Hemingway in the New Millennium Suzanne Del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49484-7 — The New Hemingway Studies Edited by Suzanne del Gizzo , Kirk Curnutt Excerpt More Information introduction Hemingway in the New Millennium Suzanne del Gizzo and Kirk Curnutt A recent headline in the Dallas News book-review section makes an eye- catching case for reading a new literary biography: Ernest Hemingway: Writer, Adventurer, Jerk – And Still Fascinating1 Oddly enough, the “J” word does not appear in the actual review, suggest- ing some anonymous copy editor in the land of big oil may harbor animosity against the author of A Farewell to Arms (1929) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). But the assumption that Ernest Hemingway is an intriguing figure despite – or perhaps because of – his reputation for gladiatorial truculence is hardly limited to this particular attention- grabber. It is a commonplace throughout popular culture, as a simple Google search will attest. “Love him or hate him,” reads the lede of a representative Internet article, “Ernest Hemingway was a genius in his craft. But that doesn’t change the fact that, at times, he was an assh*le.” The title of the link – which carries a viewer to this penetrating bit of cyber- journalism, published on a website specializing in “listicles” (infotainment articles written in the form of numbered or bulleted lists) – is “11 Times Ernest Hemingway Was a Huge Jerk.”2 We need not look solely to flippant headlines or “clickbait” for this opinion; it is a mainstay of “serious” discourse, too. Another review of the same biography assessed by the Dallas News attributes the cultural fixation with Hemingway to his polarities: he “suffered, experiencing pain almost in the same measure that he experienced pleasure. He was a blessed man – he was a poor soul. He was a brilliant writer – he was a fool. He was magnetically attractive – he was a jerk.”3 A discussion of another recent book, on the backstory of The Sun Also Rises (1926), describes the writer as “brilliant and vicious, arrogant and ambitious, an obsequious charmer and a jerk of the highest order.”4 Still elsewhere, a legendary science-fiction 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49484-7 — The New Hemingway Studies Edited by Suzanne del Gizzo , Kirk Curnutt Excerpt More Information 2 suzanne del gizzo and kirk curnutt writer expresses mixed feelings toward the icon during a podcast. “You don’t want to be a jerk,” says Joe Haldeman of The Forever War (1974) fame, offering up-and-coming writers career advice. “Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.”5 Haldeman, it should be added, is the author of the clever (and fun) 1990 novel The Hemingway Hoax and has been a regular attendee at Hemingway Society meetings for nearly forty years. Yet not everyone thinks Hemingway is “not [their] kind of person.” In a beautiful 2002 tribute, Linda Patterson Miller celebrates her readerly “love affair with the father of modern American prose.” Toying with erotic language, she describes how both she and a scholarly generation of female peers feel nary a shiver of shame at devoting their careers to a figure stereotyped as a feminist bane. Rather, she and her cohort take deep pleasure in “collectively celebrat[ing] his ‘muscular’ prose that allows for a seductive rendering of life’s emotional truths.”6 Noting how men and women alike who knew the author were drawn to his “animal magnetism,” Miller describes how she sometimes finds herself gazing at the photo she hangs on her office wall, an image of the writer as a young man in Paris “where it all began”: [He] looks handsome, wise, his hair parted slightly off center. How did he ever come to know what he knew, I wonder, as I look into his eyes that stare into the room, into me? His presence fills the room. Soon, one of my students comes for her conference clutching her composition [assignment] and sitting down nervously. When she looks up, she stops midsentence. “Wow! Who is that?” she asks, looking at Hemingway, who now seems to smile knowingly. “That’s Ernest Hemingway,” I say. “He’s really some- thing, isn’t he?” For the rest of the afternoon, as more students file in and out, Hemingway stays with me. I cannot shake him. (15) Such unabashedly romantic panegyrics to writers and their work have become something of a genre over the past twenty years – and men do write them tastefully, too, about the women writers they passionately admire, as William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (2011) demonstrates. But the tributes from women scholars to Hemingway have proved important for reminding those