When modern readers lambast the American literary canon, they’re probably complaining at least partially about Ernest Hemingway. The Hemingway clichés are easy to rattle off: a thrill seeker who fetishized bullfighting and big-game hunting to prove his manliness; a womanizer who was always on the lookout for his next wife; a wartime bystander who co-opted the violence and trauma of the Great War to make a name for himself as a writer. To use the language of Hemingway admirer J.D. Salinger, the man’s uber-masculinity sometimes had a phony stink.
To its credit, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s six-hour docuseries Hemingway doesn’t dispute much of this. The directors use the author’s own statements, letters, photographs, and other writings to verify some of our worst assumptions. As cultural conversations about whether we can separate the exemplary work of an artist from their problematic personal life resurface over and over again, Hemingway wades into that same muddy water and throws down its anchor. The result is a docuseries that acknowledges what it doesn’t definitively know about Hemingway—did his sexual experimentation suggest questions related to his gender identity; did all the concussions he suffered contribute to mental illness?—while doing its best to paint a full portrait of the artist and the man. Hemingway seems to come down a certain way on whether his moral failings overshadow the beauty and exemplary quality of short stories like “The Snows Of Kilimanjaro” and novels such as The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell To Arms, but Burns and Novick also leave space for viewers to make their own decisions.
Hemingway charts the entirety of the author’s life, dividing it into three chunks that are engagingly written by Geoffrey C. Ward and evocatively narrated by Peter Coyote, both longtime collaborators of Burns and Novick. First is “A Writer,” which depicts Hemingway as a “troubled and conflicted man, who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family.” His father was a family doctor who saw many patients die during childbirth; his mother was a former opera singer who resented her children. To amuse herself, she often dressed Ernest in girls’ clothes and pretended that he and an older sister were gender-swapped twins. Desperate to escape from the stifling, prosperous Chicago suburb in which he grew up, and increasingly hostile toward his mother, whom he blamed for his father’s late-life paranoia and instability, Hemingway began writing for The Kansas City Star at 17. (The newspaper’s style guide encouraging “vigorous English” is a particularly enlightening detail.) After turning 18, Hemingway’s time as an ambulance driver in Italy in World War I would profoundly change his life, and Burns and Novick masterfully use archival footage, news reels, and Hemingway’s own photographs and letters (the directors were given access to his collection of materials at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) to chart the horrendous physical injuries he sustained on the battlefield, and the heartbreak that came afterward.
Upon his return to the U.S. after his recovery, Hemingway relished in the hero’s welcome he received, while chafing against his parents’ strictness and teetotaling. Perhaps retelling and embellishing the stories of his injuries was when Hemingway began spinning his own performative myth, the series suggests, and “A Writer” examines how that self-aggrandizement helped shape his writing style. The sparse sentences shaped by his time as a journalist; the contemporary, informal dialogue he and other young men spoke while in Europe; and his willingness to tackle difficult material, including death, suicide, and abortion, were all shaped by aspects of his own life, Hemingway argues. His problems with his parents. His failed love affair in Italy with an older nurse who cared for him and then sent him a “Dear John” letter. All the death he saw in the trenches. Jeff Daniels voices Hemingway, and the documentary builds in long stretches where we see the author’s drafted pages, his handwriting materializing on the document, scratching out words, and writing in others, while Daniels reads the final versions of the passages. Hemingway often modeled his protagonists after himself, and that approach built a sort of self-feedback loop. “I hate the myth of Hemingway… it obscures the man,” says Michael Katakis, manager of Hemingway’s literary estate. “And the man is much more interesting than the myth.”
