by Michael Maiello

SPECIAL FOR FAST POP LIT’S HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

There’s a joke in the 1980 movie Airplane! as directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker set the scene, where we watch cars dropping off passengers as a man on a public address system directs drivers to color coded zones, some of which are designated for “loading and unloading only.” A woman takes the mic and contradicts him. It’s the other zone that’s for loading and unloading. The two argue. It is quickly revealed that the two are lovers, fighting over whether to have an abortion.

The joke is a riff on Ernest Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants where a man tries to convince his lover to have an abortion while they wait for a train to Madrid. It’s a classic Hemingway set-up, where the story hides beneath the surface of what’s going on. People, Hemingway tells us, can rarely face up to what they are doing or to their own circumstances. The stories we tell each other are the stories we tell ourselves. We have serious arguments with each other while avoiding the topic. We think we are strong when we are weak. We find strength in moments of our greatest vulnerability but seldom even notice it.

When you ask people about Hemingway, they are very likely to tell you that he employed a simple writing style. This is false. Paring down the descriptors and using ten dollar words sparingly is not “simple” at all. It is simple to call a man a bully. It is complicated to show that man using the boxing skills he learned at Princeton to best a young matador in a fight but, even in victory, to look like a coward when the battered bullfighter presents the ear of his prey to the woman the two were fighting over, in a public display of courtship.

We now live in a surface culture where if things aren’t said explicitly, they might as well not be said at all. We live in a culture where companies trying to sell us things say, in plain language, “we care about our customers,” as if stating an intention that you should be demonstrating with action makes it true, rather than undermines its credibility.

The Old Man and the Sea is probably the best story written in English about how you can face the world and nature with honor, strength and courage but still be met with indifference. The fisherman Santiago triumphs for a marlin that could feed him for months, only to have the carcass, which he has strapped to his boat, stripped of its meat by sharks. Santiago returns home, weary and unrewarded, but also undefeated.

Imagine if Santiago were analytic like people today. Imagine he gets home and uses a web-based service to contact a cognitive behavioral therapist and whines that he just cannot get ahead in life and that he sees the whole ordeal with the fish and the ocean and the sharks as a depressing metaphor for death. Of course, a modern therapist would not understand this and might suggest that Santiago should stop repeating patterns that lead to disappointment by finding some other way to get food or, at least, by fishing for smaller catches, closer to shore.

We don’t want Santiago to be so explicit about what he does and why because it undermines him and his dignity (and ours, too). We don’t want him to find an easier, practical solution to his poverty. We want him to rebuild his courage and to try again, even if the ocean will not care whether he wins or loses. But we definitely don’t want Hemingway to say that explicitly.

We want to feel that for ourselves, by reading and learning. Hemingway is not giving us the fleeting thrill of a twist ending, as if we are drunk at a magician’s show. He’s giving us a chance to more deeply understand the world by engaging with a story that is about more than the words on the page. 

Hemingway’s methods are not the only modernist techniques that work, by the way. In T.S. Eliot you’ll find a similar economy but the types of words used are very different. Eliot is fine with you not knowing the words he has chosen. He is okay with making you study. With Hemingway, you can understand every word on the page and still miss the point — it’s the opposite of advertising or contemporary journalism.

So, yes, let’s celebrate Hemingway, literary modernism, and the world beneath the worlds that we seem to have lost sight of.

KEEP UP on what Michael’s up to, here. (His Substack, Middlebrow Musings, is one of the best out there.)