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And in Paris, I read so many great ones. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, which I found in the $3 bin outside Shakespeare & Co. The copy was disintegrating, so I paper-clipped the pages together and read them while sitting on the bench outside the store. The Children’s Hospital**** by Chris Adrian (oh, and I read A Better Angel****** and The Great Night this year, too), which was probably my favorite reading experience. I spent thirty minutes or so every morning reading it, before the city woke up, sitting on the Seine and eating a pain au chocolat. There are probably still crumbs in my copy. I also read The Great Gatsby and A Moveable Feast and reread Wuthering Heights.

- from a year-in-reading post by Kelsey Ford, who had me at pain au chocolat.

And Paris.

And Gatsby.

(this post was reblogged from kelsfjord)
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Is it any wonder the most imitated writer of the twentieth century rose sometime after seven o’clock that morning, slipped a red dressing robe over blue pajamas, put on slippers, moved past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping, padded down the red-carpeted stairs, crossed the length of the living room to the kitchen, retrieved the key to the locked storeroom where the weapons were (inexplicably, Mary Hemingway had left the ring of keys on the windowsill above the sink), went down to the basement, took shells from the ammo box, closed and relocked the door, came back upstairs, walked ten steps to the front-entry foyer (one sees him in this grainy mind-movie moving very fast but also methodically, teeth clenched and bared in that sickly smile he often exhibited toward the end of his life), opened the foyer door, stepped inside, placed the butt of the gun on the linoleum tile, tore open the breech, slammed in the cartridges, snapped it shut, bent over, as you might bend over a water fountain, rested his forehead against the blue steel, and blew away his entire cranial vault with the double-barreled, 12-gauge Boss shotgun with which he’d once shot pigeons?

- the insupportably specific passage from Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson that made me decide to put the book aside and read something else for now.

Look, even though the book is biography rather than fiction, I’ll grant Hendrickson the clenched teeth he hallucinates in his “grainy mind-movie.” But there’s just no reason to write a scene that has Hemingway getting the gun before the ammunition. Except for the obvious fact that the gunshot came last, we can’t know the order of what happened that morning. Hendrickson is free to cope with that uncertainty by inventing an order. I wish he hadn’t. I’m reminded of another bit from the William Langewiesche interview I quoted a couple of days ago:

Writing is a private conversation with the writer and each individual reader. It is a very intimate communication, which relies on trust. So it is crucial to establish that trust by never tricking the reader, never playing cute, never cajoling, showing off, or wasting the reader’s time.

Fair or not, Hendrickson lost me. I tried to go on. I did go on. But I can’t get past wondering where the truth ends and the truthiness begins. My loss maybe.

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“Are you actually reading that?”

Mitchell looked up to find Claire staring at him from the bed.

“Hemingway?” she said dubiously.

“I thought it would be good for Paris.”

She rolled her eyes and went back to her book. And Mitchell went back to his. Or tried. Except that now all he could do was stare at the page.

He was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals. Mitchell thought this was an instance of tarring with too wide a brush. If he was to argue this with Claire, however, he ran the risk of being labeled a misogynist himself. More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?

Rereading Hemingway’s sentences, Mitchell recognized that they were, indeed, implicitly addressed to the male reader.

He crossed and uncrossed his legs, trying to concentrate on his book. He felt embarrased to be reading Hemingway and angry about being made to feel embarrassed. It wasn’t as if Hemingway was even his favorite writer! He’d hardly read any Hemingway!

Fortunately, a little while later, Larry announced that dinner was served.

- from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides


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A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write.

- Nicholas Sparks

(via the great FYH)

Touch your wrist. Take your pulse. Now touch just about any string of words from the start of A Farewell To Arms. There’s a pulse as human as yours or mine in “the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels” and “the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.” Read the opening to yourself. Out loud. Maybe you’ll hear what I mean. Maybe you’ll think I’m hallucinating. Here’s how A Farewell To Arms starts:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Nicholas Sparks is entitled to believe there’s a pulse as human as yours or mine in the opening sentences of A Walk To Remember, a book he wrote. You’re entitled to believe it, too. Free country, etc. A Walk To Remember starts like this:

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.