While “A Writer” tracks Hemingway’s ascension—working as a war correspondent, marrying his first wife Hadley (voiced by Keri Russell), moving to Paris and traveling Europe with her, fathering his first son, and publishing his acclaimed collection of short stories In Our Time—subsequent episodes purposefully puncture the persona in which Hemingway wrapped himself. In doing so, Hemingway pulls off a tricky balance: It allows authors, scholars, and biographers to extol, celebrate, and elaborate upon Hemingway’s short stories, journalism, and novels, while also confronting them with instances of the man at his absolute nastiest, most abusive, and most delusional. As experts of the craft, writers like Edna O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tim O’Brien, Abraham Verghese, and Leonardo Padura are able to pinpoint what made Hemingway so unique, going into specific detail on certain character arcs, narrative turns, and thematic considerations; fans of Hemingway’s work will particularly appreciate their earnest appreciation. And they don’t hold back on their dislikes, either: O’Brien sniffs at The Old Man And The Sea, calling it schoolboy writing, while Llosa bursts into laughter describing the romance between the feuding Spanish loyalist and fascist characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls. They admire Hemingway, but they’re not zealots.
“The Avatar” and “The Blank Page” follow Hemingway’s career ups and downs with the volatility of his marriages (Meryl Streep, Patricia Clarkson, and Mary-Louise Parker also voice his three future wives); the inexplicable cruelty he leveled toward people who were once friends, like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and his escape from the United States to Cuba and to Africa for lengthy safaris in which he hunted and killed dozens of animals. How did the Hemingway who so abhorred death during WWI and the Spanish Civil War become the man gunning down defenseless animals in East Africa? That’s just one of the idiosyncratic contrasts Hemingway attempts to explain. “I’m not sure what to say about this,” admits scholar Marc Dudley after he reads a staggeringly vitriolic and racist letter from Hemingway to a colleague; earlier in the documentary, Dudley had explained Hemingway’s use of the n-word in his work as “a man trying to convey a sense of his time.” The realization that Hemingway might have been a racist in his life outside of his writing shocks Dudley practically into silence. This sort of inability to reconcile the myriad identities of Hemingway comes up over and over again. Author Edna O’Brien almost sounds reverential when she observes, “I think ordinary life was anathema to him,” but when asked to speak on Hemingway’s increasingly abusive behavior toward his wives, she almost downplays it by saying that he was “a bit of a controller and a bit of a bully as well.” Perhaps Verghese sums it up best with his somewhat resigned delivery of “There he is,” a pat line that mirrors the entire approach of Hemingway: Here’s the man, brilliance and discipline and sexism and racism and all.
The indulgent run time is mostly a boon, allowing Hemingway to offer up certain lesser-known details about the author: that he served as a spy for both the American and Soviet governments, although he only divulged secrets to one side; that he subverted the career of third wife and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn by booking a better deal for himself with Collier’s magazine, for which she also wrote; that he married a 17-year-old girl of the Kenyan Kamba tribe in a traditional ceremony while on safari there with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. These aren’t exactly flattering details, and Hemingway’s most unintentionally hilarious moment might be Daniels’ snotty line delivery of the author’s insistence in a letter to his son Gregory, “I am not a gin-soaked monster going around ruining people’s lives.” The concluding sense of Hemingway, rather, is that the life the author was most responsible for ruining was his own. The documentary paints a tragic figure of an author whose work remains powerful, and whose complexities remain impossible to parse out.
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Not the biggest fan of his novels but I’ll watch this I’m a sucker for a Ken Burns PBS doc plus all the cute cats. He did have a interesting life.
Well he wasn’t a ‘gentleman from Providence’ that’s for sure.
Hardly any non-Euclidean horrors or cyclopean walls to be found in Hemingway’s work, to be sure.
Short version
“I’m Ernest Hemingway and now I am going to eat this cat.”
No wonder he raised so many of them!
And he even bred them for six toes for extra eating!
P is for ‘pussy’, is good enough for Papa…
Wait, when did Hemingway and Mrs. Slocombe hook up?
“Christ, what an asshole”
I wonder if there’s any mention of the FBI hounding the shit out of him and tapping his phones, something everyone said was his “paranoia” talking at the time, only for it to be revealed as true several decades later.Also, for a racist guy, he sure made a heck of a lot of friends in Cuba, the least racist country in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Don’t forget to soak it in gin.
