thoughts on Hemingway

 1.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway is talking about the fishermen in Paris, the ones on the banks and the bridges that fish in the Seine. They fascinate him even though, for his part, he prefers to fish in the mountains. He’s faithful to trout. He sees these people, though. He talks to these people. And, he writes, “they are good to know about.”

AMF is built on the principle of what it is good to know about. Ah, the many things – things that attract adjectives like “warm”, “fine”, “good”. Good is truly a character in these pages. But as we read Hemingway, we find that the book is built not only on a thesis, but an anti-thesis: the things that are bad to know about. The accumulated wreckage, broken relationships, drunks and suicidal tendencies, writer’s blocks and bogus posturing, these give us a four decades of what is bad to know about. Yet you don’t know anything if you don’t know what is bad to know about. The good trivializes itself, the work becomes meaningless.

When I came to France in 1981 to go to the University of Montpellier, all the Americans I was with, or at least a goodly number, knew their AMF. How could they not? We were equipped, in high school and college, with our Hemingway and Scott F. Plus various foreign films. The desire to spend a year in France has to nourish itself, in a young mind growing up in Louisiana, on some longing for the cultural monuments, such as they were.

Of course, since 1981 we are told over and over that a sea change has come, and that the old masters have been given their showtrials and exiled to used book stores. I have my doubts, however. I imagine that a goodly number of the American students who will come to France for their year abroad next year will have some passing acquaintance with Hem and Hadley and Scott and Zelda.

My generation and the one that came after might have been fed a systematically canonized Hemingway. We had to tear down that canon in order to breath, an exercise in our variously achieved enlightenments. What this meant is that what was good to think about Hemingway – his stubborn faith in the true sentence – had to overlap with what was bad to think about Hemingway – the sexism, homophobia, lust for violence, etc. – in order for us to think at all well about Hemingway.

In his preface to the book, dated 1960, we read, “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as  fiction.” Little did Hemingway know that the 60s would belong to these fictional non-fictions. Hemingway knew that a good way to think about fact was as fiction, he always knew that. So one reads the hateful bits about Stein and Ford Madox Ford and one reads the faux prole posturing about knowing as a boy among hobos that one needed a knife and needed to show one could and would use it to kill to prevent something awful (presumably rape sodomy) from happening and one grows to feel about this character that he is, when all things are said and done, worth the time. It works, somehow.

Or it did. It is hard for me to cast off the pathos of history, of the history since, and read it as straightly as Hemingway hoped it would be read, or hoped he would, in general, be read.

2.

Some of my friends, it turns out, are not fans of Hemingway. Which I found out posting a bit about Hem.

This is no surprise. What is good about talking up your private canon is not so much converting other people to your canon (I’m not a motherfuckin’ missionary, after all) but revisiting it privately, shaking it up, seeing how it relates to your current concerns. My concerns, at the moment, are all about the Cold War, which starts, I’d contend, in 1920, with the collapse of the White Armies. Charting the Hemingway persona and the work against the epoch of anti-communism gives one a different sense of Hemingway than, say, either the classroom idol of potential writers or the macho man of the haters.

I’m a pretty orthodox late twentieth century beast in my likes and dislikes. I also have made it a principle, over the years, to be careful in my dislikes. I have, for instance, never read any Salinger. I somehow dislike Salinger. But I can’t really comment too much on a writer who I dislike more for the atmosphere around him than for the work that I’ve never read. One day or another, I’ll probs give one of Salinger’s books to Adam to read – it is def in the teenage canon. Then maybe I’ll read it.

Having a kid is a good way to trip out of your own canonizing. From teen tv series to horror movies, I’ve followed my son’s own taste, much different from mine. I even have acquired a taste for bloody FX – shout out here to Monkey Man, y’all. Of course, eventually the empathy must find a stop – I’ll never be a fan of rap music from the 00s. The farthest I get there is Lil’ Kim.

The long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens don’ mean jest getting drunk. It is an instrument for keeping culturally alert.