New Pop Lit’s Hemingway Festival

Which Hemingway?

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

How Ernest Hemingway Almost Got Us Beyond the Obvious

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.)

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