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Introduction: The Hemingway “Problem” and the Matter of Art
- Louisiana State University Press
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Introduction The Hemingway “Problem” and the Matter of Art Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft—not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing. —Gabriel García Márquez, “Gabriel García Márquez Meets Ernest Hemingway” Lawrence, De Maupassant, Chekhov, and Hemingway were also a great influence on me when I first began to write short stories, very different as they all are. But, then, who is there, what modern writer of short stories has not been influenced by those four? They created the modern short story. —Nadine Gordimer, Conversations with Nadine Gordimer [Hemingway’s prose is an] achievement superior to anything in poetry—I include Pound, I include Eliot, and I include Auden. You cannot align it with the verse of Frost. You cannot align it with anything experimental, even syllabically with Whitman. This is the work of a poet who has arrived at originality at great cost. And finally, it comes into an ease that is the ease present in Troilus and Cressida or any one of the great plays. —Derek Walcott, quoted in Eric McHenry, “BU Scholars Grace Hemingway Centennial” The ultimate goal of this book is to justify Hemingway’s centrality in the canon by focusing on his aesthetics. This may seem a curious objective, since his place in literary history hardly seems threatened: Hemingway scholarship proliferates, critics of modern fiction continue to hold him in high regard, and no author of the past century has been more esteemed by other writers. Nevertheless, there remains a strong current of antipathy among academic critics toward him and his work, sometimes resulting in downright dismissal, especially among generalists and non-twentiethcentury scholars. In academia, the thoughtless put-down of Hemingway is often, if not de rigueur, at least an acceptable substitute for reasoned discourse . By way of example, some years ago Lawrence Buell, a major scholar of nineteenth-century literature, suggested, as a self-evident afterthought in 1 2 Art Matters the pages of a prestigious journal, American Literature, that the “demotion of Hemingway” would be a fine way to begin improving the canon and ridding it of sexism (114). Offered with the insouciance of the old joke— “What do you call three hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? . . . A good start.”—this attitude is not uncommon. Over the years I’ve run across many English professors who, upon discovering that I write on Hemingway , have casually assumed that I must therefore be a mesomorph. On such occasions, I’ve recalled William Faulkner’s response to Hemingway’s detractors, that “the man who wrote some of the pieces of Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and some of the African stuff (and some— most—of all the rest of it too for that matter) does not need defending” (“Faulkner to Waugh” 6). But neither Buell’s casual insinuation that a central author in the canon be busted without a court martial nor Faulkner’s defiant retort to critics (which followed upon a similarly vigorous defense of Hemingway by novelist Evelyn Waugh) bothers to argue its point. In both cases, the writer simply issues an edict that he assumes will be amply manifest to his own specific audience. In this book, I show why Faulkner felt the way he did about Hemingway, and why Buell’s comment is as inappropriate to Hemingway as it would be to, say, such academic darlings as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, or Faulkner himself. On 3 July 1961, the day after Ernest Hemingway took his life, the New York Times devoted a section of its coverage to brief appraisals of his work. For once, the famous Hemingway mystique took a back seat to art as authors working in a variety of literary genres offered their tributes. Robert Frost observed, “His style dominated our story-telling long and short.” Faulkner called him “one of the bravest and best, the strictest in principles , the severest of craftsmen, undeviating in his dedication to his craft.” To James Thurber, he was “unquestionably one of the greatest writers of the century”; Tennessee Williams flatly stated that “twentieth-century literature began with Proust’s ‘The Remembrance of Things Past’ and with Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’”; and Cyril Connolly termed him “a Titan of the age,” placing him with “Joyce, Eliot and Yeats among the real founders of what is called the modern movement in writing...