THIS is the second part of a six-part essay called ‘Caveat lector’. If you have landed here before reading the other parts, it might make more sense to read the parts in sequence. Here are links to all six parts:
WHEN one considers, analyses and ‘interprets’ the work of any writer, it would seem desirable, as formalist theories suggest, to judge that work in isolation. In practice that is almost impossible. That Hemingway was reputedly sometimes a bully, a belligerent drunkard and a know-all, or, as his sons attested, a loving and kind father and, as some friends insisted, something of an intellectual should have no bearing on how we evaluate his work or judge it to have succeeded.
Do those works engage and interest us any the less, is his craftsmanship any the less impressive once we know what he got up to with his sisters and daughters? If, as many seem to believe, ‘works of art’ have an intrinsic, almost metaphysical, quality of ‘being art’ — and I don’t — did that quality in his work disappear from one moment to the next as soon as his vices were revealed? Or was it perhaps never there in the first place and we only realised our mistake when we found out about his behaviour?
In his essay The Death Of The Author, the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes observed that
is one which, if accepted and acted upon, would severely stymy the work on Hemingway of those many academics who delve deeply into his life, the letters he wrote and his own and others’ memoirs when they interpret and evaluate his work.
In his essay The Death Of The Author, the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes observed that
. . . criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his ‘confidence’.Barthes (below) was keen that works of art should be evaluated and judged in and of themselves, and insisted that once ‘completed’, these works become independent of ‘the author’ (and, one assumes, of the composer, painter or sculptor). This is, of course, not ‘a fact’, just another ‘opinion’, a ‘point of view’; but it
For example, Philip Young’s thesis is that ‘the wounds’ Hemingway suffered in his early life, not least when he was blown up in the Italian front in 1918, largely informed his work; but it would be rendered redundant if one accepted what Barthes says. It would also give rise to an irony: Hemingway always himself insisted that his work was not autobiographical and that he had taken ‘what he knew from his own experience’ and somehow transmuted it; that would chime in with what Barthes is suggesting. So who do we believe: Hemingway or Young?
What Barthes and the formalists insist is, of course, wholly theoretical: de facto it is impossible to ignore what we know of a writer when we consider her or his work. Yet even if we decide to reject Barthes’s view and concede that referring to a writer’s biography is useful, the matter is still not straightforward — now the sticking point is: which biography, which account of her or his life? The difficulty is highlighted by Debra Moddelmog in New Essays On Hemingway’s Fiction (and Young take note). She writes
What Barthes and the formalists insist is, of course, wholly theoretical: de facto it is impossible to ignore what we know of a writer when we consider her or his work. Yet even if we decide to reject Barthes’s view and concede that referring to a writer’s biography is useful, the matter is still not straightforward — now the sticking point is: which biography, which account of her or his life? The difficulty is highlighted by Debra Moddelmog in New Essays On Hemingway’s Fiction (and Young take note). She writes
The identity of Hemingway — or of any other biographical subject including ourselves — is thus a process of articulating into being. Because this articulation takes the form of narrative, the biographer always tells a story, but the story does not come out of nowhere, nor is it implicit in the ‘facts’ of the author’s life. Rather, the biographer chooses a story from among the many that his or her culture makes available and selects the facts that will make the story cohere. Thus the biographer’s biography — like the historian’s history — always tells two stories. The first is in the text itself and is a story of inclusion: the text includes not only the plot that the biographer selects out of many, but also those particular experiences that enable this plot to come together. The other story exists only in the negative, the absent, for it is a story of exclusion: the numerous plots that the biographer rejects and those experiences that must be censored of omitted for the sake of narrative unity and ideological consistency.
When above I describe Hemingway as ‘pontificating’ on what is and what is not ‘good writing’, not only is the word distinctly pejorative, but by using it, I reveal a great deal about my attitude to Hemingway. (I did, in fact, chose to use the word as I believe that ‘pontificating’ is here, in context, the right one to employ: even close friends became fed up with Hemingway’s insistence that he was an expert in most areas of life and remorselessly instructing those around him on all manner of matters).
This is not just true of me, of course, as I trust Moddelmog, a Hemingway admirer, would concede. The words and phrases Hemingway’s biographers and, pertinently, the many men and women commentating on and analysing his work chose to use are equally subjective. In one sense, even the titles of Carlos Baker’s book — Hemingway: The Writer As Artist — and John Atkins’s — The Art Of Ernest Hemingway — have already loaded the dice before we read a single word: we know full well where Baker and Atkins stand.
One might counter that the titles chosen by Baker and Atkins simply — merely — indicated ‘what their books were about’. That’s true, of course, yet the titles do more than just that; the still inexperienced student and lay reader might already feel judgment has been passed when presented with these books by two ‘experts’, and she or he is more than likely to accept the observations and evaluation of in both as ‘correct’ and ‘fact’ from the outset.
