Hemingway Lives!: Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today

By Clancy Sigal

With the release of a flurry of feature and TV films about his life and work, and the publication of new books looking at his correspondence, his boat and even his favorite cocktails, Ernest Hemingway is once again center stage of contemporary culture. There’s something about Papa that makes any retirement to the wings only fleeting.

Now, in this concise and sparkling account of the life and work of America’s most storied writer, Clancy Sigal, himself a National Book Award runner-up, presents a persuasive case for the relevance of Ernest Hemingway to readers today.

Sigal breaks new ground in celebrating Hemingway’s passionate and unapologetic political partisanship, his stunningly concise, no-frills writing style, and an attitude to sex and sexuality much more nuanced than he is traditionally credited with. Simply for the pleasure provided by a consummate story teller, Hemingway is as much a must-read author as ever.

Though Hemingway Lives! will provide plenty that’s new for those already familiar with Papa’s oeuvre, including substantial forays into his political commitments, the women in his life, and the astonishing range of his short stories, it assumes no prior knowledge of his work. Those venturing into Hemingway’s writing for the first time will find in Sigal an inspirational and erudite guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781939293183

Clancy Sigal

Clancy Sigal was born and raised in Chicago, the son of two labor organizers. He enlisted in the army and, as a GI in occupied Germany, attended the Nuremberg war crimes trials intending to shoot Herman Göring. Although blacklisted and trailed by FBI agents, he began work as a Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, hiding in plain sight and representing Humphrey Bogart, among many others.  Sigal moved to London in the 1950s and stayed in the UK for thirty years, writing and broadcasting regularly from the same BBC studios that George Orwell had used. During the Vietnam War, he was the “stationmaster” of a London safe house for American GI deserters and draft dodgers. For several years, he collaborated with the radical “anti-psychiatrists” R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with whom he founded Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, a halfway house for so-called incurable cases. Sigal’s most recent book was the memoir Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal, and Raging Egos (Soft Skull Press, 2016).

Book preview

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

A recent item in the Billings, Montana, Gazette has a photograph of Sgt. Dan Baker, of Miles City, being deployed for a second time to Afghanistan. His wife and two daughters cling to him sobbing in the airport lobby. "With emotions running at fever pitch all around him, the 39-year old father … flipped through the pages of his e-book immersing himself in the words of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a semi-autobiographical novel about the events during the Italian campaigns of World War I almost a century ago."

Sgt. Baker may have only a vague idea of who Ernest Hemingway is. But it’s obvious the words mean something personal to him, as he and the ex-soldier-author have a shared experience, the experience of war:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Sgt. Baker, on his way to an unwinnable war, as Hemingway was nearly a hundred years ago, must have read the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, and it likely touched him through the emotional truth of his own hairy situation.

It matters if you stumble across Hemingway by accident or as required reading. If Hemingway had known as a young man that his fate would be as a classroom Assigned Great Writer he’d probably have shot himself long before he did in real life. I was lucky. At 15 I stole a copy of A Farewell to Arms from my local public library. A street pal had told me there was a lot of sex in it (he lied). The story read so differently from other books, especially the assigned ones, that at first I felt there must be a mistake with using such simple words in short sentences and easy-to-grasp imagery, the opposite of what my teachers had taught me.

I’d had crushes on girls but had never fallen in love with a writer. I grabbed every Hemingway book I could get my hands on, even shoplifting from the library’s special section designated ADULT—REQUIRES CHIEF LIBRARIAN’S PERMISSION TO CHECK OUT. Chicago library officials shared the view of Hemingway’s father, the respectable Dr. Clarence Hemingway, that his son’s books were not fit for polite society. This only made Hemingway more glamorous to me because forbidden. His world seemed both more realistic and more romantic than my usual literary diet of Robin Hood, King Arthur’s knights, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and Treasure Island, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Hemingway’s scenes of battles, love, bull fights, hunting, deep sea fishing—his realistic treatment of violence, not glamorizing it, appealed to both sides of me, the anti-war adolescent and soon-to-be-soldier. All I understood at 15 was that he was as easy and exciting to follow as my favorite movies, the latest Charlie Chan or Four Feathers. I loved how he put words together. Since then, I’ve read and reread his books, articles, war correspondence, novels, and short stories, finding something new—or new to be rejected—every time. If tended, he’s a plant that never stops growing.

Like many writers, Joan Didion among them, I have typed and retyped his stories in the hope of catching his disease. The FBI agents who once were a constant presence on my doorstep, even as they also shadowed Hemingway for much of his life, were amused by the sound of the keys like pistol shots of my Corona #3 typewriter. Whatcha doing in there, Clancy, one of them would mock through my locked screen door, you the next Hemingway? If only.

