tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3615090486175644658.post2346795125499341321..comments2023-10-25T06:19:20.288-07:00Comments on A Walker in the City: Writings by Peter Anastas: Re-reading Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."Peter Anastashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08372139385565530486noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3615090486175644658.post-52933615629821015042019-06-30T15:22:41.350-07:002019-06-30T15:22:41.350-07:00Correction: I hope I HAVEN'T tested your patie...Correction: I hope I HAVEN'T tested your patience. PPpfg powellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17407148810847119242noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3615090486175644658.post-26350235811912769462019-06-30T10:08:44.300-07:002019-06-30T10:08:44.300-07:003
My commentary has so far reached more than 14,0...3<br /><br />My commentary has so far reached more than 14,000 words, but the more I read — I have just started John Glassco’s Memoirs Of Montparnasse (NB not written, we now know, by a gifted and in hindsight preternaturally well-read 19-year-old on the brink of death, although that, in retrospect outrageous, claim, made by Glassco, and the fact that it was accepted for years, rather warms me to him) — the more I realise I must refine and reshape it.<br /><br />But my central conviction remains: Hemingway was essentially a nine-bob note (Brit-speak for nine-dollar bill) and Robert McAlmon’s pithy judgment that Hemingway was ‘the original limelight kid’ and a fabulous phoney was to my mind closer to the truth than many would like. (Pertinently Malcolm Cowley who recalls those Paris days in his book of essays A Second Flowering and who did not know Hemingway as well as McAlmon, tries to discredit McAlmon and to minimise his talents as a writer and alleges he hardly ever read a book.)<br /><br />I was relieved when I came across Carver’s admission, although previously I was also heartened and allowed myself to consider that my minority judgment was not necessarily flakey when I found John Dos Passos description of The Sun (in his review of it for the left-wing The New Masses) as ‘a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk’ and that Donald Stewart, a man who might be thought to know what he was talking about, regarded the novel as ‘journalism with just enough fiction — such as Lady Brett’s affair with Pedro Romero — to permit Hemingway to get away with calling the book a novel . . . It didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’<br /><br />As for the much-touted legend that the novel somehow portrayed the anguish and despair of a generation of young men who ruined by World War I, try as I might there are absolutely no traces in Hemingway’s novel. And the epigraph ‘Lost Generation’ attached to the novel when Hemingway first revised it, however elegantly Cowley tries to justify the suggestion in A Second Flowering. Yet pretty much the whole edifice of the novel’s significance and reputation is built on those two words — and was skilfully put to good use by the marketing department at Scribner’s.<br /><br />I could go on (as you might have gathered), but might I leave with one request? I am looking for the full text of Hemingway’s poem about Dorothy Parker ‘To A Tragic Poetess’ but can’t find the full 80-line version anywhere. Can you point me in the right direction.<br /><br />I hope I have tested your patience with this, and leave you with my best wishes.<br /><br />Patrick Powell pfg powellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17407148810847119242noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3615090486175644658.post-3795538460645316142019-06-30T10:07:10.866-07:002019-06-30T10:07:10.866-07:002
I suspect it is also relevant that you first re...2<br /><br />I suspect it is also relevant that you first read the novel in your sophomore year — as a Brit I had to look up what a ‘sophomore year’ was — whereas although I should have done, I didn’t, but came to it 50 years later. That, too, has a distinct bearing on the matter.<br /><br />Crucially, although I was aware of the broad outline of Hemingway’s life and career (and while alive he was granted a kind of superstar status enjoyed by no other living author), I knew no details. So I came to the novel cold. And boy was I unimpressed. Yet I can see exactly what might excite a 20-year-old lad accustomed to thinking ‘the classics’ were all tortuous prose and arcane thought. Pertinently, you don’t hear about too many women revealing how much they were affected by Hemingway’s writing.<br /><br />Over this past year, I have done a great deal more reading around and about the novel and the author with each new tranche of knowledge and background seeming to demand I follow yet another avenue, and the more I learn, especially about the machinations of getting The Sun published, the less impressed I became.<br /><br />Yes, Hemingway did have a way with words, but ‘a writer of genius’? The stock words used to describe his prose is ‘muscular’, ‘athletic’, simple’, ‘unadorned’, all rather congratulatory. I suggest all too often ‘flat-footed’, ‘gauche’ and ‘downright dull’ might be more appropriate. I don’t doubt that when it was first read it did appear ‘revolutionary’ and ‘innovative’ compared to — as it usually is — the ballroom styles of James and Wharton.<br /><br />The problem is that Hemingway is now still regarded as ‘one of the greats’ (a view encouraged, of course, by those who make the moolah from sales of his work) so everything — his prose style, his often simplistic thought, his obsession with machismo — has to be reinterpreted as an expression of that greatness and couched in suitably congratulatory terms, though since his death, as Raymond Carver admitted in a New York Times piece in 1981 that increasing numbers in the world of literature were beginning to admit they had somehow been ‘bamboozled’ by Hemingway.<br /><br />He was certainly talented and certainly extra-ordinary, although his major talents were more for self-promotion, networking, charming support from those he calculated might further his career, spotting the main chance, an almost sociopathic lack of conscience, all in the service of his ruthless ambition.<br />pfg powellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17407148810847119242noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3615090486175644658.post-67177082904176095082019-06-30T10:06:13.668-07:002019-06-30T10:06:13.668-07:00Peter,
This comment had to be cut in three becaus...Peter,<br /><br />This comment had to be cut in three because of the strictures of leaving comments no longer than 4,096 characters<br /><br />1<br /><br />I, too, was required to read The Sun Also Rises, when I began my English degree course (at Dundee University in Scotland in 1969), but being perhaps the English department’s worst ever student I didn’t. When I retired a year ago last July, I set about reading all the novels I thought might be worth reading but never so far had, and The Sun was one of them.<br /><br />I got to the end and wondered, despite the usual publishing gush on the back, why anyone would think the novel was ‘a masterpiece’ and why anyone would ever consider Hemingway to be ‘a writer of genius’. I was so baffled by those claims (and uncomfortably aware that I was certainly not much qualified to pass judgment) that I immediately re-read the novel. My view didn’t change, however.<br /><br />Like you, I keep a blog (https://pfgpowell-1.blogspot.com/) and decided to post an entry about the novel and my reaction to it. However, googling the net for other views, I almost immediately came across Lesley Blume’s highly entertaining account of the genesis of the novel, the circumstances leading up to its publication and the aftermath of public. By then I had already decided (for several reasons, one of which is more personal and has nothing to do with Hemingway) that my commentary should be far longer than the usual 1,550/2,000 blog entry, if nothing else to present my case in greater detail and as more than just a series of half-witted, semi-informed pop judgments.<br /><br />My googling eventually took me to your blog which I read with interest. And then I came to your line ‘Hemingway’s alienated characters are scarred or wounded by a war that should never have been fought. . .’ thought ‘he’s doing it, too, Mr Anastas has also fallen for the hype’ (or, better, what I regard as ‘the hype’).<br /><br />Let me explain: I think the main point made in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s notion of the intentional fallacy holds true, always: a poem, story or novel can only be judged by and in itself, hermetically. What we know about the author (or poet), what the author/poet says about her/his work etc is simply not relevant to our judgment. Certainly it is a purist point of view, and even more certainly in the real world such a judgment is nigh-on impossible, but I believe the notion holds true, even if merely theoretically. And by that yardstick almost all the claims made for The Sun simply don’t stack up.<br /><br />m/fpfg powellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17407148810847119242noreply@blogger.com