It’s on his Wikipedia page!
Which begs the question, how can he be racist if he loves Chinese food?
For sale: baby kitten, never eaten.
Hemingway, the myth and the writing, will always hold a special place in my heart, even if he was already seen as the problematic symbol of the American “canon” even back when I was a writing major in ‘95. So knowing that he was an asshole, overly macho, self-perpetuated stereotype is nothing new. The racism can be assumed by taking those three things and applying them to the era in which he lived (don’t know if that makes it a force-multiplier or a minor extenuation).While he isn’t a personal hero as he is to others, his enormous impact on 20th century storytelling in every medium cannot be ignored. He was certainly of his time, but his writing is not. It only feels like a parody of itself (including the annual contests) now because of it’s simplicity, as well as the influence it had across so many areas.I’m looking very forward to watching this. But from the review, I have a difficult time forecasting (or at least I get an uneasy feeling about) whether or not this is a “here’s Hemingway warts and all” or “here’s why you’re right to hate Hemingway, tear down the entire white, male 20th century literary canon” kind of take in the end. It’s Ken Burns, so I’d be surprised if it were the latter.
Are you saying that being an overly-macho asshole makes Hemingway’s racism matter less? That somehow its purported inevitability makes it less fundamental to his character?
Frankly, I’d love to see an American literary canon that was never exposed to Hemingway. I’m not sure that “enormous impact” was a good thing.
Be interesting to see what would happen if Virginia Woolf’s Jewish publisher cottoned on to her anti-Semitism and never let her fuck him in exchange for being published.
No. I’m literally saying the opposite. The racism isn’t good. But the times weren’t good for race in general. Hemingway was a TOTAL DICK. But I honestly think that when it comes to racist he was a garden variety racist for the time. He wasn’t burning crosses are supporting Nazis.
At the risk of sounding like an old, I feel like that, increasingly, there’s a significant risk to trying to judge those in the past based on current social evolution. It happens throughout history. And it is often a personal opinion on how far people let the artist’s life influence the look at their work. That’s totally fine. I get that. That isn’t what this is about.IN NO WAY do I think that Hemingway wasn’t an asshole. He was a total piece of shit person. He also wasn’t Woody Allen.But you are giving oxygen to the lunatics on the right screaming “Cancel Culture” if you think that the American literary canon would’ve continued to where it is today without Hemingway.That’s patently ludicrous. Sorry to throw around definitive statements like that in what should be a more civil internet discussion (is there such a thing?). But to say that Hemingway wasn’t one of the strongest influences on 20th century (and on) American literature is to say that you don’t understand literature.Are the topics that he about wrote no longer seen as politically acceptable? Yes. Do the stories he told reflect a culture that we’re trying to evolve beyond? Absolutely. But literature (like film) are snapshots in time for us to revisit in different eras (look at Shakespeare).
Beyond that, though, without Hemingway, there’s no Didion or Wolfe (or DeLillo, but also, fuck DeLillo and Mailer before him). And without Didion or Wolfe, you can basically scrap the entire late 20th century American literary scene. Period.
We can debate whether it’s a good or bad thing that the images and characters in Hemingways novels created an “American image” for writers and audiences alike in the latter part of the early 2000’s though the ‘50s. We can even discuss the fact that Old Man and The Sea is a basic story, told in a basic way.But we can’t ignore that it won a Nobel. A select list of American writers even to this day, and an even smaller list at the time that he won it. While today’s culture may find it distasteful, American literature would be dead without the white guys they hate in lit classes. Pearl Buck wasn’t carrying it for us. Willa Cather? Fuck no.So, yeah. The impact was important. The impact is why America has a modern literary existence even if Hemingway was a shitty dude.