If you’ve seen the actor Corey Stoll’s caricature in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris or Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in HBO’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, you may think of Hemingway mainly in terms of his drunken buffoonery, jealous narcissism, or disloyalty to rival writers, being a slob and bully in his worst moments. Such portrayals—and his happy hobby of night clubbing with gossip columnists—have set in cement an image of Hemingway as a big-game hunting, hairy-chested, racist, gun-crazy hyper-macho who hates and fears women in equal parts and who kills himself when he can no longer write. You may also think he despised politics. There’s no left or right in writing only good and bad writing, he once said, thus contradicting his own history.

This chest-thumping Hemingway is real enough. But there’s another quieter side to him too: bookish, bespectacled (due to hereditary bad eyes), generous to young writers, a literary explorer armed only with a #2 pencil and a Royal Corona #3 typewriter, who risked his life and mind trailblazing uncharted territory that should have been marked, as on medieval maps, Here Be Dragons. After publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, a reviewer wrote in the Atlantic that Hemingway writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.

In fact, Hemingway was a terrific reader of almost everything: books, magazines, newspapers. He usually slept alongside two bedside tables piled seven-high with books. As he told an interviewer (George Plimpton), I’m always reading books … Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling … it would take a day to remember everyone. (Hadley, his first wife, reports them snuggling up in bed: obsessive reader Hemingway embraced her warm body while reading a newspaper behind her back.) Reading stirred his imagination and set limits beyond which he was destined to go. He took American prose to where it had never been. Singlehandedly, he freed our language to express more feeling and emotion than previous writers—Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, all of whom he read and respected—whose styles tended to obscure with wordiness. His glass-clear, simple sentences strike some readers as hard boiled and tightlipped. The opposite is true. His simplicity camouflages deep, hard-to-control passion. He wrote as if he’d taken a screenwriting class, and his short, sharp, adjectiveless phrases are like camera shots. Twenty of his works of fiction have been made into movies.

CONSUMER WARNING: reading Ernest Hemingway for the first time can be a health risk. It’s like listening to a song that saturates your head even after it stops. There’s hardly a writer, living or recent, whose style—not technique, but a tool for finding your emotion—does not show him or her to be one of Hemingway’s children. It’s impossible to read Salinger, Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal, Garcia Marquez, Ann Beatty, Charles Johnson, Terry Tempest Williams, Nadine Gordimer, Norman Mailer, Elmore Leonard, Annie Proulx, Russell Banks, or Walter Mosley without hearing the Hemingway voice. Each of these very different writers owes a debt to Hemingway. He’s like the god Zeus up there in the clouds hurling his thunderbolts long after he’s supposed to be gone.

This small book aims to place Ernest Hemingway in our time.

1

THE FOREVER BOY

It was a bloody affair on both sides, this battle for San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898, a year before Ernest Hemingway was born in a large gabled house in a comfortable suburb of Chicago: Oak Park, Illinois. The slouch-hatted volunteers of Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders stormed the heights of San Juan, with bayonets and blood-curdling screams, in the Spanish-American war to liberate native Cubans from their cruel Spanish overlords. In the attack more Americans were killed than occupying Spaniards. Nevertheless, it was a great patriotic victory for Col. Roosevelt, with his barrel-chested body and awesome mustache and flashing teeth, leading from the front on a white horse, waving on his troops, a raggle-taggle of cowboys, gold prospectors, adventurers, Native Americans, and African-American Buffalo Soldiers. The Rough Riders became famous overnight.

T.R., later our youngest president, became a sensation in the tabloid press and pro-war newspapers. He almost predicted Hemingway in his personal contradictions. T.R. was both a nature preservationist and a big-animal hunter for pleasure. He was worshipped by the general public and, more importantly, adored by American boys, who improvised their own little versions of the Rough Rider uniform. T.R.’s bared-teeth grin was a staple of the lurid pulp magazines that young Ernest, a soprano in the church choir, devoured along with rootin’-tootin’ dime novels, with their popular mixture of adventure-romance, cowardice, disgrace, redemption, and racism, such as H. Rider Haggard’s colonialist Africa-located white-man’s-fantasies like King Solomon’s Mines and A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers, in which the residents of Sudan are fuzzy-wuzzies. Rudyard Kipling of the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book was Ernest’s favorite, and as a father, he’d later read these stories aloud over and over again to his three sons.

Ernest remained bookish all his life. He devoured literature—anything from comic strips to the classics—like an animal needing nourishment. But he was the opposite of a nerd. Like his idol the hyperactive T.R., Ernie was a social being, playing (clumsily) football and baseball and involved in many school functions.

T.R., our American cowboy president, a high priest of super-masculinity and preacher of the cult of the strenuous life, made such an impact on the boy Ernest that thirty years later, when Hemingway was a celebrated author, he hired the former president’s African guide on his own animal-slaughtering safari.

