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.

List of posts

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.

The modernist writer — Part II

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.

List of posts

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.

THERE is nothing in The Sun Also Rises which would today dismay any reader, but in uptight, teetotal, God-fearing Oak Park just outside Chicago where Hemingway grew up, once described as ‘where the bars end and the churches begin’, it disgusted his parents Ed and Grace Hemingway. In a letter to her son, his mother described his novel as

one of the filthiest books of the year . . . surely you have other words in our vocabulary besides “damn” and “bitch” — every page fills me with a sick loathing’.

His parents’ outrage was shared by thousands of like-minded folk elsewhere in the country, and it would not have needed much to persuade the good burghers of mid-America that this new writer was one of those ‘moderns’. Just why the novel caused such a stir can be gauged from the following observation of Middle America by Michael Reynolds in his biography Hemingway: The Paris Years:

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.

In other words, Hemingway might have gained the respect of a minority, the narrow literary world of New York and other major cities and of its acolytes, the ‘open-minded’ and ‘enlightened’ folk in various parts of the country; but the majority of that country were less than pleased by the appearance of a novel in which — shamelessly! — words such as ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ were prominent.

Max Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, certainly rated him as a writer, but he had to overcome initial in-house resistance to publishing The Sun Also Rises. He and Scribner’s younger editors were aware that competition in publishing was growing and that Scribner’s was regarded as more than a touch fusty. The house had been founded 80 years earlier, to publish religious tracts, and in the 1920s John Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton were more typical of its stable of authors. The younger editors feared the Scribner’s was in danger of being regarded by younger readers as too staid, and they

 

Old school: From left, Edith Wharton, Johns Galsworthy and Henry James still
sold well in the 1920s but were decidedly not ‘modernist’

hoped to rejuvenate it by publishing work such as Hemingway’s novel (and, a few years earlier, Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise and its follow-up, The Beautiful And The Damned).

To strengthen his case with the board, Perkins had persuaded Hemingway to moderate his text: for example, a reference to a bull’s ‘balls’ was changed to the bull’s ‘horns’, and language considered unacceptable was toned down (although obviously not enough for Grace Hemingway).

These moderations managed to blunt the board’s reluctance, but they did little to assuage the outrage of Middle America which also thoroughly disapproved of the novel’s casual attitude to sex and adultery. It wasn’t, though, the approval of Middle America Perkins wanted and, ironically, every instance of public outrage and disapproval was, in fact, welcome.

Perkins had begun his publishing career in Scribner’s advertising department and knew such outrage was good publicity and great for sales: as much as older folk hated the novel, younger folk would love it. Reviewing Hemingway’s short memoir, A Moveable Feast, many years later, The New Republic’s then film critic, Stanley Kauffman recalled the extraordinary impact Hemingway’s first two novels and first two collections of short stories had on him and his young contemporaries. He wrote:

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 saviour bringing curt truth to a windy and shaken society.

Here the important word is ‘context’, and it is perhaps not surprising that as the 1920s became the 1930s, then the 1940s, then the 195os, and as the ‘context’ changed and each new ‘young generation’ demanded its own heroes, what had startled and excited young readers when Hemingway burst onto the scene and made him ‘modern’ and apparently ‘modernist’ became not just far less startling and exciting, but not in the slightest startling and exciting. That is a truism, of course, but it is a truism those who still champion Hemingway’s fiction and style seem to ignore or forget.

. . .

‘Context’ is also relevant when one considers ‘Hemingway the modernist’ and whether he even was one. Certainly, a reading public in the mid-1920s more accustomed to the polite and elegant prose of John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton, both also published by Scribner’s, will have been willing to accept that he was ‘a modernist’ (as the critics assured them, of course — even today few readers dare hold an opinion publicly until it has the imprimatur of ‘a respected critic’).

His prose was decidedly different, and it is easy to see why it might be regarded as ‘modernist’. In its review of In Our Time, the Times Literary Supplement had noted — though rather tartly — that

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.

In his review for the New York City Sun, Herbert J. Seligmann observed that

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.

It would, incidentally, be interesting to know what Seligmann regarded as the ‘conventional dishonesty of literature’. On the face of it, it is just another of the myriad hi-falutin’ phrases conjured up by critics to give their judgments an all-too-often spurious heft and authority.

After the excitement created by In Our Time and its unconventional style and subject mater, one might see why Hemingway’s ‘debut novel’ The Sun Also Rises left some critics underwhelmed. Arguably, the

fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean

which so enthused the New York Times and served the stories in In Our Time well did lesser service in the novel. The New York Times was impressed by The Sun Also Rises, observing that

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

(and again it would be useful to be told what ‘more literary English’ should be ashamed about). But writing in the New Yorker Dorothy Parker had her doubts. She wrote

Now, The Sun Also Rises was as “starkly” written as Mr. Hemingway’s short stories; it dealt with subjects as “unpleasant”. 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.

One might raise an eyebrow for her claim on the basis that at the time Hemingway had published just 16, often very short, stories Hemingway, but the point here is that she was one of several critics who felt The Sun Also Rises fell a little short of what was promised and what they had expected. The Times Literary Supplement was quite candid in its view:

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.

Contemporary critics reviewing the novel upon its publication, including that of The Times Literary Supplement, would and could not have known what Hemingway’s biographers now tell us: Hemingway’s prime motivation for writing the novel was not based on modernist idealism, but to build a career for himself as a writer, and to do that he knew he had to follow up his first volume of short stories with a novel — and sooner rather than later.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it sits uncomfortably with the young Hemingway’s oft-stated claim that he was not interested in fame and that he just wanted to write. In Hemingway And His Conspirators, Leonard J Leff examines the extent to which Hemingway actively set about ‘becoming famous’. He tells us that

Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in [publicity] 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.

