Sunday 25 March 2012

Of Marlins and Men


When I first visited Floridita, a watering hole at the beginning of old Havana, one corner of the bar was chained off in tribute to an American writer. It was allegedly the spot where Ernest Hemingway quaffed his daily daiquiri when he was in town. Whether he sat on that lonely stool or not, I thought it a restrained and tasteful gesture. The next time I went the chain and the stool were gone. In its place was grotesque larger than life figure of Hemingway propping up the bar!

It’s now over fifty years since the real larger than life figure took his own life. I have mixed feelings about the man and his work. When he was good he was very very good, and when he was bad he was awful. I was seventeen when I first came across him in The Old Man and the Sea, a wonderful story of transcendent values, simple in its beauty, the tightness of its narrative and the economy of prose. For me it had almost mythological quality.

Later, at university, I ploughed through his other work, delighted at some points, acutely disappointed at others. It’s perfectly obvious that such novels as Across the River and into the Trees and the posthumous Islands in the Stream would never have been published if they had not come with the Hemingway label. But - along with The Old Man and the Sea - A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and To Have and Have Not will stand as classics of English literature. So, too, will Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises for introducing the world to a new, more rigorous prose style, though it’s a novel that really did not engage me emotionally. Overall I think that Hemingway did for twentieth century American literature what Mark Twain did for the nineteenth.

His was a truly remarkable life, full of incident and adventure. In a way he became his work and his work became him. There were good and bad things in this; good in that his writing is often imbued with an immediacy and authenticity; bad in that, as time went by, he had to live up to a macho myth, as bombastic as that figure in Floridita. I think in the end it’s a myth that pursued him to death.

Still, for all his limitations, I admire him as a man, as a hunter and as a writer, largely free of cant and dissimulation. There is so much to envy in a talent that was in the right place at just the right time - Paris just after the First World War, where he was befriended by Gertrude Stein and met such architects of twentieth century culture as Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. I read a biography of Hemingway a few years ago – the name of the author escapes me - and was amazed by the amount of incident he managed to crowd in while still writing! Incident, love, life and travel, are all there, including four marriages.

But while there was a huge expansiveness, paradoxically caught in The Old Man and the Sea, a tale of a man and a fish, there is also a narrowness, the narrowness of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which, for all of its value as a work of literature, reduces the great tragedy of the Spanish Civil War to a mere backdrop, a setting for testing the moral courage of Robert Jordan, the novel’s American protagonist. Send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for me!

It’s this narrowness that caught up with the man, who began to write in a sort of autobiographical fashion, his heroes really just being dimensions of his own personality and acquired mythos. The buccaneering Harry Morgan of To Have and Have Not is tolerable and believable; the figure of Colonel Richard Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees is a laughable parody.

In general there is a boy’s own quality to his work that is now largely out of sympathy with the times. I like hunting, I’m a hunter, but even for me Hemingway’s blood lust seems excessive. I got no pleasure at all from Death in the Afternoon, his homage to Spanish bullfighters. And as for the female figures in his books, they are also there to be hunted, for me mostly unconvincing appendages, trophies on a wall!

But he was a man for his time, a pathfinder in a unique American tradition. On my own path, I followed him through the tourist traps of Havana, even staying on my latter trips in the atmospheric and idiosyncratic Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he lodged in the 1930s before he acquired his Cuban home. His room, number 511, is preserved as a museum. I stood there, the sun shining through the window, looking at his typewriter and thinking of marlins and of men.

21 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Right on the first point, Anthony; wrong on the second! His politics were uniquely American. If you ever read For Whom the Bell Tolls the message offers very little comfort to the communists.

      Delete
    2. Left tilt "TO Have and Have Not" a confirmed view of his support of the loyalists in the Spanish civil war. He picked the wrong side twice and shot himself in the head as have England and France.

      Delete
    3. True, and he made a film on their behalf. But George Orwell also supported the loyalists and he was possibly the man who did more than any other to expose the lie of communism. It's wrong to assume that the loyalist cause was all communist, though they were busy manipulating things in the background. That biography I read on Hemingway described his politics, if I remember correctly, as mid-West Republican.

      Delete
  2. My wife grew up in Ketchum, Idaho. She and her family knew Hemingway and his wife, Mary, well. The morning Hemingway died, my late father-in-law was one of the first people Mary called for help.

    Literary fans and researchers continued to pester Fath with questions until he died a few years ago. I'm not sure they particularly liked his insights into Hemingway's personality. He could be blunt.

    I don't think there is any secret that the writer's family has a history of mental instability. I have sometimes thought that evidence of that instability has been mistaken for originality. I don't particularly like his writing, or his preoccupations, so I may be an unreliable judge of its worth.

    I prefer Jack London and Dashiell Hammett.

    You should visit Ketchum some time. It's still a very nice town, though it has changed a lot since the 1950s. The fishing is still good, though the shooting is not what it was. The skiing is still first rate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've never skiied in the States; in fact, I've never skiied outside Europe! Thanks for that recommendation, Calvin; I may very well take it up.

      How absolutely fascinating that your wife new the Hemingways. Yes, I had the impression from the biography that I read that he could be woundingly direct in his manner, especially in later life. I admire London, too (I've never read Hammett), though, like Hemingway, in parts.

      Delete
  3. I have mixed feelings about the man and his work. When he was good he was very very good, and when he was bad he was awful.

    Could almost have been a description of me.

    He was larger than life and they don't come around too often. I think of Ian Botham in this way, Mike Tyson. Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't ignore 'em.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A good summary of an extraordinary life and a remarkable, Ana. I often feel that people are apt to judge Hemingway more harshly than they do others. His writing reaches summits way beyond most writers so I think he is allowed a few duds.

    I especially like the anecdotes in the posthumously published, A Moveable Feast:

    "But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason."

    -Ernest Hemingway, "People of the Seine," A Moveable Feast.

    Like you I have also encountered the ghost of Hemingway although in Spain rather than Cuba. I spent some time in Rhonda.

    Whilst standing in the centre of the oldest bullring in Spain it was not too difficult to imagine an animated Hemingway.

    What I like most about his writing is not only what he leaves out - Hemingway is no slave to adjectives - but that ability to craft a story so that the meaning of it is not fully understood until the final sentence. Not many writers can do that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "...an extraordinary and remarkable life...." is what I meant to write :-)

      Delete
    2. Nobby, he crafted a style unique to himself Others have tried to imitate with very little success. Yes, I stood in that same bullring. The journey up to the town, I confess, was a bit of an ordeal. :-)

      Delete
  5. Congrats on nice Blog
    see my blog as well, :)
    http://internationalschoolofinternetmarketing.com/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Loved the post, Ana, but don't have time to respond properly . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There is no hurry, Chris. I did not even have the time to log on yesterday. I've been enjoying our unusually summer-like weather. March days and the living is easy. :-)

      Delete
    2. . . . your daddy's rich, and your mama's good lookin' . . . I'm writing about Lady Brett Ashley, of course! ;)

      Delete
  7. Yes, the political agendas during the Spanish civil war were complicated beyond just Communists vs Fascists.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ana a salutory post about a great and uneven writer. I recommend to you A Movable Feast.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Richard. Yes, I read that also; very good, if a little unfair to my namesake. :-)

      Delete