The modernist writer — Part I

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

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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.

. . . 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.

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 . . .

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism.

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.

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane,


The Name And Nature Of Modernism.

Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty . . . 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.

WHO, when practising in ‘the arts’, was a ‘modernist’ and what constituted ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ works is these days unhelpfully vague. In many ways Hemingway might well have been a ‘modernist writer’, as is accepted by many, but if so ‘his modernism’ was not deep-rooted, and in a sense was more a matter of appearances.

He initially looked like a modernist to his contemporaries, and so they accepted him as one; but it would be a distinct stretch to claim that any of the work he produced after the appearance in 1925 of In Our Time, his first volume of short stories, was notably modernist. Even that work, in hindsight and side by side with other literary works seen as modernist, doesn’t quite make the mark, despite its ‘shocking’, and thus ‘modern’, subject matter, and its unusual, and thus ‘modern’, syncopated style.

The Sun Also Rises, the novel much anticipated after the impact of In Our Time, disappointed more than a few critics and other writers, and they said so in their reviews. Hemingway’s follow-up novel, A Farewell To Arms, veered even more to the conventional, and when he published Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa — although admittedly neither was a work of fiction — he was firmly back in a traditional, often rather bad and, ironically, prolix mode of writing.

In her Essay In Criticism, which was nominally a review for the New York Times of Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf (right) nails his supposed modernism succinctly

. . . 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.

Pertinent here is Woolf’s mention of a ‘conception of fiction’.

One notable aspect of modernism and modernist artists was the thinking which underpinned their work and artistic aims; and although Hemingway often repeated that his aim when writing was to create a reality that was — to paraphrase him somewhat — ‘truer than true’ or ‘more real than real’, his notional modernism certainly had no philosophical or intellectual underpinning. Should it, you ask?

Well, the work of other modernist artists, writers and composers did and this might be what Woolf was indicating when she described him as ‘modern in manner but not in vision’.

Throughout his life and especially as a young man, Hemingway made a point of ostensibly and vociferously disparaging all talk of ‘art’, although colleagues on the Kansas Star and, later, his roommates in Chicago report that he took part in discussions on fiction and ‘literature’. Quite why he stood apart from addressing what might be regarded as the more philosophical aspects of modernism is anyone’s guess, because he was never reticent about laying down the law about what constituted ‘good writing’ and ‘literature’.

One explanation for his stance might lie in the many, often stark, contradictions in his character: just as the public braggart, the pugilist and bully was said by some friends to have been essentially a shy, kind and gentle man, they also insist that the ‘all talk of art is for poseurs and phoneys’ man he portrayed in public was, in private, intelligent and something of an intellectual.

But ‘Hemingway the intellectual’ was not an image Hemingway wanted the world to have of him: he wanted to be regarded as a no-nonsense, hard-drinking, down-to-earth action man who had not time for all that airy-fairy talk about art.

In fact, when his publishers Scribner’s advertised and marketed The Sun Also Rises, the notion of the effete writer as ‘the artist sequestered in his garret’ was firmly side-lined in favour of selling Hemingway as a ‘masculine’ action man who happened to write well.

. . .

To help formulate a working definition of modernism, certain general observations might help. Although many today equate modernism with the stark, jagged, sometimes brutal works of the post-World War I painters and composers, by the time much of these were produced modernism was already well-established.

It is broadly thought to have begun to evolve in the last two decades of the 19th century and had firmly established itself in the first decade of the 20th century. The then younger generation of writers, philosophers, artists and architects, and composers throughout Europe were reacting against the traditions and conventions of their parents’ and grandparents’ (as younger generations usually do). Whereas ‘realism’ had been the aim for the previous generation of writers, modernist writers increasingly wanted to get beyond and beneath that ‘surface’ realism and examine the inner life of the individual.

In the 20-odd years leading up to the outbreak of World War I, the modernist movement was generally driven by optimism and positivity. Encouraged by advances in the sciences, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, new production techniques and the growing popularity of left-wing political theory, but also alarmed by the — what it regarded as dehumanising — effects of growing industrialisation, modernists were keen to apply these innovations to how society might be reformed for the better.

