Prof. Marc Dudley
I had originally considered naming this talk “Making the Case for The Old Man and the Sea-Change He Helped to Make Happen,” but I thought that it used far too many words to please the aforementioned “old man,” and that it was way too cute for its own good. So, I contained my enthusiasm and went with the current iteration (and the inherent question driving this address): “In a Post-everything moment, does Ernest Hemingway still matter?” This year’s theme for SUNY New Paltz’s annual English graduate symposium is “Innovation and Tradition: Re-Viewing the Modernist Moment in American Fiction.” Within this context, “re-viewing” means revisiting, re-assessing, and sometimes possibly revising or even re-imagining, that tradition. It is what we do, as scholars, naturally; we are in constant communication with the past, even as we look toward the future. So, I would like to address those two things today: innovation and tradition, in talking about the continued relevance and importance of Ernest Hemingway. And I do so in answer to a handful of secondary, inherently-posited questions: How do we reconcile the big game hunting, hyper-masculine (some would say toxically masculine), “otherizing” (some would say racist) early twentieth-century icon (some would say relic) with our 21st century sensibilities? Is it even possible to do so? Should we do so? The short answer to all of these questions and the larger one afoot is “yes, we can indeed do so, and we should.” The longer answer, though, and the more genuine answer, ends with the aptly crafted qualifier, “but it’s complicated.” Reconciling this cognitive dissonance means reconciling the Hemingway we, as a collective, know (or think we know), with the Hemingway we do not, and that process requires a little work.
Dove-tailing with those last questions, are perhaps a few additional, tangential ones we should ask (and ones germane to our conversation today): Where does Hemingway, as a Modern, fit into our markedly “post-modern” moment, a moment marked by unreliable narrators, unrealistic narratives that revel in pastiche and intertextuality, in the magically real? Does he? No one ever accused Ernest Hemingway of deviating from all things real. Nor would anyone call a protagonist like A Farewell to Arms’ Frederick Henry a markedly “unreliable narrator.” But, what about The Sun Also Rises’ Jake Barnes? And what do we do with the pastiche that is in our time? Still, in an entropic world seemingly coming apart at the seams, a world where multiple meanings jeopardize Meaning’s very stability, a Modernist’s sense of tradition-as-antidote seems not only attractive, but imperative. Aptly, too, Hemingway revered tradition, a tradition entrenched in experimentation (as we shall see). Already, we can see hints of that promised complication unfolding before us.
In a post-#Metoo/post-toxic masculinist moment, does Hemingway still matter? Even the most ardent of his supporters must admit that much of Hemingway’s literary treatments of women seem to mirror his own real-life insecurities around them. Further, the 1980s saw great pushback against that bull-in the china-shop, hyper-masculinist persona that drives some of the literature and pushes much of the Hemingway brand. Feminist scholarship looked at just how Hemingway rendered his female characters, and how out-of-date his portraiture in some instances had become. As a blatant example, caught up in a whirlwind love-affair all too quickly and all conveniently (for some), A Farewell to Arms’ Catherine Barkley prostrates herself before her paramour Frederick Henry insisting that “There isn’t any me anymore.” However, decades later came the discovery of The Garden of Eden, and some of that criticism was squelched, as that novel complicated notions of both womanhood and gendered identity and called for us to reassess that well-worn boorish caricature we thought we knew. We saw, too, the true complexity of that novel’s Catherine. Suddenly, Hemingway typology was replaced by nuance and a more sensitive aesthetic. And in this new age, post#Metoo, we are granted allowances to read other texts with that same degree of nuance and sensitivity. We can read a very early Hemingway story “Up in Michigan,” for instance, properly, as a narrative that treats with great sensitivity the topic of date-rape, doing so almost a century before that topic and phraseology entered mainstream conversation. I’ve often said, too, that despite her “There isn’t any me anymore,” Catherine Barkley as painted by Hemingway (and not Frederic Henry) is arguably that novel’s code-hero, that agent of grit, resolve, and “grace under pressure.” Once again then, we can make a case for Hemingway’s prescience and continued relevance; and the complication grows.
