Splicetoday

Writing
Jun 22, 2018, 06:00AM

Why Ernest Hemingway Doesn’t Suck

Toxic masculinity or not, he had a unique kind of guts.

190528 la vie d ernest hemingway bientot 950x0 3.jpg?ixlib=rails 2.1

In the last few years, a trend among critics and contemporary writers is questioning the merits of writers that are part of the literary canon. The prose is not considered as good as when it was first received, the writer is overrated, or his personal life is a mess. It’s easy to point out flaws of a writer, or even hate them. Especially a writer that’s dead and can’t really defend himself. Ernest Hemingway hasn’t been spared.

Those critics and readers focused on Hemingway’s writing style will say that the whole “iceberg method” is just too easy and laughable and anyone can do it. Nobody should write in short, declarative sentences. Instead, we should indulge in the use of the English language.

Then there are those who get obsessed over Hemingway’s maleness. It’s a known fact that Hemingway had plenty of issues with his own masculinity. We certainly have numerous photographs of a bare-chested Hemingway, trying to prove his manliness. Critics speculate that he was gay and by being overly masculine was just a way of masking his desire to be with men.

That ridiculous and hate-filled term “toxic masculinity” wasn’t in use during Hemingway’s time, but if he lived today, he surely would be accused. One wonders whether he’d be issuing sarcastic apologies on Twitter.

All of these criticisms are fairly obvious and we’ve heard them repeatedly. Some may be true. I’ve no clue if Hemingway was gay or not, or whether he had secret desires. I’ve no interest in putting the fictional Hemingway on the couch and psychoanalyzing him.

One of the fascinating aspects about Hemingway is the authenticity of his prose. Hemingway’s athletic words seem like they’ll run off the page before you even read them. He doesn’t dwell. He’s not Tolstoy or Proust. But he does wonder about the interior lives of his characters and indirectly himself. He wonders where they’re going and where they’ve been, and how they’ll get where they need to go in the hope that they won’t be doomed or lost. He understands the essence and most importantly, the nuances of the human condition. He understands that we’ll never really get under the skin of our fleeting states of being because we’ll always want to escape our very selves.

In one short paragraph, you’ll feel the rain in Paris and the angularity of the café tables even if he never really tells you the exact details. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes: “Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.”

Describing the café at the bus terminal, he writes: “It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness.” It doesn’t matter what these dirty people drank. Maybe the smell of alcohol will be different for all of us, but we can create a mental collage of offensive smells as if they’re descending with the weight of the world on us, suffocating every pore of our being.

Despite the cold clarity of Hemingway’s scenes, there’s never anything sterile or nihilistic about them. His words don’t bring warm and fuzzy feelings, and why should they? Why should we hide behind the masks of a saccharine avoidance of good and evil? Why should we keep whistling past the cemetery as if the dead don’t exist in the air that we take in? Why should we hide from death itself?

Hemingway’s being and writing are inseparable. I believe it takes courage to write—to really write, to remove the pretenses and stand face-to-face with truth. Hemingway had that courage. It’s difficult to fully understand the extent of his internal suffering and the sad end of his life. But even if the light went out at the end, he was always seeking to write that “one true sentence.” To see directly in the eyes of humanity takes a special kind of guts. Hemingway had that resolve and freedom and fearlessness. 

Discussion
  • Had an English prof fifty years ago who couldn't say enough about Papa. After my class was over, I discovered something which I should have suspected. Prof hadn't been away from academia for more than summer vacation since kindergarten. To pshrink the guy--who was a good guy and an excellent teacher, I would suspect his interest in Hemingway was a way of making himself more of a man of the _-masculine--world. The other issue is that my father had a college friend who was wounded in North Africa and ended up after D-Day censoring correspondents' reports. His view was that the worst thing that happened to Hemingway was when he figured out he was.... HEMINGWAY. Third, I recommend reading Kipling's The Bull That Thought and see if Hemingway might have written it.

    Responses to this comment
  • I think Hemingway has that effect on people. But perhaps we could say that about all true writers. They leave something of themselves in their books. Thanks for the recommendation..I actually haven't read any Kipling so this could be a good start. :)

    Responses to this comment

Register or Login to leave a comment