The Godfather: Peter Corris on Hemingway revisited
We lay under cover by the side of the road for the ambush and Paco passed me the wineskin which was heavy with the resin-tasting wine of that part of the country which feels good when it hits the back of your throat in a spurt but you must be careful to cut the spurt off correctly for if you do not you get dribbles on your chin and your compañeros will laugh and you do not want laughter at an ambush.
This is a parody of Hemingway of course, but I do not mean it as a slur on him. Many fine writers can be readily parodied because of their distinctive characteristics. I recently heard on the radio a spoof of Thomas Hardy at work in which the actor playing the part of the writer kept reading out and changing drafts because the writing wasn’t miserable enough. It was very funny. I could easily parody Jane Austen, although to do so would offend at least half of the NRB readership.
Hemingway is unarguably one of the most interesting literary figures of the 20th century. The lineaments of his career are well known – the ambulance driving in Word War I, the reportage and, to a certain extent, his participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, the African safaris, his being an aficionado of bullfighting, the big game fishing, the marriages and the elusive sexuality, the suicide.
For me the importance of Hemingway is that his success and influence swept away the long-windedness of the Victorians and the embroidery of the Edwardians. Hemingway’s plain, unadorned language, his flat, objective rendering of human thoughts and emotions and the physical world has influenced fiction writers ever since.
But one book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, seems to me to stand apart from the others. I have listened to a very fine reading of it with great interest and attention and I can’t decide whether it’s a good book or a bad one. In his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway occasionally had a character speak in a mannered argot to suggest that a foreign language was being spoken. Used sparingly, it was a good technique. But in For Whom the Bell Tolls he goes the whole hog and people adopt a kind of medieval vocabulary and structure with ‘thees’, ‘thous’, ‘cansts’, ‘dosts’, etcetera throughout. The idea apparently is to suggest a particular kind of Spanish.
The love affair between the hero Robert Jordan and the partisan girl Maria is conducted in this way, with ‘I love thee’ and ‘lovest thou me?’ being repeated over and over again. This sexual relationship is central to the story and inspired Hemingway to invent the phrase ‘the earth moved’, which has passed into the language. The story is dramatic enough. Hemingway knew about soldiers and military action, about courage and cowardice, about the obscenity of war. But I cannot decide whether the artificial language, the repetition, the obsessiveness of the love relationship, powerfully evoke Spanish manners and mores and add conviction to the story or whether these things are faintly ludicrous.
But now, with a lot of time on my hands and books even more central to my existence, having that question to think about is something very valuable.
Interesting. I read ‘A Farewell to Arms’ last year; a good book, I thought, but not great. In fact, I thought it was slightly ludicrous, particularly the end. (Although, I found out in the latest issue of ABR that Hemingway’s lover, Pauline Pfeiffer, nearly died in labour as he was completing the book, which accounts for how the book was wrapped up.)
I’ve read quite a few of Hemingway’s short stories, including ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, which I liked. (The film version is a hoot to watch – so dated.) For me, however, Hemingway’s best work is ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, one of a handful of books I can read over and over.