Equally complicated is Hemingway’s relationship to the post-colonial. In a post-colonial world, a world with emancipated bodies and voices, where is there space for Hemingway, a figure who for so many, with rifle and map in-hand while on safari, symbolized the colonial aesthetic itself in full-tilt? Hemingway read African Game Trails and emulated its author Theodore Roosevelt on that first African safari especially in the 1930s, taking on the mantel of “great white hunter,” and taking home an embarrassing number of big game trophies. But, in the intervening years, having engaged and written about the people of Cuba, of Kenya, of Spain, at the very least, Hemingway has simultaneously provided us with the tools to make such “post” readings not only possible, but necessary and meaningful. We could ask, too, in this twenty-first century, who better to speak for the subaltern than the Hemingway critic?
Finally, in our supposedly “post-racial” moment—a remarkable moment marked by Barack Obama’s ascension to the nation’s highest office, and a moment matched by equally remarkable “Tea Party” politics inside the Washington Beltway and a spate of racially motivated killings by police and vigilante alike outside of it—a moment in which we have learned that America has yet to realize such a moment, does Hemingway (whose use of racialized metonymy and slur is at times unmatched) still matter? In a moment where the rallying cry is simultaneously a plea that “Black Lives Matter,” does Hemingway (whose very white voice supposedly speaks for his [lost] generation) still matter?
Noting its repetitions and recurring patterns, Mark Twain supposedly said of history that, while it “doesn’t repeat itself, often it rhymes.” Hemingway, as another student of history and a documentarian, as a student of history, understood that truism a century ago, and realized its profundity in his writings. Whether it is the depressed lives of Indigenous peoples or the harsh lives lived by African Americans on the margins of a Jim Crow nation, Hemingway gives us perhaps no moralization, but certainly documentation of those realities in his writings. As we well know, Hemingway’s subtleties speak volumes. And, I would argue, Hemingway does often create spaces of empathy, perhaps the writer’s greatest gift. Just how much has changed between the so-called “Red Summer” of racial unrest in 1919, the summer of Hemingway’s stateside post-war return and a summer that bore witness to some of the worst racial violence in our nation’s history (Chicago, just miles from his hometown of Oak Park, saw some the worst of it), and that fateful summer of 2020 that bore witness to the murders of Ahmad Arbery, Breona Taylor, and George Floyd? Indeed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but often it rhymes.”
In her essay “Home,” Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison searches for the “post-racial” in her writing, that safe space where race no longer matters; but as she demonstrates in Playing in the Dark, from this nation’s inception, that “safe place” has never existed in America. Moreover, as (oft-described post-modern) writer Percival Everett once quipped, “…as soon as you utter [the words] ‘post-racial,’… you’re already talking about a racial America.” Hemingway stands within Morrison’s understood, exploitative tradition; but, as a documentarian and artist, he also understands the tradition. While racial epithets shamefully abound in several of his works (neither Native, nor African American, nor Jew are spared—I’ve interrogated his engagements with race in my own work), so does the documentation of those marginal narratives that often rarely get footnoted. Writing with both a reporter’s eye and an historian’s vision, Hemingway understood this complication quite well. He documented the plight of Native Americans (the Ojibwe) left destitute and wanting in wake of horrible treaty terms that diminished their land claims and their standard of living (“The Indians Moved Away”) and African Americans relegated to society’s margins (literally living in the shadows) because of Jim Crow (see “The Battler”). There is in his work then a trade-off happening which remarks on his times, and to some degree, our own time. My point is, we have not outgrown Ernest Hemingway. In fact, Hemingway, his work and vision, have grown with us (as has his usefulness in translating our American experience, warts and all), because quite simply the artistry is timeless and universal. In fact, Hemingway’s would find aesthetic kindred spirits across the color line. Contemporaries like Ralph Ellison, who interestingly beat out Hemingway (and The Old Man and the Sea) for 1953’s National Book Award, even claimed the white writer as his literary “ancestor.” Years later, a cadre of writers including Ernest Gaines and Gayl Jones would point to that same aesthetic as influence in the crafting of their own art. Yes, the answer to my original question is complicated.