However, what Baker, Young and Atkins have to say is certainly not copper-bottomed and is as contentious as any other point of view, for the simple reason that by its very nature it cannot but be contentious.
Throughout his book Baker describes Hemingway as ‘a true artist’, and his insistence would certainly impress most young students and lay readers; but they would still be best advised to discount Baker’s virtual robes and wigs, and keep an open mind: at the end of the day Baker’s analyses, interpretations and claims are no more than his own views and opinions.
Throughout his book Baker describes Hemingway as ‘a true artist’, and his insistence would certainly impress most young students and lay readers; but they would still be best advised to discount Baker’s virtual robes and wigs, and keep an open mind: at the end of the day Baker’s analyses, interpretations and claims are no more than his own views and opinions.
Perhaps to underline the point that it’s wisest to stick to the thin line between not accepting wholesale but keeping an open mind, even one or two of the details Baker provides about Hemingway’s life are at odds with what more recent biographers have found (which reinforces Moddlemog’s advice to be cautious of the narratives with which we are presented).
For example, throughout all four editions of Baker’s book (the fourth and most recent was published nine years after Hemingway’s death), he refers to Hemingway as a ‘veteran’ of the Great War; given how the word is, in this context, habitually employed, Baker’s use of it would imply that Hemingway saw active service as a fighting soldier. But he didn’t: although for the rest of his life he liked people to believe he had ‘fought in the war’ and explicitly played on the fact, his ‘war service’ lasted for less than five months in total, between early June and November 1918.
For two weeks he drove a Red Cross ambulance, but decided it wasn’t exciting enough and volunteered to work closer to the front. There his new duty was to run a rest and recreation station some distance behind the front, serving coffee, chocolate and cigarettes to Italian troops (and nor did he — as Baker also writes — help carry wounded from the trenches to a first aid post). Hemingway — unofficially — started visiting the trenches to deliver his coffee, chocolates and cigarettes, presumably because the youth not yet turned 19 felt it was more ‘exciting’.
He was on one such visit when shortly before midnight on July 8 he was blown up by an Austrian mortar bomb. He then spent several months in the Red Cross hospital in Milan, and when he was eventually discharged in November after of many operations, treatment and recuperation to return to duty, he immediately contracted jaundice and was back in care. Discharged for a second time by Christmas, he returned to the US at the beginning of January. That was the total of Hemingway’s ‘war service’.
Notably, while researching and writing his book, Baker was in postal communication with Hemingway and says Hemingway corrected various of his ‘errors’. That Hemingway didn’t correct the error about his ‘war service’ was probably because he wanted to the world to accept him as a ‘World War I veteran’ who had ‘seen action’.
Notably, while researching and writing his book, Baker was in postal communication with Hemingway and says Hemingway corrected various of his ‘errors’. That Hemingway didn’t correct the error about his ‘war service’ was probably because he wanted to the world to accept him as a ‘World War I veteran’ who had ‘seen action’.
He maintained that fiction all his life and encouraged people not just to believe he had ‘fought’ in World War I, but even claimed he had been the youngest commissioned officer in Italy’s famous Arditi regiment and had personally been presented by the King of Italy with that nation’s highest military honour. (The medal he did receive was one awarded to all foreigners who had served with the Italian army in one way or another.)
Granted this error has no bearing on the theme of his book, but Baker’s claim is typical of the somewhat adulatory tone he adopts which also infuses his insistence on Hemingway as ‘the artist’, a description which most of us assume obliges us to genuflect. Whoever reads his book should be aware of Baker’s bias.
Being blessed with the attention of academia might well be seen not just as the catalyst of the transformation of ‘Ernest Hemingway, the famous writer’ into ‘Ernest Hemingway, the artist’ but his canonisation — over and above the public fame he had already achieved by mid-century — as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’. To substantiate his view that Hemingway was certainly more than just some famous best-selling scribbler, Carlos Baker writes
Granted this error has no bearing on the theme of his book, but Baker’s claim is typical of the somewhat adulatory tone he adopts which also infuses his insistence on Hemingway as ‘the artist’, a description which most of us assume obliges us to genuflect. Whoever reads his book should be aware of Baker’s bias.
. . .
Being blessed with the attention of academia might well be seen not just as the catalyst of the transformation of ‘Ernest Hemingway, the famous writer’ into ‘Ernest Hemingway, the artist’ but his canonisation — over and above the public fame he had already achieved by mid-century — as ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’. To substantiate his view that Hemingway was certainly more than just some famous best-selling scribbler, Carlos Baker writes
[Hemingway’s] short stories are deceptive somewhat in the manner of an iceberg [a reference to Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’]. The visible areas glint with the hard factual light of the naturalist. The supporting structure, submerged and mostly invisible except to the patient explorer, is built with a different kind of precision — that of the poet-symbolist. Once the reader has become aware of what Hemingway is doing in those parts of his work which lie below the surface, he is likely to find symbols operating everywhere, and in a series of beautiful crystallisations, compact and buoyant enough to carry considerable weight.This sounds plausible enough and has, over the past decades, no doubt been accepted and repeated in essays and exams by many students. Yet it already falls short of its goal of distinguishing Hemingway ‘the artist’ from run-of-the-mill writers in that it begs one important question: if, as Baker claims, Hemingway ‘built’ his short stories with the ‘precision’ of ‘the poet-symbolist’, why did he not — and demonstrably he did not — apply the same ‘precision’ to the verse he wrote?
