http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/aug/14/who-was-ernest-hemingway/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=August+19+2014&utm_content=August+19+2014+CID_42b8a8b35b5387ee66627c46b1dcf15a&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software
This is a really good book review by Edward Mendelson * of the second volume of Hemingway's letters, 1923-25, published by Cambridge. Professor Mendelson writes that the sexually conflicted, androgynous Hemingway created by some biographers is as simplistic as the macho man of Hemingway's own creation.
On the emotional distance in Hemingway's best work Mendelson quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing on The Sun Also Rises:
"Jake Barnes, he said, 'isn’t like an impotent man. He’s like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt.'”
That's a difference! There's a difference between impotence and imposed chastity!
There was something else Hemingway was striving for, writes Mendelson. He traces it back:
"The young men in Hemingway’s early stories live by a moral code that requires them to answer only to themselves. The moral question they ask about their actions is whether they are living up to their own heroic ideal, not what the effect of their actions might be on anyone else. They refuse the obligations imposed by their families and the commitments desired by women. In place of personal relations, they merge into an undifferentiated band of brothers." (emphasis added)
The hair fetish, the gender mixing, the alarming physical merger in The Garden of Eden are not actually sexual, Mendelson writes:
"What Hemingway wanted—both as he-man and as androgyne—was a lasting intimate connection that did not require him to be a separate individual person..."
That's deep. It is out of my depth. Don't get that.
"Hemingway’s deepest wish...was to become one with someone or something else, to live without the burden of a self."
Okay...a little clearer. I guess.
"Denis de Rougemont observed that lovers like Tristan and Isolde who wish to dissolve their separate selves by merging into each other instead find themselves trapped in their separate bodies, and can escape the trap only by dying...At the climax of a bullfight in The Sun Also Rises, Romero’s “sword went in, and just for an instant he and the bull were one.”
Okay, I understand what Mendelson is saying now. I am still not clear on what Hemingway was trying to do, if Mendelson is correct on what Hemingway was trying to do. How did Hemingway think he was going to resolve this "problem" of being "a separate individual person." That sounds to me a pretty fundamental obstacle. Impossible. Only in death, like Tristan and Isolde, like the bull? Where the hell was Hemingway intending to go with this, his "deepest wish," into the frigging afterlife? Where did he go with it in his fiction, according to Mendelson? Does this have anything to do with Hemingway's own death? Baked but half-baked. I don't know about all this; this is a good review, not a very good review.
I got a kick out of Mendelson's review of this Cambridge edition.
"The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway seems to have been edited for readers who do not exist..."
"...readers who use scholarly editions but who need footnotes identifying Tolstoy and Picasso."
...
"The air of unreality that pervades this and many other learned editions..."
"The new edition, unlike the old one, interrupts the text with a footnote explaining the philosophy of 'Marcus O’Realius.'” Hah!
"Other notes are even less helpful. Proust, the editors report, wrote a work titled A la recherche du temps passé (they also mistitle the English translation)..."
"...the third volume of which “had recently drawn attention” to the suburban village of Guermantes."
"Hemingway writes in a letter, “Thus are we buggared by destiny, as Hamlet remarked...”
"...and the editors explain:
"Possibly a reference to Prince Hamlet’s remark shortly before his fatal sword fight at the end of Hamlet by William Shakespeare that there is “special providence in the fall of a sparrow”—that ultimately “providence” controls even the smallest action and event, and that death will come when it will come."
"This overlooks Hemingway’s anatomical paraphrase of Hamlet’s: 'There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.'”
http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-is-first-paragraph-in-full-of.html
This is a really good book review by Edward Mendelson * of the second volume of Hemingway's letters, 1923-25, published by Cambridge. Professor Mendelson writes that the sexually conflicted, androgynous Hemingway created by some biographers is as simplistic as the macho man of Hemingway's own creation.
On the emotional distance in Hemingway's best work Mendelson quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing on The Sun Also Rises:
"Jake Barnes, he said, 'isn’t like an impotent man. He’s like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt.'”
That's a difference! There's a difference between impotence and imposed chastity!
There was something else Hemingway was striving for, writes Mendelson. He traces it back:
"The young men in Hemingway’s early stories live by a moral code that requires them to answer only to themselves. The moral question they ask about their actions is whether they are living up to their own heroic ideal, not what the effect of their actions might be on anyone else. They refuse the obligations imposed by their families and the commitments desired by women. In place of personal relations, they merge into an undifferentiated band of brothers." (emphasis added)
The hair fetish, the gender mixing, the alarming physical merger in The Garden of Eden are not actually sexual, Mendelson writes:
"What Hemingway wanted—both as he-man and as androgyne—was a lasting intimate connection that did not require him to be a separate individual person..."
That's deep. It is out of my depth. Don't get that.
"Hemingway’s deepest wish...was to become one with someone or something else, to live without the burden of a self."
Okay...a little clearer. I guess.
"Denis de Rougemont observed that lovers like Tristan and Isolde who wish to dissolve their separate selves by merging into each other instead find themselves trapped in their separate bodies, and can escape the trap only by dying...At the climax of a bullfight in The Sun Also Rises, Romero’s “sword went in, and just for an instant he and the bull were one.”
Okay, I understand what Mendelson is saying now. I am still not clear on what Hemingway was trying to do, if Mendelson is correct on what Hemingway was trying to do. How did Hemingway think he was going to resolve this "problem" of being "a separate individual person." That sounds to me a pretty fundamental obstacle. Impossible. Only in death, like Tristan and Isolde, like the bull? Where the hell was Hemingway intending to go with this, his "deepest wish," into the frigging afterlife? Where did he go with it in his fiction, according to Mendelson? Does this have anything to do with Hemingway's own death? Baked but half-baked. I don't know about all this; this is a good review, not a very good review.
I got a kick out of Mendelson's review of this Cambridge edition.
"The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway seems to have been edited for readers who do not exist..."
"...readers who use scholarly editions but who need footnotes identifying Tolstoy and Picasso."
...
"The air of unreality that pervades this and many other learned editions..."
"The new edition, unlike the old one, interrupts the text with a footnote explaining the philosophy of 'Marcus O’Realius.'” Hah!
"Other notes are even less helpful. Proust, the editors report, wrote a work titled A la recherche du temps passé (they also mistitle the English translation)..."
"...the third volume of which “had recently drawn attention” to the suburban village of Guermantes."
"Hemingway writes in a letter, “Thus are we buggared by destiny, as Hamlet remarked...”
"...and the editors explain:
"Possibly a reference to Prince Hamlet’s remark shortly before his fatal sword fight at the end of Hamlet by William Shakespeare that there is “special providence in the fall of a sparrow”—that ultimately “providence” controls even the smallest action and event, and that death will come when it will come."
"This overlooks Hemingway’s anatomical paraphrase of Hamlet’s: 'There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.'”
http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-is-first-paragraph-in-full-of.html
