THIS is the first part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. Here are links to all six parts if you want to read the rest in sequence:
THIS collection of essays is subtitled ‘How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’, and although other related topics are considered, examining that question is its central purpose. Whether or not Hemingway was ‘a great writer’ or merely ‘a middling writer’ is, of course, a matter of opinion, and there are still more than enough cheerleaders for ‘Papa’ to ensure we apostates are rarely heard and can be ignored. What is indisputable, whether he was a ‘great’ or merely a ‘middling’ writer, is just how famous he became in the last 20 years of his life.
In this, the third decade of the 21st century, those under 60 will be less familiar with the phenomenon of Hemingway’s global fame and must simply accept that he was extremely famous. His standing in some hypothetical ‘top ten of famous people’ will have fallen over the years as the world and its media acquired new ‘heroes’ to celebrate, but he still stands out: he was not a sportsman, politician, rock, TV or film star or royalty but a writer and that was distinctly unusual. His global fame was extraordinary, and although his novels and short stories are now out of fashion as set texts in school and college classes, there are to this day more than distinct echoes of that fame.
Hemingway was not unique: a comparable ‘globally famous writer’ while he was alive was William Somerset Maugham, although he was born in 1874, 25 years before Hemingway was born, and outlived him by four years. Both were debilitated by declining mental health at the end of their lives — Maugham’s increasingly odd and unpleasant behaviour in the years before he died is thought to have been caused by ever-worsening dementia.
Elsewhere I’ve drawn attention to Virginia Woolf’s scorn that we, the reading public, are all too eager to doff our caps and bow to the superior judgment of ‘the critics’. She wondered why and wrote
Furthermore, as opinions, suggestions, conclusions they are wholly subjective (of which we become particularly aware when different interpretations contradict each other as all too often they do). Yet time and again academia will, possibly unwittingly, present its ‘conclusions’ as though they were ‘facts’, whether they are dealing with the work of Hemingway or any other writer.
In this, the third decade of the 21st century, those under 60 will be less familiar with the phenomenon of Hemingway’s global fame and must simply accept that he was extremely famous. His standing in some hypothetical ‘top ten of famous people’ will have fallen over the years as the world and its media acquired new ‘heroes’ to celebrate, but he still stands out: he was not a sportsman, politician, rock, TV or film star or royalty but a writer and that was distinctly unusual. His global fame was extraordinary, and although his novels and short stories are now out of fashion as set texts in school and college classes, there are to this day more than distinct echoes of that fame.
Hemingway was not unique: a comparable ‘globally famous writer’ while he was alive was William Somerset Maugham, although he was born in 1874, 25 years before Hemingway was born, and outlived him by four years. Both were debilitated by declining mental health at the end of their lives — Maugham’s increasingly odd and unpleasant behaviour in the years before he died is thought to have been caused by ever-worsening dementia.
Both had wanted ‘to be a writer’ since they were young; both served with the Red Cross in World War I, although Maugham, who was a qualified doctor, did so for far longer than Hemingway; but the two men were otherwise as unalike as chalk and cheese. Maugham did not pontificate on what was and was not ‘good writing’ and did not preen himself and strut as ‘a great writer’, and he modestly described his — far larger — body of work as ‘in the top rank of the second-rate’.
Such modesty played no part in Hemingway’s character, and he considered himself to be ‘a great writer’ all his life. He certainly played up to the part: several biographers have suggested that doing so, ‘being Papa Hemingway’ for the world to admire and revere, became an ever greater strain and might well have helped to hasten the mental decline of his last 15 years. As biographer Jeffrey Meyers pointed out
Despite the almost universal critical bewilderment caused by Across The River And Into The Trees when it was published in 1950 — the critic Dwight Macdonald later described it as
In the last decades of his life, the Papa legend undermined the literary reputation and exposed the underlying fissure between the two Hemingways: the private artist and the public spectacle.One notable distinction between the two writers is that although both enjoyed a similar ‘global fame’, Maugham did not attract, and has not attracted, the widespread academic scrutiny of his work as Hemingway. The attention of the academics took off in the last decade of Hemingway’s life and was the icing on the cake for a man who was not only supremely ambitious and competitive, but according to two psychologists who have written on the matter, essentially a narcissist.
Despite the almost universal critical bewilderment caused by Across The River And Into The Trees when it was published in 1950 — the critic Dwight Macdonald later described it as
an unconscious self-parody of almost unbelievable fatuity— it became that year’s third bestselling novel in the US. Hemingway was by then routinely publicly revered, although as John Raeburn suggests in Fame Became Him, many of that reverential public might merely have been repeating what they read about Hemingway, ‘one of America’s leading writers’, in Time, Life and True magazines and the other photo publications they bought at the grocery store checkout.
