The Hemingway Enigma — Preface
Preface
This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(ironically, a fictional character).
The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare . . .
John O’Hara, New York Times, Sept 10, 1950.
Why the life of this rich libertine and destroyer of wildlife should be of such great and continuing public interest a decade following his suicide, we cannot and need not say.
Judge Charles L. Brieant Jr, Aug 3, 1976, dismissing an appeal by Doubleday over a libel suit brought by A.E. Hotchner.
His ruling was overturned on appeal seven months later.
To me, Across the River And Into the Trees is one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel’s life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.
J. Donald Adams, writing about Across The River
And Into The Trees, New York Times, Sept 24, 1950.
Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, in Scott and Ernest:
The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.
I DON’T doubt that many reading what follows will react with disbelief and scorn, and some diehard Hemingway champions possibly even with horror. More than 50 years after his death, the name Ernest Hemingway is perhaps not as popularly known as once it was, but I suspect that most who hear it will still pronounce him to have been ‘a great writer’ or even ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest writers’, mainly, perhaps, because that’s what they were taught at school. One does come across readers who think he was little more than a boorish braggart and who regard his style as dull, flat and often banal; that they have probably not read much of his work is because what they had read did not encourage them to read much more of it. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote off Hemingway as ‘a writer for boys’ and, at the extreme, was a comment by the American novelist and wit Gore Vidal who asked (about his home nation)
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?[1]
Yet these were, and perhaps still are, decidedly minority views. In 1941 the Pulitzer Prize jurors unanimously wanted to honour Hemingway for his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, and that he didn’t get the award was down to the lobbying by a very influential pro-Franco and ring-wing Pulitzer board member.[2] The jurors responded and made their feelings known by not awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to anyone else. Twelve years later they were able to honour Hemingway and awarded him the Fiction prize for The Old Man And The Sea. Then, in 1954, came an even greater distinction when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
So who is ‘right’: the champions or the sceptics? Frankly, no one is — the excellence or otherwise of Hemingway’s writing and his greatness or otherwise or his literary status are matters of opinion not fact.[3]
In fairness there was — at least at first — a little more to Hemingway’s fiction. Yet in hindsight there was also less to his writing, and in time a great deal less, than his champions — and Hemingway himself — insist. It would be a sweeping generalisation, but not untrue, to suggest that he began at the top and worked his way down. The print, broadcast and online media are often accused of working on the principle of ‘first simplify, then exaggerate’[4] and adopting that principle one could even suggest — no doubt to the outrage of many — that Hemingway’s literary success was something of a fluke. In response, the champions might choose to repeat their mantra ‘but Ernest Hemingway was a leading modernist and one of our / America’s / the English-speaking world’s greatest writers!’ Unfortunately, continual repetition doesn’t necessarily make it true. Yet having established their devotion, the devotees will never, but never, allow themselves to be gainsaid: those who disagree either don’t ‘get’ Hemingway and are obviously philistine, or quite possibly they are just being malicious. If only.
. . .
The reason this book is subtitled ‘How did a middling writing achieve such global literary fame?’ is simple: that is an enigma which has interested me ever since I came back to reading Hemingway’s work. And he certainly did achieve global fame. I had previously — many years ago in my salad days — read the early two novels and Death In The Afternoon and some of the short stories, but despite being on an English degree course, I was not intellectually equipped to deal with much literature of any kind. I also accepted without question — as did and do many others at that age when they first encounter ‘Hemingway’ — the conventional view that he was ‘a great writer’. Thus if I did not ‘get’ him or was not as engaged and impressed by the work as I believed I should have been, I assumed it was most certainly my fault. That, too, might be true of others at that younger age.
Hemingway did have a certain gift, but it was — as many commentators and reviewers have pointed out — for descriptive writing, especially about nature. Discussing Across The River And Into The Trees which Hemingway published in 1950, the New York Times’ columnist and former book reviews editor J. Donald Adams wrote
My own feeling about him has always been that he is one of the best descriptive writers in English, surpassed only by Kipling and a very few others; a master in the evocation of mood — most perfectly displayed in some of the short stories, and in certain situations of the novels. He is not, and never has been, a creator of character in the sense that novelists like Balzac and Tolstoy were, and has never come remotely near the understanding of human life and the values of which it is composed that are essential to great fiction.