To this point, in 2018, a writer for The Daily Beast asked, rather loudly, “Why the Hell are We Still Reading Ernest Hemingway?” Maybe similarly, though with more subtlety and a much greater degree of sophistication, Ken Burns implicitly asked that very same question in his major biographical documentary from 2021. In fact, that documentary’s purpose, according to both Burns and codirector Lynn Novick, was to answer that question: Why are we still reading Hemingway? Novick approached me a few years ago and asked me that question directly. One conversation led to two, and suddenly I found myself in front of the camera talking about the relevance of a writer whose fame was realized almost a century ago. I had my ideas, as did so many of the scholars and writers also consulting on the film, and the film stands as a convergence of some of those ideas. In a leadup to the film’s release, CBS Morning’s Mark Whitaker asked me about the impending “cancellation” of Ernest Hemingway in the shadow of #Metoo and Black Lives Matter. I answered that while that was a great question, and one I had anticipated for quite some time, I in fact did NOT think that Hemingway and his corpus would ever be seriously planted on that metaphorical chopping block. He has not and will not be “cancelled,” in my humble estimation, for one simple reason: He is a master craftsman with too many important things to say, even now. He is, it seems, that rarest of quantities: the quantity that is “too big to fail,” not because of his person or his celebrity, but because of his aesthetic, something about which I will speak at greater length momentarily.
Thirty years ago, Hemingway’s hyper-masculinist and racist sensibilities were, rightfully, under fire by feminist critics and lay readers alike. Today, we would call Hemingway’s brand of manhood “toxic.” Then we simply called it “misogyny.” The fact that, while criticism and labels change, the interest endures, says much about the art’s universality. My time with Ken Burns, my conversations with artists Mary Karr and Michael Katakis, and biographer Mary Dearborn, informed me of the power and breadth of the Hemingway aesthetic. And if you watch the Burns documentary, you’ll understand its breadth and impact. Further, such projects as The New Hemingway and the popularity of the current and ongoing Hemingway Letters project affirm that Ernest Hemingway, a man who reached the height of fame a century ago, never really went away. Indeed, the future of Hemingway studies is bright.
However, even as we look forward to the prospects of Hemingway scholarship, we must pay homage to its past. Today’s address is, too, very much about legacy. I’m here, practically speaking, as a direct result of Dr. Fiona Paton’s kind invitation; but symbolically speaking, I’m here to both recognize and honor, if even indirectly, H. R. Stoneback’s (or “Stoney” as his friends, and those of us within the Hemingway academy called him) legacy as Hemingway scholar and that grand tradition of which he is a large part. Whether it is his work on the “neglected short fiction” (notions of communion in “Wine of Wyoming”), his observations re food consumption in the longer works (such as Sun Also Rises and The Garden of Eden), Hemingway’s “convenient” Catholicism, or his attention to the landscapes, always Stoneback looks at those forces shaping the artist’s vision of the world, and what that alchemy tells us about both Hemingway and about that world in which he lived, the world in which we live. As such a voice, H. R. Stoneback has been a staple in Hemingway scholarship for decades.
