Hemingway

A lot of talk about Ernest Hemingway in the media lately, because of the Ken Burns documentary on him. I'm not planning on watching this. Burns's mannered and portentous style has turned me off, and caused me to turn him off, on subjects I'm a lot more interested in than Hemingway.

My experience in reading Hemingway consists entirely of two high-school assignments, which left me with an intense desire not to repeat the experience. I think my basic problem with Hemingway may be summed up in a quote from C.S. Lewis, who once wrote of the Inklings that "the problems of narrative as such - seldom heard of in modern critical writings - were constantly before our minds." Hemingway was writing for those critics who did not have the problems of narrative before their minds. In his stories, at least the ones I read, nothing happened.

One story we read was called The Old Man and the Sea. It concerns an old man who goes out fishing on the ocean, catches a really big fish, and ties it to the back of his boat. Over the course of the apparently several days it takes him to get home, sharks eat the entire fish. It seems to be telling us of the utter pointlessness and futility of life, and I couldn't agree more: not that life is pointless and futile, but that reading Hemingway is.

In another class, we read a few Nick Adams stories. Our assignment was to rewrite one of the stories from a different character's narrative perspective. In keeping with what seemed to be the spirit of the originals, I attempted to write a story in which absolutely nothing happened. I got an A. That told me a lot.

Most of the articles on Hemingway compare him to Faulkner - whom they consider a lot more influential on writing today - and whom I also bounced off of, though not in class where he was never brought up. Curiously, none of them mention the writer who seemed inseparably paired with Hemingway back when I was encountering them, and that was John Steinbeck. I found them highly contrasting. Steinbeck I liked. Yes, some of his early work was absurdly symbolic, and the later sloppy and garrulous, but he hit a sweet spot in the 1930s. Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, The Red Pony, and the unjustly forgotten In Dubious Battle all captivated me, and I read them of my own volition with pleasure. Isn't that what a writer should hope to accomplish in readers?