One does wonder what his contemporary modernist writers, artists and composers, many of whom were inclined to left-of-centre views and who were at odds with the established ethos of capitalist ambition and chasing prosperity, would have made of Hemingway ambition.

. . .

The use of the phrase ‘banal declarations’ by the New York City Sun’ Herbert Seligmann is both interesting and telling. Consider this paragraph:

In the morning it was bright and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town. 

If you do not recognise the passage and if I told you it is a short excerpt from the travel diary of one Lewis Monroe, of Rockbridge, Illinois, written on his trip to Europe in his graduation summer in 1954, I don’t doubt you would accept what I’m saying without question. But it isn’t — it is the opening paragraph of chapter 10 of The Sun Also Rises.

It is, admittedly, an excerpt specifically chosen to make a point, but it is a crucial point: could this prose really be described as ‘fibrous and athletic’ and ‘aggressively fresh’? And although I have chosen that passage as being notably banal, flat and unimpressive, there are many other similar passages in Hemingway's first novel.

Yet it is puzzling even today to be assured by academics and critics that Hemingway’s prose is still top-notch writing (and, furthermore, it would be interesting to know what today’s Hemingway champion make of the turgid and often incomprehensible prose in Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa).

It is possible that Hemingway, in ‘modernist’ mode, intended the tone of that paragraph – the novel is written in the first person – to sound so banal (‘Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river.’). He might, for example and for whatever reason, have wanted to give the reader an insight into his main protagonist’s mindset. Yet if that was his intention — and I doubt it was — it would be wholly at odds with how Jake Barnes, the novel’s cynical, worldly-wise ‘I’, is portrayed elsewhere in the novel.

One similarly wonders about other passages in the novel. Once Jake Barnes and his pal Bill Gorton have travelled south from Paris but before they settle in Pamplona and meet the friends who will be joining them, they take off in a charabanc for several days fishing in the hills north of Pamplona.

Describing their journey to Burguete near where they plan to fish, Hemingway treats us to long passages describing how the charabanc is loaded and boarded by its passengers and then of its journey into the hills. It is not surprising that in his review for the New Masses of The Sun Also Rises Dos Passos insists, taking his cue from the novel’s two — contradictory — epigraphs, that

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [it] 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.

He added

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.

Dos Passos’s view is also worth bearing in mind when once comes to the following 224-word description of the bus journey to Burguette: 

‘The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road, we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. There were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind. There were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by fences and the white house of Burguette ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.’

Hemingway’s biographers tell us that Cezanne was one of Hemingway’s favourite painters and that he claimed he wanted to ‘write as Cezanne painted’. But if one heeds and accepts W K Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s view (in their 1946 paper The Intentional Fallacy which I touch upon elsewhere) that a work — they were discussing verse, but arguably their thesis can be broadened — can and should only be judged on and in itself, the passage becomes a little deflated.

A reader unaware of Hemingway’s fondness for Cezanne’s work and his desire to ‘write as Cezanne painted’ might be more than willing to accept he or she was reading just another excerpt from the travel diary of Rockbridge’s Lewis Monroe or, for that matter, any travel book about Spain. More to the point, whether or not you rate the flat, veering on banal, style of the two passages quoted, it is difficult to see how they might have come from the pen of a ‘modernist’ writer.

. . .

These and other passages are also notable in that they ignore one of the rules Hemingway himself laid down for writers. In 1934, once Fitzgerald (also oddly classified as a modernist by some commentators) had finally managed to complete and publish Tender Is The Night — his chronic boozing didn’t help — he asked Hemingway for his candid opinion of the work.

By 1934 Hemingway had scored more success with his second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, and his novel A Farewell To Arms, although quite a bit of the sheen had come off Hemingway’s reputation with the publication, in 1932 of Death In The Afternoon (and even raised a few eyebrows). Yet by 1934 he regarded himself as an authority on writing.

Whereas he had once relied on the then already commercially successful Fitzgerald for guidance — and taken his advice to cut several thousands words from the beginning of The Sun Also Rises which Fitzgerald deemed only spoiled the novel (Hemingway claimed it was his idea and that Fitzgerald had concurred) — he now felt qualified to dispense it himself.

In his response to Fitzgerald, he is highly, even brutally, critical of Tender Is The Night, and Fitzgerald cannot much have liked what Hemingway had to say. But in his letter to Fitzgerald there is particular stricture Hemingway lays down which is relevant to his own work.

First, consider the following two paragraphs (from the opening of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises), which I give in full:

‘In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the Rue Soufflot for coffee and a brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with a coffee then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on the S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the black platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opera, and up to my office. I passed the man with the jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to avoid walking into the thread with which his girl assistant manipulated the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded hands. She was urging two tourists to buy. Three more tourists had stopped and were watching. I walked on behind a man who was pushing a roller that printed the name CINZANO on the sidewalk in damp letters. All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to being going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office. Upstairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s work. At eleven o’clock I went to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Novell-Revue-Francaise diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions by news servicemen who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d’Orsay with Woolsey and Krum.’

Considering the above in the light of what Hemingway had to say when Fitzgerald asked him to comment on Tender Is The Night is illuminating. In his letter Hemingway advises Fitzgerald

but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you

which might well be summed up as ‘leave out the irrelevant bits’. So what are we to make of those two paragraphs above in the context of the novel as a whole? What purpose do they serve?

The style is not quite as flat — for which one might even read ‘banal’ — as Lewis Monroe’s alleged effort (and parts could well have come from Dos Passos’s travel book), but it is fair to ask quite what a modernist novel which purports to deal with the lives, disillusionment and despair of a mooted ‘lost generation’ is aiming to achieve with the above description of a mundane journey to work.

Some might argue that it is ‘the novel’ overall which is modernist and thus it is unfair to select distinct passages as examples. That’s one point of view, but I repeat: what do the passages provide for the novel as a whole? If, ideally, the disparate elements of a work of art work together to create that work of art, and if elements — such as the passages I have quoted – can be deleted from the novel with no effect on it, do the even have any place in it? Isn’t that exactly what Hemingway was getting at in his letter to Fitzgerald?

