Word: hemingways
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Somehow, now, biography seems irrelevant. So does criticism. He left us just three great novels--one a very great novel--the Forty-Nine Stories, and a single masterpiece, "The Old Man and the Sea." No one will ever have to be told how to read Hemingway; he saw to that. Most of what we have been told, in fact, in the last three weeks and the last thirty-five years, has nothing to do with the novels and the stories that count. The Gableish-looking hero who collected wives and bruises and buffalo horns, the bewhiskered old Aficionado may have...
...Hemingway, the man of newsreels and interviews, never existed in his novels and stories, in the best of them. When he was there--in Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, that thing in Life last year--than the fine detachment of his art was not. We can sympathize with the pains that his art required, the monumental, self-imposed rigor of a spare and honest new way of seeing. But we can also be disappointed when he himself forgot...
...does not matter. Does the "new way of seeing"? For our generation, twice-removed from the Lost, one of Hemingway's misfortunes was to have been our grandfather. He reshaped, single-handedly, the way a century thought: he left, if anything, too strong a mark. It is hard, now, to imagine a good short story in other than the "Hemingway-an" style. His safaris and bullfights have become the in-group frauds and fads of the Ruarks and Barnaby Conrads; the Spanish Civil War is now as over-romanticized as our own. But Hemingway found them first; and by rendering...
...Eliot once proposed a test for the lasting significance of a writer: "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." Through his books, Hemingway is "that which we know" of World War I, the Lost Generation, the mystique of the bullfight, the Spanish Civil War. One can learn all of this without knowing Hemingway, but once having read him, one can never see these subjects again without some angle or tint of his vision. His best books exist at that...
...Hemingway, experience is always a form of fate. It tells of defeat and "the evil-smelling emptiness" of death. It stirs memories of pleasure and desire, "of sunshine and salt water, of food, wine, and making love." Wherever he went, whatever he did, the fate Hemingway yearned for was deceptively simple and impossibly serene-it was "the good place" Nick Adams found on The Big Two-Hearted River: "He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him. Now it was done. He was very tired...