Like so much of Hemingway scholarship in general, much of Stoneback’s work is entrenched in notions of identity-making and identity-defining. More often than not, though, for Stoneback the defining element in Hemingway’s world is place. In his article, “Et in Arcadia Ego:” Deep Structure, Paysage Moralise, Geo-moral and Symbolic Landscape in Hemingway,” for example, Stoneback suggests outright that “Hemingway believed in Geography, in Place and the Spirit of Place, and in Local Knowledge.” And much of Stoneback’s particularized vision and understanding marks so much of the Hemingway oeuvre (for example, in A Farewell to Arms, it is Hemingway’s assignment of “the sacred” to the Abruzzi region in Italy). Again, and again, Stoneback marks the text as a function of space. And Stoneback applied that same critical lens to works both great and small. Our work then—my work and his– seemed to converge in one of those smaller spaces and in our mutual recognition of one of those smaller, seldom-read works, a little-known fragment whose import within the greater Hemingway conversation has long gone unrecognized. The nexus of our spiritual conversation is “The Porter.” While Stoneback applies a literal spatial lens to “The Porter,” I apply a racial one, and each of us brings something new and meaningful to that on-going conversation.
Further, that short story, inspired my first published piece in the Hemingway Review: “Killin’em with Kindness.” “The Porter” is a fragment from an unfinished novel following the exploits of a revolutionist and his son, traveling cross-country on a train with an African-American porter, and it very much about place. But, I’ve argued, it is, too, an exploration of 20th century American race relations. And a direct interrogation of early 20th century claims of white supremacy. Stoneback looks at the “Porter” and sees the landscape as character; I see stories to be told about the characters peopling that landscape. As I suggest of that literary landscape in an article note, “father and son travel to some vague destination and this, significantly, shifts the story’s emphasis from place to character, dialogue, and the action aboard the train itself.” The long-time editor of the Hemingway Review called my reading of “The Porter” “ground-breaking.” Mind you, there was virtually no scholarship on that piece then; and over a decade later, there still is, surprisingly, very little scholarship on that story. All of this is to say, that even the most worn path has ground that often goes untrodden. I remind our attendant students here today then that our job as scholars is simply to find that untrodden ground.
Similarly, Dr. Paton tells me that she has recently revisited Dr. Stoneback’s scholarly vision as seen in his pedagogy, and revisited those Modern spaces in which he was in conversation; and she reimagined those same spaces, but reimagined them with writers like Willa Cather, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright to allow for a contemporary classroom dialectic on gender and on race. Quite simply, this is how the critical conversation works.
My own turn toward Hemingway in a serious way (I had read a few pieces by him in high school—several of which I simply was not ready for upon initial encounter—see The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”) started pretty much where yours is beginning. My serious scholarly engagements with him began over twenty years ago, as I sat where some of you sit now, thinking about just how I might enter the conversational fray and make my own readings of those perennial classics meaningful as a young academic. I took an American literature course as a Master’s student that left me with just as many questions as it did answers; and this was a good thing. The thematic tethering the course was “travel writing” and it included such disparate writers as Edith Wharton and Paul Theroux. At the center of that literary matrix was Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, a work that both intrigued and frustrated me (read “bored” and “infuriated” me). Bored and frustrated because—spoiler alert—nothing happens in this work, and because the text is in places unapologetically, racially problematic. Still, I was interested because, in doing some preliminary research, I saw that virtually no one was talking then about Hemingway’s fictionalized memoir (still, it mostly remains unread and disregarded). Reading that book alongside Toni Morrison’s seminal essay Playing in the Dark, I knew even then, that I had “something” in my racialized reading of it. Defining just what that “something” was my initial mission, and really, it has remained my mission for the entirety of my academic career. I read Green Hills of Africa and wondered aloud why so very few scholars wrote about Hemingway’s engagements with the people of Africa, and why virtually no one was writing about Hemingway and his negotiations of racial spaces. Simultaneously, I read Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and wondered why no one challenged Morrison’s assertions regarding Hemingway’s ignorance of and contempt for the Africanist presence, the Black figure in so much of his own writing. Morrison argues that for so many white American writers, Blackness (or what she calls the “Africanist presence”) has been nothing more traditionally than a means to an end in a glorified reification of whiteness. Morrison points that accusatory finger at Poe, at Melville, at Cather; and sitting at the center of her critical bullseye sits Hemingway. That narrative alone is worthy of pursuit and discussion (and that’s where my own path began: with Hemingway’s reification of whiteness); but if we complicate things, the scholarly narrative gets even more interesting.
