The Sun
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Hemingway: teacher, writer, traveler

By Carl Heintze

Generally speaking, Ernest Hemingway was no good. He drank too much booze, treated his women and wives (he had four) badly, got paranoid with age and finally, like other members of his family, killed himself.

He also had a limited range. He wrote a lot about bullfights, a subject about which most non-Hispanic people care little, about drinking, about sex, about trout fishing and big-game hunting and big-game fishing. He was an expatriate. He neither lived long in nor wrote much about his native land. He wrote a lot about Paris, Spain and the Caribbean, a little about East Africa and two books which are set in Italy.

In truth, he was more a European than an American. Or to put it more kindly, perhaps, he was a citizen of the world. He was loyal to his close friends, an enemy to many others, and never gave up a grudge.

He bullied his way through World War I, reveling in having his own private army in France and drinking his way through the Huertgen Forest, and thought himself a military tactician. Better he should have kept to writing.

He moved in circles unknown to most of his readers, though many are charmed by the glimpses he gave into such a world: the wealthy big-game hunters, those who fled to Paris after World War I, Spanish bullfighters and their hangers-on, movie stars (Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper), generals, other writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, whom he alternately appears to have admired and hated) and so on.

He tried to live like the characters he created and, in the end, succeeded in being one, and not an admirable one at that--a boozing, boasting, boring old man suffering from diabetes, depression and paranoia.

But he could write. He could really write. When he wrote badly, which was in his later years, he was awful, a parody of himself. But when he was young and at his best, he wrote prose for which there is no equal in American literature, unless, perhaps, Mark Twain's. It still shines. It still lives.

Read, for example, as I have been recently, the opening chapter of A Farewell to Arms or the last chapter of Death in the Afternoon. Or his little masterpiece of a short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a story which is really a prose poem.

In each of these, the sentences are deceptively simple and declarative. They flow like water, and as they do, they present us with an unforgettable picture, whether it is the clear stream in A Farewell to Arms or the tired waiter late at night in "A Clean, Wel- Lighted Place."

When he talked about his writing, which, alas, was too often, Hemingway tended to describe it in terms of playing baseball or as a mysterious process in which there was a third or fourth dimension. And that seems to be partly true; there is a kind of a suppressed tension flowing beneath the best of it.

Perhaps it doesn't matter that most of Hemingway's generation, those who remained on this side of the Atlantic, wasn't all that lost or disillusioned. The Sun Also Rises, like all real works of art, has a life of its own. So does all his early work.

It's only after For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book that does less to illuminate the Spanish Civil War than to create a romantic band of outlaw guerrillas, that he begins to lose his way.

But forget that. Read the early books and be inspired. Many young Americans, including me, have been. Many have taken up pen or typewriter, certain they could duplicate the third or fourth dimension of his prose just by putting down very simple, short descriptive sentences.

We've all failed.

No one has ever been able to do it in the same way, but a couple of generations of Americans certainly have tried.

Probably no one ever will, since like all great writing, his best work is dependent on time, place, age and observation. And it's greater than the junk that came after.

All who love great literature must be grateful for his influence on American writing.

For aside from the beauty of the best of his books, Hemingway's great contribution to American literature was to get it out of the 19th century.

There aren't many other great truths to be learned from his writing, but there are a few: that no man (or woman) is an island, that beauty is to be cherished, that time moves too swiftly, that memory is precious, that love (of man and woman, of close friends) is important, that there is a code to living, no matter how bleak the world may seem, that war is hell and life is short, that one should get one's own work done and get it done well.

But maybe that's enough. That's certainly what he thought. And what he did.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, July 16, 1997.
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