As it happens, here, as elsewhere in the novel, there is a great deal of scope for profound exegesis from true believers. After all, Hemingway, almost universally acknowledged — for many years, anyway — as ‘a writer of genius’ will have known what he was doing, they will say. So we might not immediately understand what Hemingway intends, but there is certainly something deeper going on.

He’s setting the scene, they might suggest, the apparent banal mundanity of it all (‘I read the papers with a coffee then smoked a cigarette’, ‘I got on the S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the black platform’) intended — who knows, perhaps ironically? — to throw into relief the inner turmoil of the man, a man rendered impotent by a war wound, no less.

It’s plausible enough, and I don’t doubt there might be other, equally plausible, interpretations. But let us apply the principle of Occam’s razor — also known as the Principle or Law of Parsimony — that the simplest explanation is most probably the right one: that passage is padding. A true ‘writer of genius’ might well have boiled down the above 363 words to fewer, far shorter, but far more telling — and thus more interesting — paragraphs. As for the alleged ‘modernism’, there isn’t a whisper of it.

These are not isolated examples: early on in the novel there are several other instances where, apparently for no reason at all, Hemingway describes his passage through various streets of the Left Bank. Once he and his characters have arrived in Pamplona and the reader is treated to other such descriptions, it might be argued that the Pamplona passages serve as a mise en scene, but that explanation holds no water for the Paris descriptions, not at least given how they are written.

In a novel famous for purportedly portraying the lives and despair of a ‘lost generation’, these passages  seem more than oddly superfluous, notwithstanding the caveat that the novel should be regarded ‘as a whole’. But note: I am simply holding Hemingway to his own rule — ‘don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you’.

Yet the ‘padding’ (for arguably that is what is was) was necessary: had Hemingway ‘left out’ the irrelevant bits, his work might not have been long enough to be submitted as a novel. But he knew that if he wanted to get his literary career off the ground, nothing but a full-length novel would do.

. . .

Guided by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein in the early 1920s, Hemingway developed a style which might superficially have resembled modernism, but that style did not survive for long. Initially, he did keep his

Hemingway mentors: Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound who reputedly did not much like each other

sentences brief, eschewed adverbs and kept adjectives to a minimum. His stated intention was simply to describe without passing judgment.

The prose of In Our Time is in keeping with these principles and that approach might well be seen by some as ‘modernist’. Yet even in the stories of Men Without Women, his second collection, published a year after The Sun Also Rises, his style is already far more conventional, and Hemingway again begins to ignore his own strictures.

In The Undefeated, the central character, the washed-up bullfighter Manuel (who is looking for work), says something ‘hopefully’, then something else ‘reproachfully’. Later, the picador Zurito, a second character reads a newspaper ‘laboriously’, ‘forming the words with his lips’.

In Che Ti Dice La Patria (which Hemingway included in his second volume of short stories and had re-worked from a feature published in The New Republic) the young Fascist who demands a lift ‘looked annoyedly’ when the car’s radiator begins to boil.

The obvious question is: was Hemingway aware of these adverbs? For a man who reputedly ‘worked hard’ on his writing and, we’re told, revised obsessively, you must conclude that he was. So why did he let them through? One has to wonder just how diligently he did revise his work. As for being a ‘modernist’, forget it.

Yet Hemingway, as ‘one of the greatest writers of the 20th century’, almost always gets a pass when such matters are raised. As Matthew Brucolli astutely observed

[Hemingway’s] 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.

The modernist writer — Part I is here.

The writer, the journalist, the insider, the expert

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.

List of posts

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.

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.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway.

LIKE many writers, Hemingway began working with words as a journalist, and many young journalists shared and share his ambition to ‘become a writer’. Some make it, many do not. Although he later insisted that his journalism was ruining his writing and ended his first stint of working as a journalist when he returned to Paris in January 1924, he resumed journalism in the early 1930s when he was invited to contribute ‘Letters’ on any topic he chose for the then new magazine Esquire and carried on turning out pieces for magazines intermittently for the next 15 years.

Despite his advice to young writers to give up journalism because it would ruin their writing, a great many writers have pursued a career as both a writer and a journalist with neither ruining the other. It doesn’t help, of course, that the notions of ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ are hopelessly vague. A copy editor (‘sub-editor’ in Britain and some parts of the English-speaking world) trimming copy and writing headlines and captions for an angling magazine is as much ‘a journalist’ as the hard news man or woman reporting from a war zone or sniffing out skullduggery in high places,.

When Hemingway decided to ‘become a writer’ is not recorded, but by his late teenage years and especially after he returned from Italy in 1918, he was writing stories and submitting them to magazines. His biographers say the works were wholly conventional and imitative of his favourite authors, and none demonstrated any unusual gift. His literary ambitions were and are certainly not unusual among men and women in their late teens and early 20s, although most fall by the wayside. Cyril Connolly observed that

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall

but he might well have said the same thing about early ambitions. That Hemingway was later able to ignore that pram in the hall and persevere with his writing after the birth of his first child, John, in October 1923, was down his then wife Hadley’s staunch support — and her trust fund income — as much as his ruthless single-mindedness and a marked self-centredness.

. . .

Hemingway’s progress as a writer, from turning out the juvenilia he submitted to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines to the triumph of his first published works a few years later has been detailed by the former Duke University English professor, Charles A Fenton.

In his book The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Fenton outlines Hemingway’s development as a writer, from his first acquaintance with English literature at Oak Park High and the stories he wrote for class, to his, albeit short, training as a reporter on the Kansas City Star and his association with the Toronto Star Weekly and its sister morning paper, the Toronto Star.