I know that there are people who wonder about me when I say this. They look at me strangely as if trying to fathom what could have happened back then, though I seldom bother to explain. Because I’ve lived here for most of my life, I don’t feel that I have to unless it’s on my terms, and that would take more time than most people are willing to give me. My story can’t be summed up in two or three sentences; it can’t be packaged into something neat and simple that people would immediately understand.

Even if we call it a tie and decide A Walk To Remember equals A Farewell To Arms, there’s no getting around timing. Sparks published his book seven decades after Hemingway published his. This makes me think of something David Foster Wallace said in an old interview I read back in February:

… after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. … I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion.

Or, as Hemingway told The Paris Review, “Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics.”

I’d feel mean for posting this if the same second-coming-of-Hemingway interview didn’t include an attack on Cormac McCarthy, whose work Sparks called “horrible” and “probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written.”

go read Dobbs

Now that I’m not hiding from the Internet anymore, I’ve had a chance to notice that David Dobbs is on fire — two smart, stirring posts about Hemingway (here and here); a piece selected for The Best American Sports Writing 2011; a post about spin in tennis that intrigued me since I spin everything I touch in sports, even bounce passes in basketball lately; and a National Geographic cover story about the teenage brain, which includes this passage:

Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology’s most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of them—angst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumbling—then how did those traits survive selection? They couldn’t—not if they were the period’s most fundamental or consequential features.

The answer is that those troublesome traits don’t really characterize adolescence; they’re just what we notice most because they annoy us or put our children in danger.

I’m delighted for David. He’s one of a thimbleful* of people I’ve never met in person but unhesitatingly consider a friend. Go read him.

——-

* Note: Do not attempt to fit actual people in actual thimbles.

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I think that many young writers confuse having a writerly persona with being a writer. They want to be like Hemingway by drinking lots of whiskey, hunting or traveling. And while emulating Hemingway’s machismo is a fast track to becoming a semi-worldly drunk, it doesn’t make you a writer. Hemingway’s comic book persona, the one he intentionally crafted for us on his African safaris and his boxing bouts and his fishing trips, the one that is parodied in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” will teach you nothing about writing. The lessons are in his sentences.
- Hannah Miet interviewed for The Hemingway Project
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When Fitzgerald saw the article, he was so miserable that, as he reported to Ober, he swallowed an overdose of morphine, which he vomited up. The newspaper article was picked up by Time, and Fitzgerald was concerned about preventing Scottie from seeing it at school. Surprisingly, he turned to Hemingway for support, asking him to respond to Mok. Hemingway replied from Montana that he had not seen the article but was ready to help. Fitzgerald acknowledged his offer: WIRED UNDER IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE IN NEW YORK NOTHING CAN BE DONE AT LONG RANGE AND ON COOLER CONSIDERATION SEEMS NOTHING TO BE DONE ANYHOW THANKS BEST ALWAYS SCOTT.

- from Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some sort of epic grandeur: the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The newspaper article mentioned in the passage was Michel Mok’s “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” from the 9/25/1936 New York Post. An edited version is here. (via squeela)

Hemingway’s “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well” just knocked me down, jumped on my chest and stood there getting heavier. This seems to be a famous sentence, but it’s not one I noticed the times I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in my teens and my early twenties. That I’m now 38 may explain why I hit rewind on the audiobook, listened to the sentence again and pulled over at the first tattoo shop I passed. In violation of several Seattle ordinances, I have no tattoos. I didn’t expect to get a tattoo. This sentence makes a tattoo plausible. If I get it, I will probably track down the August 1936 issue of Esquire and reproduce the original look of the sentence so that the tattoo says more than its words by reminding me to strive to read old writing like it’s brand new. Click for high-res photo

Hemingway’s “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well” just knocked me down, jumped on my chest and stood there getting heavier.

