Hemingway's reputation has suffered immensely over the last two or three decades. Read around enough and you'll see this. And I can feel it when I occasionally confess to people — for you don't tell this, you confess it — that I love him and his writing. I always sense a bit of a surprise, as if that's a rather strong feeling for a man who could be so odious and a writer who at times nudged close or fell in to self-parody. I've long thought of trying to explain what makes him so great and how he so utterly captivated me when I discovered him in my early 20s. Now I don't need to explain it. For James Salter, in an essay in the New York Review of Books that is itself achingly beautiful and sad, does the job splendidly:
Salter goes on to describe his ascension, the brilliance of Sun, the near-perfect triumph of A Farewell to Arms, and then his downs and ups. He didn't take the former well.> They were beginning to pic him, to get him to lower his head. The letters of outrage he wrote were childish and violent. He believed in himself and his art. When he began it was fresh and startling. Over time the writing became heavier, almost a parody of itself, but while living in Key West in the 1930s he wrote two of his finest stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” both published in Esquire. And in 1940 his big novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his experiences as a correspondent in the Spanish civil war, redeemed his reputation and restored him to eminence.
Later a couple of horrid books and a disastrous interview stained his reputation. And then when he seemed down and out -- when he was down and out...> in 1958, he finished the beautiful remembrance of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast, written with a simplicity and modesty that seemed long past. As with much of Hemingway, it fills one with envy and an enlarged sense of life. His Paris is a city you long to have known.
Deeply flawed man. But along with the power and freshness of his best writing, which Salter describes so well, distinguishing him most was an intensity of desire and ambition that matched the immensity of his vanity. It wasn't just an ambition to be recognized as the very best, though it was that too; it was a hot burn to write something truly original and great and beautiful. To read his best prose is to see that. A Farewell to Arms? My god, the power of that book. I can't read either the first or the last page without weeping.* You also see it in his interviews and his letters. The clarity and heat of that desire, so evident in the prose, captured me as a 19-year-old reading his stories, and it held me throughout my twenties as I read almost everything he wrote, including his letters, and much that was written about him. When I was 18, Virginia Woolf ** stirred in me the desire to write. Hemingway made it last. For that I will always love him.
But let Salter finish the job:> Hemingway’s Boat [the book under review] is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.
___
*The latter, which delivers in full the spare art Salter describes above, also generated one of the best interview exchanges ever. In the Paris Review interview, a very young George Plimpton asked Hemingway if he revised much. Hemingway answered that he rewrote the last page of Arms 39 times. Plimpton asked, "Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you." Hemingway replied, "Getting the words right."
**Woolf too long remained (and remains) an obsession. Wasn't easy to get those two to get along in my head.
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