I have always felt that artistic geniuses create the illusion of self-parody after a while. Their way of communicating connects so readily and so thoroughly with the audience, the audience eventually views it as shtick, when it’s always a heartfelt expression by the artist. Tennessee Williams is a perfect example. He revolutionized the American theater, but his tormented-relationships approach became something of the standard for a while. He continued in the same vein, because that’s who he was, and audiences began to find him ridiculous. They had seen it all before many times over by then. But they forgot that he invented it. Same with Hemingway, same with Ingmar Bergman. Hell, it was the same with Chuck Berry!
Right, the canon is something that should be added to, not subtracted from.
Like the saying goes, “Never meet your heroes.”
This is why I’m glad Vonnegut’s dead.
I met my hero Bruce Springsteen once in the early 90’s and had a thirty minute conversation with him in the record store where I worked. He was absolutely great. (He did hit on a girl I worked with, though. He really did. Even though he was married it didn’t bother me, because I hit on her, too. I understood.)
Even more than his writing, his contribution to the craft of writing is impossible to understate, for example the role he had in creating the modern MFA program. He is to writing as Jerry Lewis is to film.
At least you didn’t do Modernist Writing in Australia and had to deal with how “important” Katherine fucking Mansfield is, and having a litany of unrequited decrepit 1970s-throwback second-wave feminists telling you how she’s actually the most important fucking figure in literature, while Hemingway was just a scumbag. Pretty sure Hemingway never had his daddy sending him the equivalent of 12,000 pounds a year so he could party and get laid until he died, or married some poor woman out of convenience to get his mother off his back before bailing out a window literally a few hours after the ceremony, or creepily stalk his cello teacher for years.Her writing’s not that good, either.
Replace Mansfield with Barbara Kingsolver and you’ve got my American Lit class circa 1993. I still can’t stand Kingsolver. Maybe it was that class selling her up SO big, but I just found her prating.
I liked several of Kingsolver’s novels back when, but I’m not sure they would stand up to rereading … and Animal Vegetable Miracle was utterly obnoxious, a book-length brag. It’s not all mediocre women being substituted for classic male writers, though. I had to read Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies for my American Novel class in college and that was some hot garbage.
Never read Kingsolver, but count yourself lucky you never had to read The Bone Flute by Nike Bourke – one of the finest examples of Aussie Misery Lit ever written.The hypocrisy for me was how Hemingway’s behaviour was somehow shitty and unbecoming writer – he didn’t really earn it, apparently, it was just something he did between banging women and being cruel to animals and such – whereas Mansfield was somehow inherently special, even though her works have nowhere near the impact or legacy of Hemingway, and she was, quite literally, a 1920s Paris Hilton who managed to be an even shittier person. Like a lot of interpretations, Mansfield’s lauding in the literary world comes down to the constant desire for certain classist fantasies that place the rich, privileged, white female socialite at the centre of all things, as a force so inherently good that anything they do is inherently good – no matter how objectively shitty it is.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Hemingway speak, but it wouldn’t occur to me that he probably sounded like Jeff Daniels.
There are some recordings out there. He’s surprisingly soft-spoken for someone who projected his degree of machismo.
“I’m not some gin-soaked Jeff Daniels!”
During the — let’s call it extended downtime — this pandemic has offered, I’ve chosen to correct a severe lag in my reading activity.While getting caught up on several books gathering dust on the shelf, I figured a good way to ease myself back into a regular routine would be to start with something brief and not too verbose. I chose The Old Man and The Sea; I finished it the same day I started.From that point on (this was last November), in between other novels I’ve torn through The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bell Tolls, To Have and Have Not, in our time, and A Moveable Feast. I am currently a third of the way through A Farewell to Arms — the only Hemingway novel I’d read until recently, and not since high school.So clearly I’ve become a fan, and look forward to this series. I harbor no delusions about the type of person Hemingway was (a hell of a great writer, and a troubled man with serious relationship issues). Whether I end up as conflicted about Hemingway as I am now about formerly-revered icons like Woody Allen, Hunter S. Thompson and John Lennon remains to be seen, but his work stands apart, and its greatness was no doubt influenced by his checkered existence.
