Three days a week, I teach a high school creative writing class. Last Thursday, when we came to a lesson on dialogue, I chose Ernest Hemingway as an example. My students are a sharp bunch, and they'd all heard of Hemingway before, though they'd never read him.
I must admit, I was a little disappointed - but certainly not surprised. Nobody seems to teach Hemingway these days.
Hemingway has made a minor resurfacing this winter. Unfortunately, it's because of the goopy Sandra Bullock-Chris O'Donnell film "In Love and War." Sadly, it might be the closest thing some people will ever come to reading Hemingway these days.
After 60 credits in writing and literature at the University, I've read only one Hemingway novel for class. I've taken several specifically "American" literature classes, and I've read scores of short stories as assignments - nothing by Hemingway.
Methinks something anti-Hemingway is spinning through academia.
Of course, this comes as no surprise to most people. As literary studies become increasingly politicized, the tendency is to shy away from reading the dead, white males; especially dead, white males who were often mean, miserable and close to misogynistic. It's an understandable trend, but a lamentable one as well.
When I first set foot into a University classroom, Hemingway held a position in my heart that bordered on idolatry. To me, Hemingway represented all that a writer should be; and though my opinion of him has tempered considerably, I still feel a slight twisting pain in my side when I hear folks mock the great Papa Hem.
And this mocking happens a lot, especially from other writers. Vladimir Nabokov, a writer I like very much, said he read Hemingway in the 1940s - "Something about bells, balls and bulls, and (I) loathed it." But it's not just writers who poke fun and make sport of Hem. It's my own friends.
While studying in Cambridge a few summers ago, it seemed I had died and gone to Heaven: Around every corner, down every corridor, people were talking about books. Bliss. That is, until some brand new acquaintances asked me to pick my favorite writer.
I cleared my throat. Took a sip of stout. Cracked my knuckles. "Hemingway," I said. "I guess it's Hemingway."
A few snickers. A chortle. "Hemingway?" a voice sneered, "It figures."
I sulked in the corner as the crowd turned it's attention to a Marxist criticism of Aphra Behn or something. I finished my pint and walked heavily up the steps to my room.
"What do they know?" I thought. Hemingway is a good and fine and clean writer. It is a good and perfect night and I will fish in the morning. I will catch many fish and afterward I can fry them and maybe find a woman to come with me, a woman like the one I met in Padua during the war.
It's these reveries that get me into trouble.
But in my mind, Hemingway is one of the most important voices that has ever howled across America. More important than the Beats, more important than his Lost Generation peers, more important in many ways than the first American writers like Emerson and Dickinson.
In terms of craft, few writers have made so deep an impression on the literature of our country. Imagine dialogue without Hemingway's influence, imagine sparse clean narratives, imagine the slew of postmodern tales of alienation and grief. If you doubt the influence of Hemingway, try to imagine the literary world had Hemingway never existed. Imagine writers like Kesey and Carver, Mailer and McInerney, without Hemingway's influence.
Admittedly, Hemingway was at his worst when writing about women. His female characters are shallow, and the tone with which he treats them is often condescending. But rather than see that as proof of a misogynistic streak, I like to think of it as a flaw in his craft. Perhaps he really was just bad when writing about women. (Though, in some cases he is good, too, like in "Farewell to Arms" or perhaps "Garden of Eden.")
"Farewell to Arms" is the only Hemingway novel that I have been assigned (the rest I explored on my own). It was taught by one of my favorite professors, a well-respected novelist. In July 2, 1961, when Ernest Hemingway blew his head off in Ketchum, Idaho, this professor of mine, then 18, was in Paris, Hemingway's old haunt. He went from cafe to tavern to bar, toasting the memory of Papa, and he could see scores of other young writers, toasting and mourning.
These days, you sometimes feel that a toast to Hemingway should be done quickly and quietly, if you do it at all.
It seems a shame to me that future generations of literature students and young writers may never be exposed to the magic of Hemingway's stories and prose style. Instead, they'll be left to throw popcorn at the screen as Chris O'Donnell and Sandra Bullock smooch.
- Reach Dean at deanc@umich.edu.