They reflected that aim in their art, but the optimism and positivity came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of war in 1914 and was destroyed by the subsequent four years of world-war horror, destruction and misery. Arguably, the fragmentation and often self-conscious ugliness of those stark, jagged, brutal works produced in the 1920s and 1930s with which ‘modernism’ is now popularly associated were more a reaction to the horror, destruction and misery than anything modernist ideas, hopes and notions might have suggested and inspired.

One useful way of viewing modernism (for which description I must thank Suzanne Lynch of the Irish Times) is that it

was an attempt to find new ways of capturing experience and identity, ways that would prioritise the individual and the interior mind, and push the boundaries of language and form to its limits. The focus was on experimentation and newness, and abandonment of the fixed point of view, driven by a restlessness with regard to the traditional structures of 19th-century realism.

With this description in mind, Hemingway might certainly be regarded as a modernist in aim and intention, in ‘prioritising the individual’ (though it should be noted that ‘the individual’ portrayed in his work was almost always a Hemingway proxy) and perhaps finding ‘new ways of capturing experience and identity’.

In other regards — ‘pushing the boundaries of language and form’, focusing ‘on experimentation and newness’, abandoning ‘the fixed point of view’ and ‘traditional structures of 19th-century realism’ Hemingway pretty much does not even progress beyond the first round.

He ostensibly briefly seems to have stepped out in that direction, but in the event did not stray too far from the straight and narrow of the Oak Park conservatism in which he was raised (an observation also made by most of his biographers of other aspects of his life).

Certainly, compared to what almost every other writer — although not all — was then producing his prose style was ‘new’ and striking, and some might claim that he did push the boundaries of language and form. But the experiment was a limited, almost two-dimensional one, which is perhaps why Gertrude Stein, once a mentor and friend, later a bitter enemy, observed — admittedly once she was a bitter enemy — that Hemingway looked like a modernist and smelled of the museums.

The narrative routes of his three famous novels are decidedly linear, with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and the only ‘inner lives’ with which Hemingway concerns himself are those of each story’s and novel’s central character — and thus his proxy — Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan, Richard Cantwell, Thomas Hudson, David Bourne and his Spanish fisherman Santiago. In The Sun Also Rises, for example, we get to know some of Jake Barnes’s inner life (and possibly even a glimpse of the ‘private’ Lady Brett Ashley), but the depths of the other characters in The Sun Also Rises remain unplumbed.

Frederic Henry in A Farewell To Arms reveals some of his inner self, although we never discover just why he is telling his story and felt compelled to do so (a common failing of many ‘first-person’ narratives).

Despite some academics and critics trying to dignify Henry’s ‘love interest’ Catherine Barkley with ‘depth’, she (and the supposed passion she and Henry feel for the other) remain decidedly flat and distressingly insipid. The irony is that something psychologically complex must have been going on in Catherine: quite soon after losing in battle the man she regarded as the love of her life and apparently close to despair, she rapidly replaces that man with Henry after just one meeting.

Such a coup de foudre would not be unprecedented, and a psychologist — and a better writer — could chose to analyse why Catherine selected Henry as a substitute: a truly modernist writer might well have examined the complex ‘why’ of her behaviour. Hemingway does none of this: at the end of the day Hemingway was simply not interested and concerns himself solely with his proxy, Frederic Henry. The novel’s other characters, despite heroic attempts by some academics and critics to invest them with significance, serve only as a foil to Henry and also have little depth.

In the story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway’s hero, the writer Harry — yet another proxy — ruminates on his past in what could be described as a ‘stream of consciousness’ as he lies dying of gangrene. Harry’s death-bed ruminations — his self-reproach for living off his wealthy wife’s money echo Hemingway’s own guilt at the time about doing the same — are made up almost exclusively of Hemingway’s own memories.

One might, of course, argue that the dying man’s ruminations do constitute ‘a stream of consciousness’, but they are also oddly two-dimensional. Other ‘modernist’ writers played with the passage and nature of time, with alternative, often conflicting, narratives, they examined the contradictions of differing perceptions of the same events and utilised a variety of styles. Hemingway essayed no such experiments.