I chose The Old Man and The Sea; I finished it the same day I started.I went out for coffee and a newspaper.
Ah, yes, I remember the outdoors. Good times.
I’m not a fast reader by any means, but I also I finished The Old Man and The Sea in a day. That one, in particular, is very easy to get engrossed in and just breeze through.
I’m a fan, too, and am glad to see someone acknowledge “his work stands apart”. It’s sad to think that, if Hemingway were a contemporary author, he would not have the impact today—perhaps even the career–with all the social movements.
A man with that much talent, drive, obstinance and most of all charisma would probably be famous in any era. Probably wouldn’t be a literary legend now though, you’re right… I think he’d have a trajectory of fame and disgrace.
Hemingway would be a “content manager” at some website without a war to go fight in.Or making TikToks from Abu Ghraib.One or the other.
Hemingway’s clickbait: “Ten Reasons Zelda Fitzgerald Ruined Her Husband’s Career – #4 Will Surprise You”
It’s referred to in the article, but the moment in the doc when they linger on The Kansas City Star’s style guide is astonishing; like a skeleton key to Hemingway’s style. I can’t imagine the house styles of pop-culture content farms is going to generate any great literature
The late 20th century Hemingway industrial complex (at one point there was a furniture line, presumably authorized by his estate) was super annoying. But his work is important, and I am in the camp of those who prefer him to Fitzgerald. I do think people get dizzy in his testosterone fog and overlook how much of an influence Gertrude Stein had on him.
Im a big Hemingway fan, so I’ve eagerly awaited this documentary since it was announced I think around 2014. I have no doubt he was a miserable person to be around, I imagine if he were alive he would be loathed in the way Orson Scott Card is. I will add that the gender identity thread is genuinely fascinating. To think that all the hyper masculinity might have been just a lie is something that never occurred to me. Bring it on Ken!
His son Gregory later become known as Gloria. Coincidence?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Hemingway
I didn’t know that. A lot is made of hereditary psychological problems in his family. Food for thought.
Gregory had what was (and may still be) known as “gender dysphoria.” He would fluctuate most of his life between male and female identities. (While fathering eight children in the process, I might add.)
I wonder if the doc gets into his war injuries. Perhaps I have this wrong, but I thought he took shrapnel from a mine in his thighs, and possibly his groin. Armchair psychologist that I am, I’ve wondered if his hyper-masculinity was to compensate for some injuries down there …
The main character in The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes, was rendered impotent by a war wound. Hemingway, on the other hand, fathered three children after his own injuries so it appears he avoided the same fate, albeit narrowly.
Yeah, I know that. Always wondered if he wrote that as a bit of a “what if …”God, what a beautiful bitter pill of a book that one is.
If ya gon’ be impotent, betta dress impo’tant!
I don’t think the theory is he was rendered impotent or anything – just that his injuries left him with a lifelong sense of his masculinity as a fragile, vulnerable, ephemeral thing, and thus he over-compensated by trying to embody this ideal of total masculinity and machismo.
I can see that. I’m reminded of his short story, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” in which the protagonist has his manhood called into question (verbally and physically), and attempts to compensate for it in the story’s climax.
It’s covered in the first hour. 227 shrapnel wounds to the leg, from a mortar shell that killed one soldier and blew the legs of another, and the first of many concussions. Apparently he describes a near death experience at the time, to paraphrase “My soul or something was pulled from my body like a silk handkerchief pulled out of a pocket by the corner, floated around and then returned to my body.”
Yes I agree his gender identity is a fascinating area for exploration. He reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton (who Burns also profiled in a documentary). Benton was hyper masculine, always getting into fistfights, drinking heavily, exuding machismo, to the extent that it truly seemed like he was compensating for…something. Because when you look at his paintings, especially how he renders the male form, there is an undeniable homoeroticism. And then there were all those “sketching” trips into the wilderness he’d take with younger male proteges, that would last weeks.
Well. While we’re at it, John Ford.