In the course of his research, Fenton remained undeterred by Hemingway’s warnings, issued when ‘Papa’ got wind of the project in 1950, not to approach his family and those who had known him for information. Hemingway’s attitude was, though, like much in his personality, ambiguous. We are obliged to accept his continued insistence that he did not want his biography written and that the only important thing about a writer is the work he produced.

Yet his claim in several letters to Fenton demanding that he abandon his research because it was ‘an invasion of privacy’ is odd. James Mellow tellingly points out in his biography that even while Hemingway said he did not want any kind of biographical work written about him, he was already passing on ‘facts’ about his early life. Mellow comments

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 . . . 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.

Some of his later biographers list by name the three or four girls Hemingway dallied with in northern Michigan, but none reports what would have been the interesting ‘fact’ that, presumably as some kind of local Don Juan, Hemingway was forced to skip town.

It is more likely that despite ostensibly ‘correcting’ factual errors, Hemingway was again trying to contribute to the legend he had created for himself, this time stressing that he had been a womaniser even at an early age. Hemingway’s apparent reluctance to have his life examined is also somewhat contradicted by his continual self-promotion over the previous 20 years, described by John Raeburn in his book Fame Became Him, in his journalism for Esquire and other magazines.

. . .

In tracing Hemingway’s development as a writer, Fenton interviewed a great many from his early life. He spoke to Oak Park High friends, contemporaries and staff, fellow reporters and executives at the Kansas City Star who had worked there in 1917 and 1918, to executives and colleagues on the Toronto Star and Star Weekly and friends, and to acquaintances and fellow journalists in Paris.

Fenton tells us, unremarkably given the overall tone of his account, that many were even then sure the young man would go on to achieve great things, and certainly by the late 1940s and early 1950s it was natural for Fenton and others to treat Hemingway as ‘a great writer’.

Yet this almost universal intuition of 30 years earlier about the young man’s future — reported, notably, once he was famous — highlights a central criticism of Fenton’s book: it often reads rather too much like those ‘lives of the saints’ written for young children in which as a youngster the saint in question is preternaturally virtuous and an eventual canonisation is seen as inevitable.

Fenton is also sometimes at odds with later biographers on some of the facts of Hemingway’s life, although it is now almost impossible to discover whether he or the later biographers — whose accounts also often vary — were at fault.

As evidence of Hemingway’s literary gift, Fenton cites that the stories Hemingway produced for his Oak Park High English classes were read out as examples for his classmates to emulate, and that he was active on both The Tabula, the school’s literary magazine, and edited The Trapeze, its newspaper. It would be instructive to know who else was asked to read out their classwork and who else worked on The Tabula and at the time served as one of — the six — Trapeze editors.

Later, once Hemingway had arrived in Kansas City in October 1917 to train as a reporter on the Star, he was said to have been enthusiastic, eager to learn, volunteered for extra duties and to have talked incessantly about journalism and writing; but assuming working for a newspaper has been a long-held

ambition for a 17-year-old ‘breaking into journalism’ — it’s odd how no one seems to ‘break into banking’ or to ‘break into teaching’ — which of them isn’t eager and enthusiastic? And given that reputedly many journalists are said to harbour ambitions to ‘become a writer’ (and many succeed), Hemingway and his ambition were not unusual.

When he joined the Kansas City Star, Hemingway was, like all cub reporters, given a copy of the paper’s style sheet, which outlined all the rules the paper wanted its news staff to observe. It began

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English

and Hemingway later declared they were the

best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.

Certainly in his first two volumes of short stories and his first two novels (published between 1925 and 1929) Hemingway observed those rules strictly, and in one review of In Our Time, his first volume, they earned him the plaudits that his language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean

and that

his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.

A year later the New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises proclaimed that the novel had been written in

lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame

(though quite why ‘more literary’ English should feel shamed is not clear). The Kansas City Star was itself also impressed by his first novel and observed in its review that their former cub reporter wrote

with a swinging, effortless precision that puts him in the first flight of American stylists.

Oddly, though, Hemingway seems to have forgotten those Kansas City Star strictures entirely when just seven years after his first volume of short stories appeared and six years after his first novel was published he produced Death In The Afternoon, his guidebook to bullfighting and, ironically, writing. In a review in September 1932 of Death In The Afternoon the New York Times observed that

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.

It got no better when three years later he published Green Hills Of Africa, his account of his East Africa safari and, again ironically, his considered dicta on literature and writing. In 1939, the critic Edmund Wilson, who a decade earlier had been a staunch Hemingway champion but who had since revised his views with each new book the writer published, said

[Hemingway] 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.

As Hemingway would — or should — have known, ‘being dull’ is a cardinal sin in journalism. As for the prose in Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway also comprehensively ignored those sacred Kansas City style sheet rules, and Edmund Wilson also records that in the book

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 realise 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.

In a contemporary review of Green Hills Of Africa for the Saturday Review of Literature, Bernard de Voto also concerns himself with the lack of lucidity in Hemingway’s prose and writes

The prize sentence in the book runs [to] 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 . . . But, however earnest the intention, the result is a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing.

One obvious question is: did Hemingway not re-read what he had written? If not, why not? In 1936 in one of his Esquire ‘Letters’ he advised would-be writers

The best way is to read [what you have previously written] all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

Had he re-read the passage quoted by de Voto, he would certainly have realised it was in dire need of re-writing and re-phrasing. All-in-all Hemingway seems also to have forgotten his own dictum that

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

. . .

At the end of April 1918, Hemingway left the Star after just seven months for service in Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He was almost killed the following July (after just four weeks in Italy) and spent the next five months in hospital, and his experiences produced much potential material for several short stories and notably his novel A Farewell To Arms.

He was back in the US by mid-January, and after spending the summer with his family at their holiday cottage on Lake Walloon in northern Michigan, he remained in the area when the cottage was shut for the season. It seems he then began writing in earnest. He rented a room in nearby Petoskey and spent his time on his typewriter producing more fiction to try to sell to magazines (and, according to his ‘revelation’ to Fenton, getting local girls into trouble).

