If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end, even if they hanged you. Hemingway was hyper-masculine, and deemed homosexuality an affront to that.
When he was in his 20s, he found a best friend in a William B. Smith, who was the best man at his wedding to Hadley Richardson. Smith struggled with his sexual identity, and confided this in Hemingway.
Hemingway responded by bullying Smith, and advised against homosexuality in a letter rampant with homosexual slurs and homophobic rhetoric. In them occupations a male competes agin [sic] the homosexual in his worst and most malignant form. And when a male competes agin the fairy on his own grounds he loses out on acct.
Gaw it disgusts a male. Hemingway haters could be a real group of critics, who knows? Cohn is essentially a mash-up of every negative Jewish stereotype. The narrator of the book, Jake Barnes, who shares a lot of qualities with Hemingway, loathes Cohn.
It doesn't help Hemingway that he was friends with some notorious anti-Semites like Ezra Pound, and would throw out Jewish slurs in correspondence with him. To be fair, he might deserve it. Hemingway was an outdoorsman and a big game hunter. In , he went on his first African Safari in Kenya and Tanzania with his second wife, Pauline, and a friend of theirs from Key West.
He returned to Africa in with his fourth wife, and took home several hunting trophies. Hemingway was also particularly into bull fighting , which was central to The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon.
Scott Fitzgerald told him in confidence. Most professors dismissed his female characters as male fantasies, insubstantial, dependent on men, etcetera. But I had a different experience reading Hemingway. The author I encountered sympathized deeply with all people, women included. Though I have my own reservations about the macho, photo-op persona he embraced in middle-age—machine gunning sharks, swilling from a bottle, grinning next to a conquered marlin or lion—the younger Hemingway, in his early twenties, had a kid-like vitality and art-loving exuberance that were enormously appealing.
And he was more tolerant than is commonly known. Despite his conservative upbringing, he was open to lesbianism—a student of Gertrude Stein and a friend to Sylvia Beach.
He boasted and told lies, sure. But the bragging was harmless. Instead of explaining the true nature of his leg wound—received as a Red Cross ambulance driver in WW1 Italy—he told of leading crack-shot Arditi troops through the mountains. But no matter the persona Hemingway embraced at any given time, the hat came off when he sat down to his typewriter. Like most people, Brett is strong and weak, dependent and independent, according to the circumstances.
Therefore she strays. She goes off with men for a night or a weekend, seeking sex, comfort, or a little money—first with Cohn, then with Romero. Without a doubt, Brett depends on men. But it seems a quarrelsome, nitpicking game to berate a character for her failure to measure up to some English department myth of never-ending strength and independence.
Barbara Oct 21, PM 1 vote. Hemingway is Hemingway. If we all loved everything, wouldn't the world be a boring place? Art has many, many faces, and genuine artists realize this. Most artists also own the insecurity about themselves as compared to other artists, so save their criticism either for themselves or for a personal few. There are some things by Hemingway that I found puzzling, e. The Sun Also Rises.
I got tired of all the drinking and circular conversation. But, many, many people loved it. I'm sure Hemingway wouldn't care either way. He was also an intriguing man, an accomplished fisherman and sportsman. Writing was not his only thing, so it's little wonder that he was not the master of vocabulary or phrasing. But his stories taught us a lot about Cuba, the Caribbean Sea, and Europe.
There is an museum in Bimini in the Bahamas that is indicative of how he was revered there, but not as a writer. I met many Bahamians who knew him and loved him. Isn't it great that we aren't forced to read what we don't like? Geoffrey Oct 25, PM 0 votes. Whether you are fatalistic or macho begs the question. Hemingway was both and regardless if you go through life harboring or wallowing in such attitudes, my experience Reading Hemingway makes me feel the way so many people do. That therein lies his greatness for me in that he inculcates his feelings into my psyche, ones that are threadlike at best without his stimulus.
Michael Dec 30, AM 0 votes. The Old Man and the Sea was a brilliant book. A fine read from Hemingway. That and The Crucible my introduction to literature where the focus is on a single character and their engagement with the world.
I have not read anything else he has done and am not interested in the mechanics of how it was done. A wonderful reading experience.
To be honest I thought at first Hemingway was overrated because I had only read The Old Man and the Sea a book that for years heard so much praise for, how deep it was, etc. I read it and didn't understand why it was considered a classic!
Key words are "at first" after reading one of his works. Recently though I happened to see a documentary on Hemingway's life and also how much people were impacted by reading his book For Whom The Bell Tolls. Now I am interested in reading Hemingway again. I'll give him a second chance and then I'll see at least by my opinion if he isn't so over-praised or what people might say negatively about this well-known writer.
Oct 30, PM 0 votes. I think schools may be force-feeding their students these books before they're quite ready for them. And before anyone posts about how their 4 year old loves the Brontes, I'm not talking about your kid, I'm talking about the average Junior High-through-College-undergrad dumbass.
Read his short stories. His fame does not only rest on introducing 'brevity' and 'journalist style' into fiction writing. Anyone could have done that. More importantly, the man had a phenomenal power of observation and clarity when it came to studying his fellow men.
That's what was of the utmost importance to him. Writing what is 'true'. Anyone who doesn't recognize this, anyone who chivvies him for this-or-that complaint they personally harbor.. Terse style and laconic technique was only in aid of supporting this, not a goal in itself.
That's not what he was about. Either you can hack it or you cant: but Hemingway was intent on accurately portraying the way men's lives operate. Nothing turns my stomach more than wussies who want to go back and make a writer like Hemingway 'more nice-nice'. The book not only won him the Pulitzer but contributed to his Nobel Prize.