Other commentators and reviewers also pointed out that — fatally, one might think, for a writer of fiction — Hemingway was not at all good at characterisation, and one might be hard-pushed to think of more than a handful of his characters who escape two dimensions, especially his female protagonists. On learning more about his life, it often seems that Hemingway’s main gift, one which drove his career far more than any putative excellence in writing, was not literary at all but a remorseless and competitive ambition sustained by a talent for self-promotion. Yet in literary terms he did leave his mark, as pointed out by the scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli:
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.
In a sense there is, at first blush, perhaps less to that achievement than we might think; obliquely pertinent might be the observation often made about innovative software, new car models and the latest development in technological hardware: never buy version one of anything. Over the millennia that men and women have been writing, there have been many turning points in literature — though as with many such changes, they came and come in fits and starts — and as a young man publishing his first volume of short stories, Hemingway was the catalyst for one such change. The irony was that other writers took his techniques, attitude and subject matter, and turned out rather more interesting work than he did. Dare I even claim ‘better’ work? No, I dare not, but not because I might be strung up from the nearest lamppost by Hemingway champions. It’s because in many discussions, the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — and thus ‘better’ and ‘worse’ — are not just inappropriate, but pretty damn useless. They do nothing except signal the bias of whoever is using them; they tell us nothing about the work in question.
Over the intervening years, my confidence has become more robust, and I am far less inclined to accept wholesale and without question. I have also read more widely and, crucially, developed more sceptical instincts, largely, I suspect, because I once worked as a newspaper journalist.[5] I have also come to appreciate the virtues of an ‘open mind’; and as I read more about Hemingway, it was an odd, quasi-theistic, evangelical, blinkered devotion to the writer and his work which increasingly came to worry me. All too often articles in specialist publications and discussions in webinars strike a curious note of adulation, as though one were at a prayer meeting or a Britney Spears convention.[6] A curious campfire cosiness permeates far too many of the studies and articles I have read about Hemingway and his work.
. . .
This book began life as an entry intended for a blog. Several years ago and on a whim — and I can’t remember why I even thought about doing so — I had re-read Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. The blurb on the back of my paperback edition described the novel as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’, and when I had finished reading it, I was baffled by those claims. The novel was certainly no ‘masterpiece’ and its author seemed to be anything but ‘a genius’.
The novel isn’t bad and it is entertaining enough; and, certainly, the two claims owe a great deal to publishers’ hyperbole, puffing up a ‘product’ to ensure it sells. But The Sun Also Rises struggles to justify the claims made for it as being in any way ‘profound’, and to regard Hemingway as ‘a writer of genius’[7] is frankly ridiculous. When an academic — Philip Young in his 1952 book Ernest Hemingway — describes Hemingway as ‘very likely the finest writer of American prose to come along since [Henry] Thoreau himself’, you really do wonder what is going on. It came down to a simple question: did Young lose the plot or have I?
