HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

IN ANY study and celebration of Ernest Hemingway, his life and writings, the question becomes: Which period? Which of his writings? Which stories, novels, or books are most representative of the writer, the man, the myth?

Young Hemingway burst on the scene age 26 in 1925 with his first and best novel, The Sun Also Rises, the style and sensibility fully developed thanks to an arduous apprenticeship in craft and life. Sun is the ultimate travelogue and extended drinking binge, climaxed in Pamplona, Spain when bulls, bullfighters, metaphors and under-the-surface conflicts break out amid the best descriptions of being drunk ever written. Sharp clarity of memory– at the time the style was revolutionary.

Many prefer his prior minimalist in our time/In Our Time vignettes and stories. Few readers like two very bad, often-embarrassing later novels. Two other impressively titled novels– you know them– accentuated his fame.

After ups and downs including the hazards of celebrity, and multiple spouses, Ernest pulled things together with a popular novella, The Old Man and the Sea, containing some much-denied Faulkneresque Christian imagery. For many of us, the first readable-and-compelling introduction to the guy. Led to his 1954 Nobel Prize.

Reflections on the Twenties, A Moveable Feast, is good albeit not notably better than similar excursions of score-settling by Robert McAlmon and John Glassco.

FOR ME, the apex of Hemingway’s art are two Esquire magazine short stories of the 1930s. He toys with structure in both of them: with “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” more obviously. In “The Short, Happy LIfe of Francis Macomber” the seams aren’t showing, as Hemingway artfully switches viewpoints– even stepping briefly into the head of a lion– toward building to an unsurpassed climax. The best short story ever written? The most impressive, and short of a tale by little-known Richard Connell, the most exciting. Excitement with meaning and impact– we’re never completely certain of the “Why?” of what happened.

Those two stories blew me away when I first read them– and shouldn’t that be the objective of all writing?

-K.W.

(famous Yousuf Karsh photograph)

END 2024 HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL