Screw short declarative sentences!
Just a note to say that I have several interviews in the works and will post them as soon as they are finished. We will have some interesting things to talk about here in the next few weeks – Hemingway and American masculinity, the Spanish civil war and Hemingway from a Spanish perspective, and of course, more about Hadley and her friend Alice. I am also working on the audio for you!
Thank you for all of the encouraging emails I’ve been getting along the way. I have made a lot of new friends and often wonder where this blog will lead me. It is a lot of work but a lot of fun too. Speaking of fun, read on . . .
When blogs first started, I understood the medium immediately. As a writer, reader and librarian, I find blogs a refreshing way around the increasing number of gatekeepers standing between readers and writers. I read several blogs each day and marvel at the access I have to new people and ideas. From travel writing to gardening, blogs are almost always written in the first person, and are a fascinating record of our times. I love that alongside the biggest most expensive corporate website are the musings of an ordinary person who writes from their own experience and perspective and invites their readers, through comment, to do the same. As one blogger said, the internet is a fabulous example of democracy at work.
In keeping true to my blog’s purpose of Collecting stories about the enduring influence of Ernest Hemingway, I have been exploring some of the websites online written by people who dislike our man Hemingway and freely express themselves. Did you know there is an “I hate Ernest Hemingway” Facebook group? This is true! At this writing, there are 102 members. I read it from start to finish thinking I might want to do an interview, but it just wasn’t coherent enough to bother.
Another facebook page is titled, “Screw short declarative sentences”. I have a soft spot for this page however, because of the author, Kimmie. Kimmie has 12 members in her group and one officer, Christna, a “Co-Hemingway hater” and they publish from “Mr. Delaney’s English Room”. One senses there is more to Kimmie’s angst than reading Ernest Hemingway when she asks, (and I quote) “If all it takes to become a famous author is to write short declarative sentences (Hemingway). . . then why the hell am i still in highschool??????????”
By far, the most entertaining anti-Hemingway protests come from high school students commiserating with each other on discussion boards about having to read him for class. No one can grumble like a teenager, and some of their discussion is deeply funny. Depending on your sense of humor, there are some laugh-out-loud comments here. If you are easily offended, please stop reading, but if you would like to read some creative kvetching about Hemingway, please read on:
Please note: I have condensed the conversation and left the punctuation and spelling as it was written.
In September of 2007, one student starts the discussion like this:
I hate Ernest Hemingway, the most overrated and talentless hack in all of human history. He cannot write his way out of a wet paper bag. He sucks in very way that it is possible for a living creature to suck. I get the impression that even HE didn’t like his writing – because it honestly seems like after he wrote something, he just tossed it aside, hating it, and never looked at it again. His words were dry and sterile, and it is American literature’s loss that his parents were not. The very structure of his sentences makes me want to stab myself in the head. I feel vomit moving up my throat when I imagine ever reading anything else he wrote. I hate Ernest Hemingway.
Why be such a hater? Another student asks.
Are you taking English Class too? Says Rocky Raccoon
A new poster named “Wicked Sweet” joins in and observes that no one ever feels indifferent towards Hemingway, it seems to be love or hate and that even if one does not like the work of an artist, the effort should be celebrated.
The next day, the discussion continues when “Cranky” writes:
I seem to recall a story about two waitresses in a diner and one was very rude to a late night customer who was deaf. Since Hemingway didn’t clarify who was saying what I remember the dialogue was confusing, but there was something about the story that made it stick out to me. (Obviously not very well, though). I think there was some moral about people who are rude sometimes are rudely treated by others and stepping out of the proverbial darkness into the proverbial light (of knowledge). Okay, I officially have no idea what I’m talking about. It might not have even been Hemingway.
The discussion continues:
“Oh my god. This is possibly my favorite post ever.”
“Sounds like “A clean Well-Lighted Place” to me.” says “Farmer Ted”
“Don’t piss me off. I’m gestating.” Another poster writes intermittently throughout the discussion.
Cranky: replies: That’s it, Farmer Ted! So, was I even close in my summary or analysis of it? What was up with that story?
“Putting a name on that story makes me sad, Cranky. It was such an amusing post because in the end it seemed like it was just a dream you had or something”.
“I think that a Clean, Well-Lighted Place should be the name of our new forum. It is certainly well-lighted enough. And it never closes” Says a poster named “time is a river”
“. . .how can you hate an author who can compose such a beautiful phrase?”
Wow . . . How can anyone HATE Ernest Hemingway? “Without Dane” adds.
“Easily”. Concludes a poster named Vonnegut.
On another forum, “Lost in his eyes” laments having to read A Farewell to Arms for class and writes that it’s pretty boring. “Sweet Doo” says:
“I agree with fatty, here. I have to read 100 pages of him for English tomorrow. I have only read about 10 pages. I already feel sick. That’s seriously what reading Hemingway feels like to me. . .”