However, my scepticism about Hemingway’s alleged ‘genius’ is definitely a minority view: despite a decline in his reputation and popularity since his suicide in 1961, Hemingway is still spoken of by many as ‘a leading modernist writer’, ‘a stylistic innovator’ and, most dangerously for a sceptic such as me, ‘one of the greatest American writers’. Is it really likely that most of the world — many biographers, academics in their hundreds, the Pulitzer Prize jurors and notably the Nobel Prize committee — were wrong in their evaluation of the man and his work, and that I am right? Intrigued and not a little concerned that I was risking making a fool of myself, I began by scouring the net for the views and opinions of those who might share my minority view. Almost immediately I came across reviews of a book published in 2016 by the New York writer and journalist Lesley M.M. Blume called Everybody Behaves Badly, subtitled The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. It was a serendipitous find: well-researched, extensively annotated, well-written and — not at all least — very entertaining, Ms Blume’s book gave a full account of Hemingway’s early years in Paris in the 1920s and of the week-long trip to the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in 1925 upon which he based his novel. Pertinently it provided many details for my intended blog entry about The Sun Also Rises. I was, incidentally, amused — and rather pleased — to learn that the title of the German translation of Ms Blume’s book is Und Alle Benehmen Sich Daneben: Wie Hemingway Seine Legende Erschuf. The main title translates, as one might expect, as Everybody Behaves Badly; but tellingly, Blume’s subtitle has been amended, and in English it translates as ‘How Hemingway Created His Legend’. This insight by the German publisher reflects one of the conclusions I have come to. In fact, this book is essentially about the Hemingway legend and how he actively created it. And although Ms Blume refers to The Sun Also Rises as ‘Hemingway’s masterpiece’, I suspect that choice of words was, like the subtitle, not hers but her publisher’s, given that Ms Blume’s account of Hemingway and the genesis of his novel is rather less admiring than the description ‘masterpiece’ might imply.
After I had read Ms Blume’s book, I realised I had a problem. She referenced the several biographies of Hemingway and other books about the man, and increasingly I felt that to do justice to both my project and the writer, I was obliged to undertake more background reading. It also became obvious to me that when dealing with the phenomenon of ‘Ernest Hemingway, a writer deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize’, I should tread carefully. Knowing more about the man and his work — including reading more of the work — seemed not just necessary but a wise course to take. Thus what was set to become a short blog entry grew, both in intention and scope.
. . .
The first biography of Hemingway was published in 1967, six years after Hemingway’s death. It was by Carlos Baker who had been nominated by Hemingway himself as his ‘official biographer’.[8] Baker had the cooperation of Mary Welsh, the writer’s widow, although having Welsh on his side was a double-edged sword. As Baker discovered in his research, Hemingway could be decidedly brutal, vindictive, cruel and in some ways thoroughly dishonest; but Baker had to tread carefully in his descriptions of the writer. Welsh was litigious and had already taken one writer, A.E. Hotchner, to court over his memoir of her husband (a suit she eventually lost). To ensure Welsh’s continued help, Baker did not want to alienate her. His volume — very detailed, but a little dull — was the definitive work for 18 years until Jeffrey Meyers published his biography in 1985. Two years later, in 1987, came the first volume of Michael Reynolds eventual five-volume work, followed by Kenneth S. Lynn’s take on Hemingway; and in 1992 James Mellow published his biography.
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By 1985, 24 years after Hemingway’s suicide, his work was undergoing re-assessment, and in tone the more recent biographies were more critical of both the man and his work than Baker could afford to be. (Mary Welsh died in 1986 at the age of 78.) In 2016, James Hutchisson published what he called A New Life, but in truth it strikes me as simply a general romp through what previous biographers had written. Despite claims made in some reviews, Hutchisson does not seem to have undertaken any new or original research. Furthermore, although nicely produced, it contains, inexplicably, several outright howlers.
Two years later, Mary Dearborn published her biography, and although she might well have undertaken additional research, her work does not add much to what previous biographers had written. On one or two matters she even contradicts them, though who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ is impossible to establish.[9] I did not bother reading A.E. Hotchner’s memoir which, I had gathered, was distinctly hagiographic and which took as copper-bottomed ‘fact’ too many of the tall, often outrageous, stories Hemingway told about his life and experiences. Anthony Burgess’ take on Hemingway makes some interesting points, but in form, style and content it is a coffee-table book for which he also seems to have done no original research. Then there’s a curious volume by Richard Bradford, published in 2019, which is notable for its hostility to Hemingway and, which might warn us, was badly edited.
Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women was especially interesting, highlighting how much macho ol’ Ernie relied heavily on his wives, not just for emotional support but in two cases also for their money. Gioia Diliberto’s more recent work, Paris Without End, The True Story Of Hemingway’s First Wife, provides an interesting picture of Hadley Richardson and corrects the often accepted view that she was essentially a doormat who gave in to her egocentric and domineering husband at every turn.[10] Although Hadley is the main focus of her book, Diliberto also illuminates Hemingway’s character very well.