At times it seems the extent of his ‘modernism’ was, in keeping with the instruction from his ‘mentors’ Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, merely trying to ensure his prose was simple and unadorned; and even in that regard, in the work he produced after 1930, he became less successful at doing so, even as he increasingly saw himself as ‘a great writer’.

Hemingway once stated that his aim was to try

in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not to just depict life — or criticise it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing.

The obvious question is: was this not what many other writers were also trying to achieve, including those who were and are not now regarded as ‘modernist’? Was Victor Hugo not trying, in his novel Les Miserables, to get his readers to ‘feel’ what it was like to take part in the June 1832 uprising?

Then there’s the problem that many readers might report that a writer has made an experience come ‘alive’ for them, but, unhelpfully, each such ‘felt’ experience is unique and subjective. The obvious question is (and it has no answer): am I experiencing what Hemingway is trying to make me experience? How can I be sure? I might be experiencing something, but is it what Hemingway was trying to make me feel? Are you and I sharing the same experience (which would be a reliable indicator that Hemingway had succeeded)? Who knows? The point is there is and can be no way of knowing.

. . .

The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, a year after the appearance of In Our Time, Hemingway’s first volume of short stories that had so excited the critics and established him as a coming man in the literary landscape. When writing those stories, and those which had previously appeared in the privately published volumes Three Stories And Ten Poems and in our time [sic], Hemingway was self-consciously trying something new. 

Under the tutelage of Pound and Stein, he wanted to write simple prose shorn of ornamentation — out went most adjectives and all adverbs (although his style was not unique and reminded many — much to Hemingway’s annoyance — of the work of his mentor Sherwood Anderson). The prose in that first commercially published volume, variously described by reviewers as

‘fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean’

and

‘terse, precise and aggressively fresh’

was markedly different to much that had gone before which is what caused much of the excitement. Hemingway’s subject matter was equally unconventional. The critics, thus, had high hopes for the young writer’s debut novel, but it’s reception was mixed. Typical of the enthusiast who rated it was the view of an early Hemingway champion, the literary young turk Edmund Wilson. He wrote

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.

The New York Sun commented

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

and the New York Herald Tribune gushed

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 short-hands, of living speech. It is in the dialogue almost entirely Mr Hemingway tells his story and makes the people live and act.

Others reviewing The Sun Also Rises were, though, less enchanted. Time magazine (founded three years earlier and notably in later years a Hemingway stalwart as he became a public figure) observed

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 . . . 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’.

In Britain the Times Literary Supplement wrote

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

and The Observer was even more direct

‘Mr Hemingway began brilliantly, with a set of short stories called In Our Time. But Fiesta as [The Sun Also Rises was known 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 . . . Why does Mr Hemingway, who can draw flesh-and-blood, waste his time on the bibulous shadows?’

Worse, Hemingway’s then good friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, was scathing in his review of the novel for the left-wing journal New Masses, and taking his cue from the its two epigraphs wrote

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 should be noted, though, that Dos Passos was then firmly ‘of the left’ (and in later life he drifted firmly

 to neo-conservatism) and the New Masses was an avowedly left-wing publication, so his scorn for The Sun Also Rises’s decidedly ‘bourgeois’ protagonists getting drunk at a Spanish fiesta might be viewed in that light.

In fact, Dos Passos (left) later apologised to Hemingway for his review, although biographers believe this was probably more of a ‘diplomatic’ apology to spare the feelings of a man who he still thought of as a close friend.

The friendship did endure for a few more years, but the review angered Hemingway, and although he often entertained Dos Passos at his Key West home in the early 1930s, as far as he was concerned it damaged that friendship.

Never one to ignore what he regarded as slight, Hemingway then parodied Dos Passos in his mid-thirties novel To Have And Have Not, as Richard Gordon, a second-rate, left-wing novelist who is treated with contempt by his wife.

Overall, though, reviews were favourable and the novel sold (and continues to sell) steadily, although its popularity was certainly not universal.

The modernist writer — Part II is here.