Hemingway Conference Draws Fans, Students

William Meyer’s capsule summary of San Diego’s first conference on author Ernest Hemingway was as simple and blunt as Hemingway’s prose.

After listening to one expert talk at length about such things as the author’s portrayal of “the unacknowledged other within the perimeter of the self,” Meyer shook his head.

“Some of these speakers, you can hardly understand what they’re saying,” he said. “But at least they’re a little more down-to-earth than the speakers at a Shakespeare conference.”

Meyer, a free-lance writer and maverick Hemingway scholar from Beaumont, Texas, was among 70 people who attended the first day of the Hemingway conference, held Friday and Saturday at San Diego State University. Organized by SDSU English Prof. James Hinkle, the conference brought together 20 top Hemingway scholars from all over the United States to dissect, discuss and sometimes argue about the work of a man who is one of the most influential and controversial American authors of all time.

According to Hinkle, the conference coincides with a resurgence of interest in Hemingway. Fifty books on the author have been published in the last five years, including three biographies in the last 12 months.

One reason for the increasing interest is the availability of Hemingway’s papers, now on file at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston after having been inaccessible to researchers for years. “All of a sudden, scholars have a chance to make money and get recognition for publishing things about Hemingway,” Hinkle said.

But Linda Miller, an associate professor of English literature at Penn State University, noted that academicians are also beginning to reassess previous criticism of Hemingway as nothing but an macho outdoorsman who wrote with the vocabulary of a 16-year-old.

“People confuse the man with his work,” she said.

“There are some ugly things about his life. There were strains of both sentimentality and cruelty in him, and he could lash out verbally against his friends.” But such traits shouldn’t cloud the assessment of his writing, Miller insisted.

Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Ill. During the 1930s, he covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, and he subsequently traveled extensively in Africa. His interests included bullfighting, hunting and deep-sea fishing, and he wrote eight novels, three nonfiction books and numerous short stories before turning a shotgun on himself in 1961. Two additional novels have been published posthumously.

As Miller pointed out, “He certainly lived a colorful life, and people are fascinated by him,” seemingly as they are by no other American writer. Twenty-five years after Hemingway’s death, the International Hemingway Society--a group whose 300 members are evenly divided among scholars and fans--is going strong. So is the Hemingway Review (circulation 900), a journal of scholarly essays and information about the author and his works. An annual writing contest for Hemingway imitators attracted nearly 1,800 entries this year.

Hinkle said the conference at SDSU was primarily a chance for Hemingway scholars to meet each other and defend their critical approaches to the author. These are people who have read some of Hemingway’s novels dozens of times, and Hinkle conceded that their conversations tend to be narrowly focused.

No Other Topics

“We end up talking entirely about Hemingway--not just at the conference, but at meals and parties. We don’t get off on tangents like the Padres or the Chargers,” he said.

Although it was open to the public, the conference attracted mostly students and scholars of Hemingway. One of the few non-academic attendees was George Auvan, who fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and claims to have once met Hemingway in a bar in Spain. Auvan--who admitted with a laugh that he has never read anything written by Hemingway--said he came to the conference primarily out of respect for the author who “brought the war in defense of the Spanish republic to the attention of the world” in the novel “The Sun Also Rises.”

More typical among those who attended was Kevin Jones, a senior majoring in business at SDSU.

“I’m taking my first class on Hemingway right now, but my girlfriend, who’s a lit major, is really into him. So I had to come,” Jones said.

Hemingway’s “opinion of women makes me laugh, because he’s so sexist,” Jones continued. “And all his main characters are drunks. It reminds me of when I was a freshman.”

Mary-Ellen Cummings, a graduate student in American literature at SDSU, came to hear what the nation’s top Hemingway scholars had to say. But she, too, expressed reservations about Hemingway’s view of women.

“I was offended by ‘A Farewell to Arms’ when I first read it in high school,” she said. “It seemed that Catherine (the novel’s main female character) was there to fall in love, have a baby, die and nothing else.”

However, Miller and other experts argued that Hemingway’s supposed portrayal of women as an inferior sex has been exaggerated. “His macho label sometimes makes a misreading of his women almost inevitable,” Miller said. “Ultimately, his fiction is male-oriented, but . . . the female characters in his writing are very truthfully drawn and emotionally complex.”

Miller also argued that Hemingway’s penchant for describing scenes in a graphic, journalistic style is deceptively simple. The descriptions are often made by the characters in his novels and reveal their emotional state, she pointed out.

Hinkle agreed. “Hemingway was an enormously subtle artist, not just a gorilla who somehow learned how to type,” he said. “He pioneered a more natural style of writing. . . . He is certainly the most influential American writer.”

Hemingway’s literary style has by now become so copied and well-known that Harry’s Bar and American Grill in Florence, Italy--one of Hemingway’s former watering holes--sponsors an annual contest for the best and funniest piece of short prose written the way “Papa” himself would have written it.

There are 24 entries in the finals of this year’s contest, and William Meyer has two of them. One is a recipe for baking a cake:

“You must grease with a greater amount of grease than seems necessary two pans. The pans should be round and eight inches across or very close to eight inches. . . . Then you must mix. You mix what is in the box of cake mix and 1 cups of water, water that is cold and fresh and good, and three eggs or what is very close to three eggs. . . . When the cakes are done you must take two towels or two potholders or one of each and very very carefully grasp the sides of the cake pans which are still very hot and lift the pans out of the oven to success and victory on the cake rack.”

But Meyer, who also spoke at the SDSU conference about Hemingway’s quintessentially American qualities and uniquely clear, visual sense, said that writing parodies of the author “is a way of keeping Hemingway and the power of his writing alive.”

In a way, that was the whole reason for the conference. Or very close to the whole reason for it.