“Vitriol” comes to the scene saying, “For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. Also, Hemingway in his prime could kick everyone’s ass. Everyone . . .and I mean physically. Hemingway could physically kick all of your asses”.
“LOL! This is true”. Camelsmoker replies, “Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his grave.”
Later there is a discussion about Hemingway in Key West. “Soup” tells everyone that he smoked some good cigars in Key West. They were hand rolled and named after Hemingway.
“Vitriol” is back again to comment, “The guy has cigars named after him fer chrissake! I’ve wept the most manly tears reading his books. My tears were so grizzled that they said things like “My tractor died yesterday. I had her for fifty years” as they streamed down my face. Reading his books give you calluses on your eyes. One of his books could out drink Bukowski”.
Winston Smith writes, “The Old Man and the Sea is an amazing book. It was his masterpiece. He wrote it one time and they published it. No rewrites or edits at all. And it won a freakin Pulitzer. The Sun also Rises – Amazing. His short stories are fantastic. “Hills like White elephants” and “A clean Well-Lighted Place” are just great. And OMG! “The killers” was such a great story. Made a good movie too. 1946, Burt Lancaster. Good stuff! I didn’t care for For Whom The Bell Tolls. That being said. Hemingway was a jerk. Plain and simple. Great writer, horrible person. I would love to fight Hemingway. He would kick my ass, but it would be worth it.”
“Please . . .don’t hold back”. Manifold Intensity teases.
But Vitriol has the last word on this: “But you also like the Steelers. There’s no way I could trust your opinion as informed.”
But all is not lost for the future of literature! Here is a condensed version of the discussion on another forum. This discussion goes like this:
Hemingway. Great writer? Or he sucks?
I enjoyed some of it
I sort of agree . . . don’t think he sucks, but he was over-rated.
Wasn’t he a spy for the USA? He was mean to women too. I don’t like him that much.
He doesn’t suck. His stripped down prose was a welcome change from the pretentious, over written literature of the time. He is one of the forefathers of the modern novel.”
Righto. Hemingway probably wouldn’t be on my top 10, but applying normal suckability standards, Hemingway doesn’t suck.
Michael Mckinney
Wow, that was enlightening. These people obviously don’t get Hemingway or their tastes run more towards run on sentences structures. (Maybe they’ll like my stuff. LOL) as always an entertaining and thought-provoking blog from the wonderfully creative mind of Allie Baker. I think Hem would have gotten a kick out this/ your pro Hem site as well as the con Hem sites and then, knowing him, his blood would have boiled as he sat there letting the comments simmer in his brain. Keep up the great work, Allie!
Thank God Hemingway can write better then these kids! Wow!
I think it says something that even people who don’t like Hemingway REALLY don’t like him… nobody reads Hemingway and says “Meh.”
I like their comments differentiating Hemingway the man from his work. You can admire his work and still not admire the way he conducted himself in life. This is true of many artists.
Allie, This posting was so interesting and fun to read. Of course, you have another great picture posted, too. MDC
Some of those kids’ comments make me want to stab myself in the head!
Being probably one of the younger readers of this blog (just turned 21), I read this post with a mixture of pride and dismay. Pride, because some of these people have a wicked sense of humor and demonstrate our generation’s knack for being playful with language (i.e. “normal standards of suckability” haha). Dismay, because I think that people’s inability to fathom Hemingway may represent the effects of our collective a.d.d and screen-addictions (which would decrease our ability to read far between lines and intuit the powerful emotions and mysteries underneath H’s stolid prose.)
Thank you, Allie, for another fun and delightful blog!!
Oh, and I just realized I’ve become that goofy guy we’ve all seen who can’t stop chuckling in the public library;)
Well, as you pointed out here, that is democracy, isn’t it? Great photo of Hemingway laughing.
Allie,
Love your blogs !!!!
I never know what to expect from you. (except wonderful and unusual perspectives on the life of Ernesto)
This one takes the cake !
I was at the JFK Library recently. They have on display a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to EH criticizing something he’d written. EH has written on it in red ink “Kiss my ass”. I was thinking about that letter and chuckling to myself as I read these evaluations of his work.
Great post!
All right all of you pretentious assholes, it’s not that the people who read Hemingway are unable to interpret his work, or cannot find a deeper meaning. It’s that he writes with a style that mimics a five-year-old’s. Generally the people who dislike Hemingway’s work the most, are the people who don’t illicit any sort of strong emotion from his work. The hate doesn’t come from his books, it comes from the fact that these people are reading a book that gives them no emotional connection. You all can sip your tea and believe you’re better than these people because they don’t follow the Ernest-Hemingway-is -such-an-amazing-author-oh-my-god ideals. However, these are the people who can look past the mindless herd of starry eyed Hemingway lovers and recognize that this man may have had interesting ideas, but couldn’t actually write worth crap. Yeah diction blah blah blah, syntax, yadda yadda.
