HEMINGWAY PART 1

In the January cold of 2016, I escorted my AP students to NYC to visit the Morgan Library. We then headed to Broadway for a production of Arthur Miller's Freudian melodrama A View from the Bridge. The Morgan was a reliable stop for my field trips, in that there was always an interesting exhibition, and the place was revelatory in its beauty. My students were primarily interested in making it a full-day trip, so they would have gone to a falafel stand as long as it wasn't school, but they often found themselves impressed by the glories collected by Mr.Morgan. The educator liaisons and docents were always helpful and informed.

I was especially interested in the library's latest exhibition, one forged in tandem with the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, a study of early Hemingway entitled Ernest Hemingway: Between the Wars. I had often taught The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, the Nick Adams short stories, and the African stories, so this exhibit dovetailed nicely with my curricular plans. In addition to presenting some very rare Hemingway manuscripts, the displays included correspondence between the author and many of his influences and confidantes in 1920s Paris, including Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sylvia Beach. Here is a link to the CBS Sunday Morning segment promoting the Morgan Library's exploration of the artist: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-life-and-times-of-ernest-hemingway/

The New Yorker previewed the exhibition in its "Goings On About Town": "In 1950, Ernest Hemingway told Lillian Ross, in a Profile for this magazine, “I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.” (Never mind that he published his first short story when he was in high school.) Now a museum is looking at him. On Sept. 25, the Morgan Library opens “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” an in-depth assessment of a key period in the writer’s development, from 1918, when, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Red Cross and was wounded in Italy, through his years in Paris, Key West, and Havana, to his Second World War reportage. In addition to manuscripts (the first two handwritten pages of “A Farewell to Arms” are on view), correspondence (F. Scott Fitzgerald praises “The Sun Also Rises”), first editions, and photographs, the show includes personal artifacts, like the author’s 1923 passport, above."

I took photos of many of the displayed pages of manuscripts and letters. I include some of them in this post. Below is a letter from Hemingway to his father. I have read hundreds of Hemingway's letters, and always found this letter especially poignant. Here he is trying to defend his use of realistic language as essential to finding the truth in the lives of his characters. Don't misunderstand this attempt. As much as he might have liked to pepper his dialogue with obscenities and four-letter words, Scribner's certainly wouldn't have published such language because it would have likely meant open condemnation of the author and plummeting sales. He was talking of including much less controversial language. Even so, as the end of the letter indicates, any rough language or situation was still enough to cause Hemingway's mother, Grace, to distance herself from her own son. Imagine sending your parents copies of your first book, a widely-respected collection of short stories, and having them send those copies back to you?!

There were six sections in the exhibition, divided as follows: The "Prophet", covering his high school years, World War I, Paris, Key West and Havana, World War II, and finally, An Old Hunter Talking to Gods. Nineteen-year-old Hemingway was ineligible to join the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I for medical reasons. Not accepting that decision, he signed up with the Italian Red Cross, sailed to Europe, and was seriously wounded as an ambulance driver shortly after he arrived. He famously fell in love with one of the American nurses during his recuperation, an older woman of 26 named Agnes von Kurowsky. It was Agnes who was the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. The photos below show young Hemingway recuperating in Milan, looking quite content to be nursed back to health, a photo of the young soldier and his love, and a sketch he sent home in a letter to his folks stressing the number of shrapnel wounds he received trying to save a fellow soldier who had been shot. Notice the voice bubble where he begs, "Gimme a drink!"

I often taught just page one of A Farewell to Arms in my class, saying that Hemingway left three important legacies, the least of which were his novels (though The Sun Also Rises belongs on any Top Ten list of American novels). More significant than his novels were his short stories, a number of which must be included in any compilation of great short fiction. "A Clean Well-Lighted Place", "Indian Camp", "The Big Two-Hearted River", "In Another Country", "The Killers", "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" are all essential texts. Strangely, his short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is probably the most studied in high school and college today, perhaps because it so epitomizes Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory", which he defines in Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

I would read the first page of Farewell to my students out loud and cast it up on the whiteboard for analysis. We examined the sentence structures and the repetition of short phrases connected by simple conjunctions. Polysyndeton is the name of this rhetorical device. I pointed out that there were no words that my students didn't know--that it was written at about a sixth-grade reading level. We discussed the implications of "the storm coming". Mostly, we considered the evocative imagery. We could all picture the dry, dusty march of the soldiers toward their deaths. In the repetition of short phrases, we could hear a cadence--sound not unlike that of those marching soldiers. I pointed out that prior to the 1920s, no writer's style was similar to Hemingway's. Oh, there were hints of the change in the works of Willa Cather, but there is an ocean of difference between the writing style of those in the previous period--James, Wharton, Crane, Dreiser, and London and that of Hemingway. I then put the first page of Michael Herr's classic Dispatches up on the whiteboard and read that out loud. More than forty years later, you can see and hear how Hemingway's style has infused itself into the style of those who came after.

Thus, the single greatest impact Hemingway had on our culture was transforming our writing into something leaner and less descriptive, but not less evocative. Stories were told with action verbs, not adjectives. I remember in college comparing what was known as "verb density" in Hemingway's works to that of earlier writers. The number of times a verb appears relative to the number of words written. As you might guess, the change was profound. When Hemingway wrote, he would revise and revise and whittle the words until they had been reduced to their purest essence. On a great day of writing, he might complete a page. On a typical day, four or five hours of work might bring forth a paragraph. If he could convey meaning without saying something directly, so much the better.

I'll conclude today with a TED Talk that addresses the question: "Why are we still teaching Hemingway?" I was hit with this question many times, often by colleagues I respected, who often were responding to the notion that we needed to excise something labeled "toxic masculinity" without really exploring the nuances of Hemingway's brilliant fiction.