Books on Screen

We hope you're making time for a few literary adaptations in between summer blockbusters, moviegoers. Here are a couple I've recently watched.

On the Road (2012)

I loved this book, and I was really looking forward to the film. After I missed it in theaters, though, it was kind of hard to get a hold of until it popped up on my On Demand offerings—I hoped this scarcity meant that it was just too awesome for the unwashed masses to appreciate, but that I would still love it. Alas, no, it was just okay. And it was a bit depressing. And it was kind of boring. I mean, look, there are moments in the book like this one:

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”

…that clearly show there were some lulls and some downers in Sal’s adventures. But to see those moments pervade the entire film was a bit of a letdown. Here’s the other thing: what excitement there was, was mainly focused on drugs, sex and fast driving, all of which were played up disproportionately compared to the book. But where was the unbridled exuberance? And the sense of wonder? Where was the fun? They tried to sell us on Sal’s and Dean’s friendship with lots of intense, heartfelt man hugs—a constant coming and going where locked eyes and sincere, sullen glances were supposed to communicate everything. They didn’t. I thinkall but the most hardcore Kerouac fans, and even a good number of those, can skip this one.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

Ten years before he became Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck played the role of Harry Street in the adaptation of Hemingway’s classic short story. But while it starts off true enough to the original—the necrotic leg injury, the vultures, the desperate wait for a plane—it takes some liberties that rubbed me the wrong way. For one, the flashback action was just a cheap rehash of Hemingway’s own life story: Spanish Civil War, expat Paris, big game hunting, bullfights in Pamplona. I guess if you’re trying to get Hemingway nuts into the theater, that’s one way to do it. But it cheapens the work of fiction that’s supposed to be played out on screen. 

And while the trail of tortured romances opened up roles for Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, that’s not what the story’s really about. Snows  is about examining one’s life, finding it wanting, resolving to change and redeem oneself… only to have the chance whisked away at the last second. Bittersweet brilliance. Which brings me to the most egregious crime of all: the ending. Instead of flying off into the metaphorical snows of Kilimanjaro, a peaceful resignation to death and dying, Harry Street (and his romance!) are saved. The plane arrives, the vultures disappear, and all’s well that ends well. I haven’t had a film betrayal like that since The Grapes of Wrath , the movie.

Review: The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway

I don’t expect much when I pick up a posthumous work of a great author. I expect even less when it’s the fourth, and final, posthumous work of that author to find its way to publication. But I was pleasantly surprised when I finished Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden the other day.

What starts out innocently enough as a story of two newlyweds honeymooning on the post-war Riviera, quickly becomes a Fitzgeraldesque tale of an artist struggling to ply his trade with a crazy wife who is jealous of her husband’s writing. Then it veers into a sticky half-fictional situation like Hemingway experienced vacationing in the South of France with his wife Hadley, and live-in girlfriend and future-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—only with a few important details altered to make the male character come off a little better than he did in real life.

There is lots of swimming, lots of tanning, lots of passive-aggressive dialogue, lots of mixed drinks, and lots of hair styling. Yes, that’s right, hair-styling. In the end, though, this is a book about writing. Which is why it works for me. Hemingway brilliantly works a couple short stories, and the process of writing them, into the main story of love gone sour. Though the reader never actually reads them, they see the main character of David Bourne reliving the childhood experiences on which they are based as he writes them, and therefore come to a deeper understanding of who he is as a person.

Ironically, in a story where a writer reading his own press clippings becomes a major plot point to his own detriment, Hemingway leaves a few clues that he, too, was guilty of reading his own press clippings, dropping references to his newspaperman style and his iceberg theory of writing:

“He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive.”

“Finally he knew what his father had thought and knowing it, he did not put it in the story.”

“He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.”

He also talks through his editing process, and his conviction that the work has to marinate on its own:

“It was a very young boy’s story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read would feel it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.”

“He cared about the writing more than about anything else, and he cared about many things, but he know that when he was doing it he must not worry about it or finger it nor handle it any more than he would open up the door of the darkroom to see how a negative was developing. Leave it alone, he told himself. You are a bloody fool but you know that much.”

Last of all, Hemingway puts into fiction what he must have experienced when his wife lost nearly every page of his years of hard work:

“You can write them again.” 

“No,” David told her. “When it’s right you can’t remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great and unbelievable surprise. You can’t believe you did it. When it’s once right you never can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you’re only allowed so many in your life.” 

“So many what?” 

“So many good ones.”

