels were self-parodies, none more so than The Old Man And The Sea. The internal monologues of Hemingway’s crusty fisherman are unwittingly comical (‘My head is not that clear. But I think the great Dimaggio would be proud of me today’); and the message, that fish are ‘more noble and more able’ than men, is fine if you’re a seventh grader.
James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly, Oct 1983.
The ovation which greeted Hemingway’s new novel was mostly very nice. For it was mostly a desire to continue to admire a great writer. Yet there was a note of insistence in the praise and a note of relief, the relief because his previous book [Across The River And Into The Trees] was extremely bad in an ominous way, the insistence, I think, because this new work is not so much good in itself as a virtuoso performance which reminds one of Hemingway at his best . . . Whenever, in this new book, the narrative is concerned wholly with fishing, there is a pure vividness of presentation. But then the old man’s emotions are explicitly dealt with, there is a margin of self-consciousness and a mannerism of assertion which is perhaps inevitable whenever a great writer cannot get free of the knowledge that he is a great writer.
Delmore Schwartz, Partisan Review, Nov 1952.
About A Moveable Feast:
Any book by or about Hemingway suddenly becomes the occasion for another full-scale review of his career and I don’t think this one is going to prove a conspicuous exception. The St Vitus dancers among his critics who are mazily on record for changing their minds about him are always good for one more swing. But, once again, it is a greater pleasure, for the reader at large, to read Hemingway than to cope with the folklorist of his mythology.
Charles Poore, New York Times, May 5, 1964.
A Moveable Feast is composed of 20 sketches, rewritten from Hemingway’s notebooks of the years 1921-1926. Though the volume has the air of a random compilation, it is in fact a calculated production, and this for two reasons: first, because embedded in its pages are messages to the few readers who will know for whom they are meant; and, secondly, because as an artist Hemingway never allowed himself to appear in undress.
Lewis Galantiere, in the New York Times, May 10, 1962.
About The Garden Of Eden:
‘[Hemingway] was unquestionably a genius, but of the kind that advertises its limits. Critics were on to these from the very beginning, but in the forward-looking 1920s, they joined his readers to make him the writer for their time. His stuff was new. It moved. There was on every page of clear prose an implicit judgment of all other writing.
E.L. Doctorow, reviewing The Garden Of Eden for the New York Times, May 18, 1986.
Quotes by Martha Gellhorn
Marty [Martha Gellhorn] said to me in 1997: ‘I should have taken my mother’s advice and never married him. The relationship was fine as long as we were lovers Marriage was a disaster. My wise mother knew it and tried to warn me but I would not listen’.
Valerie Hemingway, neé Danby-Smith
in her memoir Running With Bulls.
in her memoir Running With Bulls.
Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was honey, appetizing, a habit.
Martha Gellhorn.
A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.
Martha Gellhorn on Ernest Hemingway.
About and by Gertrude Stein:
What a book would be the real story of Hemingway, not those he writes, but the confessions of the real Ernest Hemingway. It would be for another audience than the audience Hemingway now has but it would be very wonderful.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography Of Alice B Toklas.
A humbug she may have been as a connoisseur of art, but as an analyst of the psychology of artists she was extremely shrewd, not only because she had observed a great many of them, but because she had “plenty of brains”, as Bernard Berenson’s wife noted in her diary in 1903... Besides brains, she possessed a piercing wit, a gift for coining phrases and a flair for self-advertising that her brother’s overbearing personality could not obscure forever.
Kenneth S Lynn on Gertrude Stein, in Hemingway.
General quotes
Hemingway had come from nowhere to nascent prominence in a period defined not only by the sort of American journalism that Time [magazine] advocated, but also by the final stage of the conversion of ‘readers’ into ‘markets’. Like cosmetics, automobiles or motion pictures publishing was an industry whose future depended on turning out a product for mass audience. The author was part of the product, the more promotable the better.
Leonard J Leff, Hemingway And His Conspirators.
To younger readers, those who came to Hemingway after World War II, he could not possibly look the same as to previous generations because the later group saw him in a different context... Those who began to read him in the mid-20s, or soon after, experienced a small epiphany, saw a powerful and incredibly timely writer appear, almost as a savior bringing curt truth to a windy and shaken society. Change ensued. The first newly published book of Hemingway’s that I read was Death In The Afternoon (1932), and I can remember the quiet shock it caused among my friends, a shock allayed by Winner Take Nothing, then amplified by Green Hills of Africa. By the time we all reached For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway was just another writer, in the sense that he now wrote good books and bad books, or books with good and bad components in them. Even when he was better than good, he was not a god any more.
