The theology of evaluating Hemingway – 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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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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

IT IS instructive to debate with Hemingway enthusiasts. In spirit, a great many are far more like football club supporters for whom their side can do no wrong rather than the women or men who will discuss soberly why the work of this or that poet or writer is or is not exceptional. In brief: beware zealots.

In all monotheistic theologies, of whatever faith, two immutable facts are that ‘God exists’ and that ‘God is always right and without fault’. They are, if you are a believer, the sine qua non of faith and, naturally, of every theological debate. Indeed they must be: what would be the point of basing the imperatives of a moral system on the ‘word of God’ and debating the various arcana of ‘His’ existence and ‘His’ laws if God, too, were flawed and imperfect and no better than us mortals?

Given ‘His’ unimpeachability and perfection compared to mankind’s pitiful corruptibility, it is axiomatic that if there are some aspects of God, of ‘His’ existence’, of ‘His laws’ and of ‘His word’ we do not yet comprehend, it is necessarily our fault and we must try harder to understand what ‘He’ means and is telling us.

Furthermore, to account for the apparent incomprehensibility of some aspects of ‘God’, such as the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Trinity — ‘three persons in one God’ — they are legitimised and rationalised as being ‘mysteries’, ones we pitiful, sinful folk cannot be expected to understand (although with ‘His’ grace we might do so in time).

The concept of an unimpeachable, all-powerful and all-knowing God leads to a distressing circularity when it comes to ‘proving’ or demonstrating to a non-believer ‘His’ existence: how do we know God exists? Because he tell us he does (sometimes with the elegant variation that ‘it is through His grace that we are able to believe’). How do we know we can accept that assurance? Because he is God, and because he is God, he is always right. How do we know God is always right? Because he’s perfect. Why should we accept ‘His word’ and obey ‘Him’ without question? Because he tells us we must. And why must we accept that imperative? Because he’s God. And on and on and round and round.

A similar circularity seems long to have plagued many academics, post-graduate students writing a thesis or dissertation and scholars when they discuss, examine, analyse, interpret and comment on the work of Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, there is something quasi-theological about many such analyses and exegeses. 

The, usually unwitting, circularity is — and it doesn’t matter at what point on the circle you start — ‘this story is great because it is by Ernest Hemingway’ and ‘Ernest Hemingway is one of our greatest writers because he wrote stories like this’. And because the ‘fact’ of Hemingway’s status as ‘one of our greatest writers’ is passed on from one generation to the next, academics, post-graduate students writing a thesis and scholars are apt to tie themselves in knots interpreting his work rather than concede that some of it doesn’t always cut the mustard.

The blurb on the back of my paperback edition of The Sun Also Rises proclaims that Hemingway was ‘a genius’ and that the novel is ‘a masterpiece’; and although when proclaimed by the publisher these ‘facts’ can be regarded as no more than commercial hyperbole — no publisher ever undersells one of its authors — they were certainly accepted and repeated over time.

So we might ask: exactly how were they established? And why did what became the orthodox view of Hemingway’s ‘greatness’ reach the status of not just doctrine but dogma, such that scholars will resort to spouting blank nonsense when discussing Hemingway’s work rather than consider that like everyone else Hemingway might occasionally have had feet of clay?

. . .

Within not many years of his Hemingway’s suicide in July 1961, his reputation began to be re-evaluated. Writing in the New York Times in November 1985, reviewing Peter Griffin’s and Jeffery Meyers’s new biographies of Hemingway, the writer Raymond Carver noted that

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. They agreed that at least one, maybe two, of the novels . . . might make it into the 21st century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center stage, and deadly ‘reappraisals’ began taking place.

Carver’s claim is ambiguous: did the critics and fellow writers confess they might have been ‘bamboozled’ because they realised Hemingway’s work was not as good as they had once thought? Did they ‘go on record’ saying they, too, had been ‘bamboozled’ because they sensed the literary mood was changing and they wanted to remain part of the pack? Or had they privately never much rated Hemingway, but had been disinclined to risk their peers’ scorn by doubting the excellence of a man everyone else spoke of as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’?

Carver himself rated Hemingway and still felt that ‘with each passing year [his work becomes] more durable’. His description of the reappraisals as ‘deadly’ does, though, hint that he, too, tacitly believed Hemingway was somehow unimpeachable. He certainly did not much like Meyers’s biography and wrote sniffily that

Adulation is not a requirement for biographers, but Mr Meyers’s fairly bristles with disapproval of its subject.