This seems to be a famous sentence, but it’s not one I noticed the times I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in my teens and my early twenties. That I’m now 38 may explain why I hit rewind on the audiobook, listened to the sentence again and pulled over at the first tattoo shop I passed.

In violation of several Seattle ordinances, I have no tattoos. I didn’t expect to get a tattoo. This sentence makes a tattoo plausible. If I get it, I will probably track down the August 1936 issue of Esquire and reproduce the original look of the sentence so that the tattoo says more than its words by reminding me to strive to read old writing like it’s brand new.

Now, some will argue that I should shrug off the if-you-don’t-want-this-hunk-of-manhood-then-you-must-be-a-lesbian logic of this comeback. But Dr. Beckerman is a board-certified jokestetrician. So I’m taking his diagnosis seriously, and I’ve decided to dedicate myself to raising awareness of this troubling condition. You — or someone you love — might have no sense of humor if: 1) You get pissed off that a writer is out there making a buck by doing stuff like joking about F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44. 2) Um, I’m not actually sure what my other symptoms are. What if not knowing my other symptoms is a symptom?  Shit!!!! You’ll have to deduce the other symptoms yourself. Here’s the post that led to my diagnosis.

Now, some will argue that I should shrug off the if-you-don’t-want-this-hunk-of-manhood-then-you-must-be-a-lesbian logic of this comeback. But Dr. Beckerman is a board-certified jokestetrician. So I’m taking his diagnosis seriously, and I’ve decided to dedicate myself to raising awareness of this troubling condition. You — or someone you love — might have no sense of humor if:

1) You get pissed off that a writer is out there making a buck by doing stuff like joking about F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44.

2) Um, I’m not actually sure what my other symptoms are. What if not knowing my other symptoms is a symptom?  Shit!!!! You’ll have to deduce the other symptoms yourself. Here’s the post that led to my diagnosis.

“Joke people and you make enemies.”

It’s rare that I want to punch someone. Today, briefly, I wanted to punch Marty Beckerman. I don’t even know Marty Beckerman. The little I knew about Marty Beckerman — the thing that made me want to punch him — was this passage from his new book, which showed up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

The only time Hemingway cried over alcohol: When Congress made it illegal during Prohibition. But he pulled himself together, as a man does always, and traveled to Paris, as a man does seldom. There Papa committed to a life of glorious, full-throttle chemical dependence alongside “The Great Gatsby” author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” In Fitzgerald’s case, the drink took ten thousand drinks and then left him dead in the gutter.

Yes, I know: Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Maybe next year Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44 will amuse me. Except it probably won’t. No matter how far Fitzgerald’s alcoholism recedes into history, there will always be alcoholics, and some of them will be people we know. Maybe enough time has passed for a comic to tell jokes about the vikings raping and pillaging, but he shouldn’t expect those jokes to get big laughs when he plays Darfur.

Setting that aside, I just don’t see the point of Beckerman’s book. An excerpt that ran on salon.com lists it as “‘The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!’, a satirical look at Ernest Hemingway’s life and many misguided ideas.”

I don’t want to read much of it. But look at this. What the hell is this?

Whining is for women; whiskey is for men. The only shoulder a man cries on is marinated beef chuck, and the only tears he cries are tears of joy. “You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine,” Papa implored in “The Sun Also Rises.” “You lose the taste.”

But that’s not even the quote. Beckerman shortens it and takes it out of context. If it seems pedantic to point that out, just hang with me for a second. Here’s the exchange from The Sun Also Rises, which is so much better than anything you’ll get from me or Beckerman:

The count reached down and twirled the bottles in the shiny bucket. “It isn’t cold, yet. You’re always drinking, my dear. Why don’t you just talk?”

“I’ve talked too ruddy much. I’ve talked myself all out to Jake.”

“I should like to hear you really talk, my dear. When you talk to me you never finish your sentences at all.”

“Leave ’em for you to finish. Let any one finish them as they like.”

“It’s a very interesting system,” the count reached down and gave the bottles a twirl. “Still I would like to hear you talk some time.”

“Isn’t he a fool?” Brett asked.

