Dear Hemingway
This is a little reflection on my relationship with the works of Ernest Hemingway. I read Naomi Kanakia’s piece entitled The greatest 20th century fiction writer, which made me reconsider how his works have affected my reading and writing. I encourage you to read what Naomi has written, as it is much more well-researched, novel, and virtually every insight I share, I have gleaned from her piece. But I know my friends read my blog because they like me at least as much as my writing, so I’ll carry on.
Ernest and I met on the wrong foot. I was an avid reader as child, though nowhere near as precocious as some of these other kids I’ve heard about (looking at you, Yiyun Li). My mother, had the idea that I was reading trash and needed to read more classics, whatever that was supposed to mean. In honesty, I have considered going through the Classic on many an occasion (Thanks again Naomi), but take a break before I get through more than a couple books. I’ll certainly get there in my lifetime. Pre-teen me picked up Hemingway in an attempt to placate my mother before reading more about Irish criminal masterminds kidnapping fairies. I picked the shortest book that would qualify, which was The Old Man and the Sea, and was incredibly bored. In retrospect, it’s probably not the best place to start a mature reader on Hemingway, but as a kid, it was probably the best place to start. There was a chance that I was a savant of some sort and would immediately recognize the urgency and mastery of Heminway’s prose. Instead, I went back to my fairies and would not touch Hemingway again for half a decade.
The next few books I read were For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms: not where I would recommend a mature reader start either. It was at this point that I developed an intense dislike of war books: I found that all of them fell into the “war is bad cry cry cry” style used by WWI writers Hemingway and Remarque, or the “war is bad absurd funny haha” style that I saw with WWII writers Vonnegut and Keller. I believed that no one had anything interesting to say about war, and purely by chance, I figured Hemingway was a war novelist, with some stilted romances mixed in.
The initial détente in relations with Hemingway was the few months before studying Paris. To prime myself for the semester, I read as many books as I could that were set in Paris. Chiefly amongst them was A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir about his years in Paris. In addition to my Mount Rushmore that I mentioned in an earlier essay, A Moveable Feast was instrumental in shaping my perception of Paris. The rainy days in ruminating about horse racing, the visits to the Louvre to compare bodily proportions to the statues, the trips across France to taste varieties of wine, and the quote immemorial: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast”. The next novel I read by Hemingway was The Sun Also Rises, while studying in Paris. Well, no better time to read some Paris-based autofiction than in Paris while the determination to become a writer was slowly germinating. Hilarious book, sad book, poignant book.
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It was at this phase that I entered my “I like Hemingway as a person, just not as a writer” stage, much to the disgust of my one English teacher friend who considered him a misogynist but a great writer. I wasn’t particularly enamoured by his serial womanizing or his larger-than-life masculinity, but moreso the stoicism and the autofiction, the idea that he seemed like a parody of one of his classic protagonists. I wrote a piece a while back wherein I said I whole lot of nothing but compared Fitzgerald and Hemingway, concluding that I liked Fitzgerald more. And I still like Fitzgerald more: the themes prominent in popular readings of his work resonate with me more. Still, I don’t think I’ve read all the novels of any other author except these two. Good thing they were too busy drinking and womanizing to be anywhere near prolific novelists.
My most recent fascination with Hemingway stems from reading his posthumously published Islands in the Stream, and his short stories, among which The Snows of Kilimanjaro is my favourite. It is through these works that I have distilled my personal reading of Ernest Hemingway: not of courage and endurance, but of yearning and loss. Is this a bad reading? Perhaps my aforementioned friend will say so, that it’s not only a misreading, but one that is worn. Yet the these themes are what draws me to perhaps most literary fiction: cliché and unoriginal, yet the heart wants what it wants.
I have also discovered Hemingway’s manifestation in my written work, just as Naomi discusses. I constantly worry about whether the story makes too much sense or is too on the nose; I want to be vague and cryptic like Hemingway. Not insofar as to let style dictate substance; I have a story and theme in mind, but Hemingway and his subsequent influence on short fiction has caused me to chase the trappings of ambiguity. So much in fact, that some readers have a hard time with my stories. As an amateur writer this leaves me in doubt so I sometimes feed them to ChatGPT to validate. ChatGPT understands my stories without an issue, which leads me to believe that in a world of ChatGPT writing for people, I am perhaps the first person who writes for ChatGPT.
Hemingway, the man, the myth, and the greatest 20th century fiction writer. Intimidating in stature, both physical and literary, but also completely inescapable, given his subsequent influence on American writing and writing advice. Perhaps the best starting way to get to know him is through his short stories. That was how Hemingway and Fitzgerald made their living during their lifetimes after all. I recommend someone new to Hemingway starts with The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, the most representative of his philosophy and how he’s portrayed. Disabuse your mind of any preconceived notions you might have of him, and open your mind. Perhaps the caricature of a musty old white man dreaming of his testosterone-filled youth might just be replaced with something a bit more tender.
Thanks for everything Ernest.
