Ernest Hemingway

To end what has somewhat accidentally become Ernest Hemingway week, I thought it was fitting to add this photo. I have shown photo's of two of his other hedonistic desires, guns and alcohol, in previous posts, but it is important to end the week showing what he does best, writing.

This photograph is statuesque and in my opinion shows the power and presence the man ostensibly possessed.







'Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another' -
Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

Top 5 Literary quotes about alcohol:

This week we reviewed Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. This novel, like much of Hemingway’s work, is based around war. So I decided to post a couple of American authors and their esteemed weaponry.

Another topic that always plays a large role throughout Hemingway’s oeuvre is alcohol. So why not indulge...

1.  Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. – Ernest Hemingway

2.  An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you - Dylan Thomas

3.  The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk they’re sober – William Butler Yeates

4.  Work is the curse of the drinking classes – Oscar Wilde

5.  I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me - Hunter S. Thompson  

While writers are heavy drinkers and usually command the terrain of the written word, W.C. Fields is certainly worth a mention. The comedian, actor, performer and all round genius provides some of the most ironic, yet earnest, quotations regarding alcohol and it’s consumption. Well worth a read:

I drink therefore I am – W.C. Fields

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water – W.C. Fields.

A woman drove me to drink and I never even her the courtesy to thank her - W.C. Fields

American Writers Do Love Their Guns..

1. Ernest Hemingway teaching his son how to shoot.

2. William Burroughs, another firearms fanatic, posing mysteriously with his handgun. This is a man who accidentally murdered his wife in an intoxicated and playful game of 'William tell'.

3. Hunter S. Thompson, probably the most salient firearm-bearing writer, aiming his gun into the abyss.

Here's a relevant post: Hunter S. Thompson's obituary, of sorts, for William Burroughs. Where he glorifies and accredits Burroughs weaponry skills:

http://hstbooks.org/2008/08/19/william-s-burroughs-obituary-by-hunter-s-thompson/

Here is a truly remarkable video of William Burroughs, clearly deteriorated and incapacitated by old age, shooting William Shakespeare:

Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls

'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.'

John Donne

Ernest Hemingway’s brevity has never been imitated or matched. His prose is fast, laconic, at times brutal and often breathtaking. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, shortly after his celebrated novella, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was awarded the prize ‘for his mastery in the art of narrative’ and modestly claimed the award was undeserving, due to the aptitude of his competition, but stated that the prize money was still welcome.

Hemingway lived a tumultuous life, riddled with violence, depression and war. A life filled with wonderful romances and woeful separations. He frequently claimed to be lonely and desolate and believed this was the perfect psychological state for all good writers. He said in his Nobel acceptance speech that ‘writing, at its best, is a lonely life’.

All these troubles, his failed romances, his experience of war and his sustained injuries arguably culminated in his suicide in 1961. However, it was later found that he had a rare genetic disease; hemochromatosis, which was passed down from his father, who tragically reached his own suicidal demise. The disease doesn’t allow the body to properly metabolize iron, which can result in mental and physical deterioration.

One can hardly speculate as to whether he was depressed because of the horrors he had witnessed in war-torn Europe, or whether his 4 failed marriages were to be held somewhat culpable, or whether his depression was solely attributed to this rare disease; one thing we do know is the hardships, the atrocities and those painful, woeful moments are immortalized in his terse, yet wonderfully explicit, semi-autobiographical prose throughout every page his wonderful oeuvre.

Hemingway writes with astonishing verisimilitude, and while his life was noticeably painful, he never neglects moments of spontaneity and always presents his audience with extraordinary romances and friendships. His novels are inextricably fluctuating, expounding the extremes of all emotions in his most idiosyncratic and distinctive prose.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is no different. In fact, it is probably the best example of this erratic prose. The story follows protagonist, Robert Jordan, empathetically know as ‘English’, through the violence and terrors of the Spanish Civil War. He is sent to a camp of republican guerrillas, who are fighting against Franco’s Fascists, in a conflict that tore Spain apart and eventually saw Franco in power. Jordan, a dynamiter, is sent there to blow up a bridge in order to aid the republicans.

As the narrative progresses, the protagonist is seen falling in love with a young girl living at the camp named Maria. Maria is a victim of the Fascists, who executed her parents and proceeded to sexually abuse and rape her. Jordan and Maria's attraction is instant, and provides gentler tones to a book that is quite sanguineous and horrific by its very nature.

Throughout the novel, Jordan argues with the old camp leader Pablo, a drunk, who was once a brave and ruthless soldier, over his conspicuous ineffectuality and his perpetual inebriation. Other than this, Jordan for the most part becomes friends with those in the camp and listens to their copious stories, anecdotes and tales of war, none more frightful than those from when Pablo was in charge.

One sequence in particular sticks with the reader, a sequence as merciless as any to be found in modern literature. Pillar, Pablo’s wife and current leader of the camp, tells Jordan of Pablo’s cold-hearted brutality in the days when he drank less and fought more. This particular story is somehow picturesque despite its palpably vicious inclinations. It displays how Pablo led men of a cliff after threatening their lives. How a group of guerrillas lined up and killed Fascists, one by one, in regimented yet horrific fashion.

If you have, or even hope to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, you will know of this scene. It is quite brilliant. The way Hemingway describes, in his distinctive brevity, the action of each man who is led to their deaths, down the tunnel of guerrillas towards the cliff. The ones who try to escape, who are then beaten continuously until they either die from such beatings or try their luck of the cliff. The ones who accept their fate, who walk proudly off the cliff as if straight into heaven. The ones, who scream for forgiveness, ask for exoneration and beg for mercy.

