I have enjoyed Ernest Hemingway’s writing all my life. My library at home is filled with his works, starting with “The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway,” a little-known biography of his early years as a newspaper reporter at the Kansas City Star. Though out of print, it is a gem.
A favorite that I read with my son is “The Nick Adams stories,” a collection of short stories about the formative years of an adventurous boy, including his experiences fishing and camping (but also helping to deliver a baby in “Indian Camp”). I have visited the Hemingway House in Key West, with the famous six-toed cats, when I worked in Miami. Hemingway’s death was tragic. The L.A. Times has a retrospective 50 years after his death on July 2 called rethinking Hemingway that provides some interesting insights:
Boozy, boorish and self-besotted, the world-famous writer in Woody Allen’s current hit film, “Midnight in Paris,” is kind of a clown. And, as played by actor Corey Stoll, he’s an instantly recognizable replica of the author of “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”
He is, of course, Ernest Hemingway. Or rather, he’s the Hemingway caricature handed down to posterity: a hard-drinking, womanizing, big-game trophy-hunting, fame-craving blowhard who pushed his obsession about writing in a lean, mean prose style to the point of self-parody.
But exactly 50 years after the Nobel Prize-winning writer committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961, there’s another, more serious and respectable Hemingway still duking it out with this comic imposter in the ring of public perception. Marty Beckerman says that he had both Hemingways in mind while writing his just-published book, “The Heming Way,” a combination of loving tribute and tongue-in-cheek how-to guide for what Beckerman, 28, sees as today’s Facebook generation of timid metrosexual males.
“I think that everybody knows the Hemingway cartoon character, even guys who’ve never read ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Farewell to Arms,’ ” says Beckerman, a writer for Esquire magazine whose book is subtitled, “How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!”
But Beckerman also wanted his book to remind people of the other Hemingway: intrepid war correspondent, colorful bohemian and virile man of action, whose muscular short stories and novels define modern writing the way Picasso’s paintings define modern art.
“I think there’s a lot of lessons that Hemingway taught that definitely could apply to modern guys,” Beckerman says. “I think that guys today aren’t really living on our own terms and have lost a certain passion. Everything we know comes from Wikipedia, and everything Hemingway knew came from adventure. Get off your iPad and get off your smartphone and go slaughter some bulls and some lions!”
The rest of the article is here.
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Ernest Hemingway is my first favorite author. I was assigned “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” from my junior English teacher, incoming NU Principal, Mike Blake. I hated literature as a high school student, but Mr. Blake instilled an appreciation, starting with Hemingway, that I picked up later in life. “The Sun Also Rises” is the only novel I’ve ever read twice. The short stories are a must read. For students who don’t like to read, the short sentence structure is ideal. Though I don’t agree with his opinions of women, his stories are entertaining and fun to read. His opinions of women are also a good point of discussion.
I just saw Hemingway in Midnight in Paris. It has been years since I have read any Hemingway. I probably should as a man in his 40′s instead of a young 20 something. See what different perspective will come about.
A Hemingway story figured obliquely into the first date I ever had, as a teenager in the late 1950s. The memory of that experience is still vivid, no doubt a persistent remnant of post-traumatic date disorder.
I was of course both incredibly attracted to girls and terrified of them. I was a shy kid and so nervous about calling to ask her out that — in my anxiety — I forgot to talk about what we were going to do. It was harrowing enough to have just made the call.
Every time I spoke, I felt like a fool. Every time I did almost anything, I felt like a fool. That was the existential essence of my teenage years.
The conversation we had when I picked her up the following week didn’t help:
“How about a movie? What would you like to see?” I asked.
“I dunno. Whadda you wanna to see?”
“Well, how about the new movie with Spencer Tracy called ‘The Old Man and the Sea‘? We read the novel in Mr. Kowalski’s class.”
“I never cared for fish stories much,” she said.
It was all downhill after that.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Those damn sharks.
I came of age, and moved west, from my home base in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace, which he dubbed, “the town of wide lawns and narrow minds”. Hemingway is a mythic figure in Oak Park, his home preserved, his memory cherished, his place revered just below Frank Lloyd Wright, whose studio and Unity Temple are just up the street, and above Bob Newhart, whose humor is honed on the very mid-western mores that Hemingway critiqued.
The high school I graduated from, Oak Park-River Forest High School, is Hemingway’s alma mater, and his visage is enshrined on its walls in a graduates ‘Wall of Fame’. Joining Hemingway looking down on students today from that wall are novelist Jane Hamilton, actor and humorist Dan Castellenta, entrepreneur Ray Kroc, disgraced Governor Otto Kerner, journalist Bruce Morton and the originator of the term ‘global warming’, scientist Wallace Broecker. Visiting my former school last spring to see my niece play Becca in “Rabbit Hole”, I reviewed the wall and noticed a pattern from my youth; polite, well heeled challengers of the status quo stared back at me.
