“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction,” Ernest Hemingway says in the preface to A Moveable Feast, the collection of his notes from the Paris years. “But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”
Like nearly everyone in my generation, I read The Old Man and the Sea in high school. And hated it. Yeah, I got the metaphor. But I still hated it.
A few years later, I was six months from college graduation, and was spending the summer on campus, working at the newspaper and serving as a freshman orientation staffer. I signed up for a course on Hemingway because a friend was taking it.
Then I got sucked in. For life. But then, you probably guessed that, given my propensity to write simple and spare.
Yes, there’s some bad Hemingway. Downright awful, in fact. Across the River and Into the Trees definitely belongs in that category, and personally, I’d put Old Man and the Sea there too.
And then there’s the rest. I defy you to read the closing of A Moveable Feast, when Hem sees Hadley after he’s been carrying on with Pauline and knows the marriage is going all smash, without aching over his vulnerability. I defy you to find a more perfect closing line than The Sun Also Rises’ “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” I defy you to find a better set of short stories than the Nick Adams stories, in particular “The Three-Day Blow” or “A Way You’ll Never Be.”
We know so much about Hemingway, but there’s so much we’ll never know for sure, like why he blew his brains out fifty years ago today. As he wrote in that preface to A Moveable Feast, fiction and fact can sometimes blur. What our family and friends and total strangers regard as fact about us may or may not be correct. People read meaning into the things we say or write that was never there… or miss our original intent. I’m not sure it really matters. But I am sure that Ernest Hemingway and his body of work inform my writing every time I sit down to attempt to write one true sentence.
Nice tribute, Mel, to my favorite writer. We can agree to disagree on The Old Man and the Sea. I too read it as a teenager and loved it. In fact, it’s one of my 10 stranded-on-a-desert-island books. I will admit, though, Across the River and Into the Trees was pretty bad. I think Papa would’ve been better off finishing The Garden of Eden in the late 1940s and shelving Across the River for this children and grandchildren to edit and fight over after his death.
I like The Sun Also Rises a lot. And you’re spot-on with its ending line, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, which says so much about Jake, Brett, and just about everything else that goes on in that novel. But for me, Papa’s best novel is A Farewell to Arms. We male writers are always at our creative best after we get the classic — albeit horribly trite — I-just-wanna-be-friends talk from a woman.
All bitterness aside, I have too many favorite Hemingway short stories to list. I will, however, make this point: Whenever I read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, or anything from “In Our Time” (including the vignettes) I am invaribly left with the bitterly cold feeling that writing literary fiction with my mind is like climbing Everst with the same sneakers I use to cut the grass.
Pardon my misspelling of Everest. I’ve yet to finish my first cup of coffee.
Amen to that! I’m buffing up a short story (told from a male POV; chapter from a novel) this morning for a contest, and despairing about how effortless he made it look. I do think I have one true line… but am in need of more!
Dame Fortune watched the arc of the ball as it sailed over the yellow sandy field and the players in their red caps looking up, up, watching and wondering how far it would go and would it be enough to take them to the championship or would this be the end of their Kansas City summer, the one true summer, the big show, and then the slowness ended and the ball fell suddenly, deeply, and Dame sighed, knowing what she would say to them later.
But where was the bag? Still slung over her shoulder?