“Now,” the count brought up a bottle. “I think this is cool.”

I brought a towel and he wiped the bottle dry and held it up. “I like to drink champagne from magnums. The wine is better but it would have been too hard to cool.” He held the bottle, looking at it. I put out the glasses.

“I say. You might open it,” Brett suggested.

“Yes, my dear. Now I’ll open it.”

It was amazing champagne.

“I say that is wine,” Brett held up her glass. “We ought to toast to something. ‘Here’s to royalty.’”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

So, for giggles, Beckerman shortens this line from Count Mippipopolous and turns it into something that “Papa implored in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’”

OK. Time for two quotes I just found from The Good Men Project’s interview with Beckerman:

1) “Hemingway would think that I’m a total sissy. This book isn’t written from the perspective of ‘I’m the ultimate man, and I’m going to lecture my inferiors.’ It’s written from the perspective of ‘I’m a cosmopolitan infantilized eunuch who eats cupcakes and drinks smoothies just like everyone else with a Y chromosome, and this needs to stop.’I want to learn how to hunt, I want to learn how to sail, I want to learn how to short-circuit my liver … and Hemingway is my North Star.”

2) “I thought it was appropriate to open the book with Hemingway’s quote: ‘The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. … The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.’”

See, I read that second one and I’m appalled that I ever wanted to punch the guy. But then he ends the interview like this:

As much as I love Gatsby, Fitzgerald doesn’t have a lasting iconic persona. Nobody aspires to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, except for lame-o English majors and people who hope to die in a gutter.

Let’s be done. One final exchange between Count Mippipopolous and Lady Brett:

“I’m not joking you. I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies. That’s what I always say.”

“You’re right,” Brett said. “You’re terribly right. I always joke people and I haven’t a friend in the world. Except Jake here.”

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UPDATE: Then this happened.

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This man, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the F.B.I. was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.

- Hemingway’s friend A.E. Hotchner in a 7/1/2011 NYT op-ed that would have been good to know about before I wrote my “Typing ‘hemingway FBI’ into Google” post late last night.

Its absence must have seemed odd to anyone who read both. Thanks for not booing audibly.

Knowing about the op-ed wouldn’t have changed my core point. Any professional writer asserting in print that it was paranoid and delusional for Hemingway to believe the FBI was tracking him must must must must must at least glance at the public record to see if credible evidence exists that the FBI tracked Hemingway. That evidence existed decades before Mr. Hotchner’s new op-ed.

Typing “hemingway FBI” into Google seems like the very least that “prolific writer and commentator” John Walsh should have done before writing this in Britain’s The Independent last month: The words wouldn’t come. Depression came instead, and with it (as we learn from AE Hotchner’s memoir, Papa Hemingway), paranoid delusions. He thought that the two men he saw working late in a bank were “Feds”, checking his bank account for irregularities. Yes, “paranoid delusions.” Automatically, right? Because “Feds” don’t investigate novelists. The first Google result that pops up for “hemingway FBI” is a 1983 New York Times story headlined “Publishing F.B.I. File on Hemingway.”  It includes this: A special agent still followed him when he entered the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, a few months before his death, and reported to Mr. Hoover, on Jan. 13, 1961, that Hemingway was “physically and mentally” ill and had registered in the hospital under an assumed name. The fourth Google result — the FBI’s very own “electronic reading room” — links to the “FBI main file on Hemingway with documents ranging from 1942 to 1974.” The file can be downloaded as a PDF. Page 110 (see image at top of this post) is the 1/13/1961 report mentioned in the NYT story. The Special Agent in Charge in Minneapolis sent it to “DIRECTOR, FBI” and marked it “PERSONAL ATTENTION.” I don’t actually see anything in the document that proves, as the NYT reported, that “a special agent followed him when he entered the Mayo Clinic.” What the document does show is that J. Edgar Hoover’s office got a report detailing Hemingway’s hospitalization and the ostensibly private information that “the doctors were considering giving him electro-shock therapy treatments.” It continues: … the clinic had suggested that Mr. HEMINGWAY register under the alias GEORGE SEVIER. [BLACKED OUT] stated the Mr. HEMINGWAY is now worried about his registering under an assumed name, and is concerned about an FBI investigation. [BLACKED OUT] stated that inasmuch as this worry was interfering with the treatments of Mr. HEMINGWAY, he desired authorization to tell HEMINGWAY that the FBI was not concerned with his registering under an assumed name. [BLACKED OUT] was advised that there was no objection.  I don’t pretend to know what this all adds up to, except that John Walsh should Google more often. In the same Independent piece, he wrote that “America entered the Second World War in 1944.” Right decade, at least. Hemingway died July 2, 1961. That’s 50 years ago today. I thought about posting this after the anniversary passes, but I suspect we’ll be seeing more stuff about Hemingway than usual today. Consider this a reminder that some of it will be sloppy, half-assed nonsense. Let’s end this with a quote from the FBI file. Here’s a 6/13/1943 bureau memo submitted by Mr. R.G. Leddy, legal attaché in Havana: A clique of celebrity-minded hero worshippers surround Hemingway wherever he goes … To them, Hemingway is a man of genius whose fame will be remembered with Tolstoy. Click for high-res photo