Well get this then.
I am currently listening to his short stories and his novels. I am amazed at how fresh and unlike most cliches about him and his writing the actual things are. Haters dont even spae the time to see past cliche. Screw em.
“Anyway he died that winter in Seville with a tube in each lung, drowned with pneumonia that came to finish off the tuberculosis. When he was delirious he rolled under the bed and fought with death under the bed dying as hard as a man can die. I thought that year he hoped for death in the ring but he would not cheat death by looking for it. You would have liked him…..He was generous, humorous, proud, bitter, foul-mouthed and a great drinker. He neither sucked after intellectuals nor married money. He loved to kill bulls and lived with much passion and enjoyment although the last six months of his life he was very bitter. He knew he had tuberculosis and took absolutely no care of himself; having no fear of death he preferred to burn out, not as an act of bravado, but from choice. He was training his younger brother and believed he would be a great matador. The younger brother, also afflicted in the lungs, turned out to be a coward. it was a great disappointment to us all.”
Death In The Afternoon
EH said that the measure of what you get out of reading him is the measure of what you brought in. Life is a tragedy because the essence of life is a preparation for death. Few can accept that.
I must say that Hemingway’s books have not aged well, to say the least. They are filled with disappointing endings, pointless death scenes and dialogue, and various other remarkably amateurish things that writers often advise other writers to never, ever do. I honestly have to wonder if an editor ever even saw them. I know that it might seem like sacrilege to criticize the great Writing God Hemingway as being rather amateurish, but I suspect his reputation as a “Writing God” was formed in another time, under another set of values, which have long since gone away. I have seen many books far better-written than Hemingway’s from a dramatic point of view, and even just in terms of good writing.
My reaction to Hemingway is very like that of Bradley Cooper, in the movie “Silver Linings Playbook.” Cooper reads to the end of Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell To Arms, and freaks out. The reason? (Spoilers!) The wife of the main character in A Farewell To Arms just DIES for no apparent reason, leaving her man bereft and alone, and very very sad – and after an entire book of the man attempting to find his woman, overcoming enormous obstacles, until (seemingly) finally achieving victory and happiness! Pointless, cliched, and amateurish.
I have seen writers such as Stephen King – together with so many different writing instructors – advise other writers to never, ever have the main character fail entirely to achieve his/her goals by the end of a long novel. Readers do not stick with a main character through a 200 or 300 page book (or longer), just to see him/her struggle, struggle, struggle, and then suddenly fail to triumph at the end. It’s the equivalent of seeing a hero struggle brilliantly against the bad guys for a long, involved epic, only to have the hero fail completely at the very last moment, and the bad guys win. Yech. What an ugly ending. Whatever Hemingway’s ultimate point in writing such an ending, dramatically, it doesn’t work. Readers tend to feel cheated by having the main character fail completely; they feel frustrated and let down, as does Cooper in the movie – he throws the book out a window – and most of Hemingway’s books seem to have similarly amateurish and unsatisfying endings in them.
In Hemingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” (more spoilers!) the main character, Jordan, fails to escape from an ambush scene during World War Two, and, wounded, spends the last pages of the book gasping out his final breaths, waiting for the enemy to arrive and kill him. No point, no victory, no triumph – just pointless death. And after a whole book of difficult, heroic struggle, too. This is fantastically unsatisfying, and actually made me quite angry as a reader at Hemingway for wasting my time and for cheating me. Having a main character die at the end of a long novel is another huge literary no-no, and it also tends to make readers feel cheated and frustrated. Unless the death is done very, very well, as is Dumbledore’s death in Harry Potter, writers should not kill main characters at a novel’s end – and Jordan’s death is not anywhere NEAR as satisfying and well-done as Dumbledore’s.
And in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake, spends a great deal of the book pursuing a girl named Brett, who in the end just decides arbitrarily to have a relationship with Mike, another rival character – and Jake and Brett spend the final pages of the book in a taxi, discussing “what might have been.” Another disgusting, pointless ending, where the difficulties are not overcome, and it all just ends because it ends. This no doubt prompted one reviewer at the time to say of the book that it “begins nowhere and ends in nothing.” I must say I heartily agree.
Why did Hemingway frequently write endings that other writers tend to describe as amateurish and cliched? My suspicion is that he was trying to be all “literary” and “serious.” It’s almost as though he’s saying, “Look at how most of my main characters fail in the end! I must indeed be a very Serious Writer, who takes Literature VERY Seriously, and who is trying to make a very Profound STATEMENT. Life and Death, wow! Meaning and meaninglessness, ooh!”
