Hemingway, Finally, or a Review of Some Basic Assumptions

Finally, in bocca al toro

It took me a long time to gird up even to read this volume from Library of America.  How do you read Hemingway, set aside “tackle” him?  The task is much harder — not easier — if you like to think that you are passionate about American letters.  I put off this LoA volume for a while.  Compounding the problem, I was laboring under some measure of mortification arising from the fact that I had not previously read most of the works it contained.  Shame on me.  But now I have, and I found myself disappointed, saddened, and even appalled by the man and writer I discovered he was. 

The excellence of this volume owes a lot to the work of Robert Trogdon, a professor at Kent State who is almost certainly not paid enough and who navigates Twitter by the charming handle @DrTroggie.  By my book, Doc Troggie did the very best editorial job of any LoA literary collection I have yet encountered (the volumes of historical correspondences etc. might be judged by different criteria).  His organization, selections, and copious brilliant endnotes are edifying, subtle, and, where appropriate, archly brutal.  I did not give great attention to the notes until I had finished reading most of the volume, and I am glad I did not, as they therefore did not color but instead confirmed the impressions I had developed of Hemingway through careful reading.

In short, Hemingway comes across as a nasty, small-minded sonofabitch, penurious of spirit, extravagant in spite, odious and deceptive, vain and hateful.  And he was, often, a middling writer.  It has to be said.  Though his spareness, sparseness, iceberg-y-ness, cadence, and lacunae would have been — must have been — revolutionary when published, I do not know why his work is so often and conventionally and even cavalierly viewed as standing the test of time better than, say, that of Sinclair Lewis or John Dos Passos.  I can not find the reason why he remains at the top of almost every American literary pantheon.  I believe most of his production, from this volume, at least, can and should be shoved over into the column of “Extremely Important Artifacts” (like those of Lewis and Dos Passos), worth studying so we know whence we came but not worth celebrating religiously.  More on that below.

But first, let us see Hemingway for who he clearly was: a manly pile of unmanly vanity, cloying, wheedling, inveigling, groveling, truckling, fawning and bootlicking.  Examples in this volume, from his fiction to his many letters, abound.  He was nasty toward Gertrude Stein in a letter to Ezra Pound (he called her a “safe playing kike” because she wouldn’t review his story in case his novel turned out to be a bust).  Simultaneously, he beseechingly asked, while expressly denying asking, for Pound’s review of his story and foully lied about why, telling Pound it’s because he was the “only guy who ever told him anything sensible and practical about prose.”  

Hemingway was a toady.

And a vindictive martinet.  Hemingway boasts, in a private letter, that he wrote the abysmal Torrents of Spring (1926) to “destroy Sherwood [Anderson]” and various others, to “show . . .  up all the fakes of Anderson, Gertrude [Stein], Lewis, Cather, Hergo and all the rest of the pretensious [sic] faking bastards.”  Talking easily out of both sides of his face, in a nearly exactly contemporaneous letter, he lavishes praise on Gertrude Stein when seeking her blessing of another piece of work.  Torrents itself, an ungainly parody of his coevals, is mostly unreadable, but Hemingway himself thought it was marvelous.  The most probable path to generosity when reading this mean-spirited, simple novella is by recalling that Hemingway was a very young man when he wrote it.  It also helps to focus on the book’s snapshots of men in war, which are surprising as compared to the rest of the book and seem startlingly truthful.  Some reader or another will be interested to know that, in Torrents, we also find the early forms of his contrapuntal style, which I understand has been the cause of much rejoicing over the decades for reasons I do not comprehend.  Even his avant-garde elements are just lazy and uneven.  The book switches haphazardly among idioms you might find in liner notes, stage directions, dialogue, short story, and novella. The kids musta thought it was genius.  

And though we can excuse his nastiness as youthful indelicacy, once he reached his mid-twenties, Hemingway does not appear to have become more kind, generous, or superb with age — at least as far as this volume goes.  The earliest contributions include dispatches from Canada and Europe to the Toronto Star in the late 1910s and early 1920s.  They brim with Hemingway’s self assured cleverness, choppy sentences, and practical American eye.  Editor Trogdon did us a great favor by including these, as we can see the very rapid growth in the very young Hemingway’s intelligence and depth.  And Jesus, man, he could write a letter.  The letters to his family and pals from WWI overflow with brio and zest and playform and humor.  He’s in utter control of each line, and we are uplifted by his pacing and flourish.  I found myself wishing we could have seen more that style in his dialogue.  We do get flashes in the Sun Also Rises. Not too much to be tiresome.  On the contrary, far too little.  His letters probably contain the best of him.  They are often long, discursive (indeed, meandering), dialogic, monologic.  They read like a drunk man talks.  It is very easy to get the impression Hemingway was often drunk, as per his reputation, or wanted everyone to think he was.  Many misspellings seem deliberate, humorous, troublemaking provocations, insouciances, and inflections.  Others seem dumb or befuddled.  Nearly always, he is a nasty gossip, ornery, horrible toward gay men, petty, unceremoniously antisemitic, and jealous.  I could barely find a letter in which he actually got away from his mean-spiritedness.  It was always there, always lurking, like a trout under the surface of the water.  