Being thus blessed by the interest and attention of academia was tantamount to Hemingway’s canonisation as ‘a serious artist’. Critics? Those critics who crawled on literature? Who needed the critics? The academics, the intellectual heavyweights, were the real deal. Furthermore, now that the academics had sanctioned Hemingway’s writing and deemed it worthy of their study and analysis (and continue to do so), you and your judgment risked no longer being taken seriously if you did not sign up to the creed.
Once the academics got involved, it was up to the doubters and sceptics to ‘prove’ Hemingway was not a great writer: the interest and attention of academia demonstrated that was now a given and de facto inarguable. An irony was, of course, that Hemingway, who liked the world to see him as an unpretentious action man with a ‘built-in bullshit detector’ and no time for airy-fairy nonsense, had long had — or had long feigned to have — a distaste for academia.
As a bestselling author who had caused such a stir when he first published in the 1920s, Hemingway had been profiled and written about in the more serious publications throughout the 1930s and 1940s. For example, his new ‘socially engaged’ attitude in To Have And Have Not — reluctantly adopted, it has to be said, after pressure on him from ‘the left’ at the height of the Great Depression to become more political — was scrutinised and contrasted with that of his peer John Dos Passos, then still avowedly left-wing.
As a bestselling author who had caused such a stir when he first published in the 1920s, Hemingway had been profiled and written about in the more serious publications throughout the 1930s and 1940s. For example, his new ‘socially engaged’ attitude in To Have And Have Not — reluctantly adopted, it has to be said, after pressure on him from ‘the left’ at the height of the Great Depression to become more political — was scrutinised and contrasted with that of his peer John Dos Passos, then still avowedly left-wing.
But in however worthy the publication, such journalistic scrutiny was not the same as being written about by the college man and women. Then in 1952, possibly rallying to Malcolm Cowley’s clarion call of a few years earlier (in his introduction to A Portable Hemingway) that Hemingway should be taken far more 
seriously ‘as an artist’, two American academics and a British writer, poet and playwright published books dealing with Ernest Hemingway’s work. They were by Carlos Baker, Philip Young (left) and John Atkins.
Baker, who was later nominated by Hemingway to be his official biographer (on the curious grounds, according to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, that he and Baker had never met, although they had corresponded), published Ernest Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. John Atkins published The Art Of Ernest Hemingway; and Philip Young (eventually — for over a year Hemingway refused his publisher permission to quote from his work) came out with Ernest Hemingway, revised and re-published in 1966, five years after Hemingway’s death, as Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration.
Baker, who was later nominated by Hemingway to be his official biographer (on the curious grounds, according to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, that he and Baker had never met, although they had corresponded), published Ernest Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. John Atkins published The Art Of Ernest Hemingway; and Philip Young (eventually — for over a year Hemingway refused his publisher permission to quote from his work) came out with Ernest Hemingway, revised and re-published in 1966, five years after Hemingway’s death, as Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration.
All three books were closely argued works and more than plausible enough to persuade even the most sceptical just how special the three academics — and as, by implication, should the ‘serious reader’ — thought Hemingway’s fiction was.
Two years later, in 1954, Charles A. Fenton published The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway became an eminently respectable subject for academic work, and to this day an ever greater number of books, learned articles, theses, essays and dissertations have flowed from academic pens. The imprimatur was final: Hemingway was now officially ‘a great writer’ (with the unspoken and for many clinching sub-text that ‘and we academics wouldn’t, of course, waste our time on him if he were not’).
If only it were that simple.
If only it were that simple.
. . .
Elsewhere I’ve drawn attention to Virginia Woolf’s scorn that we, the reading public, are all too eager to doff our caps and bow to the superior judgment of ‘the critics’. She wondered why and wrote
When we see [kings, judges and lord mayors] go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs. No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity . . . [the believer] begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right [and] begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.The same seems to be even truer of academia. The lay reader is more than ready — to put it crassly — to bow low before the conclusions of ‘academic opinion’, and the academics are more than happy to bask in such reverence.
Even if we might choose to adopt a superficial scepticism about them and their work, especially when faced with a book or a paper with some convoluted title we barely understand, despite ourselves not a few of us will be intimidated. We are less than confident that our own threadbare intellectual clobber can match the intellectual robes and wigs academia seems to wear.
We decide it’s best not to mix it with those we tacitly regard as ‘experts’ and risk looking very silly: thus any ‘debate’ is over before it has even begun, the lay reader gives in and accepts academic pronouncements without question.
Now consider in particular the young men or women studying English literature at school and college, and keen to do well. As part of their studies, they will certainly encounter the analyses and judgments of the academics, some of whom will also be their teachers and tutors; and it would seem natural, when you are in your late teens and early twenties, to regard these men and women as ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’.
Now consider in particular the young men or women studying English literature at school and college, and keen to do well. As part of their studies, they will certainly encounter the analyses and judgments of the academics, some of whom will also be their teachers and tutors; and it would seem natural, when you are in your late teens and early twenties, to regard these men and women as ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’.