The bottom line is that this novel is probably less interesting for the story it tells, than for the insights it gives us into the life of the author as he surveyed his 60 years and wove it into his fiction. I liked it. You might, too.

Summertime: No pants required

A gratuitous re-post from last year, but with some new additions:

"I am doing the country like Cezanne"

We’ve mentioned Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” here. And we’ve drawn analogies between great painters and writing styles here. But did you know that young Hemingway was quite literally trying to mimic Cezanne's painting style in words when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River?”

He wrote the following to Gertrude Stein at the time:

“I have finished two long stories ... and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell.”

And of Cezanne’s In the Forest of Fountainbleau  (pictured above)  he once said:

"This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods and the rocks we have to climb over."

—Source

The (literal) Snows of Kilimanjaro

One of my all-time favorite Hemingway stories is “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” You may recall this image from the story, from which its title is drawn:

“Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

I stumbled across Google’s satellite time-lapse Earth Engine   the other day, and thought it would be interesting to train the lens on those famous snows of Kilimanjaro. Go here, to see how they’ve evolved from 1984 to today. Hem's metaphor could be lost before long...

Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised when I opened up Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife  a few weeks ago. It’s a view of Hemingway’s Paris years through the eyes of his first wife Hadley, and I’m happy to report that anyone with a predilection for the writer, and for Paris in the 20’s, will probably enjoy the book.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t read it like a novel, though the writing is fine and the story is certainly strong enough to carry the reader along. Rather, I read it like a Hemingway biography. Call me a pig, but that’s what I was interested in. And say what you will about McLain as a novelist, the woman did some pretty serious research to get the thing off the ground.

I was looking for fresh angles on familiar characters (the Fitzgeralds do not come off well, Joyce barely shows up at all), new tid-bits I’d never heard before (did you know it was almost Rome, and not Paris, for example?) and Hadley’s take on some of the bigger plot points (how would she handle the tragic loss all of Hemingway’s early work at the Gare de Lyon? Or the affair with Pauleen Pfeiffer?).

There were no huge surprises, but there were a few eyebrow raisers. I think we’re all fully prepared to see Hemingway revealed as a bit of an ass, but McLain makes Hadley out to be far more athletic, lythe and attractive than she really was. I mean, not to be mean, but we do have pictures after all. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona:

At the same time, she portrays Hadley as such a weak, accepting, milquetoast of a character, who lets Pfeiffer walk all over her marriage and even right into her bed. (A diligent Googler will find some evidence of Hadley’s easy acquiescence, but no hard proof that the three ever shared the same bed— outside the plot of Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden , which contains a similar episode.)

Regardless of the Hemingway-McLain ‘he said-she said,’ you almost get the impression that you could read The Paris Wife  alongside A Moveable Feast , and between the two of them, start to arrive at some version of the unvarnished truth behind Hemingway’s first marriage. But it was an interesting read, and I’d recommend it to others who suffer from Hemingway "aficion."

What They Were Reading: Clive James

“After Shakespeare, my favorite poet is Dante. My favorite novelists are Proust and Tolstoy, closely followed by Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Hemingway when he isn’t beating his chest. But in all my life I never enjoyed anything more than the first pieces I read by S. J. Perelman.”

“I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that I’m running out of time. But recently I did reread all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and was pleased to find that he was almost as thoughtful as, say, Olivia Manning, although his snobbery sometimes grates. Also, I enjoyed “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, all over again: the funniest novel I have ever read. Is there some Bulgarian equivalent, languishing untranslated? Probably not.”

“In Australia 60 years ago, when I was an adolescent, nobody was reading the American author Booth Tarkington except me. His character Penrod Schofield — awkward, disobedient, adventurous — was the beginning of my love affair with America. Today, my friend P. J. O’Rourke is a big fan of Tarkington, but I wonder if anybody else is. Still, my real plan is to make P. J. a fan of Dante.”

-From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 11^th, 2013

Striking it poor with great fiction

There’s been lots of talk about shrinking author advances lately, with the once-common $10,000 advances for mid-list writers being replaced by sums that are half, or even a fourth of that amount. Author royalties above and beyond the advance can still add up, but trickling in as they do twice a year for a pretty limited period before bookstores return the unsold copies to be pulped by the publisher, they’re hardly a sure-fire way to get rich quick.

