Miscellanea

“boring, hemingway.” — adam brock, “fred astaire”

here is yet another author-themed rabbit hole…

in high school, when i was entirely obsessive and would spend most of my time in my room, i went through a period where, prior to reading an author (usually a classics author that would peak my interest), i would first read whatever other biographical detritus i was able to find about said author. rather than allowing the author to materialize from the work, i strove to gather the entire apparatus beforehand: neuroses, political opinions, alcoholism, humiliations, illnesses, affairs, preferred breakfast, circumstances of death. from there, i would finally read the book(s) with enormous and likely unnecessary paratext sitting behind it.... i did this so frequently that perhaps i will make this a series at some point. the authors subjected to this treatment included, but were not limited to, ernest hemingway, kurt vonnegut, ray bradbury, william faulkner (i LOVE as i lay dying… perhaps the eventual post should be about the book rather than faulkner himself), john steinbeck, alan alexander milne, and j. d. salinger (researching salinger made the catcher in the rye a particularly fun experience, so perhaps he will be next…. as annoying as i find salinger).

i will note that this was a habit i exclusively had in high school, but i had so much fun that i do the reverse now….i read something first and, if it sufficiently infects me, i begin compulsively excavating the person who made it. recent examples include the beat poets, r. f. kuang, donna tartt, and charles bukowski (who should also get his own post at some point). i love initially encountering a work as a relatively closed system and afterward allowing the biography to contaminate it.

for hemingway, following my standard high school protocol, i read everything of his that i could find, though this unfortunately did not result in me becoming a particularly devoted hemingway fan (“boring, hemingway..”).

the procedure i would abide by goes as follows: i would treat his stories like forensic problems; i would read them without looking anything up, decide what i believed was happening, then afterward scavenge manuscripts and explanations. an example is “hills like white elephants,” a vague story about abortion. it is notable that the published story never explicitly states that the couple is discussing abortion; they speak by circumlocution, referring to “it,” and “the operation.” i believe that when i first read it my interpretation was something about abuse or running away, though i unfortunately cannot completely recall exactly what i thought anymore or why. afterward, i would find the manuscript history. i discovered that in a 1927 draft, hemingway had actually written “three of us” into the conversation, and then crossed it out. he also began another sentence in which the man says “three of us could get—” and eliminated that too. the finished story’s famous ambiguity was therefore not simply the product of readers collectively deciding to see pregnancy everywhere; hemingway had made the referent considerably more explicit and then physically removed it from the page. I found robert w. trogdon’s account of the manuscript, which describes these deletions.

this was fun. i liked doing this. obviously authorial intention is not a divine answer key and a story does not become invalid because a sixteen-year-old reads the wrong secret into it, but i liked having the comparison. classical literature felt less like being handed a canonical interpretation and more like reverse-engineering a machine after somebody had deliberately removed half the screws.

in the middle of this rabbit hole, i also encountered one of the strangest pieces of hemingway lore: toward the end of his life he became intensely convinced that the federal government was watching him. he told his friend a. e. hotchner that federal agents were following him, that his car had been bugged, and that his mail was being intercepted. the people around him largely understood this as part of his deteriorating mental state. and then, after hemingway died, the fbi files came out.

the boring version of this fact is “hemingway was right.” the more accurate version is much stranger. the fbi absolutely did maintain a substantial file on him, beginning in the 1940s, much of it concerning his activities in cuba and his intelligence work there; the bureau’s own vault now makes the file publicly available. hotchner later said that, after obtaining the records, he regretted dismissing hemingway’s fear of surveillance, and said the records showed that the government had monitored him and tapped phones. this does not mean that every car he thought was following him contained federal agents, or that every auditor he saw through a window was secretly examining his finances on j. edgar hoover’s orders. some of his beliefs clearly expanded beyond anything the surviving evidence can establish. but the horrible kernel of the paranoia was real: there actually was an institution watching him while the people around him were telling him that this particular fear was a symptom.

