The Goddamn Manful Hemingway Thread

btw, that's something i dont consider his weakness. hills like white elephants and Three Day Blows are two of my favorites and they're pretty much all interaction.

i'll have something to say, in a few days.

My sense is he's faded into the background and has a lot fewer readers these days. Maybe because Hemingway suffered so much from being widely imitated that his stylistic strengthes all became cliches, while his weaknesses were all his own.

Among other things, femininist critics lit into him in the 1970s like wolves on fresh meat and no one much bothered to defend him, because they were mostly tired of him by then.

i'm reading the sun also rises, am about halfway thru it, and find his style mostly a joke (but a funny one).

'hills like white elephants' um, 'pwns'

My wife and all her English-major girlfriends take the feminist side, which I can kinda see. I mean, it's not like Catherine Barkley or For Whom's Maria are anything other than supporting characters. I can't say it really bothers me, though. By the same token, I don't read Woolf for strong, sympathetic male characters.

i'm curious to see his treatment of brett in SARs. [waitwait don't tell me]

admiral stockdale survived as a pow by thinking abt epictetus!

It's funny that McCain should say that, since Robert Jordan (I love that one stylistic tic -- one forgets it after a few pages, but it has its effect. What effect is it, exactly, though? Dashiell Hammett does the same thing in The Glass Key, I believe.) -- since Robert Jordan, it's clear, would prefer death by firefight or his own hand to ever being held prisoner.

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/022309/for-sale-hemingway.gif

ooops, credit: toothpastefordinner.com

I recognize he's a boring choice but The Sun Also Rises meant a lot to me a few years back.

I love For Whom the Bell Tolls and the Old Man and the Sea but I haven't read anything else by Hemmingway. Tried the Sun Also Rises once but I found the character's too annoying and Jake's impotence is kinda, I dunno, frustrating to read, or something. Although I've always had a thing were I find afflicted protagonists hard to stomach, e.g. loved Crime and Punishment but it was a bit of a slog for me to be following mad bastard Raskolnikov through the whole thing.

also Hemingway = classic, Hemingway's influence = at least slightly dud.

braggin 09 but: he was my grandmothers godfather

sun also rises in the reread every year category for me

The short stories are where it is for me.

I also like, not the goddam manful Hemingway but, to follow Burroughs, the uncanny Hemingway who could sense the approach of death, as at the end of "Snows of Kilimanjaro" and in real life it seems.

His style really wearies me, but I do enjoy some of his short stories. The Sun Also Rises I also quite enjoyed, though the way the whole impotence thing was handled was unintentionally hilarious.

sun also rises wasn't as absorbing as i wanted it to be, though i still found it a fairly quick and enjoyable read. i'll get to the other novels before long.

it's funny that people complain about his female characters being thinly sketched and caricatured -- i think his male characters are like that too! i don't think characterization was his strong point.

idk i mean i think the dudes who inherited the macho ticker tape mantel got really good at deft hypersubtle characterization

I read Sun Also Rises last month for the first time and I liked it, but not the way I loved some of his other stuff. My favourites are Moveable Feast, Death in the Afternoon and some of the Nick Adams stories, but I haven't read a lot more than that, I have to admit. At his best I find his style so lovely, just very hypnotic and calming.

A Farewell To Arms is unbelievable. I remember not liking it when I read it becaues it was so unconventional and spontaneously tragic. Nowadays that's what I like most about it.
I read Green Hills of Africa because it was name-dropped in On The Road ("It's Hemingway's best"). It was good. I mean, the first half is awesome; Hemingway gets loaded, starts talking shit about literature, kills a rhinoceros(!). The second half is really hunting-heavy though and kind of a slog. That said I highly recommend it. This is going to sound lame but it was really relaxing.

He's a short story writer with novelistic ambitions, and as such only hit it twice: The Sun Also Rises and (barely) A Farewell to Arms. I'm really fond of the posthumous The Garden of Eden, in which he exposes the polymorphous perversity that served as subtext for so many years.

Papa's got a brand new dress.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2713/4457746844_dec3f4e357_o.jpg

bang

"one book by me about the sea"

I was a young teen when Hemingway killed himself. He was my hero and I felt betrayed. I never read him again. All these years and the betrayal is still fresh.

― jerry myers, Sunday, 4 June 2006 08:53 (5 years ago)

Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway,
Hemingway in despair, Hemingway at the end,
the end of Hemingway,
tears in a diningroom in Indiana
and that was years ago, before his marriage say,
God to him no worse luck send.

Save us from shotguns & fathers' suicides.
It all depends on who you're the father of
if you want to kill yourself --
a bad example, murder of oneself,
the final death, in a paroxysm, of love
for which good mercy hides?

A girl at the door: 'A few coppers pray'
But to return, to return to Hemingway
that cruel & gifted man.
Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger
or all my life I'll suffer from your anger
killing what you began.

-- Berryman, D.S. #235

i'm nearing the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls (having read the big collection of his short stories repeatedly in high school, and Old Man and the Sea, and that's it, otherwise), and I guess it's long fallen out of fashion to love him, but I do. There's a departure near the end of FWtBT, starting with "Then after your father had shot himself with this pistol, and you'd come home from school", and continuing on a paragraph later with a section about taking that pistol and riding a horse out to a lake that was supposedly 800 feet deep and dropping it in, watching it sink. Just killed me. Probably from having a few friends who had killed themselves, long ago, + 3/4 fifth of Maker's Mark, but i just hate how you can no longer be like "FUCK YEAH HEMINGWAY" anymore, you're supposed to couch it in reservations

Yes yes, the PC police can be so wearying.

It's odd coming to him as a comics fan, as one of his major impacts there has been Dave Sim's loving encomium over about a year, featuring Ham Ernestway and his shrewish wife Mary, who eventually pushes him towards suicide. On the one hand he's tainted by association with Sim during the height of his misogyny, on the other it's assumed that the caricature has surely exaggerated him. And then it hasn't.

Is this the longest all-boys thread on ILB / on ILX? Certainly if you'd asked me what the longest all-boys thread on ILB was, I would have come up with Hemingway after a while.

Regarding his style: there's a parody in a 1932 New Yorker, bearing the subtitle "(With the usual apologies to Ernest Hemingway, who must be pretty sick of this sort of thing)"

I am a girl and I adore Hemingway. His real life and goddam manfulness doesn't change the fact that I love the sentences he wrote. Reading him is a weirdly beautiful experience for me.

Sun Also Rises is my least favourite, although I haven't read everything or even most of his stuff. I read Farewell to Arms earlier this year, it was pretty devastating. The short stories were my first intro to him, and might be my favourite.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/ernest_hemingways_reading_list_for_a_young_writer_1934.html

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~sunny/maestro.pdf

thought thread title said mariel hemingway, was confused and excited that she would have her own thread

Bibliography (edit)

Mariel Hemingway is the author of:
Hemingway, Mariel (2002). Finding My Balance: A Memoir (1st ed.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-3807-9.
Hemingway, Mariel (2006). Mariel Hemingway's Healthy Living from the Inside Out: Every Woman's Guide to Real Beauty, Renewed Energy, and a Radiant Life (1st ed.). HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-089039-1.
Hemingway, Mariel (2009). MARIEL'S KITCHEN Simple Ingredients for a Delicious and Satisfying Life (1st ed.). HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-164987-5.

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