But you’re not alone, discouraged writer. One of the most-heralded debut short story collections of the last century, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time , was given an advance of only $200 in 1925. In today’s money, that comes to just under $2,600. And the print run? A whopping 1,335 copies. If He was lucky enough to get, say 25% in royalties (most would kill for that today), and every book sold, he was looking at another $8,600 in today’s money. (The book was priced at $2.00 a copy)

No wonder he had to keep slaving away as a foreign correspondent while penning his fiction.

Le Mot Juste- Without a Thesaurus

In A Moveable Feast  Hemingway calls Ezra Pound:

“the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use…” 

Like Flaubert, Hemingway was known to be  a believer in the ‘exact, right word’ and is widely admired for his ability to cut to the chase and deliver a punch in just a few, well-chosen words.

Yesterday’spost mentioning In Our Time  jogged my memory about one of my formative “mot juste” reading experiences. It happened while I was reading  the short story “Big Two-Hearted River” in that early collection of Hemingway’s, and it consisted of one simple sentence.

If you’ve read that two-part short story, you know it’s light on plot, but heavy on description. In minute detail, we follow the character of Nick Adams heading out, alone, on a fishing trip. Though it’s not explicitly stated, the story’s got a lot to do with coming home from war and the regenerative powers of nature. But in the midst of his lengthy descriptions of the trout visible in the clear water of the river, Hemingway delivers this short paragraph:

“His heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.”

For whatever reason, that last line absolutely knocked me on my tookus. To the point that I still remember it ten years later. Hemingway didn’t even have to tell us what the feeling was  (Did Nick feel jittery? Serene? Ecstatic? Sentimental? Enthralled? In his element? Happy? What?!) He didn’t have to scour the thesaurus for just the right phrasing or color. What was it Nick felt? The old feeling! All of it. Nothing more.

How incredibly plain and simple that is, but how effective it is in showing us that this renewed connection with nature is rejuvenating and invigorating and relaxing and a hundred other things, too. It doesn’t matter what the feeling was, what matters is the effect it had on the character. And that’s what makes it exactly the right word to use. I'm in awe of that kind of finesse.

Hemingwood Anderson

In this post we mentioned Sherwood Anderson’s influence on the generation of writers that followed him and that came to dominate the 20^th century literary landscape. But it’s one thing to talk about influence, and another thing altogether to see it plain on the page. Take a look at this passage from Winesburg, Ohio , and tell me you don’t see the pared down language and short-sentence-style that is so commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

"The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean, that paragraph could be something right out of In Our Time.

Reading "the baseball"

I took six years of German growing up- even passing the AP test in high school. Unfortunately that didn’t fulfill the language requirement for my BA, so I took two years of French in college. Then, for other reasons, I ended up spending a couple years overseas in Slovenia learning that language. And after loving the one college linguistics course I took (and with Germanic, Romantic and Slavic languages “under my belt” in varying degrees) I seriously considered studying linguistics when it came time to choose a major.

Alas, I didn’t. I was already much further along on a History track, and had pantloads of science classes I was trying to complete as a pre-med student on top of my regular major. So linguistics fell by the wayside. Perhaps someday, when I retire, I’ll go back and bone up on the study of languages through continuing education courses. After my architecture degree, that is. Or maybe before it. Who knows.

Anyway, why do I bring all of this up? Because there’s a part of me that still gets a strange thrill when I come across other languages in my reading. No, I don’t mean actually reading in a foreign language, although I’ve dabbled in that,too. No, I’m talking about dialogue written in English that captures the feel  of another language, and transports you out of your own culture for a time, by way of an implied direct translation, rather than a transparent translation. Take this exchange in The Old Man and the Sea :

“I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?”

“Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball...”

“The Yankees cannot lose.”

“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”

“Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

‘Read the baseball,’ ‘the Indians of Cleveland,’ ‘the great DiMaggio’…  all of these phrases will clang around clumsily in a native English-speaker’s ear, but that’s precisely what makes them work for me. They reinforce the authenticity of the dialogue as it was imagined to have occurred- in Spanish - with Spanish phrasings, Spanish word order and Spanish color. Hemingway had already done this elsewhere, of course. Take this exchange from For Whom the Bell Tolls :

“You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, don Roberto,” he said standing over there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.

“I am accustomed to it.”

“When are you relieved?”

“At four.”

“There is much cold between now and then.”

“I am accustomed to it,” Fernando said.

“Since, then, you are accustomed to it-“ Robert Jordan said politely.