Surely verse would be particularly suited to the kind of precise artistry which Baker says Hemingway made his own? But he didn’t. His verse is banal, superficial, adolescent and obvious (and I have yet to come across any commentator who thinks any of it is worth a candle).
Similarly, other ‘facts’ ‘proving’ Hemingway’s artistry and presented as almost unassailable by Baker also don’t quite stack up. He writes
Similarly, other ‘facts’ ‘proving’ Hemingway’s artistry and presented as almost unassailable by Baker also don’t quite stack up. He writes
If he had wished to follow the mythological method of Eliot’s Waste Land [sic] or Joyce’s Ulysses, Hemingway could obviously have done so. But his own esthetic [sic] opinions carried him away from the literary kind of myth-adaptation and over into that deeper area of psychological symbol-building which does not require special literary equipment to be interpreted. One needs only sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness. The special virtue to this approach to the problem of literary communication is that it can be grasped by all men and women because they are human beings. None of the best writers are [sic] without it.Thus (says Baker) in both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway symbolically distinguishes between ‘the mountains’ and ‘the plains’. The mountains are ‘home’ and ‘natural’ and thus — in Hemingway’s aesthetic, according to Baker — ‘beautiful’. They are associated with dry-cold weather, peace and quiet, love, dignity, health and happiness.
On the other hand ‘the plains’, which are ‘not-home’ and ‘unnatural’ and thus ‘ugly’, are associated with rain and fog, obscenity, indignity, disease, nervousness and war and death. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton go trout fishing in the mountains — well, the hills — north of Pamplona and find peace and solace, whereas the plains — Montparnasse in Paris and Pamplona — is where all the drunkenness, discord, jealousy and ugliness reside.
In A Farewell To Arms Frederic Henry ignores the priest’s invitation to spend his winter furlough with the priest’s family in the hilly Abruzzi region, and later Henry and his pregnant partner, Catherine Barkley, find sanctuary after escaping Italy in the Swiss mountains. The plains are where the troops are stationed and where the military police are executing officer deserters and which (says Baker) are ‘sinister’.
Yet again, this analysis is plausible enough — ‘plausibility’ plays an important role when considering the evaluations, conclusions and verdicts of literary academia — and there is a neat symmetry to Baker’s juxtaposition that might convince many. Inconveniently, however, it doesn’t quite work: ‘the mountains’ are also where the enemy is positioned and from where it will attack, where the fighting between the Italians and Austrians takes place and where Henry is blown up and might have been killed (as are many Italians). ‘The plains’ are where the retreating Italians head for to find safety from death at the enemy’s hand.
Yet again, this analysis is plausible enough — ‘plausibility’ plays an important role when considering the evaluations, conclusions and verdicts of literary academia — and there is a neat symmetry to Baker’s juxtaposition that might convince many. Inconveniently, however, it doesn’t quite work: ‘the mountains’ are also where the enemy is positioned and from where it will attack, where the fighting between the Italians and Austrians takes place and where Henry is blown up and might have been killed (as are many Italians). ‘The plains’ are where the retreating Italians head for to find safety from death at the enemy’s hand.
One might even add — adopting Baker’s method — that it is on the plains where Henry finds true love and is thus eventually redeemed from his habitual cynicism and where he had found a good, loyal and true friend in the Italian officer Rinaldo.
With those points in mind, it would seem Baker’s neat analysis of Hemingway’s apparent ‘psychological symbol-breaking’ breaks down (even for those lucky readers with sympathy and a few degrees of heightened emotional awareness).
In fact, Baker seems to contradict his own analysis when he writes about ‘The First Forty-Five Stories’ and analyses some of them. The title of that omnibus edition of the short stories which had already been published is a tad disingenuous: yes, these were, strictly, the ‘first’ forty-five stories’ written by Hemingway; but ‘first’ tacitly implies there were many others.
In fact, Baker seems to contradict his own analysis when he writes about ‘The First Forty-Five Stories’ and analyses some of them. The title of that omnibus edition of the short stories which had already been published is a tad disingenuous: yes, these were, strictly, the ‘first’ forty-five stories’ written by Hemingway; but ‘first’ tacitly implies there were many others.
There were not, only about another nine or ten. By comparison — and Hemingway did like to compare himself with other ‘great’ writers — Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories and Anton Chekhov 500.