By the beginning of 1920 (not, as Fenton reports, by the end of 1919) he was in Toronto to spend a month with the family of a wealthy businessman as the companion and mentor of a disabled son and was invited to extend his stay.

It was through the businessman that he made contact with the Toronto Star Weekly whose editor, Herbert Cranston, agreed to consider for publication any features he produced. Yet the Toronto Star and the Star Weekly, and the Kansas City Star were like chalk and cheese. Fenton writes:

In Kansas City Hemingway had worked under conscientious editors who took with the greatest seriousness their responsibilities to the profession in general and to young reporters in particular. . . Hemingway had been indoctrinated in the necessities of accuracy, in the obligations of vigorous prose, and the requirements of forceful narrative. It had been a school with high, harsh standards, rigidly enforced. Few such standards existed on either of the Toronto papers owned by the late Joseph E Atkinson . . . The Star Weekly was in particular dedicated largely to the indiscriminate entertainment of its subscribers.

The Star’s imperative of entertaining rather than informing its readers was reflected in the paper’s layout and visual impact. Fenton adds that

Sensational headlines, red type, comic strips, eyewitness and flamboyant reportage, basic English and many photographs were [its] fundamental tools.

The Star needed a lot of copy week-in, week-out and, says Fenton

More important, from Hemingway’s point of view, the Star Weekly emphasised feature material on a virtually limitless range of topics . . . and bought most of its material, in 1920, from freelance writers.

Any and all writing, irrespective of its purpose, which demands a certain discipline is good training for a would-be writer, whether he or she hopes eventually to produce high art, low art or even, as Hemingway boasted of The Sun Also Rises, something in between.

It increases a familiarity with words, their varied use, their sound, meanings and ‘import’. So whether Hemingway was writing short, accurate and succinct news reports for the Kansas City Star or fluffy and disposable colour copy for the Start was neither here nor there: he was writing.

None Hemingway’s Kansas City Star output seems to have survived — why would two-paragraph stories on local street accidents or such be preserved? But some of the short colour pieces Hemingway produced in Toronto (and later in Paris) for the Star Weekly have been and can be read on a Toronto Star website dedicated to the paper’s connection with the writer. Fenton’s analysis of this work is thorough and honest: he admits that although some of the pieces Hemingway produced were quite good, much else was workaday.

The last, though, should not necessarily be regarded as criticism: Hemingway was not paid by the Star to produce literature, but to help turn out the reams of copy it needed to fill the pages of the morning paper and its weekly stablemate.

Those short pieces demonstrate that Hemingway had a neat turn of phrase, a colourful style and an easy gift for producing such fluff, though such a facility is not unusual among working journalists. What also stands out is a certain sardonic take Hemingway had on most things, although that, too, is not unusual in a young man in his late teens.

. . .

By the summer Hemingway was back with his family at the Walloon Lake cottage, arguing with his parents a great deal and doing little except fishing with a friend from the Kansas City Star who had also served with the Red Cross and who was staying. They ignored his mother’s requests to do small chores around that house, and finally his mother kicked them out.

Hemingway moved into Chicago where he found more writing work, this time producing and editing copy for a monthly newspaper called the Cooperative Commonwealth (intended purely to drum up subscribers to a scam outfit called the Cooperative Society of America run by a crook called Harrison Parker). Hemingway, who later claimed he was the paper’s ‘managing editor’, was worked hard work, but yet again the discipline of churning out copy by the yard was good training.

He lodged with the brother of friends from northern Michigan, a man who worked in advertising and who introduced him to a former colleague, the writer Sherwood Anderson. Anderson, then riding high in literary circles, liked the fiction Hemingway showed him, and when Hemingway told him he and his soon-to-be wife Hadley Richardson were planning on moving to Naples where he would write, Anderson persuaded him instead to move to Paris and promised to supply him with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. It is not recorded whether or not at the time Hemingway knew who Stein and Pound were.

Hemingway and Hadley married in September 1921, and by late-December were in Paris, where within days Hemingway was filing copy to the Star: his first impressions of Europe (he and Hadley had travelled to Paris via Spain), the life of a freelance, his impressions of the ‘bohemian’ Montparnasse where he and Hadley settled (whose cafes, he told the Star Weekly’s Ontario readers, were filled with men and women posing as ‘artists’, whereas true artists like himself simply got on with it) and café life. It was the kind of timeless, inconsequential colour copy the Star Weekly wanted.

. . .

When Hemingway is spoken of, almost in awe and certainly with respect, as ‘the youngest foreign correspondent in Paris at the time’, it is useful to bear in mind that he was not working as a hard news reporter. His arrangement with the Star Weekly (and, in time, with the daily Star) was on the same freelance basis as it had been in Toronto.

In Paris he was ‘a stringer’, a journalist on call and only paid if what he supplied was published. Even when, come April 1922, the Star asked him to attend the Genoa economic conference (and much later in the year the Lausanne peace conference), they wanted their usual colour pieces not news reports. These they obtained from the wire services.

In fact, his trip to Constantinople, Smyrna and Thrace in the autumn of 1922 to provide more colour pieces had been at his own suggestion. It was the excitement of the war he craved (though working trips away from Paris also paid better freelance rates, as well as $75 in expenses).

Hemingway was a gregarious man and was soon socialising with other Paris-based journalists from whom he picked up a great deal, not least snippets of political analysis which he was able to use in the pieces he filed for the Star. One useful journalistic talent he mastered and employed in those pieces was to appear well-informed. The role of ‘the insider’, of the man ‘who knows’, the man who had (in his own phrase) ‘the gen’ was one he espoused with enthusiasm.