In my first book, Hemingway, Race, and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line, I contend that Hemingway’s (self)glorification and aggrandizement of whiteness is complicated by a persistent and profound racialized empathy that marks the entirety of his literary canon. Moreover, I argue, Hemingway demonstrates more than a casual understanding of America’s tragic racial history. So, yes, Hemingway mattered. And as I looked to defend those dissertation, then manuscript ideas, I had a former professor at North Carolina State University (a Renaissance scholar), and a now mentor and friend, confirm my suspicions. She told me quite bluntly that Ernest Hemingway, like William Shakespeare, would always have currency (read “always be modern,” if you will), and that the critical lane I had begun to devise for myself would insure that for me. The most important takeaway there was that I had indeed found my lane, as a reader of the literature, and as a writer and scholar attempting to enter that conversational space with other scholars.
Those same curiosities and problems I encountered in my first writings never went away, and neither did my work’s primary driving question. If, as Morrison asserts in Playing in the Dark, Hemingway was genuinely unconcerned with the racial other, then why would he spend his life and career writing them? The short answer: because he did in fact, see them, because contrary to Morrison’s contention, they did matter. Moreover, this quintessentially “old, dead white man” had a sense of things tragic in America like few contemporaries; and his conveyance of that tragedy is what makes him timeless, and what makes him matter.
Realize, too, that my own work is not exhaustive. There is still fresh ground to be tread, new innovative work yet to be done; this all points to the promise of Hemingway studies in the years to come. For example, thirty years on and we’re still having a conversation begun by the likes of Deborah Modelmog and Carl Eby about the notions of a multi-cultural classroom, about Hemingway, queerness, and notions of gender identity. Note, too, that Alex Vernon broke new ground in recent years on Hemingway’s wartime experience. Likewise, Suzanne del Gizzo’s work on Primitivism and Amy Strong’s work on Hemingway and indigenous people, along with my own scholarship, helped usher in a new era of Hemingway and race and cultural studies. As we look toward the horizon, we can see possibility for those exploring Hemingway’s life and work through ecocritical, traumatic and disability studies lenses, to name but a few. Your charge, then, as you venture out and do your own critical work is quite simply to look at words “as though seeing them for the first time” (borrowing from Hemingway himself, speaking of his own writing process in 1945). This is where the alchemy happens.
So once more, I revisit our original question: Does Hemingway still matter? Or put differently, am I being presumptuous in advocating for “the importance of being Ernest Hemingway in a ‘post’-everything moment?” Some case can be made for the greatness of Hemingway blurring epochal lines, as he looked both backwards for reassurance and forward with an imaginary eye, looking beyond his moment (post?) to document, and to craft something entirely new. Moreover, I can wage further arguments that Hemingway’s continued relevance goes well beyond documentation and politics; indeed, so much of his import to so many lies in his artistry. Every edition of every Scribner paperback novel bears out this truth: “Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century, and for his efforts he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.”
Arguably, with his emphasis on form, Hemingway at least in part, satisfies definitions of the post-modern. Simultaneously, like so many of his contemporaries, so many of his fellow Moderns (including the likes of T. S. Elliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound), Hemingway drew from tradition, from foundational texts, for stability and meaning in a world that barely survived “the war to end all wars.” Accordingly, Hemingway looked to a host of others for guidance, and for inspiration as he sought to craft something altogether new.
