By Patrick J. Walsh.
Ernest Hemingway may well be the most famous novelist of the twentieth century. A career journalist, he knew how to manufacture a public persona of himself as a sportsman, hunter, hard drinker, globe-trotter, sexually promiscuous “He-Man”— appealing to the restless “Jazz Age.” Hemingway kept his escapades continually in the news.
Born 127 years ago on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway began writing as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. The Star’s stylebook urged reporters to construct short sentences and short paragraphs with fewer adjectives in an effort toward intelligibility for the mass man. Hemingway strove “to strip language clean, lay it bare down to the bone.”
Hemingway’s prose contains little figurative language, such as metaphors or similes. It is utilitarian, not imaginative, blandly prosaic, journalistic—the language of the proletariat. His simple sentences and small word repetition create mood through reiteration. This carefully crafted technique creates a rhythmic, hypnotic flow that deadens thought.
Gertrude Stein advocated this literary style of word repetition and sounds over thought. Hemingway used words to invoke sensate life, emotion, and moods rather than the intellect. I find his style monotonous and intellectually dissatisfying.
The art of writing as known to the great Masters is more than sounds, as words have meaning and approach something beyond themselves, involving a transcendent mystery piercing the encompassing fog of human existence—a level to which Hemingway never ascended. But we are not prevented from praying for his repose. Everyone has their own favorite Hemingway novel. I was partial to The Sun Also Rises, published one hundred years ago this October.
The novel begins in Paris, narrating a group of American and British expatriates on a Spanish vacation. It ends two weeks later in Paris “just as the sun rises and hastens to the place where it arose,” one of the book’s epigraphs. The other epigraph is from Gertrude Stein, summing up post-WWI youth as “a lost generation.” Both epigraphs furnish a good summary of the novel and of Hemingway’s bleak worldview.
Hemingway’s characters in this novel are restless figures lounging about in hotels and cafes, eating, moving from one place to another and one love affair to another, consuming large quantities of alcohol of various mixtures, and livened up by violence.
In college I couldn’t fathom why academia and the literary critics referred to Hemingway characters as heroes or admirable. Allegedly they followed some kind of code. The characters live in a meaningless universe. Hemingway seems to believe that what little meaning there is in the world can be imposed on it by man. I saw nothing heroic in this. Perhaps Pedro Romero, the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, and Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls are exceptions.
Other critics try to lift Hemingway to a higher plane, arguing that he is not an advocate of nihilism. But I believe Hemingway is an unwitting part of the spiritual restlessness plaguing modern secular society. His characters never emerge from the slough of despond.
Hemingway characters are emotive, never intellectually examining or seriously discussing anything. Bill, a comical wiseacre in The Sun Also Rises, asks, “Jake, are you really a Catholic?” Jake answers “Technically.” Bill says, “What does that mean?” Jake answers, “I don’t know.”
T.S. Eliot dismissed Hemingway’s work as “literary barbarism,” writing that “Hemingway seems to deny that human beings have any obligation to think or to feel any but the most elementary emotions or to express themselves in anything but stuttering repetitions of inanities.”
Wyndham Lewis, great painter, novelist, and critic, likewise pointed out in his great 1934 work, Men Without Art, that Hemingway’s works, “scarcely contain a figure who is not in some way futile, clovenlike passive and above all purposeless.” Furthermore, “[h]is world of men and women (in violent action certainly) is completely empty of will.” They, “never from first to last betrays a spark of intelligence.” He went on to say that Hemingway was “a queerly sensitive village idiot of few words and fewer ideas.” Lewis said his writing constitutes “baby talk” taught to him by Gertrude Stein. “The sort of first-person singular that Hemingway invariably makes is a dull witted, bovine, mono-syllablic simpleton. This burlesque first person singular behaves like a moronesque version of his brilliant author. He steins up and down the world with a big lustreless ruminitory orbs of a Picasso doll woman.”
After reading this review of Wyndham Lewis at the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris, Hemingway, in a fury, punched a vase of tulips across the room.
