Writer: Ernest Hemingway

Today I want to suggest Steve Newman 's review of John Atkins An Introduction to The Art of Ernest Hemingway. I started re-reading Hemingway in prison. Those notes may get here if my Probation Officer approves my new laptop. I had become dissatisfied with Hemingway decades ago (thanks to Kurt Vonnegut's Happy Birthday Wanda June), but if I was going to fill the holes of my literary education I needed to deal with him. I will not deny he is a great writer. From the review, I think those more taken with Hemingway will want to track down the Atkins book. Certainly, read the review:

Atkins admits to being puzzled as to where to start in his study of Hemingway, and the need to find the novelist’s centre of gravity… “the point at which all forces remarkably create a state of rest.” And I think Atkins was right to try and find Hemingway’s centre of gravity, which is a natural place that intuitive readers can find, sometimes without realising it, and often in the first handful of pages, which is certainly the case with A Farewell to Arms, as it is with his posthumously published, A Moveable Feast, where the reader feels at ease almost immediately. That is not necessarily the case with For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, mainly because Hemingway’s style had changed since those heady days of Key West (where he wrote most of A Farewell to Arms), leaving the reader to work much harder. In Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway tries hard to regain that early style of the late 1920s, to hopefully create something of a sequel to A Farewell to Arms. The trouble was that Hemingway had, by the early 1950s, become ill and dangerously nostalgic, with the novella, The Old Man and the Sea, written originally as a parable to sit at the centre of a planned war trilogy that should have included the posthumously published Islands in the Stream (with Across the River itself a part of a much longer volume about WWII), which does feel as if Hemingway was finding his centre of gravity again: albeit with a few more adjectives than before, which is okay if you’ve become an old romantic. When you read Islands in the Stream now the young Hemingway is there bullying the old cat to get something done: to make something of his proven masculinity, bravery, and rage, yet showing a true sensitivity that passes from the pen to the readers heart and soul.

sch

1/23/22