Carver was also put out by Meyers’s ‘strong belief’ that

like his heroes, Twain and Kipling [Hemingway] never fully matured as a writer.

Yet that view is not uncommon among some apostates on the matter of Hemingway’s ‘greatness’ and is certainly alluded to by Vladimir Nabokov (below) in Strong Opinions, his collection of essays and interviews.

When he was asked in one interview whether he had indeed described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’, he agreed that he had and added that

in neither [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 . . .

A similar point about the appeal of Hemingway’s work to the adolescent in us was made as recently as July 2018 by N. J. McGarrigle in the Irish Times when he observed that

Your attitude to Hemingway depends on how early you reach him on your reading map.

Writing his biography more than 20 years after Hemingway’s death, Meyers did certainly get off his knees, which was a welcome change from the earlier, quasi-hagiographic accounts of the writer by Malcolm Cowley, Charles A. Fenton, Phillip Young, John Atkins and the younger Carlos Baker, written when the Hemingway was still alive. A similarly more sceptical account of Hemingway and his work came from Kenneth S. Lynn whose biography appeared two years later in 1987.

. . .

One difficulty in evaluating a writer’s work is that it is not — and can never be — a simple question of a scientific ‘if this, then that’, although there is certainly a tendency to do so. There are no definitive answers to the worth of any writer’s output (or even her or his ‘meaning’) as there certainly are definitive answers to the equations ‘two plus two’ and ‘sixty divided by twelve’.

Insisting on absolutes and that there are ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ conclusions when judging a writer is as fatuous as it would be to ‘have an opinion’ on whether or not ‘two plus two equals four’. Yet this is precisely the habit many Hemingway scholars (and no doubt scholars involved in the work of other writers) fall into.

One example of such a mechanistic approach to analysis and appreciation is from Joan Didion, the writer and journalist. In a piece about Hemingway in the New Yorker in October 1998, she quotes the first paragraph of his novel A Farewell To Arms and writes

. . . four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen . . .

She then examines those four sentences and notes

Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are ‘the’, fifteen are ‘and’. There are four commas. The liturgical [sic] cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of ‘the’ and of ‘and,’ creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of ‘the’ before the word ‘leaves’ in the fourth sentence (‘and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling’) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season. The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountain, what troops?

Where Didion becomes ridiculous is when she attempts to pin down what moved her in the paragraph by listing the particular number and arrangement of syllables, sentences and commas and how often the words ‘the’ and ‘and’ are used. Her approach reminds one of William Wordsworth’s observation in The Tables Turned that

Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms 
of things / We murder to dissect.

Quite apart from how effective or not a well-placed comma is (and it most certainly can be — punctuation is a very useful literary tool and can subtly change how a sentence is read and can be understood), each and every reaction to that paragraph will be unique and, more to the point, subjective. 

Didion says she was ‘thrilled’ by it, though she was a young girl and not yet a woman: another reader might agree that first paragraph is lyrical and even moving, but might not be as ‘thrilled’ as Didion, despite being confronted with the same number and arrangement of syllables, sentences and commas. Another reader might enjoy it but not find it in any sense outstanding or remarkable. So who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’?

The real difficulty with a great deal of literary interpretation, not just when dealing with Hemingway, is that although we might ostensibly agree that ‘each reaction is subjective’ and that, strictly, there can be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation, all too often we tell ourselves that so-and-so is an academic and a scholar and thus a ‘professional’ in these matters and her or his opinion ‘carries more weight’. From there it becomes quite easy to come to regard the opinions of the ‘professionals’ as ‘objective’ and definitive.

Yet such judgments, whoever makes them, are as much a matter of opinion — and fashion — as whether United are a better soccer side than City. Carver obliquely acknowledged the role of literary fashion in his New York Times review when he noted that as Hemingway’s reputation shrank, it was

not entirely coincidental, either, that soon after his death a particular kind of writing began to appear in [the US], writing that stressed the irrational and fabulous, the antirealist against the realist tradition. In this context it might be worthwhile to remind ourselves what Hemingway believed good writing should do. He felt fiction must be based on actual experience.

Carver makes a fair point about what might have been a sequence of cause and effect, although an underlying assumption seems to be that the new ‘antirealist’ kind of writing was somehow inferior to what Hemingway was doing in fiction. In fact, Hemingway had a distressingly narrow — and arguably even simplistic — notion of fiction and its purpose, and ever ‘the expert’, even condemned contemporary writers who did not follow his dicta on what was ‘good writing’.

. . .