Lewis continued, “There is no serious writer who stands higher in Anglo-Saxony today than does Ernest Hemingway—then we are by the same token saying something very definitive about that civilization.” Wyndham Lewis challenged the reader, “Take up any book of his again, and open it at random: you will find a page of stuff that is considered in isolation valueless as writing.” Wyndham Lewis believed his time was out of joint and that the artist had a responsibility to think his way to the truth of things and not be part of the invading disorder.
In A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933), Hemingway composed a Pater Noster of his belief:
It was all nothing and a man was nothing too… Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
Flannery O’Connor saw another reality beyond the despair of nada. She described nada, or nothingness, as the reality of evil. Unlike Hemingway, she faced life head-on, believing that periods of emptiness in human existence are a mystery to be courageously endured.
Robert Penn Warren saw Hemingway as an anti-intellectual whose world is, “God abandoned the world of Nature as all…. with nothing at its center.” Like PBS’s science programming propagating that the universe is chaos, not a cosmos. Warren added, “Hemingway linked ‘happiness,’ a notion traditionally connected with a complicated state of being, with a set of merely agreeable sensations.” Man is thus reduced from the classical and Christian level to a mere sensory beast, a mass man.
Hemingway is blind to the preternatural dimension of reality. Nothing in Hemingway speaks to human expectations or answers our deepest human desires—creatures ill at ease in time and seeking the eternal. In Hemingway there is no wonder or awe toward creation. No intuition of a harmony or mystery enveloping life is sought by the greatest artists. Hemingway advocates a closed cosmology of self.
Hemingway’s philosophy of life became more untenable and his drinking increased. He became a pantomime of his own publicity. Max Eastman saw through Hemingway’s tough-guy image as false and a pose of a man living in fear. A world nomad, often photographed shirtless and ever smiling like a Hollywood film star. The image became the man.
The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge spotted him in Paris during the city’s liberation in WWII. Hemingway was drunk, posing for photographers. Muggeridge’s beautiful writing style violates every prose principle Hemingway advocates.
Hand grenades like monstrous beads—which everyone hoped had been immobilized, since, as he lurched about one might so easily have gone off. Occasionally he doubled up his fist for a fight, fist clenching and beating the air; the beard surrounding the face like an artist’s shading making it nebulous, indefinite. Looking at him, there was some comparison I was reaching after; someone he closely resembled. Then I remembered; it was the beard which gave me the clue—of course, Walt Whitman. A similar ribald figure, boozy preoccupied with image rather than reality. Music in muzac, speed in a speedometer, beauty in cosmetics: virility in the pederastic posturings of a Whitman and strength in a Hemingway’s fists beating the air—these two pre-eminently the dreamers and the dream.
Hemingway’s continual drinking led to increased paranoia, attempted suicide, and mental illness. Committed to the Mayo Clinic several times; after release in July 1961, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Hemingway, I find, is a spender of our spiritual patrimony, tearing down ideals, moving toward emptiness and futility. He built up a tremendous reputation in his era, but will not be respectfully regarded in the future, and time will deal savagely with him.
Allen Tate called him a “complete son of a bitch” because Hemingway was repeatedly ungracious and nasty toward contemporary writers who helped him. He turned on Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and even his great mentor Gertrude Stein. So perhaps it is a retributive justice to allow a Hemingway contemporary the last word.
There is a wonderfully satirical scene in Farewell My Lovely, a 1940 novel by Raymond Chandler, where private detective Philip Marlowe, the book’s hero, is repeatedly punched in the stomach and head to get information out of him. Marlowe’s only answer after each punch is to call his assailant “Hemingway.” He repeatedly says, “Ok Hemingway.”
The villain administering the beating becomes tired and worn out and in exasperation finally cries out, “This Hemingway stuff is what really has me down. Who is this Hemingway person at all?” Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe, in an astute literary observation of Hemingway’s repetitive prose style, answers, “A gag. An old, old gag. A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
Patrick J. Walsh is a writer living in Quincy, Massachusetts.
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