I personally think it’s just plain bad writing. But hey.
Hemingway’s books also tend to be remarkably boring and dull, no doubt arising from his amateurish grasp of drama, as demonstrated by his hackneyed bad endings. He does little to satisfy the reader in most of his books, in their middles OR at their ends, preferring to remain unspokenly Profound, and (as I said earlier) it doesn’t work. Writers can be as profound as they want, but if they don’t have a dramatically interesting story to tell, it really doesn’t matter. As Stephen King says, most readers just want a good story, something to get lost in – and I think most people today find it very, very difficult to get lost in Hemingway’s writing. I don’t see any major movies being made of his books today, as there are (for example) for J.R.R. Tolkien – whom I consider to be a vastly superior writer to Hemingway. The reason seems to be that Hemingway’s books are, for the most part, not very interesting or dramatic, and are often awkwardly written and amateurish in their endings. At least Frodo Baggins destroys the Ring in The Lord Of The Rings; most of Hemingway’s characters just seem to die or fail at life (or both). I really don’t see blockbuster material here, or even very good writing.
As for Hemingway’s “short” sentences, I have to say that most of them are not really all that short. H. G. Wells, for example, in his masterpiece “The Time Machine,” uses much, much shorter sentences than Hemingway tends to – and “The Time Machine” was published in 1895, far earlier than Hemingway, and is a much more interesting and well-written read than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
Sometime a writer’s work just ages badly – and I think it’s time for a major re-evaluation of Hemingway’s books in general. The best-selling author during Hemingway’s time was not Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Salinger – it was Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inventor of Tarzan, which really says something, I think – Hemingway never created any characters as deep, memorable or unique as Tarzan; every school-child has heard of Tarzan. And reading Burrough’s actual books, it is very clear that Tarzan himself is an absolutely remarkable character; he doesn’t just stay in the jungle like in the movies; he becomes an English Lord, and a soldier, and distinguished himself by fighting in World War Two. Way better than Hemingway’s war stories. Even Hemingway’s CHARACTERS aren’t all that terribly great or compelling, and I think it’s about time he shouldered some criticism for that too.
In summary, I find Hemingway to be a rank amateur writer, about whom I cannot understand why various “literary” people frequently make so much fuss – maybe they just like dull, uninteresting stories with cliched endings. I think much of his reputation as a “Writing God” is thoroughly undeserved, and should in fact be revoked. He doesn’t challenge me intellectually or dramatically; his badly-written stories mostly just frustrate me and annoy me, as they did Bradley Cooper – and as I think they do most people with any real experience with more expertly-written stories. Now that I’ve actually READ most of Hemingway’s books – most recently The Old Man And The Sea – I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. Why is Hemingway so famous? I think it’s just an accident, really. I think he just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and for no other reason. Editors frequently say that there are absolutely no rules in the publishing business, about why one writer becomes famous, and another does not. If it happens, then it happens. I think Hemingway is just an overall bad writer who got very, very lucky – and I think he has been unfairly held up for years before the rest of us as what a writer SHOULD be, despite his rather boring stories, unmemorable characters, and amateurish endings.
In the words of Bradley Cooper, “No, no, I’m not going to apologize to you; ERNEST HEMINGWAY needs to apologize, because THAT’S who’s at fault here. That’s who’s to blame.”
I am 52 years old and am back in college finally finishing my degree and I must say that I agree with many of the young people-Hemingway is painful to read. Hills like White Elephants should be renamed: Drunk Writer likes Pink Elephants while writing . I think the line in the story, “That’s all we do, isn’t it-look at things and try new drinks?” basically tells us the story of Hemingway-That’s all he does-write things and try new drinks. Unfortunately for readers-it sounds like he has tried too many new drinks before he started writing. I know some say that we should separate the man from his writing but I have the sense that the story is autobiographical and he is the older jerk who only cares about booze and is ready to dump his girl if she does not take care of “it.” I read that someone had put Hemingway’s stories through some software algorithm and it came back that Hemingway is writing at a 4th grade level. Ironic that so many College Professors think his writing is so deep rather than inept. Leaving out words such as adjectives and words that would let you know who the hell is speaking is not genius-it’s incompetence and laziness and possibly drunkenness! Why do we glorify artists who are raging @ssholes who spend most of their lives drunk, high, and abusing women? If Hemingway were around today he would be the first one on the Island voted off on a Reality show-or possibly fool everyone and win the million dollars. Me-I would not even be watching the show. I don’t do caveman speak. Hemingway can continue grunting and knocking women over the head with his club and dragging them off. Women professors that still make us read him are the epitome of irony because if they ever met a man like Hemingway in real life, they would slap him and have him arrested.