When we trace Hemingway’s rise from the ambitious and unknown young writer of the early 1920s to ‘Papa’, the grand old man of literature honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature and apparently revered by all, it is now accepted that as his public celebrity grew from the 1930s on, his standing in literary circles slowly declined. Even Hemingway acknowledged that the Nobel Prize for Literature was tacitly awarded for a writer’s past achievements and to make sure an ageing writer was honoured before he died, and this irritated him.

By 1954, when he was made a Nobel Laureate, Hemingway’s name certainly no longer had the same cachet among the critics as it had done in the very early years of his writing career in the late 1920s. On the other hand by 1954 academic interest in Hemingway and his work was growing remarkably, sparked

ten years earlier by Malcolm Cowley (right) in his introduction to The Portable Hemingway in which he suggested there was far more ‘meaning’ beneath Hemingway’s apparently simple stories than so far assumed and that Hemingway should be considered far more as ‘an artist’.

Cowley had known Hemingway in Paris in the early 1920s, although more as an acquaintance than as a friend. Hemingway mocked him in his story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, though Cowley never knew it was he who was being mocked because Hemingway removed his name from the story and Cowley was not publicly identified as the ‘potato-faced poet’ the story’s protagonist Harry (for whom read Hemingway) remembers from his days in Paris.

In fact, Cowley had once asked a mutual acquaintance whether it had been Ezra Pound Hemingway had mocked. The acquaintance knew the truth and told him that, no he didn’t think so — but did not enlighten him further. Cowley was and remained a staunch Hemingway champion, and following up the claims he made in his introduction to The Portable Hemingway, his feature for Life magazine in January 1949 entitled A Portrait Of Mister ‘Papa’ did a great deal to boost the writer’s public profile. Yet ironically, as John Raeburn notes in Fame Became Him,

the mass media which lionized [Hemingway] 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.

Feature articles such as Cowley’s in Life were a case in point. Raeburn adds that

[Hemingway’s] 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.

As Raeburn and other biographers make clear, ‘becoming famous’ was one of Hemingway’s prime aims from a young age. Raeburn notes that in the last decade of Hemingway’s life he wrote for and was regularly profiled in middle-brow picture-spread magazines such as True and Look, for sale at supermarket checkout tills, whose reader might have regarded him as ‘one of our greatest writers’ — because that was what they were told he was — but that many would not have read a word of his fiction.

(He did occasionally feature in literary magazines such as the ‘interview’ with him in the 1958 spring issue of The Paris Review. The ‘interview’, in fact, consisted of Hemingway supplying written answers to questions the Review’s George Plimpton had sent him, despite in print being made to appear as a bona-fide interview.)

. . .

The when, how and why Hemingway came to be accepted by many as ‘a genius’ and by others as ‘one of our greatest writers’ took place over many years, and it is impossible to establish when the tipping point occurred. His own insistence, even when unknown, to anyone of any consequence that he was ‘a great writer’ will have helped.

As a forceful and at times bombastic man, he also managed to persuade the world that he was a great hunter and fisherman, an excellent sportsman and boxer — he claimed to have fought professionally — a successful racing tipster, an authority on writing, fine wines, fine dining and travelling, an expert on warfare and military strategy and much else. These ‘facts’ were established by being repeated in magazine profiles and were accepted wholesale by the public.

The word ‘genius’ in connection with Hemingway was used early on as his career was taking off, in a New York Herald Tribune review of In Our Time in February 1926, although the paper was, in fact, simply praising his potential. It wrote that the collection of short stories did not perhaps have

enough energy to be a great book, but [that] Ernest Hemingway [had] promises of genius.

As with the publisher’s blurb on the back of my paperback, this could be marked down as over-exuberant hyperbole, but it does indicate the extraordinary impression In Our Time and its markedly different style and content made when the collection was published. Thirty-seven years later, the biographer and critic Maxwell Geismar wrote in the New York Times that

A re-reading of his first collection of stories, In Our Time, . . . 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.

Eight months later came the — for the times quite shocking — novel The Sun Also Rises, and although one or two critics confessed that after the promise of Hemingway’s debut volume of short stories they had expected more of his first novel, the majority view was that it and its author were quite remarkable. It’s initial modest 6,000-odd print run sold out quickly, and it was printed six times in its first year.

His star rose further with the publication of Men Without Women, his second volume of short stories, in 1927 and his second novel, A Farewell To Arms, in 1929, and both seemed to confirm to the literary world that among writers Hemingway was special. Biographer Kenneth Lynn notes

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 [A Farewell To Arms] and to spread the author’s 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.

