The Hemingway Industry

Copyright © 2019 David Faris. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse    09/24/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2855-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2853-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2854-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019914857

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Contents

I    INTRODUCTION

II    PARIS 1921-1928

1    In Our Time

2    The Torrents of Spring

3    The Sun Also Rises

4    Men Without Women

III   KEY WEST 1929-1940

5    A Farewell to Arms

6    Death in the Afternoon

7    Winner Take Nothing

8    Green Hills of Africa

9    The Snows of Kilimanjaro

10    The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

11    To Have and Have Not

12    For Whom the Bell Tolls

IV   HAVANNA AND IDAHO 1941-1961

13    Across the River and into the Trees

14    The Old Man and the Sea

V    POSTHUMOUS WORKS

15    A Moveable Feast

16    Islands in the Stream

17    The Dangerous Summer

18    The Garden of Eden

19    True at First Light and Under Kilimanjaro

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I

Introduction

An industry is an organized productive activity in which labor and capital are brought to bear on raw materials to produce a desired output. Literary criticism is an industry in which scholars apply their skills to the work of an author to produce books and articles that add to the overall understanding of the author’s work. The Hemingway Industry is about the work that Hemingway experts do in analyzing Hemingway’s seventeen published books.

Biographies are a good way to provide the background of Hemingway’s work. Scott Donaldson, a professor and active leader of the Hemingway Society, has prepared a book on literary biography, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. In his opinion, there are several attributes in life writing that are useful for the biographer to possess. He must be an archaeologist and a storyteller, who sifts through masses of different types of documents to hopefully find a pattern, but he will try to be ethical and tell the story responsibly. Letters and interviews are the most important sources. Although objectivity is a goal, the result will inevitably be subjective. More practical problems include determining the relevant amount of detail, dealing with family members, and the reluctance of the subject of the biography to cooperate. His book was reviewed by Verna Kale in the Fall 2015 issue of The Hemingway Review. Donaldson has also written a Hemingway biography, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway. And, in his colorful memoir Hemingway Encounters: A Biographer Reminisces in The Hemingway Review, Fall 2011, he looks back on his interactions with other Hemingway experts, such as Charlie Fenton, Malcolm Cowley, Michael Reynolds, and Paul Smith, who in 1980 was the founding president of the Hemingway Society.

The classic Hemingway biography is that by Carlos Baker (1969). There are four more recent general biographies: Jeffrey Meyers (1985), Kenneth Lynn (1987), James Mellow (1992), and Mary V. Dearborn (2017). They will be cited occasionally in later chapters of this book. Also important to later biographers has been Michael Reynolds’ many volumes of biography; he died in 2000 and there is a nice memorial to him in the Fall 2000 issue of the Hemingway Review. All of these biographers have analyzed many letters, journals, and other source documents, which are housed in the archives of various libraries, museums, and collections. They have also interviewed many people who knew Hemingway.

The complete title of Mellow’s book is Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. He explains that the subtitle comes from one of Hemingway’s most famous short story Soldier’s Home (CSS 109) where the thoughts of the protagonist Krebs are described: He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences. Mellow interprets this to mean that around 1924 when the story was written Hemingway had begun to entertain a philosophy-impossible though it might be to maintain-of playing always against the odds (Mellow 125).

Each biographer brings a different background to his writing. Mellow’s book was the final volume in his trilogy about modernist writers of the Lost Generation: his other two biographies were of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mellow was an art critic and book reviewer as well as a writer. He died at 71 in November 1997. Kenneth S. Lynn died at 78 in June 2001. He was a professor of English, history and American civilization at Harvard and Johns Hopkins until his retirement in 1989. He also wrote a biography of Charlie Chaplin.

Jeffrey Meyers has written 43 books, including 20 biographies. He earned his doctorate at Berkeley and taught at the University of Colorado from 1975 to 1992, when he became a full-time writer. He is one of twelve Americans who are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. Meyers’ book is more suitable in some ways because it is organized by topic instead of being a straight chronological history, as is found in Mellow and Lynn, although Lynn’s book is also good at analyzing the various stories and books as they were created and he placed them in the book in the appropriate time and place of Hemingway’s life

Mary Dearborn emphasizes that her biography is the first written by a woman. She also has had the benefit of recent scholarship in the last three decades. Her book is very readable and she is not shy about giving opinions on the personalities of those involved in Hemingway’s life. She offers a vivid chronicle of Hemingway’s declining mental state in his later life, which she diagnoses as mania and manic depression.