Hmmmmm that’s a good question. The early 1900s was full of those hyper masculine icons. Benton, Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt. For years I’ve never heard any suggestions that this may have been compensation for something or a smokescreen of a type. From the press junkets I’ve learned Hemingway apparently liked to go by female names when with his wives. Boy that opens up an interesting line of questions.
This has got to be one of the first documentaries about a major figure to approach the gender identity concept. Modern times.
All I know is that Ernest Hemingway would have made a terrible waiter.
…Ernest Hemingway would have made a terrible waiter…Really? Seems to me he’s rattle off the specials quickly and succinctly, get your drinks to you damn quick, and get your order right. The kitchen would fear violence from him, so your order would go to the front of the pass, with extra sauce.Of course, he might try to fuck your wife. Or perhaps your son, as this new film seems to indicate.
“Excuse me, waiter, I ordered a martini. This appears to be in a pint glass.”“That’s a goddamn proper martini.”
“Excuse me, waiter, I ordered a martini. This appears to be in a pint glass.”“Yes.”
“Que?”-Ernest Hemingway, as portrayed by Manuel. “You’ll have to excuse the waiter, he’s been drinking in Barcelona.”
“…he’s been drinking in Barcelona…”On my first trip to Barcelona many years ago, I made a point to visit Bar Marsella, a drinking establishment favored by Hemingway. The place was scheduled to open at 11 PM…and they were late.There was a place next door that apparently banked on the fact that the Hemingway haunt always opened late, and the cornerstone of their business was enabling Americans seeking to Drink Where Papa Drank engage in pregame activities.
No sarcasm, that is a cool story. My husband and I took a cruise to Key West and the Bahamas back in ‘09, but we never got to see the Hemingway house. I’d love to go back someday to see it (though that will most likely not happen for a long time, being a parent and all).
Hey, kids love the polydactyl cats at the Hemingway house in Key West!
“This is just a pint glass of Scotch.”
“Excuse me, waiter, there’s a cat in my soup!”
I never met a terrible writer who wasn’t obsessed with Hemingway.
So, is the author dead? Are we trying to resurrect them? What’s going on here, folks?
Just in time for Easter, yes.
Given all the new discoveries being made about the effects of repeated blows to the head, vis a vis pro football players, I wonder if similar TBIs could in part explain Hemingway’s increasingly erratic behavior. On top of the many, many fistfights he had, he suffered two very, very serious head injuries in as many days while in Africa, both stemming from plane crashes. I’d be amazed if he DIDN’T have a pretty advanced case of CTE by the end of his life.
That’s a really good point.
See also: Canadian pro-wrestler Chris Benoit, only to a far more disturbing extent.
Oh yes, very much so. An excellent comparison.
Seeing him win the title and hug his best friend in the ring was one of my favorite memories as a fan. It’s a shame that that moment has been deleted. It took up until March of last year before I could watch wrestling again.
If you want to have an uncomplicated love of a certain artist’s work, learn as little as possible about that artist. They will all disappoint you, every last one.
Except for Bob Ross.
And Raffi. Less documentaries about Hemingway, more documentaries about Bob Ross and Raffi!
…a wartime bystander…Uh, no. The dude volunteered as an ambulance driver before the US entered the scrum, and helped drag both the living and the dead off of battlefields. He then got his ass blown up in a mortar attack.He may not have brandished a gun during the conflict, but “bystander” is hardly an accurate description.
Was his ass ok?
He seems like a man who, having witnessed extreme violence, developed a philosophy of live and, particularly, violence. Like most philosophies, it was absolutely batshit in practice.
Talent doesn’t atone or excuse. It sometimes shows glimmers of who a man or woman could have been.
F. Scott Fitzgerald rules. Hemingway? Not so much. That said, I am looking forward to Ken Burns’ upcoming 11-hour documentary on the history of Electric Football.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda are buried in Rockville, MD, a somewhat nondescript Washington, DC suburb whose only other claim to fame is that it was referenced in an R.E.M. song.