A few years later he developed this skill for the ‘Letters’ he wrote for Arnold Gingrich’s then new magazine Esquire, and very soon became ‘an expert’ — and was swiftly accepted as such by his readers — in all kinds of areas: fishing, hunting, wine, fine dining and where to eat, etiquette, travelling, art and, of course, writing — it was a persona that, as John Raeburn demonstrates in Fame Became Him, contributed greatly to the ‘public Ernest Hemingway’.

. . .

In parallel to his life as a freelance journalist in Paris, Hemingway had followed up two of the letters of introduction Sherwood Anderson had supplied and contacted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He showed them the fiction he had so far written, and both took it on themselves to help him develop a modernist style.

This, as far as Hemingway was concerned, was the kind of writing he wanted to produce. Unfortunately, almost all of that work and anything he had produced before and since arriving in Paris was lost when a small valise his wife has using was stolen from a train in the Gare de Lyon. Just two stories, which were not in the valise, survived.

In those 22 months in Paris, the Star asked Hemingway to go on several trips for them to produce copy, but his heart was not in journalism which he was convinced was ruining his writing, and he turned down some of them (which would have been impossible had he been on staff).

When Hadley discovered she was pregnant, however, and Hemingway faced the prospect of providing for a family, he finally took up the daily Star’s offer of a staff job in Toronto, and he and his wife sailed to Canada in September 1923.

Hemingway was worked hard in Toronto and got none of his own writing done. Harry C Hindmarsh, the deputy managing editor, who happened to be married to the daughter of the Star group’s owner, Joseph Atkinson, (both pictured left) thought him to be a cocky show-off.

Most recent biographers state that Hemingway did overdo the ‘veteran’ journalist who had ‘covered war’ and who was to boot ‘a published author’ — because of his two slim volumes of poetry and short stories that had been privately published earlier in the year — and Hindmarsh set about taking Hemingway down a peg or two.

It didn’t help that Hindmarsh was also at odds with his immediate boss, the managing editor John Bone who had taken Hemingway on full-time as a news reporter. Within weeks Hemingway had fallen out with Hindmarsh and was de facto demoted to working full-time on the weekly Star where he was back to turning out the fluffy inconsequential colour pieces it needed.

By Christmas he had had enough and handed in his resignation, and that was the end of his association with the Star papers and regular journalism. Before the end of January he, Hadley and their newborn son, John, were back in Paris where Hemingway intended to dedicate himself to writing full-time.

. . .

Now without an income of his own from Star freelance work, Hemingway, Hadley and their young son had to exist on the money Hadley’s trust fund paid out. Money was tighter than it was before the brief sojourn in Toronto, but Hemingway did not look for paid employment. He did work part-time on Ford Madox Ford’s short-lived literary magazine transatlantic review (the title was all in lower case) and Ernest Walsh’s This Quarter, but it was not paid work. But at least he could now dedicate himself to writing fiction with no distractions.

In Paris, Hemingway was continually assuring friends how hard he was engaged on ‘difficult’ work and was writing every day whenever possible, whether in cafes, at home or in a garret room he later claimed

he had rented nearby. But a frank assessment of how much he produced in 21 months — between the beginning of December 1922 when the valise was stolen until October 1924 when he dispatched the manuscript for his first commercially produced book, In Our Time, to his New York publisher, Boni & Liveright — indicates it was not a great deal.

The manuscript included the three stories and the 18 very brief vignettes (which he called chapters) from his first two privately published works and 13 new stories. Of these new stories, the two-part story Big Two-Hearted River, at just over 8,000 words, was by far the longest in the collection. The others, at between 500 and 2,500 words were shorter.

In Our Time attracted attention and impressed many in literary circles, not least because of its startlingly different subject matter and style, but it did not sell well. It had an initial print run of just 1,300 copies, and Hemingway (who thought he knew best about on most matters, in this case publishing) told Boni & Liveright they should have printed at least 20,000 copies and claimed that the poor sales were down to inadequate advertising by the publisher. But at least Hemingway could now claim to be a professional writer.

His life as working journalist was over and his life as ‘writer’ was now beginning. Although several years later he contributed his ‘Letters’ to Gingrich’s Esquire, he was by then not a hack hired to supply reams of inconsequential copy, but an established and increasingly famous author whose thoughts and opinions might interest readers. There was a world of difference.

Hemingway and ‘the truth’, a ‘truly’ odd relationship

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.

List of posts

Hemingway always embroidered the events of his life. His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humor that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them. . . 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 imaginative alternative to commonplace reality.

Jeffery Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography, 1985.

. . . 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. 

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, Monologue To
The Maestro, Esquire, October 1835.

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. 

ANYONE familiar with Hemingway will also be familiar with what seem to be his favourite words — ‘true’ and ‘truly’. Advising on writing, he insists that to get started on piece of fiction

all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

But what at first blush seems to be a craftsman’s sage advice, becomes ever less clear and ever less useful when you drill down a little. What is ‘a true sentence’? And what might ‘the truest sentence you know’ be? You think you understand what is being said, but there again . . .

The words ‘true’ and ‘truly’ as well as ‘fine’ and ‘good’, crop up time and again in Hemingway’s writing and letters, and are intricate to the image of the honest craftsman, the no-nonsense and experienced man-of-the-world Hemingway wanted the world to see and as, no doubt, he saw himself. But anyone writing about him — quite apart from trying to evaluate his work — sooner or later faces the very real problem of just what to believe. Just how credible — just how ‘true’ — were many of the hitherto accepted ‘facts’ of his life for which he himself was often the sole source. And given that a great many were not and that most of the falsehoods were perpetuated by Hemingway himself, how did the man who insisted that

. . . 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

reconcile his ostensible beliefs with his lifelong habit of telling extremely tall stories about himself Hemingway champions might, of course, argue that we are dealing with different kinds of ‘truths’, and that the ‘truth’ Hemingway is describing in his dicta on writing is ‘artistic truth’.