Young folk, on the cusp of adulthood and still less sure of themselves than they might be, perhaps deem it wisest to conceal whatever ‘sensitive, hesitating apprehensions’ they harbour about a writer and his or her work. The best and safest policy will be to repeat in class, in your essays and in exams what have become the orthodox views, especially if you hope to achieve good grades.
Then, having thus imbibed what was decreed to be the case, several of those students might after graduation take up high school and college teaching as a career; thus the orthodoxies are perpetuated.
Admittedly, in recent decades there has been an ostentatious encouragement for students to ‘think for themselves’, and they are often urged to ‘think outside the box’ and ‘think the unthinkable’; but to some extent that is liberal window dressing rather than a sincere invitation to upset the apple cart.
A further dilemma faces those who want to examine and discuss the academics’ interest in Hemingway and his work: in might well amount to commenting on, and at times even criticising, the practices and habits of academics in general (at least those engaged in ‘the arts’ subjects rather than the sciences). Yet again the risk of looking — or being made to look — stupid is immense. A withering retort from academia along the lines of ‘I think you’ll find it’s a little more complex than that’ would be enough to convince most of those intimidated by the virtual wigs, robes and outriders that the doubter in question really is something of a wrong ’un and is best ignored.
A further dilemma faces those who want to examine and discuss the academics’ interest in Hemingway and his work: in might well amount to commenting on, and at times even criticising, the practices and habits of academics in general (at least those engaged in ‘the arts’ subjects rather than the sciences). Yet again the risk of looking — or being made to look — stupid is immense. A withering retort from academia along the lines of ‘I think you’ll find it’s a little more complex than that’ would be enough to convince most of those intimidated by the virtual wigs, robes and outriders that the doubter in question really is something of a wrong ’un and is best ignored.
It would be both foolish and wrong to indulge as a matter of course in wild, iconoclastic philistinism and dismiss the academics and some of their conclusions out of hand; but it is equally foolish and wrong slavishly to accept their every word. Yet such is the power of those virtual wigs, robes and outriders, though that many unthinkingly do just that.
It is important to remember when we consider the putative expertise and the conclusions and pronouncements of the academics working in ‘the arts’ that their thinking is not — and, by the nature of what it deals with, can never be — in the same class of thinking as that involved in mathematics and the sciences; yet that seems to be a point that is largely ignored, if not forgotten.
. . .
As I remark elsewhere, in mathematics you can’t ‘have an opinion’ on whether or not two and two really do equal four as you can agree or disagree on whether — as Philip Young hypothesises — Hemingway’s fiction was informed and sustained by the various ‘wounds’ big and small he suffered while growing up. Nor can Young be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, however interesting and plausible his suggestions are, as it would be ‘wrong’ to deny that adding two and two gives you four.
Put aside for now the complication that atomic physics tells us an electron is at one and the same time both a wave and a particle (an object with mass), in mathematics and the sciences there are demonstrable ‘facts’: adding an acid to an alkali results in a reaction which produces a salt and water. Time and again this has been found to be so, and we are confident it will always be so.
There are certainly also ‘facts’ which might be cited when dealing with an author and her or his work, but they are far more limited in scope. There will be biographical and other, possibly indisputable, ‘facts’: publication dates and how many editions of a work were published, whether and when it was translated into this or that language, where it was written, and so on. There will, for example, be the ‘facts’ that a great many of Charles Dickens’ novels take place in London and that Shakespeare wrote some of his plays to be performed by the theatre company he co-owned.
As far as Hemingway is concerned, it is also a ‘fact’ that For Whom The Bell Tolls takes place over three days during the Spanish civil war, and that Across The River And Into The Trees describes the brief love affair between a fifty-something army colonel with heart disease and an Venetian woman just short of her 19th birthday.
But interpretation, conclusions reached by ‘close reading’ and analysis are never as copper-bottomed: that parts of The Sun Also Rises take place in Paris, Pamplona, Burguete and Madrid are ‘facts’ about the novel; that it portrays a ‘lost generation in despair’ and that it is ‘a tragedy’ are opinions, suggestions, readings — call them what you will. But they are not ‘facts’.
For each individual academic her or his take on a novel, story or poem might well ‘be a fact’; for the rest of us, matters should not necessarily be quite as certain. But such is ‘the power of credulity’ observed by Woolf (right) and the ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ status many of us accord the critics and academics, these findings might also be accepted as ‘fact’ by many, whether the student or the lay reader.
Thus, at some point — a point no doubt already reached by many reading these essays — not only does it sound odd for sceptics to disagree with the academics, but, de facto, it is thought to be up to those sceptics to prove the academics to be ‘wrong’. But Woolf’s advice to the students and lay readers is worth repeating: ignore those imaginary wigs, robes and outriders, whether worn by critic or academic, and pay rather more attention to your own judgment (though always keep an open mind).