Ernest Hemingway, much to the surprise, chagrin even, of some, has staying power (aptly, no man would appreciate that compliment more than Ernest Hemingway). And he has staying power, continues to endure, because he matters. He matters because he is, like so many in that pantheon of revered (literary) artists, first and foremost, a master-craftsman. Long recognized for his reputation as the master of that short declarative sentence, Hemingway also rather unfairly has languished there, in the land of the simpleton. While we get flourishes of the remarkable brilliance of old in his later work, such as in The Old Man and the Sea and The Garden of Eden, Hemingway is a parody of himself to some degree in the later works (see Across the Rivers and into the Trees), wherein his brand seemed to over-run his talent. For those who failed then and who fail now to see past the celebrity—the face of the elder statesman emblazoned on the front of Time Magazine, Look Magazine, or the cartoonish face staring at us from the covers of lesser rags like Man’s Magazine and Man’s Illustrated (the list of the ridiculous goes on and on)—they miss much amidst all the bravado. Others (and I’m looking at some of you now) though, recognize the genius inherent in all of that supposed simplicity.
“There is no order for good writers,” Hemingway insists in his 1935 fictional memoir Green Hills of Africa. However, he definitively tells us further that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Hemingway admired Twain for his ability to convey the experiential with an aesthetic of immediacy as few others before him had. That said, Hemingway would demonstrate to us his reverence for a select few others besides Twain in making his case for the greatness of American letters. Each and every assertion in this series of grand declarations is certainly debatable; but Hemingway’s general insistence on paying homage to those who came before him is without question. To this point, Ernest Hemingway is an amalgam of all the best that American literature has to offer; more precisely, Hemingway is all of the best of American literature before him. This is his nod to a Modern understanding of Tradition’s import in an ever-changing, quickly-shifting world. And while he insists that “There was nothing before [Huckleberry Finn],” Hemingway’s own aesthetic tells us differently. I would amend his declaration and insist that perhaps before Twain, there was only one: Walt Whitman. Few artists have conveyed the Romance of American experience more convincingly than Whitman. Moreover, I’ve long insisted that Hemingway’s debt to the poetry of Whitman is as undeniable as is his debt to Twain’s brand of Realism. And we see and hear this connection already in the prose writer’s very formative years. At barely eighteen years old, Hemingway penned these not-so-classic lines:
When the June bugs were a circlin’
Round the arc light on the corner
And a-makin’ shooty shadows on the street;
When you strolled along barefooted
Through a warm dark night of June
Where the dew from off the cool grass bathed your feet.
When you heard a banjo thunkin’
On the porch across the road,
And you smelled the scent of lilacs in the park
That there was something struggling in you
That you couldn’t put in words —
You was really livin’ poetry in the dark!
Indicators of literary greatness? Not so much (although, strangely enough, very early on as he crafted the first iteration of in our time, Gertrude Stein suggested he “stick to poetry and intelligence and eschew the hotter emotions and the more turgid vision.” Call it a stroke of good fortune that Hemingway failed to take direction well). Still, in these rough-hewn lines of adolescent verse, there are definite signs of a literary aesthetic that would continue to inform his writing for all of his literary career. His writing here is already all-sensory; and the sensual would help him translate experience in all that he would write.
Hemingway’s work simultaneously embodies the best of Stephen Crane, from whom he learned the fundamentals of Naturalistic philosophy and what Crane aptly called “loyalty to the real thing.” Just as Huckleberry Finn set the bar for the exposition of American Experience writ large in the nineteenth century, Stephen Crane’s seminal war novel did the same for Hemingway in relation to the burgeoning twentieth-century and the American war experience. Of Crane’s novel, Hemingway suggested that, “There was no real literature of our Civil War . . . until Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage.” A necessary function of Hemingway’s admiration and of Crane’s “successful” translation of experience was and is his uncompromising fealty to the real.
