Baby Steps

               Last month, I began the self-imposed challenge of reading all of Hemingway by reading Jeffrey Meyer’s biography of the writer: Hemingway: A Life.  I’m not a voracious reader of biographies; I find usually them unbearably sad, with their insistence on the immutable heartaches involved in living from day to day, month after month, year after year, until death ends all. (I am perhaps the only viewer who cried while watching De-Lovely, a largely forgettable bio-pic of Cole Porter. Don’t even get me started on La Vie en Rose.) Occasionally I’ll read a biography of a literary figure: Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens. For me, the Ur-Biography will always be Edgar Johnson’s two-volume biography of Dickens, which a friend from graduate school gave me as a gift many years ago. I’m probably dating myself when I write this, but my view is that no one does it better than Johnson, who mixes biographical facts with literary criticism in a thoughtful blend that makes it all look easy.

               Meyer’s biography of Hemingway is informative, but confusing. Dates bled into each other as I worked my way through the chapters. Important events, such as the death of Hemingway’s grandchild, were glossed over, mentioned only once in passing and never picked up again. Through Meyer’s thorough but difficult-to-read biography, however, I was able to develop a basic sense of the body of Hemingway’s work and the shape of his life—but this, predictably, was depressing. Hemingway apparently peaked at a young age and then simply repeated the same old ideas again and again, hoping to hit pay dirt once more. To make matters worse, Meyer seems downright antagonistic to his subject much of the time, which both surprised and confused me: why write a biography of a man, spending hours and hours on researching his life, if one isn’t simply ape-shit bananas over him? I could not answer this question, not even after finishing Meyer’s book, all 300-plus pages of it.

               And where am I now in my quest? I’m steadily plowing through Hemingway’s short stories. And there are some beauties: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Capital of the World.” Those are memorable stories, ones that stick in your head for hours after you’ve read them. I was less impressed by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which seems too much like self-pitying autobiography. And to be honest, I’m bored by many of the Nick Adams stories, despite the fact that I know they have a huge following. My attitude no doubt owes something to my Brooklyn background: “So, you went fishing. You caught a trout. Maybe you didn’t. You were mean to some girl. Or she was mean to you. So what? Big deal! Life happens—no need to write a story documenting every detail of your life for some poor schlep of a reader. How would you feel if I made you read a story about my trip to the grocery store? Or my search for a dress to wear to a neighbor’s wedding? Big deal!” On the other hand, one of my favorite stories so far, one that I’d never heard of before I began reading Hemingway’s short stories in a systematic way, is “A Canary for One.” This story is an interesting exercise in which a first-person narrator suddenly appears halfway through the story, intruding himself and adding a snappy little ending worthy of Saki (H.H. Munro). Somehow—I’m not sure how—Hemingway makes that one work well. I find myself wishing Hemingway had written more of these tricky little stories, and fewer of the bullfighting, war-time, or fishing stories.

               I am halfway through the collected stories, so I have lots more to read. And, undoubtedly, more to report as well. Until next time!

Introduction: A Year-Long Study of Hemingway

For ten years, I’ve been haunted by the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. Not literally—I’ve never seen an apparition of the man (although Hemingway’s great-nephew lives nearby, and resembles his famous uncle closely). What I mean is that every where I turn are traces of Hemingway and the life he lived in Northern Michigan. I live in Petoskey, where Hemingway may have written some of his very worst work. He lived in this part of Michigan through many summers and for a year or so after he served in World War I, and he must be, along with the Civil War scholar Bruce Catton (now largely forgotten) and Sufjan Stevens, Petoskey’s two favorite native sons.

I certainly didn’t move to Petoskey because I wanted to study Hemingway. As an English major in college in the 1980s, I read my share of his works and decided forthwith that he was not for me. As a graduate student teaching American literature at The University of Texas at Austin, I once announced in class that between Faulkner and Hemingway, American literature just about imploded, destroying itself and anything in its path. It’s no surprise that I specialized in English literature, not American. My field of study is about as far as you can get from Hemingway: Victorian novels, particularly those written by women.

So, in a way, I’ve been avoiding Hemingway for most of my life. But I’ve learned that when you give up things to live in a small town—like good ethnic food, responsible local government, and low retail prices kept in line by healthy competition—you compensate by taking advantage of what’s around you. It’s for this reason that I grew to love Japanese food. For many years, the only decent ethnic restaurant (now closed, sadly) in Petoskey was Japanese. While I never really craved it when I lived in the metropolis (Indian and Thai food were more my style), I learned to appreciate it once I moved here. Likewise, I took up golf when I moved up north, as well as skiing and fishing: what’s the point of living in a resort town known for these activities if you don’t take advantage of them? It’s taken me a long time to see the connection, and I’ll admit I resisted it as long as I could, but I see now that I have to put Hemingway in the same category as golf, skiing, and Japanese food: if I’m going to live in Petoskey, I might as well delve in and do it right.

And that’s how I’ve come to make the decision to study Hemingway’s work in a systematic way over the next year, and to keep a record of my activities through this blog. I’m trained as a literary scholar and critic, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find something to say about Hemingway’s stories, essays, and novels. And it will be entertaining to find some of the places he mentions in his writing and visit them, imbibing the rarified, up-north air and using it to get into a real Hemingway mood. On the other hand, I’m fairly ignorant about Hemingway, so I will have to learn along the way, and, like any aspiring writer, I’ll have to conduct my education in public.

Here goes, then! I’m looking forward to this adventure, and I hope that along the way, I find some readers (and correspondents) to keep me company. Next post, I’ll discuss how I’m going to attack this project and find a way into Hemingway studies.