American literature

Why Hemingway Matters

HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

TODAY it takes historical perspective to realize Ernest Hemingway was the most important literary modernist of the 20th Century. Whoever’s #2 isn’t close.

Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound were there before him– huge influences on his work. It took Ernest Hemingway to use their insights and innovations to create truly compelling new work which engaged the greater reading public. If experimentation is just for a tiny circle of aficionados, what’s the point?

What were the modernist insights?

One of them surely was that less is more. As with impressionist painting, you don’t need to describe every minute aspect of a scene or event. A few striking details is enough. Our brains fill in the rest. We need some description of course– but it needs to be artfully handled.

Several studies show, for instance, that presenting too many choices causes the brain to tune out. (Here’s one article about it.)

YET what do we get from, say, a Don Delillo? An endless recitation of data. The ethos of this age. Data! And ever more of it. Sentences piled upon sentences. Information and more information. This isn’t art, but the absence of art.

(Something’s loaded down alright, and I kinda think it’s the narrative.)

AS his writing style engaged the public, Ernest Hemingway engaged the world– via wars, traveling, hunting, fishing, boxing, partying– and in the process created the classic Hemingway persona.

(photo c/o cooperhemingway.com)

He became that most horrific of literary animals– a celebrity! (Gasps from the status quo intellectual crowd.) For a brief period of time, writers mattered. Literature mattered– was at the center of society and the world, as it clearly isn’t now.

-Karl Wenclas

7 Questions Every Literary Historian Should Be Able to Answer

SEVEN LITERARY QUESTIONS

1.) Who was the most influential post-World War II American novelist?

2.) Which famed literary publication was founded with Random House money as a corporate ad vehicle during a major newspaper strike?

3.) Which canonical author’s cousin headed a Cold War CIA-front arts organization designed to steer literature into safe directions?

4.) Which innovative writer was once left by American soldiers in a cage on an airport tarmac in the hot sun, for hours?

5.) Which American populist novelist, forerunner of the Beats, went from being an acclaimed author to writing screenplays for low-budget monster movies?

6.) Which literary critic, after writing a scathing article in the Atlantic about the pretentiousness of American literary fiction, received a torrent of vitriol and denunciations from book reviewers, novelists, and corporate publishing power brokers? (The person currently lives in South Korea.)

7.) Which over-the-top pulp novel was praised by both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud for exploring realms of the unconscious?

(Please give your answers below.)

Finding New Influences

HOW TO REVIVE AN ART

Winston Churchill, one of the first politicians to see the threat posed by an Austrian crackpot named Adolf, once said something to the effect that he could see farther into the future, because he looked further back into the past.

Following that strategy, searching for new influences and sources, I’ve been studying American cultural history of past decades. Current one examined: the 1930’s.

Which has led me to a uniquely overlooked novel: City for Conquest by Aben Kandel. A throwback to when novels were large of experience and passion, and attempted to encompass the world. Were critical standards different from what they are now (critics today favor inward-looking tomes of refined language), it might be considered one of the nation’s great novels, as it portrays the reality of America and its growth as well as any novel ever has. Instead, though, to know about the work, you have to find out about it by accident, inevitably by encountering the minimalist-by-comparison movie version. For the gatekeepers of “Literature-with-a-capital-L,” the novel might not be politically incorrect, but it’s stylistically unacceptable. Too raw. Too real.

The book is described in the Introduction to its latest printing as “vivid, overwrought, and melodramatic.”

My reaction: Awesome! This is exactly what the new novel will need to be to grab the attention of the unwary in this tumultuous, ultra-noisy civilization– every bit as noisy today near the end of 2023 as the way Kandel described it in 1937. I’m nine chapters into the book and it doesn’t disappoint. Its strengths adeptly utilized can be part of an upcoming and very necessary Culture Shock provided by never-before-seen kinds of literary products able to stand a once-great but currently-stagnant art form on its head.

Don’t bet against it.

-Karl Wenclas