Hemingway compounded that bit of acquired wisdom with what he learned about the power and importance of sound and of repetition as it relates to recurrent experience and associative power from Gertrude Stein; and to a great degree, Stein in turn learned those same things from William James, renowned psychologist and brother to Henry. James’s research demonstrated to her the variance and potency inherent in repetition (of both sight and sound). As Ralph Ellison keenly observed of Hemingway’s continuance of that tradition: “his repetitions and formalized rhythms are made to carry… a load of psychoanalysis.” Hemingway, like Stein before him, places the onus on the reader to carry that psychoanalytical load. This principle is at work in his so-called “the ice berg principle” of revelation, the idea being that you make the visible do the work of the invisible. Hemingway likely used as source material any number of poems from Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). In “Orange In,” for example, we see what we would consider “classic Hemingway” rhetorical strategies on full display, years before he would engage them. We can clearly see in here poems repetition and emphasis on concrete things as working, guiding principles: “Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal” (see Hemingway’s opening lines in A Farewell to Arms as a wonderful correlative—the leaves, the road, the rain all come to the fore in making that imagined space real for us). Further, Stein toys with assonance, alliteration, and word repetition: “Whist bottom whist close, whist clothes, woodling.” Or here again in this sequence: “Next to me next to a folder, next to a folder some waiter, next to a folder some waiter and read letter and read her. Read her with her for less.” Stein assures us of her methodology’s import and effectiveness: “I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people…hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations … until finally if you listened with great intensity, you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them…the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.” In these aforementioned lines, Stein is, much to Hemingway’s chagrin (he would later famously minimize Stein’s influence in A Moveable Feast), plainly the great woman behind the great man.
Stein, like Hemingway, knew the value of crafting an affecting image. Still, we can thank the Imagists for that, too. Good friend Ezra Pound’s poetic aesthetic and imprint are also seen/heard in much of Hemingway’s work. From the likes of Pound, Hemingway would learn the value and power of that economy of language that would mark his work going forward. Pound’s famous four-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” demonstrates this best:
The apparition of these faces in the
crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound takes a paragraph’s worth of ideas and pares them down to just over a dozen words. No fourteen words could do more or be more evocative. Of course, as Imagists, Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, and company aimed to translate the visual experience, what was happening on the painter’s canvass, to the written page. Enter Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and of course Paul Cezanne as visual muses to emulate and inspire; and looking to simplify and therefore transform that experience yet again, the Cubists further reduced and reified that translation. Note, for example, Pablo Picasso’s transformation from realist (see his 1897 production “Science and Charity”) to abstract minimalist painter in 1937’s “Guernica.” With an impending civil war in his native Spain and the threat of fascism looming large, extreme times understandably called for extreme measures in translating an artist’s angst; and with its splayed bodies manipulated and mixed with a Cubist’s tools, few artistic renderings do more with less than does “Guernica.” In the best of Hemingway’s prose, we can see and feel the imprint of all of the aforementioned artists, visual and literal, even as he crafts something that is all his own.
In the preface to Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway spells out his aesthetic mission in the simplest of terms: To write, and to show “how far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck.” Further, it is to realize a “fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten…Then nothing else matters.” It is a prose, he insists, “that is much more difficult than poetry” to realize. “It is as prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.” No tricks. No cheating. Simply the best of craft. And that mantra is what sustained him, is what sustains him still, as we reassess the old man some one hundred years on from those early works that would define his career. Hemingway: Master-craftsman.
So, each time out, just as the world either forgot about him or turned their collective backs on him, or else threatened to do so, Ernest Hemingway reminded us, and continues to remind us, scholars and layman alike, once more, of his pervasiveness, his (continued) presence, and his perpetual prescience. As Nick Adams, he so affectively asserts of the river in “Big Two-Hearted River” that “[it] was there.” Indeed, the great ones, like that featured river, endure. So, we return to our original question: In this “post” (post-racial, post-colonial, post-modern, post-everything moment), does Ernest Hemingway still matter? Without cheating, without tricks, without unnecessary verbiage, and in perfect alignment with that Hemingway aesthetic, I will simply say “yes…yes, he does, very much so; but it is complicated.”