Typing “hemingway FBI” into Google seems like the very least that “prolific writer and commentator” John Walsh should have done before writing this in Britain’s The Independent last month:

The words wouldn’t come. Depression came instead, and with it (as we learn from AE Hotchner’s memoir, Papa Hemingway), paranoid delusions. He thought that the two men he saw working late in a bank were “Feds”, checking his bank account for irregularities.

Yes, “paranoid delusions.” Automatically, right? Because “Feds” don’t investigate novelists.

The first Google result that pops up for “hemingway FBI” is a 1983 New York Times story headlined “Publishing F.B.I. File on Hemingway.”  It includes this:

A special agent still followed him when he entered the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, a few months before his death, and reported to Mr. Hoover, on Jan. 13, 1961, that Hemingway was “physically and mentally” ill and had registered in the hospital under an assumed name.

The fourth Google result — the FBI’s very own “electronic reading room” — links to the “FBI main file on Hemingway with documents ranging from 1942 to 1974.” The file can be downloaded as a PDF. Page 110 (see image at top of this post) is the 1/13/1961 report mentioned in the NYT story. The Special Agent in Charge in Minneapolis sent it to “DIRECTOR, FBI” and marked it “PERSONAL ATTENTION.” I don’t actually see anything in the document that proves, as the NYT reported, that “a special agent followed him when he entered the Mayo Clinic.” What the document does show is that J. Edgar Hoover’s office got a report detailing Hemingway’s hospitalization and the ostensibly private information that “the doctors were considering giving him electro-shock therapy treatments.” It continues:

… the clinic had suggested that Mr. HEMINGWAY register under the alias GEORGE SEVIER. [BLACKED OUT] stated the Mr. HEMINGWAY is now worried about his registering under an assumed name, and is concerned about an FBI investigation. [BLACKED OUT] stated that inasmuch as this worry was interfering with the treatments of Mr. HEMINGWAY, he desired authorization to tell HEMINGWAY that the FBI was not concerned with his registering under an assumed name. [BLACKED OUT] was advised that there was no objection. 

I don’t pretend to know what this all adds up to, except that John Walsh should Google more often. In the same Independent piece, he wrote that “America entered the Second World War in 1944.” Right decade, at least.

Hemingway died July 2, 1961. That’s 50 years ago today. I thought about posting this after the anniversary passes, but I suspect we’ll be seeing more stuff about Hemingway than usual today. Consider this a reminder that some of it will be sloppy, half-assed nonsense.

Let’s end this with a quote from the FBI file. Here’s a 6/13/1943 bureau memo submitted by Mr. R.G. Leddy, legal attaché in Havana:

A clique of celebrity-minded hero worshippers surround Hemingway wherever he goes … To them, Hemingway is a man of genius whose fame will be remembered with Tolstoy.