The Goddamn Manful Hemingway Thread

i mean we could try i guess

I like that list of books in the Esquire article -- it's not the same as the earlier handwritten list. I wonder if Mariel has read them all.

Hemingway sounds nasty and condescending in his account of his conversations with Samuelson, which gives the Olympian writing advice an undertone that would be funny if the effect were intentional. I can't quite read it that way.

this 22-year-old showed up on his porch and asked to be taught how to write and hadn't even read war and peace; i think he behaved extremely well for ernest hemingway.

Hemingway comes across as a nicer guy in Samuelson's account of their meeting than he does in the Esquire piece.

I'm trying hard to recall reading The Old Man and the Sea more than 40 years ago. My memory tells me it was so stripped down and simplified that a re-reading might look like a self-parody or it might look like the apotheosis of the style Hemingway was striving for all his life. From this distance I can't say. I do recall it having gravitas far beyond what I normally read in my teens. I suspect it was a great book in its way. I guess it wouldn't take me long to find out if that's true.

Another one who thought it was the granddaughter's thread for a second.

Anyone gonna watch the Ken Burns series?

A review: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/a-new-hemingway-documentary-peeks-behind-the-myth

Revisiting his writing, I remembered it was its movement that touched me—how he gets characters from one part of the room to another. Easier said than done, and one of the ways in which he separated himself from Stein. He replaced thinking with action—which Stein considered an affront to modernism. “Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway,” Stein wrote in “Alice B. Toklas.” “They both agreed that they have a weakness for Hemingway because he is such a good pupil. He is a rotten pupil, I protested. You don’t understand, they both said, it is flattering to have a pupil who does it without understanding it.” Stein’s voice and her experiments with sound are part of the spine of his work, and how gripping is that? To realize that Hemingway’s famously muscular prose was born of admiration for a middle-aged lesbian’s sui-generis sentences and paragraphs? Absorbing Stein’s influence, and admitting to his attraction, was one way of getting at what he always longed for: to be a girl in love with a powerful woman.

posthumously psychoanalyzing hemingway strikes me as a parlor game without much excitement