Ernest Hemingway

thursday three (on friday)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been accumulating little notes here and there about things I could write about, but none of them were really strong enough for a whole blog post.

So, here is a selection:

1) “No Comfort” by Fintan O’Toole

I read O’Toole quite often, mostly about politics, but this (even though it starts about Elon Musk) is not about politics. It’s about the inescapable cliche that Shakespeare wrote about “heroes” who were brought down by “tragic flaws.”

To offer a brief quote:

The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

Well worth reading.

 
2) Shelley Duvall (1949 – 2024)

Here are two good obituaries of Shelley Duvall:

This article is good, too: “The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd“

It’s really too bad that so many people these days know her, if they know her at all, from her (excellent) work in The Shining. She was consistently good, in a variety of roles, in all the movies she made with Robert Altman.

Speaking of Altman, this was interesting: “The 10 Best Robert Altman Movies, Ranked.” I don’t entirely agree with the ranking (if I made a Altman Top Ten list today, I would undoubtedly disagree with it by tomorrow), but it enough in sync with my own preferences that I’m tempted to re-watch 3 Women, which I haven’t seen in ages and which I’ve never reviewed (and which stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek).

 
Also:

I’ve still been dipping in and out of Across the River and into the Trees, from time to time, but my opinions haven’t changed. And now there are no more Hemingway novels for me to read for the first time (I have no interest in the posthumous ones). Oh, well, the short stories are generally better anyway.

I’ve also been re-reading parts of A. E. Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway, which is about the years they were friends (and collaborators, since Hotchner adapted quite a few Hemingway stories for the screen). And during that time, they (and several other people) traveled around Spain following a season of bullfighting, partly because of a very intense rivalry between two great matadors, both of whom Hemingway was friends with.

Hemingway wrote a book about that summer, called The Dangerous Season. I’ve never read any of his non-fiction writing, but I decided to try this one.

(Weirdly, I do have to report that I felt a wisp of an obligation to insert a caveat explaining that I don’t approve of bullfighting. Looking at this objectively, this is odd, since I frequently read — and write — murder mysteries and I have never felt that I should clarify that I’m not in favor of murder.)

It is difficult to describe how much I enjoyed The Dangerous Season. Unlike Across the River, this is not Hemingway attempting “calculus” in prose (and did Hemingway even know what calculus was? — I doubt it) — this is Hemingway writing simply and well about people he knew and a sport he had studied for a lot of his life. It has humor, too, which the novel mostly doesn’t. (Orson Welles said that Hemingway could be really funny in life, but he obviously thought that humor had no place in serious fiction.) His humor can be rather dry and subtle, but it’s there.

In fiction, there are fairly predictable ways that this story could have ended (see the Lady Bracknell quote above), but these are real events and so they end as they ended.

One thing particularly amused me after reading this book and the Hotchner book referred to above. The two matadors whose rivalry is at the center of the book were Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Dominguin’s sister Carmen was married to Ordóñez. Hemingway clearly liked Carmen, and writes about her with admiration, but what he never mentions (and Hotchner does) is that she had been a matador herself, and a very good one. Hotchner makes it clear that no woman could succeed in the macho world of bullfighting unless she had undeniable skills.

Why is this book so much better than Across the River (apart from the “calculus” question referred to above)? Frankly, one reason is that it was edited, and heavily (I think partly by Hotchner). As far as I can tell, Across the River was never even proofread, let alone edited.

across the river and into the trees

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I thought this article about Hemingway was interesting: “Hemingway’s Consolations“

It requires registration or a subscription, but the part that struck me the most is a footnote which didn’t make it into the online version anyway:

… Hemingway is far better on hating one’s wife than on loving her. His depictions of amorous couples are numerous — they appear in A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the posthumously published Garden of Eden — with results mostly ranging from insipid to wretched. An alternate key to understanding which of Hemingway’s works have endured might be: only the ones with unhappy couples or unrequited lovers.

That really clicked for me, I must admit. Sometimes when something about a novel (or a movie or TV show) doesn’t move me at all, I wonder if it’s me, so it can be nice to get confirmation that I’m not alone. Thinking back on Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, for example, she seemed like a real person, living a life, in a way the Renata in Across the River and into the Trees doesn’t. I haven’t read For Whom the Bell Tolls in years (and I have no desire to read it again), but I remember the romance in that book as being lousy.

On the subject of Hemingway, here are my two ideas — my two initial ideas, at least — about Across the River and into the Trees:

In the beginning and ending sections of the book (the good parts), we see Colonel Richard Cantwell, a career soldier who served in both World Wars. We see his rough way of acting and speaking (exacerbated now by his knowledge that he is going to die very soon), and we see his eagerness not to be this way anymore, not to be “brutal” — in general and specifically with his lover, Renata, an Italian countess who is much, much younger than he is.

We see this very clearly during the (more or less endless) middle part of the book, where he is spending time with Renata. By the way, the sentence above about Hemingway’s writing of amorous couples doesn’t mention this book (possibly most people who have read it want to forget the entire experience), but “with results mostly ranging from insipid to wretched” applies here.