Which brings us, unhappily, to the trout.  Hemingway’s endless writing about trout fishing.  In newspaper dispatches, in letters, in stories, in vignettes, in novella and novel.  It is utterly dull, and he does no good job of enlivening it.  Much of his depiction of trout fishing could belong in the pages of a mid 2000s Spring edition of Outside magazine, excepting the overwrought chopped up “plain language” part of it (and more on that, again, later).

By contrast, Hemingway is at his best when covering the bullfighting.  He brings to bear his journalistic observational excellence, his eye for unusual detail, his obvious passionate interest in hidden or exceptional personalities, and his taste for extremes (heat, conditions, danger, consumption, night living, sex), the main chance, and the prize, table-turning moment.  It is easy to share his excitement in the action, his scent of the sun-stroked dust, his reveling in desperation and morbid comedy, and his heart leap at the sudden cymbal crashes of the action.  Yes, much of his writing on bullfighting is as good as anything else you’re going to read.

But the balance of the Sun Also Rises — often enough regarded as his most important book, I understand — makes for good high school English class coursework, when the High Symbolism of Impotence and the tragicomedy of uncertain, unrequited (unrequitable) relationships must land perfectly.  Not to mention the hidden, implied, lengthy pauses of time between sentences and paragraphs, set aside that famous chopped up language he loves to use.

Which we must, after all, mention.  It must have been a hoot at the time, and it must have just rocked the proverbial boat.  Because he is all about the Plain Language.  Perhaps Hemingway’s legacy to the American writers who followed him is, in fact, Good, Plain Language, that Speaks Plainly, I mean Plainly.  G-d help me it becomes predictable so damn quickly.  You could imagine instructing some Artificial Intelligence to push out phrases like “The trout fishing was good and the room cost 9 pesetas incl a quart of wine and the food was good and a lot and so was the wine.”  Or, just a few pages later, some redux like “We went into the cafe which had sturdy marble tables and ate there.  The food was good and in large portions, and the wine was good.”  No, these aren’t quotations.  They are (barely) parody.

There are some shining gems in this volume.  Hemingway saw Mussolini for what he was, and very early, maybe five or ten or even fifteen years before the West understood the Duce, even though it seems clear Hemingway fabricated some of his encounter with the man.  And once in a while, you come across some superb and superbly articulated truth, hiding in the pages, like “The English spoken language — the upper classes, anyway — must have fewer words than the Eskimo.”  (A reference in the Sun Also Rises to Brett’s using the word “rot” all the time.)  Or, in a letter, he reveals himself in a way that reflects his usual machismo but also a share of his soul: “Need a big town to write in” and, later, “As usual in the country I have an awful time writing.”  Both from 1925, when he was about twenty-six years old.

I am especially hesitant, in this cultural moment when artists are subject to cancelation for some venal personal activity or another, to think too much about what an artist must have been like and why that might matter when evaluating his or her art.  In general, I am first inclined to seek to admire the works, even if the person who made them was somehow dislikable.  I have always had this instinct, I think, and this has been reified, not diminished, by current movements that seek to persuade us otherwise.  So you can imagine how hard I tried not to care about who I found Hemingway to be.  And you can further imagine how dismal and awful I indeed found him to be — since I am making so much of it.  Hemingway was, by my reading, deplorable.  He was a routine fabulist and self-promoting liar.  Editor Trogdon catches Hemingway in many lies, some of them material.  For example, in professional correspondence, Hemingway claimed he was plagiarized by the same famous plagiarist who ripped off James Joyce.  He wasn’t.  And he was vain to the point of not understanding that his confession of his vanity was itself a vanity.  At one point, in his familiar fluent phrasing, he asks a friend in a letter what he thinks of their mutual acquaintance.  “Why did you ask about Hank?” he writes.  “He hasn’t got a pleasant manner and he certainly looks and acts like hell.  I suppose the reason I like him so much is because he likes me.”  

Judging from the works contained in this volume, I say it’s time to let the sun begin to set on Hemingway.  Leave him to the dust and to the bulls.