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Coda: Hemingway’s Legacy
- Louisiana State University Press
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Coda Hemingway’s Legacy interviewer [George Plimpton]: Who would you say are your literary forebears —those you have learned the most from? ernest hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoi , Dostoevski, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevodo, Dante, Vergil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers . You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious. —Hemingway, Interview by George Plimpton Art is what makes the impossible look easy. And Hemingway was that artist; a name at the bottom of no man’s list. —John Ciardi, “The Language of an Age” In 1904, two years before his death, Paul Cézanne was asked by a friend what he thought about the Masters. He replied: “They are good. I used to go to the Louvre every morning when I was in Paris; but in the end I attached greater importance to nature than to them. You have to create your own vision.” Pressed further, he elaborated, “You have to create your own perspective, you must see nature as if no one had ever seen it before.” But what did he mean by nature? Was art “a union of the world and the individual ” or, restated in our terminology, what are the respective roles of the external world and the artist’s perceiving mind in the creation of art? To this question Cézanne responded: “I understand it as a personal apperception . I locate this apperception in sensation and I ask of the intellect that it organize these sensations into works of art” (qtd. in Bernard 79–80; 224 Hemingway’s Legacy 225 translations mine).1 Although his answers remain vague, nevertheless Cézanne here gathers up several of the topics we have been exploring in this book: what O’Faolain terms “literary personality” (personal apperception); impressionism and expressionism (perception and sensation); form, craft, and technique (organizing these perceptions and sensations into works of art); and what underlies innovations in technique (creating one’s own perspective and seeing the world anew). Technique was not, to either Cézanne or Hemingway, culturally neutral; it’s the method by which artists render their unique visions, their worldviews. Hemingway learned lessons from many craftsmen—fiction writers, artists , musicians, journalists, poets, matadors, fishermen, hunters, soldiers— from anyone whose profession demands applied technique. In the end, he sided with what Cézanne termed “nature”; like the Frenchman, he broke it all down and rebuilt it according to his own vision, writing fictional prose different from any written before. Although his style has been more imitated than any author’s of the last century, no one has ever successfully reproduced it. Whenever someone has tried, it’s come out badly, producing unintentional versions of the entries in the now defunct annual “International Imitation Hemingway Competition,” no different really than when Hemingway briefly emulated Jack London in his teens or Stein in his twenties . When one truly understands Hemingway’s art, one sees its traces everywhere , not just in those writers whose fiction most resembles his. One need not write in the manner of Hemingway in order to have learned from him, any more than one must be a late Impressionist to have felt the influence of Cézanne. In other words, except in the works of authors who’ve been dubbed, somewhat facilely, “hard-boiled” or “minimalist,” Hemingway ’s immense legacy has not always been in plain sight. The many important writers whom he influenced eschewed imitation and learned to create their own styles. To take two examples, although Ralph Ellison called Hemingway his “ancestor” (140) and Gabriel García Márquez credited him as the premier influence on his own fictional craft (“Meets” 16), it is difficult to see clear connections between Hemingway’s art and either Invisible Man...