That, of course, does little but divert the matter onto a different path: what is ‘artistic truth’ and can we be sure that what I understand by ‘artistic truth’ is what you understand? And, I suggest, once we start dealing in such arcania, the danger of tripping and falling into talking nothing but hi-falutin’ nonsense grows ever greater.

. . .

The degree of veracity of the facts of his life that Hemingway passed on might be gauged by his claim that he and his first wife Hadley lived in poverty in Paris and that once he had given up his freelance work for the Toronto Star to write full-time, he was often reduced to catching pigeons in a nearby park for their

Harold Loeb

supper. This might just be true, of course, but it is far more likely to be just another piece of Hemingway myth-making, another pillar to support the Hemingway legend. As Harold Loeb — Robert Cohn of The Sun Also Rises — points out in his essay Hemingway’s Bitterness (Connecticut Review, 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.

In fairness it should be pointed out that Loeb, who was made to look very silly in The Sun Also Rises, was, 40 years on after the novel appeared, still bitter about its portrayal of him when he wrote his essay (which might well have been called Loeb’s Bitterness); and Hemingway paid for the Miro in instalments, though again the matter is not quite straightforward.

He ostensibly bought the painting, The Farm, as a birthday present for his wife Hadley, but when they split, he somehow managed to keep it in his possession. When many years later she eventually asked him to return it, he simply refused, and the painting remained prominently displayed at his Finca Vigia home on the outskirts of Havana in Cuba.

As for being Hemingway being reduced to catching pigeons for his and Hadley’s supper, Loeb observes

I do not know why Hemingway told [early biographer and friend 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.

In fact, during his first stint in Paris, from December 1921 until September 1923, when he was still selling stories to the Star and being paid quite well for the freelance pieces he submitted (contrary to the assumption of many, he was not on staff in Paris), the bulk of the household income came from a trust fund Hadley benefited from that was worth around $3,500 to $4,000 a year.

Taking inflation into account, that sum would (in 2020) be roughly the equivalent of between $54,000 and $62,000 (£41,500 and £47,000), more than enough for a newly-married, childless couple to live on very comfortably. In fact, it is by no means unlikely that when Ernest, an ambitious would-be writer in his early 20s, and Hadley, almost nine years older, decided to marry and move to Europe, it was the prospect of having a reliable and regular income from her trust fund which will have made their plans feasible.

The young couple had initially intended to move to Naples and only changed their minds when the novelist Sherwood Anderson persuaded them that Paris was where artistically it was all happening. A considerable bonus was that the post-World War I exchange rate made the franc very cheap indeed for those with dollars to buy them, further boosting the purchasing power of Hadley’s trust fund income substantially.

The dollar/franc exchange rate was so favourable for Americans (and British) that throughout the 1920s thousands increasingly went to live in Paris, their savings going a great deal further than they would back home. The richer expatriates lived in the more affluent Right Bank districts, but those with artistic pretensions opted for the ‘artistic’ Left Bank where they hung out in cafes and could pose as bohemians. So much for Hemingway ‘living in poverty’.

That the Hemingways — or rather Hemingway, as he called all the shots — chose to live in a rundown apartment with no indoor toilet when they first lived in Paris puzzled their friends, who knew they certainly had the resources to pay for better accommodation.

When they returned from Toronto in January 1924 for a second sojourn in Paris, they moved into a similarly down-at-heel apartment (above an active and noisy sawmill), and choosing to live in such near squalid conditions again was especially odd now that they had a three-month-old son, John (called Bumby). Yet money was tighter when they returned to Paris.

Hemingway had by then severed his ties with the Star, so their sole income was from Hadley’s trust fund, and money was occasionally short if her quarterly trust fund cheque was late; yet there was always someone from whom to cadge a few thousand francs.

Notably, even after they returned from Toronto the Hemingways always had enough money to eat out regularly and to pay for extended trips away from Paris to Italy and Austria, although these trips were partly subsidised by sub-letting their apartment and, again because of the exchange rate, living in a small hotel in Schruns when off skiing in Austria, was even cheaper than in France. They were also able to afford a nanny for John, a Breton woman who was also their cook and housekeeper, and took care of the boy when they went on vacation.

. . .

Hemingway’s practice of inventing facts about his past made the task facing his biographers more difficult. At first, Philip Young and particularly A. E. Hotchner, who came to fulfil the role of Hemingway’s amanuensis and general dogsbody, accepted at face value what the writer told them, questioned none of it and repeated it all as fact.

In his somewhat adoring book The Art Of Ernest Hemingway, the British writer John Atkins even repeats the ‘facts’ that while living in Oak Park Hemingway twice ran away from home and that in World War II Hemingway had performed valuable war work for the US navy off the coast of Cuba hunting down German submarines. In fact, he never ran away from home.

Although he did somehow persuade the US ambassador in Havana, Spruille Braden, of the viability of his ‘submarine hunting’ scheme — luring German U-boots to the surface, then disabling and destroying them by lobbing hand grenades downs their conning towers, it is now accepted that Hemingway’s ‘submarine-hunting’ was partly just a ruse to obtain rationed diesel so that he could carry on fishing in the Gulf. Before publishing his book in 1952, Atkins submitted the manuscript to Hemingway and, unsurprisingly, it gained his imprimatur.

When Carlos Baker was hired as Hemingway’s ‘official’ biographer in 1962 and began investigating the writer’s life, he found many inconsistencies in Hemingway’s accounts, and Baker was certainly not as uncritical as Young, Hotchner and Atkins.

Baker was, though, keen to keep Hemingway’s widow Mary Welsh Hemingway onside as he needed her cooperation, and so he was obliged to tread cautiously. Welsh regarded herself as the keeper of the flame, and in 1966 she had even taken Hotchner to court after he had revealed in his book Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir that the writer’s death had been suicide and not, as Welsh insisted, an accident which occurred while her husband was cleaning a gun. (Welsh lost her suit, the judgment went to appeal and she lost again.)