‘A curious idea to…’ and ‘much cold’ are both charming Spanishisms, but I really love that last sentence, where the unfinished thought, the trailing off into silence, is itself an implied idiom. And even if you’ve never heard the specific phrase or idiom that’s implied, the point is that your recognize that there is one. The author knows it, because the characters spoke it. It transports you across cultures and into their heads. Pearl Buck is another author who does this. Here are a few random lines from The Good Earth :

“It is an anger to me.”

“Well, and he may even be killed.”

“Well, and it is like the old days.”

“Well, and if it must be so, let it be so.”

I swear, for a solid week after I read that book, I had to consciously avoid beginning my own real-world dialogue with the ‘Well, and…’ affectation. (“Well, and if the car needs an oil change, I’ll take it in for an oil change.”) But this same sense of foreignness can be conveyed in other ways, too. Just listen to the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station  as he relays his poorly understood Spanish conversations to the reader:

“The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.”

The guesswork, and the multiple potential truths make for a  humorous situation. But it’s another effective way of illustrating that gulf between the reader’s culture, and that of the book’s characters. And I love it when I come across this stuff.

Another post for another day: how should such passages be translated back into the characters’ original language? Should they retain the intended idiom? Or should they retain the feeling of foreignness? I could be convinced of either, but I’d probably say the former. I'll have to noodle on that one a bit.

The Bell Tolls for... Spain?

We don’t often talk politics here, but I know some of you writer-types are still smarting from the recent election.

No, no, no, not the U.S. Presidential election, I’m talking about the recent elections in Spain- and Catalonia in particular- which looked like it might finally be headed toward secession from the Kingdom of Spain.

See, earlier this year the Convergence and Unity party, which has ruled Catalonia for the past couple decades, finally made the switch from championing greater autonomy for Catalonia within  Spain, to outright support for a referendum on Independence (a majority of Catalans support Independence). Of course, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the central government in Madrid have said they will do anything necessary to block such an action, which sounds kind of like the makings of another Spanish Civil War, does it not?

Now, as we’ve said elsewhere, we would obviously never hope for war. But could a modern Catalan independence movement be the springboard for a new generation of writers, just as the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was for Hemingway, Orwell, Dos Passos, Gellhorn, Garcia Lorca and countless others?

We may never know. Arthur Mas and the Convergence and Unity party actually lost seats in the November 25^th election. Other pro-independence parties gained new seats, but it was not the clear mandate that Senor Mas was looking for. Would-be writers may have to look to Scotland’s upcoming independence vote, or hope for Quebec to bristle again under the harsh oppression of Mother Canada.

Or, they could just write their stuff anyway. Also a possibility, I guess.

Where Santiago and Manolin fished

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea  was originally published in LIFE Magazine. They sent a photographer to Cuba to capture images of the author and the Caribbean island that inspired the novella’s setting. Above is his shot of Cojimar, the small fishing village northeast of Havana, that served as Santiago’s home harbor- the one that also inspired this famous first edition cover art:

The Writer's Gene

Yesterday’s post got us thinking about literary lineage. Not influence, mind you, but writers who actually beget other writers. In my five minutes of looking around, it appears to be more common than you’d think. Perhaps there’s a “writer’s gene” waiting to be isolated in the human genome project.

Take William Falkner. No, that’s not a typo. I’m talking about the author of The White Rose of Memphis , great-grandfather of the William Faulkner we all know- the one born before the family added a “u” to their name.

Or, there’s John Steinbeck… the Fourth- son of the John Steinbeck we all read in high school, journalist and posthumous memoirist. Or his brother Thomas, author of a few novels of his own, not to mention an upcoming memoir.

Hemingway’s first son, Jack, helped prepare A Moveable Feast  for posthumous publication, and himself published a memoir. Jack’s daughter Mariel has written three books of her own. Ernest's second son Patrick edited his father’s 800 manuscript pages from a trip to Africa into True at First Light , and has been good for an introduction or forward in many a Hemingway book ever since. Youngest son Greg (AKA Gloria) also authored a memoir, as have a couple of his children.

Then there's Thomas Mann, whose brother was also a writer, as were three of his children. Or the Bronte sisters for that matter. I’m sure there are tons of other examples I don’t have time to research, but it’s shockingly common. So maybe there’s something to this writing gene after all.

(That, or maybe there's a universal desire to capitalize on one’s family name when it happens to be a juicy one. I could be convinced of either.)

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.

Cause or Effect?

Ernest Hemingway used a shotgun. David Foster Wallace used a noose of some sort. Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and walked into a river. Sylvia Plath lay down with her head in the oven and turned on the gas.