Stanley Kauffman, reviewing A Moveable Feast,
The New Republic, June 9, 1964.
The New Republic, June 9, 1964.
Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in photographs, Book of the Month club editions, and stage or movie adaptations that could bring an author fame and fortune; he wrote, in other words, ‘for the relief of [his] own mind and without thought of publication’. Certainly he wanted an audience to hear what he had to say about valour or love or the anatomy of fiction. And certainly he needed money to sustain the grand life he had after 1929. Beyond that, however, he radiated personality and cultivated publicity even as he pretended to scorn it. In his first letter to Perkins he mentioned — not wholly facetiously — that it would be ‘worthwhile to get into Who’s Who’. In short he wanted fame in both the Renaissance and the contemporary sense.
Leonard J Leff, Hemingway And His Conspirators.
The 1920s, the decade of the ascent of Ernest Hemingway, the decade of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, was also the era of modern advertising — bold and noisy and professionalised. Anything could be sold, even books, if only they were marketed well.
Leonard J Leff, Hemingway And His Conspirators.
Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art
‘As [Hemingway’s] fame grew, his self-dramatizations hardened into myth, for he had tapped into the twentieth century’s enormous nostalgia for the manly virtues of earlier times, as defined in America by the pathfinders of Fenimore Cooper, the foretopmen of Herman Melville and the cowboys extolled by Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister and Frederic Remington.
Kenneth S Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
Perhaps to an extent greater than any of his contemporaries, save [his contemporary novelist] Thomas Wolfe, he habitually re-created his life through his art, not in unrestrained confessional floods, as Wolfe, did, but in the unique stylistic shorthand of his own invention and in the guarded manner of one who, in spite of limited self-understanding, sought to explore, to express and to find some measure of resolution of agonizing personal conflicts.
Kenneth S Lynn, in his biography Hemingway.
As for you two children: You grace the Earth. You’re so right, because you’re so close to what’s elemental. Your values are hitched up to the universe. We’re proud to know you. Yours are the things that count. They’re a gift to those who see them, too.
Letter from Gerald Murphy to Ernest and Hadley
Hemingway in July 1926 after they had
attended the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona together.
Hemingway in July 1926 after they had
attended the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona together.
[the bullfighters] live in a region all their own — and alone each, somewhere between art and life — and eclipsing at times each of them — make you feel that you are as you find other people — half-alive. They are a religion for which I could have been trained. This knocked at my heart all the time I was at Pamplona’.
Letter from Gerald Murphy to Ernest and Hadley
Hemingway on July 14, 1926, after they had
attended the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona together.
Hemingway on July 14, 1926, after they had
attended the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona together.
Without mentioning Hadley’s name, Sara clearly included her in the category of second-raters. Sara Murphy, the great mother and provider of Gerald’s comfort, was tolerant of many, but quietly judgemental of all who crossed her threshold. Ernest, who won her affection as he had won that of many another older woman, could do little wrong in those days. Pauline Pfeiffer, who was a friend of Sara’s before Ernest appeared in the Murphy menagerie, was one of them — quick, witty, educated and monied — a good match for Ernest in Sara’s mind. Hadley, whom she barely knew, having seen her only in trying circumstances, was, Sara thought, responsible for the separation. Hadley should never have confronted Ernest with his affection for Pauline.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
Whatever the Murphys saw that night at supper with Hadley and Ernest vindicated in their minds Ernest’s complaints about Hadley. The same two people who, earlier in the summer were so enamoured of the Hemingway marriage, left Paris convinced that Hadley had never carried her share of the weight.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
Gerald was less concerned with Ernest’s wife, whoever she was, than with his art. Before leaving Paris, he told Ernest: “We believe in you in all your parts. We believe in what you are doing, in the way you are doing it. Anything we’ve got is yours: somehow we are your father and mother, by what we feel for you.”
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
So long as he published with “little” or literary magazines like The Quarter or transatlantic review or with Left Bank publishers of limited editions like Robert McAlmon, Hemingway was one of a crowd, a piece of the Montparnasse firmament, fitting comfortably into his niche... Hemingway’s move to Boni & Liveright with In Our Time raised him only slightly among his peers. However, when he signed the Charles Scribner’s Sons contract, Hemingway moved into the major league. That the shift took place at the same time that he was ridding himself of Hadley and moving to a more sophisticated woman seems to have been coincidental, but it was all of a piece with his life.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
By the time thet went to Zaragoza, MacLeish, older and with two children to Hemingway’s one, was calling Ernest ‘Pappy’ a version of Hemingway’s latest, self-selected nickname ‘Papa’. Archie thought it referred to Ernest’s fatherhood, but he could not have been more wrong. To be ‘Papa’ was to have authority over whatever the game happened to be.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
A new generation does not appear every thirty years... or “about three times in the century” to quote Fitzgerald; it appears when writers of the same age join in common revolt against the fathers and when in the process of adapting a new lifestyle they find their own models and spokesmen.
Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering.
The men of the Twenties had such good times that later some of them — Hemingway, for example — fell into a frozen attitude of regret for an irrecapturable past.
Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering.
With no way to know it in advance, Ernest Hemingway had found among all the available women in Paris not the prettiest, not the richest, but the one best suited to his situation with his career about to burgeon. He no longer needed a devoted Hadley leaning heavily upon his lead. What he needed now was a wife to help manage his career, a woman who can make decisions and take care of yourself a woman like Pauline Pfeiffer.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
‘Because he was a storyteller by both trade and inclination, Hemingway often embellished his life for old friends and chance acquaintances, or improved upon it in letters when he wanted to amuse. Before it was over, he was as much to blame as the media for creating the larger-than-life Hemingway who prospered so outrageously on paper. That the public myth so prospered was, of course, a function of America’s need for such a man.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
Frequently needling the Hemingways [Zelda] told Hadley one day, ‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants’. Hemingway did not much care for the remark, but, as Hadley said later, it was perceptive of Zelda about Ernest wanting everything his way.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
The five years of her marriage to Hemingway had toughened her up more than she had realised. Now, for the first time in her life, she was free to live as she pleased and hows she pleased, answering to no one... Despite the ache of loss, Hadley discovered a new wholeness to herself; she rather enjoyed the quiet days in Chartres, no longer tied to Ernest’s emotional roller-coaster. Perhaps her highs would no longer reach the peaks they had with him, but then neither would she have to face his suicidal lows.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
In 1923, under the energetic leadership of [Harry C] Hindmarsh’s father-in-law, the late Joseph E Atkinson, the Star was emerging as the colossus of Canadian journalism. Sensational headlines, red type, comic strips, eyewitness and flamboyant reportage, basic English and many photographs were the fundamental tools. In the bible-belt atmosphere of southern Ontario the Star’s management also uncovered in religion an appeal which Hearst, for example, although he frequently attempted it, was never able to exploit fully in the United States. Atkinson’s nickname in the trade an indication of the pious hypocrisy his contemporaries felt they detected in the contradictory components of his papers. They called him Holy Joe.
Charles A Fenton, The Apprenticeship
Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.
Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.
As long as people around [Hemingway] were worshipping and adoring, why, they were great. The minute they weren’t, there was a tendency to find others who were.
Arnold Gingrich, founder and editor of Esquire.
Ernest Hemingway worshipped Joyce as the leader of intellectual Paris in the 1920s, yet his copy of Ulysses lies in the John F Kennedy library with all but the early and final pages uncut.
Declan Kiberd, Ulysses And Us.
He hated all falsity, but it was easier to express the distaste with reference to bullfighting. He hated falsity in writing, but it is not easy for someone who doesn’t write to see this so clearly. Insincerity can creep into writing, unknown to the author, who must be eternally vigilant. Trying too hard to avoid insincerity can produce the greatest insincerity of all. But watching bullfighters, it is easy to spot.
John Atkins, The Art Of Ernest Hemingway.
[Syvlia] Beach had just published the Paris edition of Ulysses, which Hemingway described in March [1922] as a ‘most goddamn wonderful book’, though he seems to have had private reservations. Two years later he praised the characterisation of Leopold and Molly Bloom, but hinted he could not abide the over-intellectualisation of Stephen Dedalus.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer As Artist.
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.
Declan Kiberd, Ulysses And Us.
There wasn’t room in his head for cops and robbers, a six-day week, and serious writing. Even to his journalism he brought standards that were personally exacting. ‘Don’t talk about it before you write it,’ he warned Mary Lowry once, as they walked back to the Star after a provocative interview with the survivors of a Japanese earthquake. ‘You mustn’t talk about it,’ Hemingway insisted. ‘You’ll spoil it.’
Charles A Fenton, The Apprenticeship
Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.
Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.
When Fenton also began querying his sister Marceline and his outlawed sister Carol (she had married he college boyfriend John Garner in 1933, against Hemingway’s wishes and he vowed never to see her again), Hemingway gave him a ‘cease and desist’ order: ‘When you go into my family etc, it is to me an invasion of privacy.’ The correspondence developed into angry exchanges. Yet, with each angry response, Hemingway, by way of correcting errors, also began feeding out more tempting bait ... it was to Fenton that he gratuitously offered the dubious information that he had had to get the hell out of Petoskey because of troubles with four or five girls.
James Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences.
During such moments of despair, it is unlikely that Hemingway realised that he was one of the luckier writers in modern history. Circumstances often seemed to conspire in his favour. All of the right things made their way to him at the right moment: motivator mentors, publisher patrons, wealthy wives — and a trove of material just when he needed it most, which he promptly translated into his groundbreaking debut novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926.
Lesley M M Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly:
The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece
The Sun Also Rises.
The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece
The Sun Also Rises.
In the first page or pages of your Mss. I found so many errors of fact that I could spend the rest of this winter re-writing and giving you the true gen and I would not be able to write anything of my own at all.... Another thing: You have located unsigned pieces by me through pay vouchers. But you do not know which pieces were changed or re-written by the copy desk and which were not. I know nothing worse for a writer than for his early writing which has been re-written and altered to be published without permission as his own. Actually I know few things worse than for another writer to collect a fellow writer’s journalism which his fellow writer has elected not to preserve because it is worthless and publish it. Mr. Fenton I feel very strongly about this. I have written you so before and I write you now again. Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters.
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Charles A Fenton.
The first printing of 5,090 copies of The Sun Also Rises (1926), which established Hemingway’s literary reputation and public fame, sold out quickly. The novel was reprinted six times during the first year, reached its tenth printing in November 1929, and had sold more than a million copies by the time of Hemingway’s death in 1961. A Farewell To Arms (1929) sold more than 79,000 copies in the first four months, earned Hemingway $30,000 in book royalties and reached 1,400,000 copies by 1961. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) sold half a million copies in the first six months; and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) had even greater success. The entire novella appeared in ‘Life’ magazine—which then had a circulation of 51⁄2 million— ten days before publication. The first Book-of-the-Month printing was 153,000, and the book still sells more copies than any other work by Hemingway.’
Jeffrey Meyers, Introduction to Hemingway
in the Critical Heritage series.
in the Critical Heritage series.
How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence and the critic must go outside the poem for evidence of intention that did not become effective in the poem.
W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy,
The Sewanee Review, vol 54, 1946.
The Sewanee Review, vol 54, 1946.
The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public.
W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy,
The Sewanee Review, vol 54, 1946.
The Sewanee Review, vol 54, 1946.
About Hemingway’s wisdom
Madam, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you... If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon.
After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it, at least you can always drink from it.
Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon.
About Hemingway’s attitude to homosexuals and lesbians
Talented or not, Hemingway could not stand male homosexuals, especially when they congregated in groups. In letters and throughout his published works, he went out of his way to articulate his virulent scorn for homosexuals — so far out of his way, in fact, as eventually to lay himself open to counterattack by psychologically-oriented critics.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
About Hemingway’s attitude to friends and friendship
Hemingway himself possessed an extraordinary capacity for inspiring the affection and admiration of other men. A shortcoming of Carlos Baker’s biography, Malcolm Cowley feels, is that the book ‘give hardly any notion of the immense charm’ Hemingway exerted — a charm derived from his ‘tall, handsome, broad-shouldered’ presence, from his seemingly boundless vitality, and from his ‘habit of paying undivided attention’ to people, one at a time, of really listening to what they had to say.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
Many people ‘were not only content’, as Baker does comment ‘but even eager to tan themselves like sunbathers in the rays [Hemingway] generated.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
What he wanted most of all, those early years in Paris, was literary success, and in this quest Hemingway’s abundant charm undoubtedly served him well. The novelist Nathan Asch, a fellow expatriate, note how Ernest ‘managed to have it important for visitors to Paris to meet him.’ He ‘was a conscious careerist,’ Asch concluded, but ‘finally he did have the stuff, and he delivered.’
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
Similarly when he and John Dos Passos quarreled over the politics of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest let his old friend know in person, by letter, in a magazine article and through the portrait of Richard Gordon, the fellow-travelling novelist in To Have And Have Not, just how naïve and contemptible he thought Dos Passos had been. Yet when Dos Passos depicted Hemingway as a character in his 1951 novel Chosen Country, Ernest raged that he’d trained a fierce crew of cats and dogs at the Finca to attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards on sight.
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
‘You wouldn’t call Poppa [sic] mean or nasty,’ said Leicester Hemingway in summing up his brother’s capacity for putting people down. ‘You’d call him malevolent.’
Scott Donaldson, By Force Of Will: The life and art of Ernest Hemingway.
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