There was no excuse to offer and he offered none for the way he acted at times, the things he said or wrote. Hemingway summed it up once. “When I write I’m an artist. When I’m done writing I’m a son of a bitch.” That about covered it without mentioning that he could be kind, generous, and helpful, too.
Rather than narcissism he inhabited a persona created like body armor to shield his sensitive aesthete self from a harsh world that treated him roughly. He kept an eminence front as The Who termed it. A put-on as a keep-off. Living in that projected shell hollowed the real man and left him empty of much but desperation, depression, and declining powers.
Who would have suspected burly manly macho Hemingway feared sleeping alone because he worried his soul might slip out of his body while he wasn’t looking as it had done when he was momentarily killed by an artillery shell exploding. It killed and tore apart the comrades he was with at the time and he tells of looking down on his own dead body before going back into it and being alive again. Who would have detected such a skittish terror amidst all that brawling bluster he kept throwing at the world?
Some wonder how Hemingway has escaped being cancelled as they call it when modern sensibilities are applied to artists from other epochs. Regardless how shallow and ersatz cancel culture may be we can see its dimming effect on Culture. Years ago Mark Twain was targeted by people simulating outrage over Huck Finn’s character Nigger Jim, despite Clemens having used that character to humanize an escaped slave marked by his own skin as a target for the bigoted hate of white culture. Twain’s Jim was a solid finger in the eye of racism, not racism itself.
Certainly those howling back then knew this just as those knew who’d howled about Lady Chatterley’s Lover using the word fuck or years later Kurt Vonnegut using that and other words the far right social puritans consider taboo. Their attempts to cancel various writers and to ban various books or burn them only proved how specious their arguments had always been.
In recent years we’ve seen H P Lovecraft removed as a symbol of excellence by the Horror Writers of America as increasing diversity among the writers of fine horror fiction contrasted with his distinctly racist attitudes and fictional content. It is interesting the Stoker Award bore the face of Lovecraft, not Bram Stoker. Poe was taken by the Mystery Writers of America and remains unchallenged except perhaps by some who cannot tolerate Gothic shadows.
Hemingway briefly shared the literary stage with such hardboiled writers as Dashiell Hammett with such stories as “The Killers” but if we dig into Hammett’s superb, spare oeuvre we find “Dead Yellow Women” used as title and topic in a fictional account of murders in Chinatown, LA. This could get him cancelled these days even though he was circumspect about language as he fenced with a prudish editor and social mores to present accurate detective fiction. He drew from his experiences as a Pinkerton detective, a background rare in mystery and detective fiction writers.
That Hemingway’s iceberg or telegraph style continues to influence is no surprise. It took discursive Twain and Sherwood Anderson further into plain speech before exploring what lay implicit in language itself. Since Hemingway only perhaps Vonnegut has had a similar influence if not as global and Vonnegut’s style hearkens to Twain and Ambrose Bierce more than to Hemingway.
Of such leap frogging are literary influences made.
I watched the first installment of HEMINGWAY by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick fascinated but without surprise. Having read many biographies and critical studies of his work nothing new bobbed to the surface. Having recorded the next two installments I find myself reluctant to bore through them, each being two more hours of more of the same stuff I already know. My reluctance stems from the tone much of the discussion sparked by the documentary has taken.
While an excellent documentary as we’d expect from Burns & Novick it seems to have stirred the silt of cancel culture or at least muddied the questions being asked about it. Once again we must pretend to be shocked, shocked I say that art and artist don’t necessarily reflect each other much or connect intuitively. Grumpy old artists can produce sublime work. Crappy people can make fine art. Genius is a spirit and not a permanent state of mind.
It would be pretty to think Hemingway might have lived as clean, concise, and no-nonsense a life as especially his early prose in the short fiction exemplifies but it would be unrealistic, inhuman, and naive, too. Yukio Mishima, another Nobel prize-winning writer and suicide, committed seppuku after leading a failed coup attempt. This means he tried to live and die by Bushido, an ideal unattainable outside fiction and myth.
Same with Hemingway’s prose. At its best it demonstrates ambition to reach beyond language into experience itself but in its influence it shows us to think more and write less to express the most. That lesson is timeless.
Be blunt.
Mimicry protects only so far before it becomes a carapace that traps further development.
Stop copying others and find your own voice, then sing.
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