Young Ernest could not have chosen a more paradoxical role model. Teddy (who loathed this nickname) was a primal force of nature who by sheer will power had overcame a frail body and near-fatal childhood illness (asthma) to reinvent himself as a sword-slashing, swaggering soldier; a predatory imperialist; a racist admirer of primitive native cultures; pioneer environmentalist; and a doting father who on a single 1909 African trip collected (shot) over 11,000 (!) beasts. He evangelized for a religion of being tough and unbreakable. As president he suffered a serious chest bullet wound when a crazy assassin shot him on a speaking tour in Milwaukee. With blood dripping through his shirt, T.R. refused to quit the platform and orated for the next hour before seeking medical treatment. Friends, he cheerfully told the crowd, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible … I have just been shot.

T.R. was Hemingway before there was a Hemingway.

Teddy Roosevelt in uniform

Today, Hemingway’s Oak Park, Illinois 60302, is one of the richest ZIP codes in the state, a Chicago suburb famous as an architectural testing ground for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes, built when a young Hemingway was growing up there. Wright could be sarcastic about Oak Park, where there were so many churches for so many good people to go to, but it was a pleasant and very conservative place for a boy to grow up in.

Ernest’s Oak Park was upper-middle class with tree-lined avenues and good schools. Today it votes liberal but not in Ernest’s time, when it was all white and solidly church-going and benevolent to its large servant class. The first African-American family did not move in until 1950. Their house was dynamited.

Unlike other Chicago writers such as Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren, Hemingway was raised comfortably in a spacious three-story house with eaves and turrets and a wide verandah that his mother, Grace, had designed herself. Grace was a formidable woman—a psalm-singing, strong-willed suffragette who had given up a career in opera to marry a manic-depressive obstetrician, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, and raise their brood of six children, four of them girls. However, in their own cautious Midwestern way the Hemingways were less conventional than their neighbors. Clarence cooked and cleaned, Grace sometimes made more money than her husband by giving music lessons, and they both taught their daughters, as well as their sons, to shoot and fish and—quite bohemian this—ride a bicycle!

Hemingway’s family portrait. Left to right: Ursula, Clarence, Ernest, Grace, and Marcelline

Ernest was a boy in a house brimming with female energy, from his mother and four sisters— Marceline, Sunny, Carol, and Ursula. His brother Leicester was 16 years younger, not much company for Ernest. Grace, with more zip and go than she knew what to do with, poured most of that loving energy into Ernest, insisting that he say his prayers, sing solo soprano in their Congregational church, and learn to play the cello. As was a custom then, Grace dressed Ernest and his slightly older sister Marceline as twins in girls’ curls and dresses. Freudians love to make much of Ernest, later a world-famous icon of machismo, being dressed in female skirts as a child. In fact, dressing a boy in girls’ clothes up to a certain age was common in Victorian families.

Clarence took Ernest with him on fishing and hunting trips in the Michigan woods where father and son powerfully bonded. Father taught little Ernest to shoot, to scout the best trout streams, to hunt for live wormy bait under rotten logs, and to know the secrets of semi-wild UP, the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the Hemingways had a cottage and some land on Walloon Lake near Petoskey. Photographs of seven-year-old Ernest, fishing rod in hand, look like illustrations from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, Mark Twain.

Young Hemingway fishing at Horton’s Creek

Young Ernest loved the outdoors, especially the forest’s hidden places, like a shadowed stream or a dark swamp. The whole family spent hot Midwest summers in the cool of Lake Walloon with its woods and creeks. Ernest learned to go off by himself to fish, to shoot squirrels, and sometimes, best of

Reviews for Hemingway Lives!

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent Hemingway primer. Perhaps the last hagiography of the man that will ever be written by a generation that was impacted by his work. Hemingway's 'manly' pursuits can appear comical and pathetic to a non-sympathetic reader of later eras - Sigal undertakes the job 'translating' Hemingway to the present day and largely succeeds.

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have mixed feelings about Clancy Sigal’s 2013 “Hemingway Lives! Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today” but still want to give it a generally positive review. On the one hand, it is a very compact and easy to read life and career overview of Hemingway that discusses almost all of the full-length books and a few dozen of the short stories. On the other hand, the views expressed are Sigal’s own personal readings and although these often have a interesting slant and take they often seem to be the result of mis-readings or mis-remembered details. I noticed this about a dozen times but there were enough instances of it that I began to wonder how much of it I may have overlooked. So the book left me feeling slightly mistrustful. Sigal also has a tendency to put quote marks around words or passages which of course leads you to think that they are direct Hemingway quotes but some of them are definitely paraphrases* or outright fabrications.So this is a qualified recommendation. If you are new to Hemingway, Sigal does present him in a very compelling way and his passion for the writing can be quite addictive. You should just be prepared to make your own readings of the books and come to your own conclusions. If you are already an old Hemingway hand, Sigal will likely renew your enthusiasm but you will be kept busy leafing/scrolling through your copies of the books to seek to either confirm or dispute what Sigal said or quoted. In that sense, the book pays off as it will cause you to rethink and reexamine your own conclusions about Hemingway.*e.g. Harry Morgan’s last words in “To Have and Have Not” are 'No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody chance.’ and not Sigal's “No man alone now has got a bloody fucking chance."