Hemingway’s sensibility struck my
teenage self as inarticulate and sexist.
The first time I encountered a
reputedly great novel that I could not stand was in my senior year of high
school. My A.P. English teacher had assigned “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” by
Ernest Hemingway, and as I read it, I felt boredom, then anger, then
incredulity. The main characters — the macho Robert Jordan; his compliant love
interest, Maria; and his friend, the “ugly” virago Pilar — seemed to have been
slapped like paper dolls against the background of the Spanish Civil War.
Hemingway’s sensibility struck my teenage self as inarticulate and sexist.
Stunned that this book and its author had earned such acclaim, I went to the
library to hunt for clues to Hemingway’s psyche, hoping to understand his
motivations, if not his fame.
I found satisfaction in a book by
Anthony Burgess called “Ernest Hemingway and His World” (1978), which raised
and answered the exact question that gnawed at me. “What was wrong with Hemingway?”
Burgess asked. “Possibly growing gloom at his failure to be his own myth; more
possibly a sexual incapacity which, considering his prowess in other fields of
virile action, deeply baffled him.” Dredging up details of the author’s
childhood in the Chicago suburbs, Burgess revealed that Hemingway’s mother had
dressed Ernest like his older sister Marcelline, in “pink gingham with a floral
hat” — with, he implied, disastrous psychosexual consequences.In reviews of Hemingway’s novels by
his contemporaries, I found assessments that echoed my own. In 1937, the critic
Bernard DeVoto wrote of “To Have and Have Not”: “So far none of Ernest
Hemingway’s characters has had any more consciousness than a jaguar. They are
physiological systems organized around abdomens, suprarenal glands and
genitals.”In 1940, Burton Rascoe (previously
the literary editor of The New-York Tribune) published a scathing critique in
The American Mercury: “Ernest Hemingway, in his latest novel, ‘For Whom the
Bell Tolls,’ again demonstrates that he is the most infantile-minded writer of
great talent in our time.”But some years later, I read the
novel again. This time, I was ravished by the writing, and bewildered by my
adolescent antipathy. Hemingway’s intentionally awkward language struck me as
potent and talismanic. Now, Robert Jordan’s bond with Pilar seemed authentic
(it made me think of Hemingway’s friendship with Gertrude Stein), while his
romance with Maria no longer struck me as implausible. Fascinated, I moved on
to “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and Hemingway’s other novels and
short stories. These days, when I read him, his terse, evocative descriptions
seem to hang in the air, gathering power like chords played in a vaulted nave,
reverberating and blending with mounting resonance.So why did I hate him, the first
time around? Not long ago, I read a novel by Muriel Spark, “The Girls of
Slender Means,” in which a young writer named Jane, attracted to “men of books
and literature,” resents it when they don’t fall for her. She couldn’t
understand, Spark writes, that “literary men, if they like women at all, do not
want literary women but girls.” Of course, this is not always true; but mulling
that passage, it occurred to me that it might help explain my angry reaction to
Hemingway at 17. Had I felt rejected by the fact that Robert Jordan (and, thus,
to my literal-minded younger self, his author) admired women who did not
resemble Spark’s Jane . . . or me?In Spain, more than a decade ago, I
traveled to the Andalusian town of Ronda, and stood on the massive stone bridge
that spans the El Tajo gorge — the wild, rocky setting of “For Whom the Bell
Tolls.” I imagined Robert Jordan taking shelter in that rough terrain, hiding
amid the leaning green pines, shouldering his bags of dynamite. And I saw: The
filter Hemingway imposed on the world, and on the people he set amid it, was
not cynical, not inartful. It was just his filter, not anyone else’s. And it
was good.
No comments:
Post a Comment