not in the know that, first, not all of his fans are sexagenarian men who look “like stage- three Hemingways with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd cites biographer © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49484-7 — The New Hemingway Studies Edited by Suzanne del Gizzo , Kirk Curnutt Excerpt More Information Hemingway in the New Millennium 3 Gioia Diliberto describing the audience that showed up to book signings in 1992 when she published her life of the first Mrs. Hemingway, Hadley Richardson.7 More importantly, these encomia, whether by women or men, remind us of qualities Hemingway exuded that are often overshadowed by the brasher personality traits that get him labeled a “jerk.” Valerie Hemingway, who worked as the writer’s personal secretary in 1959–1960 and later married his youngest son, Gregory, has spent much of the past two decades arguing that the writer’s heightened capacity to maximize experience and wring enjoyment from life was the source of his overpowering charm. Both in her memoir Running with the Bulls: My Life with the Hemingways (2004) and in countless presentations, interviews, and courses she teaches, she emphasizes the convivial over the contentious and competitive, celebrating the sway of his gusto and his ability to turn any excursion into an irresistible adventure. “I’ve never met someone who not only enjoyed life but who understood,” she typically testifies. “Being with him was a heightening of the senses. It was only after he [died] that I realized how extraordinary my experience had been.”8 Hemingway’sappealcrossesallkindsoflines.SenatorJohnMcCain and President Barack Obama both cited For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)as a favorite book, despite their differences on the 2008 presidential cam- paign trail. When McCain succumbed to brain cancer in August 2018,his significance for American civic life was interpreted, strikingly, as much through his deep investment in Hemingway’svaluesasthroughtheseven years of torture that the former fighter pilot endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. For Whom the Bell Tolls provided eulogists, including Obama, a means of dramatizing service and sacrifice. “Honor. It is to some ears an outdated word,” begins a McCain obituary on the public- affairs website Politico. “Like his favorite author Ernest Hemingway, McCain embodies an older America where the concept of honor was concrete – where both physical courage and moral courage were the qualities admired above all others.”9 Miller, meanwhile, concludes her essay quoting the late Honoria Murphy Donnelly, daughter of Gerald and Sara Murphy, remembering the warmth of the man who visited her younger brother as he battled tuberculosis in an Adirondack sanitarium: “Hemingway was the most gentle and loveliest man I have ever known. When he came to see Patrick as he lay dying, Hemingway wept openly. It was the first time I had ever seen a grown man cry” (22). Tears and tenderness, it may not need saying, are emotions rarely associated with jerks. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49484-7 — The New Hemingway Studies Edited by Suzanne del Gizzo , Kirk Curnutt Excerpt More Information 4 suzanne del gizzo and kirk curnutt As these examples demonstrate, Ernest Hemingway incites extreme reactions sixty years after his suicide. The contradictory nature of these responses suggests that, for all the ink spilt analyzing him, we cannot quite get a bead on him. He remains elusive in a way that few authors do, despite the prodigious parodies and caricatures that, on the surface, can render him cartoonishly simple. Among other American literary giants, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Kerouac may remain as equally omnipresent in the popular culture, but the interest they attract is not concerned with judging what type of person –“assh*le” or arresting, infectious bon vivant – they were. Perhaps best illustrating the point is how Hemingway is narratologically framed in the near constant stream of movies, novels, and plays that have portrayed him throughout the past two decades. In Paula McLain’s novels The Paris Wife (2011) and Love and Ruin (2018), wives one and three (Hadley Richardson and Martha Gellhorn) respectively gain confidence in their own senses of self by coming to grips with various Hemingway betrayals and emerging from his immense shadow. In Erika Robuck’s Hemingway’s Girl (2012), a fictional protagonist, a maid working in Hemingway’s Key West house in 1935 on the eve of the deadly Labor Day hurricane, discovers her moral sensibility through a dangerous infa- tuation with the author.