As the son of a college professor, who drilled literature into our heads from the cradle and read to each of his children for 30 minutes a day until they discovered the opposite sex, I read most of Hemingway’s works long before I entered high school. From Nick Adams stories, to the Snows, to the Sea, Hemingway was a summer respite, a place to recharge pre-adolescent batteries with one dimensional cartoons of life lived on the edges of adventure.
Imagine my chagrin when I entered high school and had to do it all over again with the doey eyed instructors who memorialized Hemingway while dreaming of one day manufacturing the great American novel. From first to last, every semester, a new Hemingway novel marched across the fields of our desks, on its way to martyrdom and sainthood. I once had a creative writing instructor who returned a paper with a “C” and a red scrawl that read, “No sentence longer than eight words, remember your Hemingway!” When the Bataan like march finally ended my senior year with “Islands in the Stream” it was V-J Day.
After school all the stoner kids would go to Scoville park a few short blocks away and fire up under the statue of the WWI dead and wounded, with Hemingway’s name enshrined at the base. (Of course, I played Frisbee instead.)
To say that by the time I entered high school in 1973 I was more interested in Russian literature, French existentialists, and modern fiction would be an understatement.
Then, many years later, I found myself hiking the Grand Canyon, without an unread book. After two nights of solo stargazing I ran across another hiker and we brokered a deal, a spring trade, Raskolnakov for Robert Jordan.
I re-discovered Hemingway.
Yes, Hemingway is a man of few words, but his direct prose took on a new meaning and taught me about scarcity; yes, he drafts characters like tract homes, but they are representative of his youthful view of narrow minds; yes, he lacks the poetry of Thomas Wolf or the biting wit of Sherwood Anderson, but his words are painstakingly selected, each one intentional; yes, each novel is a moral play, but you never doubt the lesson.
Novelist Richard Ford says Hemingway was almost casual in talking about loss, tragedy, and despair; his characters were conspicuous in their ability to not say what they were thinking.
Finally, I discovered that what I had mistaken as a youth as a penchance for chronology, like the few days of “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, actually had a subtlety that could not be rejected. His clarity of vision, his attention to precision, his brevity and his use of white space to convey meaning say a lot about the “American Century”.
On this 50th anniversary I am with Mr. Pelline, Hemingway is worth re-reading. He will will bring you back to an America that many long for and few remember accurately.
http://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/06-28-2011/Remembering_Hemingway%27s_death
Oh man, Thomas Wolfe.
I devoured “Look Homeward Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” when I was a young man. I thought I was Eugene Gant.
But then, while reading “Catcher in the Rye,” I thought I was Holden Caulfield.
(A few years ago, when I tried to register a gmail account as HoldenCaulfield and found that it was already in use, I realized that there are others out there who also think they’re Holden Caulfield).
Wolfe’s novels seemed like epic poems to me.
Dan Castellenata, that’s high company!
By the way, my instructor was less than amused when I told him the “your” in “remember your Hemingway” was not only superfluous, but would reduce his criticism to eight words.
Chris, Ben, Don and Steven,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and memories! Very enjoyable on a Fourth of July weekend. Best to all of you and your families.
-Jeff, Shannon and Mitchell
“Adventures of a Young Man” was the film adapted from the Nick Adams stories.
I was about twelve and a huge fan of Richard Beymer who played Tony in West Side Story, so my folks took me to see his new movie.
The film actually featured the scene of an Indian woman giving birth with Nick’s help.
My mom was mortified that I should see something so graphic at such a young age.
But I loved the film and all the cameo actors, especially an almost unrecognizable Paul Newman as a punch drunk road boxer who Nick encounters on his adventures. Awesome!
I wonder if that old film is available on DVD.
I googled the movie, duh!
Wikipedia, Amazon, this is what I love about the internet and access to information.
I didn’t remember all of the cast of Adventures of a Young Man, but OMG, what a list of luminaries.
Hi Judith, I was trying to find your email address the other day because I wanted to ask if you’ve read Charles Mann’s 1491, a history of Indian civilizations and nations in the Americas before Columbus arrived in 1492. If you haven’t read the book, I suggest going to Amazon to read the reviews and comments. I thought about you because of your background and active interests. Mann’s book certainly turned my view of the Americas before Columbus upside down. The whole book is fascinating, especially the relationship between the first American colonists and the Indian nations.
I’m all in favor of those who hunt lions with paintball guns and no backups, just a fast motorcycle.
I think of the line, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” every time there is a quake, freak accident, or simple car wreck or pool drowning. And especially when I’m doing anything less than absolutely safe on my tractor. Yesterday it was pulling logs off our hillside.
By the way, another summer reading observation: I am reading Pat Conroy’s “South of Broad” this weekend, and I am reminded how beautiful his writing is.
Conroy…one of my favorites. His sense of place is…well, indescribable. Hope to read his latest soon. Kate