I first discovered Ernest Hemingway in high school.
Well, not really "discovered." More like my twelfth grade English teacher told us to read "The Sun Also Rises" and I (in what is likely a metaphor for my high school career) ended up stealing the book but never reading it.
I tried to (kind of), but the story of the disaffected, semi-crippled World War I veteran living abroad went far over the head of my teenage mind, which didn’t yet have the necessary depth to comprehend the tale.
A decade later, after some of life’s hard knocks and cheap shots, I read the thing in one night and instantly the black beauty that seeps through the ink of each of the novel’s printed words shined.
It will likely surprise no one that since then, Ernest Hemingway has had a tremendous impact on me. As I delved deeper into the legend that has assembled itself around this dramatis personæ, I came to understand I share many of the same loves: boxing, fishing, the great outdoors; and many of the same vices: an intense love for a good late night at a nameless bar, or with a woman you just met.
Coming from the halls of a college where excessively complicated writers were worshipped, it took me some time to become accustomed to his famously terse writing style. But, there was a certain allure to his prose, which relied more on dialogue than description and gave just enough of the iceberg so that you could picture what the part below the water looked like.
From the galloping pace of the great hunt in "Green Hills of Africa" to the measured battle that takes place in "The Old Man and the Sea," the simple narratives were stories that could be just as easily told around a mountain campfire, and this paid off; there are guys I know who refuse to "waste their time" reading any book, but count a Hemingway story as their lone favorite.
I’ve always believed that Hemingway knew that by simplifying his delivery, he could reach the same people he wrote about — the boxers, the soldiers, the fishermen — who would never normally be reached by prose. That was his gift.
With the 50th anniversary of his death this past July, more attention than normal has been heaped upon the writer, and analysis of his "gifts" has commenced once again.
The New York Times ran an article called, "Blood, Sand, Sherry: Hemingway’s Madrid," in which a travel writer retraces Hemingway’s steps through the city that he lived in during various times in his life.
Woody Allen joined in also; Hemingway is one of the famous characters that Allen’s protagonist meets in 1920’s France in his movie "Midnight in Paris," and on the anniversary of his death, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece called "Rethinking Hemingway 50 years after his death," which provided an abbreviated timeline about how the author fell from grace in the wake of the women’s liberation and hippie movements of the 1960s.
The LA Times article delineates why people sometimes ignore Hemingway now; feminists have always cried that he was a sexist, while others critics have said that he was, at various times, a racist, an egotistical blowhard, and a "lazy" writer whose work paled in comparison to the William Faulkners of the world.
And this long assault on Hemingway has occurred during the same decades that the attacks on all things "male" began in earnest, and it’s no coincidence.
In stark comparison to the old days, men are portrayed on TV sitcoms as bumbling idiots who must constantly be saved by our all-knowing wives, who roll their eyes at our misguided macho attitudes before taking care of whatever we screwed up.
Hunting is constantly frowned upon by those too good to spend a weekend in the woods, and the archaic term "college boxing team" has become more ironic than anything else here in the 21st century.
In 1913, Abercrombie and Fitch outfitted Teddy Roosevelt for an expedition to the then barely known "River of Doubt" in the Brazilian Amazon; today, the only thing they outfit are the skinny runts known as "male models."
These days, the concept of the swaggering, brawling adventurer has been subverted and destroyed as "the ideal" by the suave, urbane, sensitive metrosexual who hangs out at Starbucks and has never been in a fight — and it is now that Hemingway’s legend is most crucial.
He served in one world war and covered another, travelled, hunted, fought, drank, and loved. By the time he reached his brutal end, staring down the barrel of his favorite shotgun, he was famous the world over as much for his raucous sense of adventure as he was for his Pulitzer Prize winning prose.
An old-fashioned, hard-living, no-regrets type, he was the antithesis of what is now presented as a "man," and this reality-television generation that watches life more often than it participates in it could afford to take some cues from him.
So put down the TV remote and go read "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
It won’t hurt. It’s short. It’s even free online.
Go, and read, and remember.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/132216093_A_lesson_from_Hemingway__five_decades_later.html?page=all