this becomes even more grotesque when placed beside everything else happening to him physically and psychologically. hemingway accumulated an outstanding number of injuries during his life. in east africa, he and mary welsh survived two separate plane crashes on successive days, and newspapers briefly reported him dead. he emerged alive but badly injured, and the consequences of those injuries were added to earlier concussions, years of very heavy drinking, chronic pain, depression, and whatever neurological deterioration may have been occurring by the end of his life. in 1960 and 1961 he was hospitalized at the mayo clinic and received electroconvulsive treatment. he underwent repeated courses of electroshock therapy there and afterward complained of memory loss, which he believed was interfering with his ability to write. there is a temptation to compress all of this into the romantic category of the insane writer—the doomed genius, the alcoholic, the man losing his mind—but that category is almost too aesthetically convenient for what was actually a fairly ugly deterioration.

and he could be ugly to other people long before the end. this is the part of literary biography that tends to get converted into charming euphemism: “tempestuous marriages,” “a difficult personality,” “a complicated relationship with women.” hemingway was not merely complicated. ken burns and lynn novick’s documentary recounts him verbally abusing martha gellhorn and, during one fight, slapping her. his marriage to mary welsh could also become frightening; accounts describe cycles of humiliation, threats, cruelty, and violence, including episodes involving guns. none of this becomes less abusive because he was ill, injured, drunk, famous, or a good stylist, although all of those things are relevant to understanding the deterioration of the person doing it.

he was also simply an almost implausibly eventful person. he volunteered as an ambulance driver in the first world war and was badly wounded in italy; reported on the spanish civil war; covered the second world war; lived in paris among the writers who would later be packaged into the “lost generation”; hunted, boxed, fished, drank, married four times, survived the aforementioned plane crashes, won the pulitzer prize, won the nobel prize, and spent portions of his life alternately seeking danger and constructing an increasingly theatrical mythology around himself. even separating hemingway the person from “hemingway,” the cultural character he spent decades helping to manufacture, becomes difficult.

i believe there are authors where biography seems extraneous to the writing, and then there are authors whose public self becomes a sort of second oeuvre. hemingway cultivated masculinity, danger, war, blood, alcohol, hunting, women, stoicism, and death so aggressively that reading about him begins to feel like reading another one of his fictions, except that periodically the mythology breaks and something much sadder appears underneath it.

i also think my hemingway phase was where i first became conscious of the difference between interpretation and archaeology. i liked a story, or did not like it; i decided what it meant; and then i went digging through the material around it to see which components of that meaning had been deliberately engineered and which i had supplied myself. the crossed-out “three of us” is almost too perfect an emblem for this. the meaning is literally there, underneath the finished story, crossed out in pencil.

anyway, i am still not the biggest hemingway fan. perhaps adam brock had it right.

authors who deserve their own post at some point

kurt vonnegut

ray bradbury

william faulkner, or preferably just as i lay dying
probably just as i lay dying. i have considerably more to say.

john steinbeck

a. a. milne

j. d. salinger (quite possibly next)

r. f. kuang

donna tartt

charles bukowski

hemingway things i read / should probably revisit

in our time

the sun also rises

men without women

“hills like white elephants”

“the killers”

“a clean, well-lighted place”

“the snows of kilimanjaro”

“the short happy life of francis macomber”

a farewell to arms

death in the afternoon

green hills of africa

to have and have not

for whom the bell tolls

across the river and into the trees

the old man and the sea
yes, i know.

a moveable feast

islands in the stream

the garden of eden

sources

revising “hills like white elephants” — robert w. trogdon
trogdon’s account of the surviving manuscripts, including the crossed-out “three of us” and “three of us could get—” passages.

ernest hemingway — fbi vault
the rather surreal primary source for the fact that the federal government really did maintain an extensive file on hemingway.

hemingway, hounded by the feds — a. e. hotchner
hotchner’s later account of hemingway’s surveillance fears and his regret at having dismissed them.

hemingway — ken burns and lynn novick
useful general biographical and archival material on hemingway’s life, relationships, injuries, writing, and deterioration.

mary welsh — pbs
useful for the east african plane crashes, his marriage to mary welsh, and the increasingly strange mythology surrounding his later life.

hemingway: life chronology — pbs
a chronology of his later years, including his mayo clinic hospitalization and electroconvulsive treatment.

fred astaire — adam brock
source of the extremely economical literary criticism, “boring, hemingway.”