People really need to leave their political, gender, and racial issues at home. George Oct 22, PM 0 votes. Hemingway was the anti-Henry James. The beauty of EH, was his simplicity. Ahmad Dec 25, PM 0 votes. Read him slowly. There's a lot between the lines. Monica, What James said about the short stories.
I have the Finca Vigia Edition and enjoy it immensely. Perhaps in time I'll read these books again and enjoy them more. Good luck in your reading quest. The Sun sets Stephen Crane and others preceded EH by some 30 years in developing a sparse, small word, short sentance prose style that described "complex emotions" and multi-layered personalities, etc.
Red Badge of Courage is a masterwork for that reason. Also, EH made certain that his protagonists always erred on the side of aggression or assertiveness, as opposed to restraint or retreat in things moral. Joyce Sep 19, PM 0 votes. The Sun Also Rises is my favorite work by Hemingway. I really liked that one, and I hated the Old Man and the Sea. Joanna Sep 20, PM 0 votes. I agree, of course, that Hemingway is a very good and important writer but that does not mean that we all have to like him.
I don't. It's ok not to like every important writer! Sherif Nov 09, AM 0 votes. A Movable Feast is Hemingway's best work in my opinion. A farewell to arms is another good work.
What is fascinating about Hemingway's works is his personality which is obvious in all his books. You either love him or hate him. As a teenager I adored him, I still appreciate his work, I read a movable feast twice and would read it again. Steve Nov 24, AM 0 votes. How fascinating to hear everybody's favorites. I'll throw in my two cents. To me, Hemingway's best was a good as it gets, but there was a lot, in my opinion, that fell well short of that.
I am surprised to see the popularity of "Moveable Feast. Since English is not my native language, it is quite possible that many of its finer elements went over my head. I enjoyed the book, although it was not among the best I have read.
How this book can be considered among the classics is beyond me. It is literally a story abut an old fisherman trying to catch a big fish, written in a language a middle school student could imitate. Many seem to ascribe it some kind of deeper meaning, but Hemingway himself has stated that it has no other meaning than what one sees black on white. It is literally about an old man trying to overpower a fish, a battle which is uninteresting, lengthy, unnecessary and boring.
I found myself searching for something more, but why should I make it into something it is not, simply for the benefit of the writer? Hemingway is praised for revolutionizing writing, but I cannot understand that this in itself should be enough to make someone a good writer, nor why making something more straight-forward is considered groundbreaking. People seem to praise anything seemingly new and undiscovered nowadays, no matter the quality. I believe one should do something well before receiving praise, and although Hemingway is no bad writer, I do not find him a great one.
Perhaps his popularity is more of an American phenomena, as I have seldom, if ever, heard him mentioned in my home country. The language barrier might very well be ruining him for me, but I cannot find it in myself to see his writing as anything more than average. I am far from fluent in English and I apologize for any spelling mistakes. Gregsamsa Sep 27, AM 0 votes. What you don't appreciate is that Hemingway is considered stylistically innovative by people who have never read newspapers. Well, that's not entirely fair; there are people who see some of his other stuff as stylistically innovative because they've never heard 4-year-olds talk, so there's that, too.
Jay Oct 29, PM 0 votes. Across the River and Into the Trees is his weakest book, and that's well known. Everything else he wrote is masterful. I love almost all his short stories. As for non-fiction, you can't beat "Green Hills of Africa. Mark Aug 04, PM 0 votes. Try thinking of it like this. As a communist, Hemingway was involved in the world of fascist-capitalistic conflicts while also trying to do something good for others in the world. That's what people were like. He chose to reveal the underpinnings of societies both wracked by war and celebratory in victory.
He did so by revealing its characters within the Geo political economic state the world was in at that time. Where some may see macho ego fulfillment I see a revolutionary cultural critique of early 20th Century manhood.
The quintessential Hemingway subject- a man goes on a fishing trip. This is no sparse drama and anything but shallow. What do you see in the folly of a man, isolated from companions by class, whose personal history was laid bare and burnt by war, finding only the simplest solace in eating a can of beans and spaghetti and at once afraid and driven by all that he was and will ever be to go after a fish into the depths wherein he may disappear into himself.
Stylistically many not only underestimate the provocative and complex nature of his psychology, but so too, especially in this generation of tweets, come to see his structures superficially and overly simplified.
Yet if we only look at the surface of his prose and see simple reflections of our own insecurities fears and what not that says more about us as readers than about the actual prose, let alone the character of the man.
My guess is that Ernest was an alcoholic who believed near the end that he'd lost his power as a writer and an artist to achieve anything like he'd already accomplished. Of course his father had also committed suicide when Ernest was young and there are no doubt a host of other psychological issues that drove him. His mother dressing he and his sister the same. I've read every work of fiction except the posthumous work, some non fiction and many books of his multiple times over the last 30 or so years.
I've been to his house and museum in Oak Park. I always find myself immersed in the narratives and amazed when the prose sparkles. Having said this, there are times when I at once am blown away by the prose, the perspective, the craft, the art, the psychology, the social criticism, BUT frustrated by subject - bull fighters, boxers, thugs, jockeys, soldiers.
Yet when I appreciate that this was the world of men at the time, I feel myself so ever grateful that for a time, the world had in Hemingway its finest cultural epidemiologist chronicling the age. Tim Nov 24, AM 0 votes. You've read one of his worst novels and a novella that is beautifully written but not among his most engaging stories on a human level.
If you come to appreciate Hemingway after that and I hope you do , you should read Islands in the Stream, which is my favorite Hemingway novel, though it was published posthumously and he never considered it finished. Berniece Sep 13, AM 0 votes. In my opinion, Hemingway can be considered one of the best prose writers!
0コメント