Very useful were Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband which covers much the same ground, as well as his book on the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then there are the comparatively short volumes on the writer and the man by Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Griffin, Charles A. Fenton and Verna Kale. The Second Flowering, Malcolm Cowley’s volume of essays, two of which are about Hemingway, provides useful considerations on what is referred to as ‘the lost generation’.
. . .
The more I read, I also realised that given the standing Hemingway had and for many still has in modern literature, I would have to do more than simply examine The Sun Also Rises and question why it was and still is hailed as ‘a masterpiece’. It seemed to me that the central conundrum was: just why and how did Hemingway, essentially a middling writer of some talent but of no more than many other writers, attain such extraordinary worldwide prominence? None of his peers came close to enjoying such global recognition.[11] On that question Leonard J. Leff’s — rather luridly titled — Hemingway And His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s And The Making Of American Celebrity Culture was especially interesting. It examines the growth of celebrity and pop culture in 1920s ‘jazz age’ America as well as developments in advertising and marketing, and how Ernest Hemingway and his literary career benefited.
In his career of just under 40 years, Hemingway did not write a great deal — in fact, compared with his contemporary writers, he wrote surprisingly little. Despite the acclamation his early work met, by the mid-1930s, after the publication of Death In The Afternoon (1932), Green Hills Of Africa (1935) and then To Have And Have Not (1937) his reputation was already in decline, and some critics began to have doubts about the Wunderkind of ten years earlier. With the exception of For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), which became a best-seller, not least because in the US it was chosen as a Book Of The Month, and 12 years later The Old Man And The Sea, another commercial success and which also appeared its entirety in Life magazine,[12] Hemingway’s scant work from 1929 on was regarded as nothing remarkable to not very good at all.
. . .
As my project took shape its focus changed: it was no longer to examine why The Sun Also Rises was and occasionally still is spoken of as ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway was and is hailed as ‘a genius’. Broader questions presented themselves, questions which transcended Hemingway and his work. For example, on the back of Virginia Woolf’s pithy remarks about critics (as part of her review of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories), I began to wonder whether objective judgment of a piece of writing — or of any work of art — is even possible. Why, almost without question, do we hold academia in such esteem and seem prepared to accept their — often very contradictory — pronouncements as far more worthwhile than our own? It seems, at times, as though we allow our English literature professors to adopt the role of druids, shamans, rabbis, mullahs, priests and preachers past and present to interpret the ‘word of God’ on our behalf, and the humble believer feels disinclined to challenge what they say. I also consider the commercial background and imperatives of the second decade of the 20th century and how innovative advertising and marketing techniques helped to ensure Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel became success. There was the question of Hemingway’s alleged ‘modernism’: why was — and still is — Hemingway touted as ‘a modernist’ writer when it soon became clear — to me, at least — that he had next to nothing in common the ‘modernists’ who had been working in many fields since the last decade of the 19th century. Then there was the puzzle of why and how it came to be believed — to this day — that The Sun Also Rises portrayed the ‘despair’ of a ‘lost generation’. What are we to make of Hemingway’s writing ‘style’; and why was and is his ‘iceberg theory’ of writing celebrated and regarded — not least by Hemingway — as an ‘innovation’.
Central to it all was the force and impact of Hemingway’s personality on his rise to fame; so this book concludes with short accounts of Hemingway’s life, distilled from the various biographies. They recount his youth, his early years in Paris and his life in the 1930s when he began to play the part of the celebrated ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the hard-drinking, hard-living, action-man writer; then came his brief ‘war’ in France and his slow disintegration. Incidentally, Hemingway awarded himself the sobriquet ‘Papa’, and by the mid-1920s he encouraged everyone to address him with the name. No one knows quite where it came from and why he chose it, and why he often insisted he should he addressed a ‘Papa’.[13] It did, though, help to perpetuate the image of ‘the authority’, ‘the insider’ and ‘the expert’ he wanted the public to accept.
. . .