Baker spent seven years researching and writing his biography, and finally published it in 1969. More biographies began to appear in the mid-1980s — Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78 — and their authors were far more sceptical.

Hemingway’s work was by now undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical than Baker could afford to be, both of the man and his work. Jeffrey Meyers published in 1985, the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work and Kenneth S Lynn’s take on Hemingway appeared in 1987, and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography of Hemingway. None chose to take on trust Hemingway’s many claims.

Michael Reynolds, for example, made a point (he informs us in his introduction to his second volume, Hemingway: The Paris Years) of not including any of the accepted ‘facts’ about Hemingway that he could not himself verify.

One example he gives is Hemingway’s oft-repeated claim that he had rented a garret room in which to write in a hotel in the rue Descartes (in which, Hemingway claimed, the poet Verlaine had died). Hemingway might well have rented the room, says Reynolds, but he could find not a single piece of independent verification for the claim and concludes it was possibly just another piece of Hemingway’s perpetual legend-building.

If Hemingway did rent that room, it would have been during his first Paris sojourn, because that claim is hard to reconcile with his own account that he stayed in bed to write or that he composed his stories in cafes where he had to nurse one cup of coffee for hours (and where he resented the attention of friends and acquaintances who approached him — ‘bitched’ his writing — while he was working).

Whatever is true or not, all three accounts help burnish the image of Hemingway liked to promote of himself as the ‘dedicated young writer’ whose sole concern was the quality of his art and who ‘worked hard’ doing ‘difficult work’.

Another fact widely accepted about Hemingway’s life that is now also being questioned concerns two small trunks of his papers that were apparently discovered in the basement of the Ritz hotel in Paris in the mid-1950s and which, he says, provided him with material for his memoir A Moveable Feast. It seems Hemingway is the only source for that ‘fact’.

The French-Canadian scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin undertook research into the matter for her book The Mystery Of The Ritz-Hotel Papers and concludes that, on balance, the trunks never existed and that Hemingway invented the story as a kind of preamble to publishing A Moveable Feast.

As for that myth-making, there is probably, and ironically, truth in the suggestion that as a teenager known for his outgoing and gregarious nature Hemingway was something of a joker and made up stories simply to entertain his friends.

Yet from an early age he also seems to have fully intended his tales to be believed; and although the practice might be understandable in a young lad in his pre-pubescent and early teenage years, as he grew older Hemingway’s habit of making bizarre claims — that he had been part of a Loyalist murder squad which killed more than 100 Falangists in a mass execution and had flown a Hurricane fighter in missions for the British RAF — became ever more disconcerting for those who knew him and knew the stories to be wholly untrue.

Even as a very young man, he lied to Eric ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, who was to become a lifelong friend and had been wounded in World War I. They met in Milan while Hemingway was recovering from being blown up by a mortar just before his 19th birthday in July 1918, and when Dorman-Smith, who had been

Eric ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith

‘mentioned in dispatches’ three time and was awarded the Military Cross and Bar for bravery under fire, asked the young American how he had been wounded, Hemingway told him he had been fighting with the Italian ‘Arditi’ troops and had been the youngest officer to lead one if the regiment’s battalions into battle.

The wonder is not that Hemingway would dare tell such a blatant lie, but that Dorman-Smith, who was no fool, believed him, never seems to have questioned such an unlikely story and apparently carried on believing it until Hemingway’s death. Perhaps he simply liked Hemingway and his company so much that he chose not to confront him about the untruth.

. . .

From the end of World War II until his suicide in July 1961 Hemingway never stopped telling outright and outrageous lies about himself, his life and his experiences. This tendency was probably exacerbated by his poor mental health which deteriorated badly in his last 15 years; and what we now know about his mental disintegration — which might well have been underway by the beginning of World War II and had several other possible causes quite apart from his alcoholism — caution is not just advisable but necessary when asked to accept at face value any claims he made towards the end of his life.

But the important question is: does any of this matter? Who cares whether a writer, still regarded by many as a writer of genius, told lie upon lie about himself and his experiences? Of course it doesn’t. It might have some bearing upon Hemingway the man, but had and can have no bearing upon Hemingway the artist and Hemingway the writer. A rapist could be a composer, but his talent neither excuses his crime and nor do his crimes diminish the quality of his music: the two are separate and distinct.

Yet there is something disconcerting that a man who time and again insisted on truth in fiction played fast and loose with truth in real life. In her book Tavernier-Courbin quotes Hemingway as claiming that

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?

In fact, her version might not be quite what Hemingway wrote; or perhaps he wrote two versions. Item 845 in the JFK Library Hemingway Collection in Boston is a scrap of paper in Hemingway’s writing (but which otherwise remains unidentified) in which the writer claims that

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 [sic] 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.

The addition of this, that

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 [sic] 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

does cast the what precedes it in a different light, and Hemingway makes fair point that alcohol (and presumably other drugs) can and do spark a writer’s imagination. But he is being wholly disingenuous by equating ‘having a strange or marvellous experiences in his dreams’ with ‘lying’. 

Someone who lies does not just know she or he is telling an untruth, but fully intends it to be accepted as truth and fully intends to deceive. That is the essence of lying, and with the best will in the world Hemingway’s claim is not just distinctly tenuous but outright nonsense: although those telling lies are certainly ‘creating fiction’, ‘creating fiction’ is not the same as ‘lying’. ‘Creating fiction’ is something else entirely.

We don’t know the circumstances of when, where or why the excerpt above was written, but it does sound as though Hemingway, aware of his incessant fibbing and the danger that at any pointe each fib might be revealed for what it was, was attempting to get himself off the hook and trying to justify why he told such lies. But it will not wash: those telling lies are certainly creating fiction, but those creating fiction are not lying, and Hemingway was certainly bright enough to know the difference.