A lesson from Hemingway, five decades later

"I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

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

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Irene's winds meet Hemingway's wisdom

BY STEVE JANOSKI

'Il faut (d’abord) durer.’

Supposedly it was Ernest Hemingway’s favorite saying, and, roughly translated from French, it means "One must (first) endure."

I would be lying if I said this wasn’t a phrase I had liberated for my own use after reading it some years ago, because if my limited experiences have taught me nothing else, it’s that often there comes a time when one must simply put their head down and move forward — as Churchill said, "If you’re going through hell, keep going."

As I write this on Friday afternoon, Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the North Carolina coast, and over the past week, the warnings for this area have vacillated from somewhere between "There’s going to be a lot of rain" to "Repent, for the end is nigh."

It’s yet unknown how hideous the storm will be when it strikes New Jersey, and its strength and the magnitude of the damage it causes may make these words seem entirely foolish by Wednesday, or at least defang them if the city streets remain dry due to a tragedy narrowly averted.

But one lesson that we can take from this storm, or even the threat of this storm, is the same one that we must carry away from all natural disasters: nothing, absolutely nothing, is guaranteed, and things in life can and will change in monumental ways without hesitation.

We all hear, of course, that there is a "reason" for every misfortune, but I’ve never thought that to be true.

I am no fatalist and a particularly weak believer in God, and I cast about between being some sort of bastardized deist to an agnostic depending what time of day you ask, so the idea that there is a "reason for everything" seems a naïve, foolish way to justify the curveballs (and sometimes the artillery shells) that life hurls at us.

Whether an event happened for a reason is simply irrelevant, and putting it in cosmic terms, such as suggesting that a space god deemed it necessary that this thing happen for such and such a purpose, is a waste of time.

What is no waste of time — what is completely necessary, in fact — is to simply determine to continue.

It goes without saying that this weekend will be hard on somebody, regardless if that somebody is in North Carolina, Maryland, or New Jersey, and that even if we don’t have to bear Irene’s hammering might, we will inevitably have to do so again when some disaster, be it public or private, befalls us.

If it does happen to be this weekend, though, it will be a frigid reminder that no matter how comfortable we get, how safe and secure in our happy little lives are, we are but a few powerless days away from being thrown into an unimaginable upheaval that would have been totally foreign to us but a week before.

Hopefully, we will take away lessons from this, because aside from proving the strength of our spines, learning is the only thing that these calamities are useful for.

Maybe we will learn to not build in flood basins and go toe-to-toe with nature, and dismiss the silly ideas of building 10-foot wide flood tunnels to Nutley as exactly what they are: silly ideas.

Maybe we will learn to live with and around the land a little bit better, because we know that when Nature rises up in her full fervor we can be swept from the table like so many plastic pawns.

This is my own conjecture, of course, and it’s more than likely that things will never change because of property tax rolls and political battles.

But for the regular people, the ones in Pequannock and Pompton Lakes and Lincoln Park, who will go through this storm and be worse off for it, there is nothing left to do but keep going.

Endure, once again.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com

http://www.northjersey.com/news/128859443_Some_thoughts__Irene_s_winds_meet_Hemingway_s_wisdom.html

Catching one of nature's finest predators

BY STEVE JANOSKI

As the boat headed toward deeper waters, I lay back on the bench, vainly trying to catch up on some of the hours of slumber I'd lost the previous night.


I would wake only briefly, lazily opening one eye when the mate, a large, tanned man with a moustache and waders, was pulling one of the fishing rods off of the ceiling in his never-ending chore of keeping the lines in the water.

We'd woken up at 2 a.m. to start this trip, and six of us drove from North Jersey to the town of Montauk, on the edge of Long Island, to take a charter boat out in the wee hours of a Monday morning.

Half a day later, we had caught our fair share of bluefish and striped bass when the captain, an older man whose white beard gave him a passing resemblance to Hemingway, asked us if we'd like to go out a little further in search of shark.

"They're biting," he told us.

As far as I know, there's only three types of sharks that swim in the waters around New Jersey that taste good when eaten: the thresher, the mako, and the legendary great white.

Some years ago I caught a massive blue shark, and fought him for 20 minutes before we figured out that once we landed him, he couldn't be taken home-and it's always better when you can eat what you've caught.

We agreed, and hoped that we'd be luckier this time around-an hour's ride later, we could barely see the outline of the land on the horizon.

Even at 15 miles off shore, the waters were calm; typically at that distance, boisterous waves smash the stern with enough force to make even the hardiest of souls seasick.

But this tranquil Atlantic made sleeping easier, and because shark fishing can sometimes be interminably tedious, most of us on the boat began nodding off in some fashion or another.