Across the River is in third person, but mostly third person limited, so we see Colonel Cantwell’s actions and thoughts, and his ideas about how others see him.

But, every so often, and sometimes only for a phrase, the camera swivels around and shows us how the men around him (and, once, Renata) actually view him.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Not that Cantwell always learns how the others see him, but we do. It’s quick, as I say, and sometimes easy to miss, but it’s there.

For at least one man — the poler who is piloting the colonel’s boat and scattering his decoys — his antipathy toward the colonel turns out to have nothing to do with Cantwell’s actions and his words, nothing to do with how “brutal” he is or is not being at any given moment, and everything to do with his U.S. Army uniform.

We can try to improve how we treat people, but a lot of how people react to anything or anybody has to do with other things in their lives.

My current opinion is that this would have made a really good short story.

 
My second idea is that the colonel spends a lot of his last hours with Renata telling her all sorts of stories about the battles he’s fought in his career. Renata encourages him periodically, usually after he says that he’s sure he’s boring her, but the colonel obviously wants to share this information, as much as he can. He knows that he is about to die, and this is his only chance to pass these things along to someone else.

I was less sure about this interpretation than the first one, but then I found out that one of Hemingway’s early ideas for this book’s title was “The Things That I Know.”

 
Other posts where I talked about this book:

  1. Death in a Box
  2. Getting Deeper into the Trees

getting deeper into the trees

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Is it better to read five books once each, or is it better to read one book five times?

If you want to choose a good car to drive, it’s probably best to do research on a bunch of different ones, do some test drives, ask around from people who know cars, and so on.

However, if you want to figure out how to build a car, you might want to take one car apart and put it back together again, and then maybe do the same with another car, and so on.

When I first bought Inherent Vice (on my lunch hour, on the day it was published), I started to read it, and I ended up reading it pretty much continuously for the next five months, from the beginning to the end and then back to the beginning again, including listening to the audio book version many times. I figured out some interesting things about the book, wrote a lot of blog posts about it, and added extensive notes to the online Pynchon wiki.

I’m not sure if I learned any useful lessons to apply to my own writing, though. As I’ve mentioned before, when I’m reading Pynchon I’m always aware that any one of his sentences is better than any sentence I have ever written or am ever likely to write. So, not much to learn there.

Anyway, I am still poking around in Across the River and into the Trees, and I now have a second theory to add to my first one. I’m still testing them, though.

On the other hand, I’m definitely not going to devote five months to this project. There is pretty much no chance that I will figure out something which will elevate Across the River… to the level of Inherent Vice.

As I said in a comment on another blog:

“I’m reading Across the River and Into the Trees now, which is interesting. It’s taking some work, but I think I’m beginning to understand what he [Hemingway] was going after. As he said to A.E. Hotchner (talking about this book, and critics), ‘In this book I have moved into calculus, having started with straight math, then moved to geometry, then algebra; and the next time out it it will be trigonometry. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them.'”

paul temple, and more papa

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Paul Temple

As I mentioned a couple of times ago, I’ve been listening avidly to the Paul Temple radio detective series. I was trying to find a way to describe it, but then from this article I found this:

In the words of the entertainment historian Keith Howes: “All the plots were hugely convoluted, usually set in and around shady nightclubs and studded with murders and attempted murders, halting deathbed revelations, breathtaking escapes from gunfire, flooded mills or burning boats, [and] a final episode gathering of the suspects.”

That’s an interesting mixture of genre elements, since the show has all the “gentleman detective” fixtures (the sophisticated detective and spouse, the comfortable lifestyle, the banter, the cocktails, the cigarettes, and the gathering of all the suspects at the end of the story — often for cocktails) but there are also all those exploding booby traps, and cars with the brake lines cut, and snipers.

And, unlike most “gentleman detective” stories, the bad guys are almost always criminal gangs, often drug smugglers or blackmailers (or both). So, the solution at the end often has two stages: 1) Of all the characters introduced, which ones are in the gang, and 2) Which one is the head of the gang?

It makes me think of the Ellery Queen stories, where a gangster sometimes appeared as a suspect, but experienced Queen readers always knew that this was a red herring. In one story, the police had actually arrested the gangster, and at the end, when Ellery explained the whole crime, he gently pointed out that they really needed to release the crook, who was, in this case at least, completely innocent.

More Papa Hemingway

In addition to reading Across the River and Into the Trees, as I talked about before, I’ve also reread Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, by A. E. Hotchner. So, I’m reading Across the River…, and simultaneously reading about the (mostly negative) reaction when it was published.

(By the way, I don’t think Across the River… is actually good, but it’s certainly not the worst book he ever wrote.)

The Hotchner book also brings out what Orson Welles talked about — Hemingway’s deteriorating mental condition when he killed himself. Some of that, especially the helplessness of the people who cared about him as they saw him slip further and further away from reality, is difficult to read.

