HEMINGWAY RECONSIDERED
Our family recently watched the PBS Ken Burns three-part biographical
account of one of the most influential of all American writers – a man
who was idolized by many, but despised by just as many. The man was
Ernest Hemingway – hereafter referred to as “Hem.”
Among his admirers were two major groups: outdoors men and writers.
Writers admired Hem for his terse, chiseled style and his amazing
ability to convey a scene, or an emotion or a dialogue. Note this
passage from “A Farewell to Arms”: “If people bring so much courage into
this world, the world has to kill them to break them. So of course, it
kills them. The world breaks everyone, and afterword many are strong at
the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the
very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are
none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be
no special hurry.”
Hem's detractors considered him a womanizing, narcissistic,
death-obsessed purveyor of violence and immorality. Like many of my
generation, I was attracted to his actually living the dangerous life of
the soldier, the big game hunter or the adventurer. Furthermore, his
outdoor writing about fishing and hunting influenced many of the great
outdoor columnists like A. J. McClain and Lee Wulff who were my idols as
a young angler.
Certainly there was good reason for people to admire or detest Hem
according to their own values. But I find myself ambivalent about Hem. I
love his writing style and his love of nature and outdoor pursuits like
angling and hunting, but I have to say he did irreparable damage to
nearly all who were close to him. I won't go into the damage he
inflicted on all of his wives – and the fact that he brought
misery--even suicide to many in his family. But he really did me
personally a lot of damage by glamorized drinking and the loose
lifestyle of ex-patriots who hit Paris in the 30s ostensibly to follow
their art or politics, but many, like F. Scot Fitzgerald, fell victim to
alcohol, infidelity and ultimate failure. In the late 50's and 60's, one
could often sit at a college bar and hear a student next to you ordering
the kind of drinks they read about in Hem's books--drinks like Pernod
and quinine or anisette, or dark beer.
Hem also saw no reason not to fall for any strange woman he came across
– that lifestyle mirrored in countless movies, seemed to say that
cheating and adultery were perfectly okay. I can only imagine the number
of broken marriages his books probably inspired.
Hem seemed to be a trophy hunter, not only of women but of all the
then-glamorized big game animals found on his safaris. But I can't for
the life of me see how he could justify killing hippos or elephants or
the amazing cheetahs. Still, it had to take real guts to stand one's
ground against a charging lion, or even worse a cape buffalo – both
famous for killing hunters and many natives.
All in all, Hem still deserves our
appreciation for his great literary gifts: he has left us with some of
the finest books in American Literature, especially The Old Man and
the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms,
not to mention numerous brilliant
short stories.
The excellence of Hem's style is
indisputable, but the substance of many of his books is still up to
question. I've re-read The Old Man and the Sea, and Big
Two-Hearted River many times along with many of his short stories
like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,”or “Hills Like White
Elephants” but of his major novels, I'm prone to read just selected
passages which I''m convinced will forever be matchless. But the
Hemingway lifestyle was a prescription for disaster, which led him and
many others of “The Lost Generation” to despair. That life-style is
seductive but it's deadly.
Hem once pointed out that he was
most influenced by Mark Twain 's Huck Finn, but the truth is,
both Twain and Hem and Melville too, truly owed their terse, beautifully
rhythmic cadences to the prophet Isaiah, The Psalms of David and
writings of Moses and Solomon in the King James Version of the Bible –
the book, which, according to several of my best professors and my
mentor, Rufus Bellamy, did more to inspire great writing for centuries
than any other book ever written.
One need only consider what The Book of Job's last chapters did to
inspire William Blake's breath-taking engravings or Herman Melville's
timeless masterpieces, “Billy Budd” and “Moby Dick.”
When one compares the majesty of the
King James Authorized version of the Bible, to some of the “tin-eared”
modern translations, one can only lament in the words of an old country
tune, “Look what they've done to my song!” But those versions are
also now necessary to allow everyone to understand the powerful stories
of that book.
I'm told that the PBS Hem. Series can be accessed “streamed.” But not
being on line, those are “streams” I haven't fished in.
edited html update 08-15-2021
Gene
Pinkney - For the Wahpeton Daily News