An hour went by before a cry from the boat's captain broke my slumber.

"It's a shark! He's got a mako on the far line!"


Instantly I was up, stumbling around the cabin bleary-eyed searching for my camera, and the back deck of the charter became a maelstrom of activity with the captain coming down from the bridge as the mate scrambled, preparing the harpoon and the "bang stick" (a special underwater firearm that employs a long tube and a shotgun shell) for their deadly work.

About 50 yards out, the mako somersaulted out of the water, a beautiful flash of blue and silver against the sky, before plummeting back down, drawing out the line on reel once again.

It took 10 minutes before the shark was able to be reeled in close enough for a gaff (a long pole with a steel hook on the end) to be used to hold the shark in place. A rope was then tied around the tail to better control its thrashes.

My father held the gaff while the mate lined up his shot; seconds later, with a swift movement, he launched the harpoon into the mako's side.

"I got him!" he yelled to the captain, and pulled the body of the harpoon away, leaving the head lodged above the shark's gills.

The captain then moved forward and, with a hard strike, punched the shark's head with the end of the bang stick. A loud crack was heard as the shell went off, and blood quickly began to flow into the water and lap the sides of the boat.

With that, the shark began its death rolls, and the rage leaked out of it with every ounce of blood that spilled into the ocean.

Eventually, it would be strung up by the tail to ensure that it was completely dead before bringing the six-foot, 125 pound mako (along with its jagged, intimidating teeth) on board.

As I leaned over the side of the boat, I stared into its black poker chip eyes.


When the boat would dip to the side, the shark would be submerged again, and its lungs would flex to life and the eyes would momentarily stir, only to flatten out again as the oxygen left its system.

It was, indeed, an unequivocal triumph over one of the sea's consummate killers.

Making life for the movies

BY STEVE JANOSKI

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S. Thompson

I was never fond of the idea of a “bucket list.”

In my eyes it was a pretentious sort of thing to write down things that you determine you must, beyond all reasonable doubt, do before you die, or else you would declare all your years a waste.

Either do the things or don't, but posting your list on your refrigerator door like Martin Luther with one of your kid's animal magnets seems insincere at best.


Death, of course, has a way of changing things, and breaking down my innate cynicism I've worked so hard to sharpen, and so two weeks ago, as I looked over my grandfather's laid-out corpse, I couldn't help but feel a tingle of my own mortality.

It happens every time I go to a funeral, and that's why I avoid those functions as much as possible.

But even as I took in the sight of him lying in a casket, there wasn't that sense of overwhelming regret and destructive sorrow- he was 84 years-old, and had lived a long life that was truly, and in every sense of the word, worth living.

Born in 1926, he was a part of what's been called the “Greatest Generation,” having signed up with the Navy at the tender age of 17 in 1944. He was promptly sent to the Pacific Theater, where he was part of the crew of a PBY Catalina, the “flying boat” type plane that could land on water.

The PBY was often used as a sub-hunter in the Pacific, and although the details of the engagements were left out, an eager energy would trace across his old eyes when he recalled the adventure of those days.

During one of those missions, his head was grazed by a .50 bullet that barely missed- one inch the other way, and this writer wouldn't be here.

Over the course of the war the years immediately after, he was stationed across both America and the South Pacific, and by the age of 22, he'd seen more of the world than most of my generation will see in their entire lives.

Being a young man watching these old lions die brings home the reality that no matter how long life seems, it is truly a harrowingly short ride that should be enjoyed with the most intensity that can be drawn from each breath.

So recently, as a way of keeping my intentions straight- you guessed it- I'm beginning to write up a bucket list. I'm not going to call it that, because I still think it's a ridiculous term, but I've admitted that there are certain things that I've thought about doing but had considered out of my reach for one reason or another.

Unlike the movie, I'm not going sky-diving, because I still can't figure out why someone would want to jump out of a plane that isn't falling as fast as they are.

However, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro? Absolutely. I've gotten into the outdoors much more in the last few years, and summiting Hemingway's legendary conquest would be a story worth living myself.

I'd like to take a boat down the Amazon River, because the sheer natural brutality of that region has captured my imagination for years.

One day, I'd like to stand at the Straits of Gibraltar, and then later on that day, get drunk at a bar that lies at edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

There are many journeys I plan on embarking on, and with my natural tendency to seek out the worst people and seediest parts of wherever I am, I'm sure they'll be interesting.

This way, when I'm done living this life, I'll be able to say that I made it all worth it, and lived a life that the wild men of the world would look on with approval after some producer makes a movie out of it decades from now.

As one man I know often says, “It's better to wear out than rust out.”

There could be no better motto for anyone's life.