Hemingway biographies cover three basic areas: the people he knew, the places he lived in or visited, and his literary output. In her recent (2014) short (186 pages) biography, Influencing Hemingway: People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work, Nancy W. Sindelar emphasizes the chronology of his travels (places) and some of the people in his life. She cleverly places her literary analysis in her last chapter, Ch. Seven. Places of the Soul (143-156). Her book can be read along with the volumes of the Letters and as she cites a letter it can actually be read in the Letters volume. However, her citations are to Carlos Baker’s book, Selected Letters, 1917-1961. As a source, she also frequently cites Mellow’s biography. She generally gives Hemingway’s life a positive spin and is especially good at providing photos and details about his various residences and favorite places: Oak Park, northern Michigan, Italy, Paris, Key West, Spain, Africa, Havana, and Idaho. Her book was reviewed by Dennis Ledden in The Hemingway Review, Spring 2015 issue and for him her findings are fresh enough to validate her critical biography as a worthwhile addition to those studies that have made meaningful contributions to our understanding of Ernest Hemingway and his literary canon (141).

By contrast, Carlos Baker’s book, The Writer as Artist, focuses on the literary aspect of Hemingway’s life. While he may use biographical details, his main interest is in literary criticism of each major work. Each of his fifteen chapters is devoted to analysis of a single work of fiction, nonfiction or the short stories which in total deal with war, bullfighting, fishing, hunting, drinking, death, and romance.

Book critics who reviewed a Hemingway book on initial publication were not Hemingway specialists but were usually well known as journalists or columnists. They were not shy about giving an opinion about the work, and would often comment about the current direction (up or down?) of Hemingway’s career at that time. A useful book containing copies of initial reviews is by Robert Trogdon, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (1999).

Professors publishing in scholarly academic literary journals focus more on the writer’s literary output than the people and places in his life. The Hemingway Review is the main publisher of critical Hemingway scholarship. It is published twice a year by the Hemingway Society; Fall 1981 was the first issue. The Society, with Project Muse, also maintains an archive available on line of all issues after 1999. The Hemingway Society was founded in 1980. There were 121 charter members (those whose dues were paid before March 15, 1981). There are now 600 members. The Society also hosts a biennial international conference at various locations symbolic of Hemingway’s life. The predecessor to the Hemingway Society was the Hemingway Foundation, founded in 1965 by Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s widow. Hemingway notes and The Hemingway Newsletter were the predecessor publications to the Review.

The Spring 2016 issue of the Review was its 35th Anniversary Issue. It featured Kirk Curnutt’s interview with Charles Oliver, who was the founding editor of The Hemingway Review, and served from 1981 to 1992. He experienced the computer revolution and the flood of books on Hemingway that came out in the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Beegel took over the editorship and she published her thoughts about the Review it its Spring 1998 issue. She found that in circulation it outranked many other single-author journals. Criticism can take the form of articles, notes, monographs, and doctoral dissertations. According to MLA (Modern Language Association) statistics, among American 19th century authors only Henry James and Melville receive more attention. The Hemingway Review uses a system of author-anonymous peer review. Submissions are sent to reviewers who use the same critical method (feminist, post-colonialist, ecocritical, etc.) as the submitted article. There is a diversity of critical methods in the items published in terms of traditional versus trendy. And Furthermore, all labelling of critical methods is reductive to some extent (Beegel 15). She is optimistic about Hemingway’s position in the canon but urges those in the Hemingway industry to reach out to critics who still view him unfavorably as a Dead White Male.

The organization, analysis, and publication of Hemingway’s letters has been an important task assumed by academic scholars. The most recent effort is the Cambridge Edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, begun in 2011 with the publication of the first volume in what is estimated to be a seventeen-volume series. The Hemingway Letters Project was organized in 2002 when the project was authorized by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders of U.S. and international copyrights to the letters. It is estimated that he wrote between eight thousand and ten thousand letters in his lifetime and that there are at least six thousand known surviving letters that have been seen in print. These letters are now collected in various archives and over thirty such archival collections are cited in recent volumes to date and they come from over 250 sources. In the published volumes scholars, led by the Hemingway Letters Project editorial team, have supplemented the printed letters with comments elaborating on the background and contents of each letter.

Hemingway writers also produce books on specific (single topic) subjects, such as Paul Hendrickson’s book, Hemingway’s Boat, Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, Alfred Knopf, 2011, which was reviewed by Joseph M. Flora in The Hemingway Review, Spring 2012. Hemingway bought the boat in 1934 at Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn and named it the Pilar. He raised the $7,500 cost of the boat from articles submitted to Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire. In the book, which took Hendrickson seven