In hindsight it was at this point — late 1929 — that among his peers, the critics and intellectuals, Hemingway was at the zenith of his career.

Yet until he published For Whom The Bells Tolls eleven years, later his literary reputation went into a continuing decline. Winner Take Nothing, his third and final volume of original short stories, which appeared in 1933 was not as highly regarded as his earlier fiction, and in the New York Times, its reviewer John Chamberlain noted that

[Hemingway] has lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.

Almost 40 years later Matthew Brucolli reiterated the point that the decline — though a gradual one — had started early. In Scott and Ernest: The Authority Of Failure And the Authority of Success he writes that

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.

More seriously for his literary standing, in 1932, a year before Winner Take Nothing appeared, Hemingway had published Death In The Afternoon, his rambling guide to bullfighting, Spain and his thoughts on writing. It was nominally treated as ‘important’ because it was by Ernest Hemingway, but was not what the critics nor the reading public expected or wanted.

Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s remained loyal and supported him, but he had been urging Hemingway to produce more fiction and was not overjoyed that Hemingway had insisted on publishing the book. As for the famed style, the critics wondered what had happened to the writer whose prose had just a few years earlier been celebrated as

fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean.

In the New York Times, R. L. Duffus observed that in Death In The Afternoon

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.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin was equally unimpressed by the writing and told it’s readers that

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.

In a review for New Republic entitled Bull In The Afternoon (and one which enraged Hemingway), Max Eastman wrote

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?

Eastman’s review also compared the literary style of the ‘school of fiction-writers’ Hemingway had founded to

wearing false hair on the chest

and this jibe led several years later to a minor fight in Maxwell Perkins’s Scribner’s office. Dropping in unexpectedly, Hemingway encountered Eastman (below) for the first time since the review was published and ripped open his shirt to prove he did have hair on his chest. It was all very good-natured until

Hemingway’s mood changed and he slapped Eastman’s face with the book in which the review had appeared.

The two men then briefly wrestled on the floor. Eastman claimed he had thrown Hemingway over Perkins’s desk. Hemingway denied this had happened and said Eastman had meekly taken his insults. Perkins and Scribner’s remained diplomatic on the matter, merely commenting that it had been ‘a personal matter between the two gentlemen in question’.

Hemingway did not redeem himself from the blow to his reputation with Death In The Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing when, three years later in 1935, he published Green Hills Of Africa. It was an account of his safari in East Africa interlarded with his thoughts on writers and writing, and it was met with disbelief and some dismay. Although in the New York Times Charles Poore began positively enough and declared that

In Green Hills Of Africa [Hemingway’s] writing is better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full power

he noted how longwinded Hemingway had become (although he didn’t use the word) and complained that

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.

Where overall Poore was enthusiastic, a colleague on the New York Times was less so. John Chamberlain was gently satirical and wrote

Sometimes dispensing with grammar, Mr Hemingway decimates the fauna of Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo along with Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier and Thoreau. The carnage is frightful. ‘Ping’ goes the bullet from Mr Hemingway’s rifle and another black-maned lion bites the dust. ‘Zingo’ goes an epigram from Mr Hemingway’s mouth and the reputation of Thomas Wolfe curls up and dies.

Other critics were less polite. In New Masses, Granville Hicks declared that

Green Hills of Africa is . . . the dullest book I have read since Anthony Adverse [an historical novel by Hervey Allen published in the same year]. 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.

In the Saturday Review of Literature, Bernard de Voto lambasted Hemingway’s writing and complained that

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.

Distinctly unimpressed, de Voto described the style of the book as

a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing.

Edmund Wilson, an early and staunch champion of Hemingway and his work when the writer was still unknown, was decidedly brutal. In New Republic he wrote that

[Hemingway] 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 adds

[Hemingway] 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.

Revisiting the book four years later, again in New Republic, Wilson was even less charitable, declaring that Hemingway

has produced what must be one of the only books ever written which makes 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.

The critics were also baffled that Hemingway seemed to assume American readers — now in the depths of the Great Depression — would be interested in an exhaustive guide to bullfighting and its lore, and an account of a seemingly rich man’s safari in East Africa.

The trip had, in fact, been financed by Hemingway’s second wife Pauline’s very wealthy Uncle Gus, but that was not common knowledge among the US public of whom millions were by then unemployed and hundreds and thousands were queuing outside soup kitchens and living on the breadline. None of these and other critics would, in the mid-1930s, have agreed that Hemingway was — or was likely to be acclaimed as — ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’.