Today, I bring you Ernest Hemingway. What a fascinating man! But so tragic. :( What was your first experience with Hemingway? What is your opinion of his work? Critics still can’t agree! Hemingway is easily known as one of the greatest American authors. We have come to know him as the writer who disdained “the grandiose wordiness of Victorian prose for a clean, stripped-back simplicity, conveying emotion by what was not said as much as by what was.” In fact, I don’t think there is any living person who doesn’t know Hemingway and his “Iceburg Theory.” One article even compared his legacy to the literary equivalent to a Nike swoosh or the golden arches, asking, “Who doesn’t have a mental picture of the gray beard and safari shirt? Who couldn’t vamp a Hemingway-like sentence in a pinch?” And what a shame that perhaps because “we’ve come to fetishize this voice that we accept and even admire gnomic truisms like ‘a writer should write what he has to say’—an observation from Hemingway’s Nobel banquet speech,” we may miss what he was really good at: his “earlier, more uncertain writing—the prose that openly struggles to track and parse a mess of a life—that gets into your blood.” In short, Hemingway tried to prove that less is more (coming from his journalistic background) and taking his cue from Ezra Pound who taught him to “distrust adjectives,” that adjectives can do more harm than good in writing prose. Some critics, however, say Hemingway’s penchant for creating novels that usually follow a basic chronological order, are boring and typical for one touted as such a great American author. And when critics aren’t arguing about his genius, they argue about why he is a genius! Some argue that it is that which Hemingway leaves out, which, by proxy means, we, the reader, must put back in, that makes him a genius, while others say it’s NOT what he left out but what he left in, and that everyone has gotten it all wrong! Confused yet? 😊 I’ll never forget my first experience with Hemingway’s work. It was “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t think there is a more stripped-down version of a tale out there. It had a profound effect on me. Today, in my career, Hemingway is by far the most argued-about “classic” writer in my field of teaching. Many don’t teach him, sadly, and call him overrated. I hear it a lot. “I can’t stand Hemingway.” In short, it seems you either love or hate him. How about read his work? There’s a start. 😊 As a writer myself and with so many “how we should write” manuals out there, it is interesting to read about Hemingway’s method. He was most assuredly not what we call a “pantster.” He carefully analyzed his storylines, looked at every sentence and word, and if it didn’t serve a purpose or function, he expunged it. Some use the term “hard-boiled literature,” unemotional, without sentiment, to describe him and his work. But biographic research showed that “behind the macho façade of boxing, bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing” existed quite “a sensitive and vulnerable mind that was full of contradictions.” I think one of the most fascinating things we remember, as is often the case with legends who die tragic deaths, is his suicide, and it is these contradictions that seem to be at the root of why. Why did he do it? We know he meticulously planned his suicide, having chosen the outfit, something he called his “emperor’s robe,” before taking his double-barrelled shotgun and blowing his brains out at 7 am on July 2, 1961. Most have come to pinpoint the moment of his outward demise to his father Clarence’s suicide in 1928 of the same means, a gunshot to the head with a .32 Smith and Wesson revolver, but some trace it back much further to his childhood of abuse and identity confusion. His mother dressed him in “white frocks” and did his hair like a “little girl’s” while also praising him “for being good at hunting in the woods and fishing in the stream in boys' clothes.” It seems Hemingway had always “hated her, and her controlling ways,” referring to her as "that bitch” and presenting in a “parody of masculinity” as a result. And his father “was a barrel-chested, six-foot bully, a disciplinarian who beat his son with a razor strop. Ernest didn't retaliate directly. He bottled it up and subsumed it into a ritual, in which he'd hide in a shed in the family backyard with a loaded shotgun and take aim at his father's head.” Hemingway may have been idealized as the perfect “man’s man,” but “those who knew Hemingway well, especially in these early years, reported that his braggadocio was something of a cover: Far from being the swaggering, insouciant rake of lore, he was emotionally fragile, stirred into panics by women’s rejections, prone to insomnia…a workaholic and perfectionist.” Now, some psychologists glean that he suffered from bipolar disorder and borderline narcissistic personality traits, which led to self-harming and alcohol dependence. (Hemingway has a long list of near-fatal physical accidents, many of which were direct injuries to his head, some saying each seeming to “emulate his…father’s self-imposed head wound”). Many in his family– “his father and mother, their siblings, his own son and his grand-daughter Margaux – were prone to manic-depression,” which was clearly the case in his final years. “Hemingway's taste for chronic self-immolation was matched by his prodigious feats of drinking. The drinking got worse after his father shot himself.” His suicide may have seemed a surprise to the outside world who saw a man who had it all, but he told a lover: "I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish, so I won't kill myself." After being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, he worried that, “after receiving the prize, most laureates never wrote anything worthwhile again.” And after 1960, he found he could no longer write. It was his writing that kept him from evading death, but when he felt he could no longer write, depression, “paranoid delusions,” electro shock treatments, and medication filled the page instead. When asked to write just one line for Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, he said the words “won’t come anymore.” Where some of my information came from and more reading from PBS, Anders Hallengren, and Nathan Heller: http://www.pbs.org/…/ernest-hemingway-reflections-on-e…/629/
https://www.nobelprize.org/…/la…/1954/hemingway-article.html http://www.slate.com/…/ernest_hemingway_how_the_great_ameri…
2 Comments
Master
7/27/2018 12:21:02
One of my favorite authors. Write drunk. Edit sober. Nice work.
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Joseph Barrett
8/2/2018 07:15:37
Thank you for this article R.B. I never knew this about him, and in some ways I do understand. I find myself a better writer when my emotions are in high gear, when my heart is heavy and hurting! Sometimes I think I’m too nice and caring, my ex-wife told me I was too sensitive! After my separation I started reading and writing poetry, something I use to hate as a young man. But when I read and wrote poetry this cleared my mind, heart and soul! How can this happen to an old man?
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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