When considering Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ and his worldwide fame, it might be worth noting the following observations. Both are pertinent to how he achieved the status of ‘one of America’s greatest writers’. The first is by Mario Menocal Jr, a son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends who himself became a friend, writing in a letter to biographer Jeffrey Meyers. In view of what he says, it is worth stressing that he and Hemingway did not fall out as Hemingway had with many of his other friends,[14] and Menocal’s comment was not intended to be hostile:
No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.
Then there is the observation Michael Reynolds makes in the second volume of his five-volume biography, In Hemingway: The Paris Years
Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
It would not be too far-fetched to suggest that ‘Papa Hemingway, the great writer’, was a conscious construct, one distinct from the ‘real Ernest Hemingway’, and that furthermore in time Hemingway lost control of that figure.[15] One psychoanalytical conclusion was that the difficulties he faced reconciling the ‘real’ Hemingway with the figure of the ‘great writer’ he had created finally overwhelmed him and contributed to his eventual mental disintegration which culminated in his suicide.[16]
I have not undertaken any original research, and the nature of what I write would seem to make it superfluous. I suspect that apart from the major biographers, neither have many of the academics and critics who have added their two ha’porth worth — an American might choose to describe it as adding their ‘two cents worth’ — to ‘Hemingway scholarship’. In fact, it is astonishing how much they all accept as established fact much about Hemingway and his writing which is certainly contentious and, when they are not disagreeing, echo each other. All the views expressed here are my own.
[1] It has to be said that Vidal delighted in shocking and taking a contrarian view. In his collection of essays Pink Triangle And Yellow Star, published in 1983 from which this quote is taken, he was also exceptionally nasty about F. Scott Fitzgerald.
[2] Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University.
[3] When reading this some might scoff ‘well, that’s just what you think’. I wonder whether they are aware of the irony implicit in their scorn? The distinction between what is and can be a ‘fact’ or an ‘opinion’ is crucial, and I touch upon it later. See p.59ff
[4] This is said to have been serious advice given to his young journalists by Geoffrey Crowther, the Economist’s editor from 1938 until 1956. I suggest that adopting that principle might prove helpful in the short run, but in the long run will only distort.
[5] First as a reporter then as a sub-editor [US copy editor].
[6] Britney Spears’ heyday was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Readers are welcome to substitute the name of any other pop starlet, boy or girl, of their choice with whom they are more familiar. At the time of writing it might be Taylor Swift.
[7] Little more than publishers’ hyperbole it might be, but when you come across such a claim as a young student in a seminar or reading an academic tome, you are more likely than not to take it seriously and worry why you can’t agree.
[8] That Hemingway believed it necessary — or perhaps, more charitably, agreed — to nominate ‘his official biographer’ indicates what a high opinion he had of himself and his work. I have yet to nominate my ‘official biographer’.
[9] This has nothing to do with ‘opinion’ but with factual claims. Dearborn reports, for example, that Hemingway wrote the first draft of The Sun Also Rises on a typewriter. All the other biographers — if they mention it — say that what began as a short story and later evolved into the novel was written in a number of blue notebooks. So who got a ‘fact’ wrong?
[10] Michael Reynolds records F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda as telling Hadley ‘I notice that in the Hemingway family you do what Ernest wants’.
[11] Somerset Maugham had a similar name recognition, but he was born in 1874 and was arguably of the previous generation of writers. He was already over 50 when The Sun Also Rises was published.
[12] It is still often called ‘a novel’ but frankly it is simply a long short story.
[13] He did not like his given name ‘Ernest’ and is said to have detested being called ‘Ernie’, though his family, some friends and relatives did call him that.
[14] Menocal and Hemingway’s other rich Cuban friends were, however, appalled by how he embraced Fidel Castro and often commented that Cuba’s revolution was all for the best. They themselves were forced to leave the country and were exiled abroad.
[15] See p.99ff for the conclusions of psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom and his author and historian wife Marilyn.
[16] There were certainly other factors, not least Hemingway’s chronic heavy drinking and the brain damage inflicted on him in the several concussions he suffered.