According to this wikipedia page, these famous authors  (not to mention 284 other writers) chose to end their lives prematurely through suicide. Why so many? This story in the Atlantic seems to provide some scientific background on the problem:

“When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.”

I’m not sure that statistic surprises anyone who reads it, but I think it reveals more about the virtues of writing than it does about how occupational choices affect our mental health. It’s a classic question of cause and effect: Are writers more likely to suffer from mental health woes because they’ve chosen a particularly painful career path? Or are those who suffer mental health woes more likely to choose an occupation like writing because it helps them process their thoughts, make sense of the world, and even escape from reality from time to time? I tend to think it’s the latter.

At least I hope so... because, ya know,... of this.

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?

The Tour de France kicks off today

“I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the races are both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads.  

“…I must write the strange world of the six-day races and the marvels of the road-racing in the mountains. French is the only language it has ever been written in properly and the terms are all French and that is what makes it hard to write.”

-Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast

(And yes, in the 20s there was a slightly higher incidence of smoking on the Tour than you’ll probably find today. But that’s awesome in its own way.)

Hemingway and Gellhorn

Anyone see “Hemingway and Gellhorn” yet? I don’t subscribe to HBO, but they must have had a free preview a couple weekends ago because I was able to snag it on the ol’ DVR. Now that I’ve had a chance to watch it, I thought I’d weigh in with my thoughts.

As the title suggests, the film is a biopic on Hemingway and his third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Clive Owen plays the role of Hem, while Nicole Kidman plays Gellhorn. Both are about 10-15 years older than the real Hemingway and Gellhorn were when the actual events took place. But Kidman, I think, still manages to pull of a youthful look. Owen… not so much. More on that later. The supporting cast include Robert Duvall, David Strathairn, Parker Posey and a surprisingly obese Jeffrey Jones (picture Edward R. Rooney with about 80 lbs too many.)

The movie takes us to Key West, Cuba, Ketchum and even China, but focuses for the most part on what I think is the most captivating period of Hemingway’s life: his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and his documentation of it in For Whom the Bell Tolls,  and in the short propoganda film, “The Spanish Earth.”  (If you haven’t read FWtBT,  repent forthwith, and if you haven’t watched the film he helped write and narrate, go here.)

But make no mistake, this is Gellhorn’s story. Hemingway is continually portrayed as an overbearing, sexist lout- all of which he probably was. But you won’t find any of Gellhorn’s well-documented infidelities in the film. Her story feels a little too white-washed. When an assignment from Collier’s takes her to China, no mention is made of Hemingway’s own credentials with PM magazine, or his post as an intelligence officer for the US Treasury Department. The viewer just assumes he’s tagging along on her assignment and resenting her for it. In another scene Hemingway is shown practically raping her backstage in order to “feel like a man” and overcome a bout of stage fright before speaking. Gellhorn is then called out on stage for impromptu remarks which outshine Hemingway’s in every way.

At other points he is shown flying off the handle for no apparent reason and challenging a Communist General to a game of Russian Roulette. He stabs people in the back, rides roughshod over everyone in his path. And I don’t know how they did it, but they made Clive Owen appear tired, pasty, sniveling and frumpy. Hemingway is no doubt far from perfect, but the continual pile-on just didn’t ring true.

Don’t get me wrong, I came out of this movie with a desire to know so much more about Gellhorn and her life, but I felt that they gratuitously “over-caricatured”  Hemingway to provide a compelling foil for her. Too many pot shots at an easy target.

Anybody else see it? Anyone disagree?

Symbolism in Literature: Not so fast, my friend...

INTERVIEWER:   Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?

HEMINGWAY:   I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

INTERVIEWER:   Continuing with just one question on this line: One of the advisory staff editors wonders about a parallel he feels he’s found in The Sun Also Rises  between the dramatis personae of the bull ring and the characters of the novel itself. He points out that the first sentence of the book tells us Robert Cohn is a boxer; later, during the desencajonada,  the bull is described as using his horns like a boxer, hooking and jabbing. And just as the bull is attracted and pacified by the presence of a steer, Robert Cohn defers to Jake who is emasculated precisely as is a steer. He sees Mike as the picador, baiting Cohn repeatedly. The editor’s thesis goes on, but he wondered if it was your conscious intention to inform the novel with the tragic structure of the bullfight ritual.

HEMINGWAY:   It sounds as though the advisory staff editor was a little bit screwy. Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as is a steer”? Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man  but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.

-From the Paris Review Interview published in 1958