That part had stuck with me from when I read the book the first time (some decades ago), but I had not remembered the amount of alcohol in the book. Up until the last portion of the book, when Hemingway’s health was bad and he was strictly limiting his drinking, everybody seems to be nearly drowning in booze. I had that in mind when I read this article in the Guardian: “Time to face the brutal truth: there’s no glamour at the bottom of a glass.”

Not that I’m against drinking in general (although I haven’t had a drink since the pandemic started), but the romanticized connection between drinking and writing (most of it by non-writers) is ridiculous.

The Guardian article starts:

When I was 21, I decided I should make a proper effort to be a writer. I knew what I needed: countless films and television shows had told me. I needed a typewriter, fags and a bottle of whisky. I acquired them, and set myself up at the kitchen table. Yep, I thought. Now I am the business. I was Dorothy Parker, Carson McCullers, Raymond Chandler. So I would die miserably – who cares? I was 21, and still immortal.

As always, I go back to my father’s words: “There is only one rule in writing: Write well.” I think Hemingway would have agreed with that.

death in a box

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of reading two books which have made me think about death — and specifically death in murder mysteries (although neither book is a murder mystery).

One book is Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway. After I wrote about “Papa” a few weeks ago, I decided to read Across the River… (although the general opinion seems to be that it’s lousy) — just because it was the only Hemingway novel I’ve never read (not counting the posthumous ones). It’s very much concerned with death — the protagonist, Colonel Richard Cantwell, has a heart condition and knows he’s going to die very soon.

The other book is The Girl in the Back, by Laura Davis-Chanon, a memoir of her days in a New Wave band called the Student Teachers. The Student Teachers were all around sixteen years old, and they were quite successful on the local New York scene, and then beyond.

At one point in the book, Laura is the drummer in an increasingly successful band, basically homeless, attending her high school classes but not always keeping up with her assignments, and seems to be surviving on a diet of White Russians and occasional lines of cocaine.

Being familiar with rock & roll and its related lifestyles, it’s easy to tell that trouble may be on the horizon. (Also, full disclosure: Laura and I are not friends, but we were acquaintances back in those days and we had friends in common, so I know that something else bad is on the horizon for her, too, not related to drugs and alcohol.)

So, both books have a certain ominous quality. They are different, of course, since Colonel Cantwell is clearly going to die, and Laura Davis is obviously going to survive since she recently wrote the book. Plus, one book is intensely concerned with being old, and the other is about being very young. But they both have a similar mood in the middle of the book — I want to find out what happens next, but I dread it a little, too.

Murder mysteries are obviously concerned with death, but they tend to have the death at or near the beginning (unless they have more than one), which means they often don’t have that same quality of dread. This is probably not an original thought, but in reading these two books it occurred to me that this is why murder mysteries can be so much fun, even though they’re centered on death. The death is contained and relatively safe, like seeing a dangerous animal in a zoo, or in a movie.

And another point is that, in murder mysteries, there is generally the expectation that the death will be explained at the end. It won’t be random or capricious or impersonal, as it often is in real life.

After all, how else is it possible that there could be “cozy” mysteries (which is sort of what I’m writing these days)? There aren’t “cozy” post-apocalyptic disaster stories, or “cozy” zombie horror stories (to mention two other death-centered genres).

It’s good to think about this now, since I’m currently tossing around ideas for the next story in the series I’m writing. In a series of stories like this, there needs to be variety, but there also seems to be some consistency in the underlying assumptions.

If you’re reading a book of Sherlock Holmes short stories, it doesn’t work if in one story he’s solving a mystery on the moon.

papa (reporting back, as promised)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Well, I said I would report back on the Hemingway documentary.

I watched slightly more than an hour, which was about my limit. It was slow-moving (“ponderous” is a little strong, but it’s tending in that direction), full of platitudes, and, for me at least, full of information that I already know. (In fairness, I’m probably not the target audience, since I’m already very familiar with both Hemingway’s writing and his life story. I get the impression that this was intended as “Hemingway 101.”)

I did come upon this, though, which is wonderful, and less than five minutes long:

The thing I like particularly is Welles’ lack of hokum when talking about Hemingway’s suicide. He (Hemingway) had a mental illness, which culminated in him killing himself. He was also, at his best, a great artist. There is also substantial evidence that he was sometimes a crappy human being. He was also a celebrity, which, especially these days, encourages people to draw facile connections between the first three facts.

In a New Yorker piece about the documentary, this question was asked:

But why a film about Hemingway now, and not, say, Faulkner? Is Faulkner not a more vibrant figure, who prefigured in his Snopes stories and novels the age of Trump and Derek Chauvin’s trial, and the Gordian knot of race that continues to choke large portions of our country?

The piece doesn’t answer the question, probably because the answer is too obvious.

Hemingway will get a lot more eyeballs watching. Not that he’s more often read these days than Faulkner (I have no information or opinions about that), but I’ve met a lot of people who have strong opinions about Hemingway despite never having read a word of his writing. Everybody I’ve ever met who had strong opinions about Faulkner had actually read his work.