In these frightful scenes, Hemingway describes how Pablo is cold and fearless, which lends the reader a degree of admiration for the drunk who has fallen from glory, who once fought valiantly and boldly against a Fascist regime. And at the same time you sympathize with the devil, these Fascists, some hard-line, some nascent non-believers, all seemingly on a journey through perdition.

Much like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway volunteered for the Spanish Civil war, lending the novel its inevitable biographical content and its veiled realism. The book can be exceptionally cold and at times perhaps a little too masochistic, but for me, it remains permanently entertaining.

The book is neither for the fainthearted, nor for those who enjoy drawn out, leisurely, Proustian prose. This novel is almost 500 pages of pure, unadulterated emotion, always extreme and always enjoyable. It has action, love, friendship and brutality almost in repetition, all embroidered and implemented with Hemmingway’s incomparable brevity and distinguished style.

Hemingway is often praised, and rightly so, for the Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms, but it is here where his disparate style, his laconic prose and his truly desolate literature is best displayed. Out of all of Hemmingway’s work, this is the book that encapsulates Hemingway, this is the book that shows how truly astonishing a writer he really is.

Hemingway Top 5:

As tomorrow I will review this weeks book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, I think it would be acceptable to show 5 of my personal favourites:

University Rankings for 2013

For all you undergraduates in the Uk:

The Guardian Rankings for 2013:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2012/may/21/university-league-table-2013

And for the rest of you:

The Times: top 400 Universities in the world:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html

Good Luck

A New Paradigm

Saw this on another blog. Quite interesting

All about changing education paradigms. Seeing as this is a literary blog, this seems pertinent.

Interestingly, what this man says about coming out of university with a degree no longer guarantees a job, is something I fervently believe. I feel that I was lied to about the symptomatic effects of gaining a degree. It isn't a bridge to more money and guaranteed employment, that was a fallacy...

The Best Vocabulary Game Online

This is the very best vocab game, fast-paced, intellectual and enjoyable.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/quiz/index.htm

Thanks!

Nikolai Gogol - The Nose

For a few weeks I read solely short stories, this concluded with what I now consider to be one of my favourite books, Nikolai Gogol's The Nose 

It wasn’t until I read David Foster Wallace’s collection Oblivion that I realized how wonderful short stories can be. His most celebrated, and best, The Depressed Person, showed that shorter stories can be as enjoyable as many longer novels. Upon finishing this I read Lorrie Moore and Miranda July’s attempts, and while they didn’t quite match Foster Wallace’s effort, they were still fascinating.

I would advise reading Miranda July above Moore, if only because I was attracted to the use of experimental perversities that seems to play such a large role in her work. After reading these I came to the realization that I hadn’t read any classic short stories, of which many authors are famous for.

So I read Dubliners, and was instantaneously in awe with James Joyce’s seemingly abundant talents. Honestly, James Joyce might just be literatures monotheistic saviour. I went on to read a collection of Hemingway’s short stories, which included, The Old Man and the Sea, which is arguably a novella rather than a short story, either way it was magnificent.

Then there’s other novella’s that fall under this distorted category (that I would personally term short stories). Some notable examples are Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

After Reading these brilliant works, I came across a collection of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories, entitled Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector, & Selected Stories (Left). Amidst a somewhat disappointing start (I thought that Diary of a Madman, the esteemed titular short story, wasn’t very good) I stumbled across a story called The Nose.

The Nose is brilliant, it is as surreal as it is funny, really mindboggling stuff. It follows a respectable man who wakes up one morning and in horror is missing his nose. The man is understandably bemused and apoplectic, and wonders how to escape his predicament. Amidst his wonderings, he sees his nose, in the street, fully formed and of human size. The story follows this man, his thoughts and feelings while he tries to restore his face to its previous nasal normality.

It is a wonderful journey and unexpectedly humorous. Gogol, who was Dostoyevsky’s foremost influence, is an exceptional writer. Dead Souls, his magnum opus, is brilliantly written, however the overwhelmingly sombre undertones does mean, that while it is certainly a magnificent novel, it is quite difficult. The Nose is Dead Soul’s polar opposite, absolutely hysterical and whimsical yet retaining that brilliant Gogolian dialect that makes all his works so fascinating.

It seems that I have been primarily reviewing well know books that I have enjoyed, often without criticising them. And while I would love to break that trend, by being critical, it is perhaps not the time. The Nose is beyond criticism; it is so enjoyable and memorable that it would be a sin against literature not to advise it. It really is superb. 

Top 100 Books

With the craze that surrounded Harry Potter and all things magical, the BBC decided to publish a 'Top 100' list as part of their 'Big Read'. The book was supposed to indicate books that everyone should read, however I found the list quite erroneous (how can all 7 Harry Potter books make the fold). Judge for yourself:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

Anyway, I found this list on the Guardian and deem it far more comprehensive and, in my personal taste, correct:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/08/books.booksnews

Here's a few notes, please disagree:

Firstly, the list is less suffocating as it hasn't numbered the entries, this allows the reader slightly more freedom in discerning for themselves where each entry should lie.

It dates well, whereas the BBC version was slightly compact and overly modern, the Guardian is far more ubiquitous and rounded.

A problem with the Guardians version, is that it has 'complete works', which feels obvious and contrived. After all, Kafka's best book is not his 'complete works'. Quite stupid really.

That's about all, as a side-note, Crime and Punishment shouldn't be in either. It's overrated. (Sorry)