And that you shouldn’t go back there.
Foosball. A Ken Burns film.
And somehow the late Shelby Foote is involved.
Ya’ll know the great Foosball war of 1905 was a failure of communications. A little owl sat there and watched the whole battle. It really made Nathan Bedford Forrests grandson homesick. Also if I was alive back then I would have proudly fought for the boys in red.
Foosball is all mixed in with tobacco juice, and a hardy feeling amongst the fans, joshing one another. It’s a great sport, that one.
From the auteur who brought you Curling: A Closer Look REDUX
“I been looking in the wrong place all this time?!”
“he served as a spy for both the American and Soviet governments, although he only divulged secrets to one side”Which one?!
Also, wouldn’t that mean he only really served as a spy for that one side?
Was he Control, or Tony?
And how do you spy for any side without providing them with any information?
What kind of “bystander” drives an ambulance at the front line and is severely wounded by enemy fire? What a bizarre description.
If you were at or anywhere near the front lines, you couldn’t be labeled a bystander. A witness, sure.
a wartime bystander who co-opted the violence and trauma of the Great War to make a name for himself as a writerUh, what? He volunteered to serve in the war, survived multiple bombardments, and was badly wounded not once but SEVERAL times while on duty.I don’t see how that makes him a “bystander” ffs, especially when the bleak, dry tone he used in books like A Farewell to Arms was lauded PRECISELY because of how accurately it captured the wartime experience, you know, the one he “co-opted” while he was literally writing news articles from the front lines.
So how does it end? Whatever happened to this Hemingway guy anyways?
His style really suited short stories. His story about a guy going fly fishing is somehow electrifying and haunting. And I hate fishing
I once picked up a Cliff’s notes about one of his novels. First, it was probably a longer and more involved read than the novel itself. Second, the intro to the book noted that, 30 years prior, any analysis of his work would probably talk about how what an incredible, groundbreaking writer Hemingway was. But since then he had fallen out of fashion amongst modern novelists and critics, and was thus due for rediscovery and reappraisal. That was written in the 1960’s.Point being, labeling Hemingway as out of style or overrated has been in style for a fairly long time. Probably even longer than he was an active writer. And yet, his detractors come and go but we keep on reading and talking about Hemingway.
Yeah, the thing about a lot of new “hot takes” is that they aren’t particularly new. It’s the same thing with Freud — people keep writing that his stuff wasn’t particularly scientific and reflected his hangups more than his patients’ as if this was new information. He was already losing influence in psychiatry while he was alive for exactly this reason
Damn straight. And yet sometimes it’s the same people in both categories, the long-haulers, and not just the durned kids. A few years back I was browsing the shelves and realized that Frederick Crews had somehow written *yet another* book about how awful Freud was and how utterly discardable his work should be. (Then again, this is a guy who was so obsessed with “elevating” literary criticism to the realm of scientific objectivity that he initially jumped on the bandwagon of psychoanalytic criticism, only to spectacularly jump off… He wrote this essay once about how much he “dreaded” teaching his impressionable young charges the fact that Yeats was (…shudders…) an occultist…)It’s almost enough to make you think the guy might have, you know, Daddy Issues…Like someone said above, canons should be added to, and argued about, and their mechanics should be critically discussed. But they shouldn’t be willfully subtracted from, other than because people just lose interest for a while. And when they do, maybe they find it again, maybe not. Freud hasn’t stuck around because he was scientifically rigorous (as much as Freud would have wanted you to think so). He’s hung around because his ideas are compelling in the same way that good fiction is compelling. Love your handle, by the way. Been gradually working my way through “Love and Sleep” on and off for the past while…
a wartime bystander who co-opted the violence and trauma of the Great War to make a name for himself as a writer. I mean, the guy was a frontline ambulance driver who was wounded in action. Criticise the guy’s personality, beliefs and writing all you want, but trying to act like he was some kind of wartime poseur is really just starting to get a bit petty.