Hemingway’s Spell Is Conjured Anew

Papa. Just a mention divides the room. The entanglement of literature and legend has come to mean different things to different people, sometimes opposite things. But to those who appreciate the art of the storyteller, the distilled power and lyricism of words, gusto for life, Ernest Hemingway remains among the great stylists of the century.

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he wrote: Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Now, we get another chance at remembering the old alchemist.

Hemingway would have been 100 this year. Centennial celebrations, exploitations and ruminations are underway in advance of his July 21 birthday. His family produced a recent television biography for A&E;, and a second has been aired independently. A line of designer furniture bearing his name, if little else, has been licensed by his heirs. Magazines are weighing in, and planning more. Critics are clearing their throats. The National Portrait Gallery has scheduled a show in his honor. The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, which holds the Hemingway archives, will conduct a symposium with writers from around the world. At least one fresh biography is due.

Then, in summer, from a yellowing manuscript in his steamer trunk, a new Hemingway book has been assembled for publication--surely the last to bear his name.

“We wanted to give people a final glimpse of Hemingway, as he used to say, ‘between hard covers,’ ” says his middle son Patrick, 70, who edited the book.

The new volume will be titled “True at First Light,” a 100,000-word version of a 200,000-word draft about a hunting safari to East Africa from August 1953 to March 1954. This was Hemingway’s second safari to Africa; this will be his second book about his travels to the continent. Naturally, the manuscript is a matter of anticipation, and argument.

His Imagination Ruled; His Creativity Obeyed

The underwater part of the iceberg.

He worked slowly, barely composing 600 words a day or so, compressing ideas and arranging sentences to suggest far more than was said.

He wrote for the eye. Grammatical patterns gave emphasis, and corresponding vigor, to words beyond what they otherwise conveyed. He wrote for the ear too. Read Hemingway and you immediately recognize the sounds of language.

At his best, he achieved in prose what Impressionists accomplished with painting: The writer’s experience went into the story; the reader’s came out of it. His elegant story of fishing in Michigan, “Big Two-Hearted River,” tells of a man’s return from war. Not once is war mentioned, but it cloaks the action from beginning to end.

That’s the underwater part of the iceberg.

Others, of course, achieved similar effects but never with such simplicity. Lean prose. Clipped dialogue. Rhythmic sentences that delivered words onto paper like brush strokes on canvas so the writer of a scene emerged as distinct as the scene itself. All of it crafted into action stories that sprang full-blooded from a life of action. That’s what made him original. In 1952, Americans lined up at the newsstands to buy Life magazine for the novella “The Old Man and the Sea.” In 48 hours, 5.3 million copies were sold.

This fable of adversity and character succeeded no matter what degree of emotion, imagination and intellect readers brought to the tale. People who did not ordinarily read serious books could, and did, appreciate Hemingway because his vocabulary was elementary and his imagery straightforward. The literati could swoon because the noble little story of a Cuban fisherman also floated elegantly atop the vast and worldly icebergs of their own understanding.

As a result, Hemingway was both great and popular in his day--an achievement that seems almost quaint in contemporary America. He continues to sell better now than he did in his lifetime.

Critics greeted his 1929 novel of war and love, “A Farewell to Arms,” as a lasting work of literature. Paperback publishers reissued it with a bodice-ripper cover and the subtitle, “They Stole Love From a World Afire.”

Both were correct. The story accommodated the reader.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you.

Admiration, With Some Reservations

He was a macho pig, a boor and a bigot.

Even those who admire Hemingway’s life and work find themselves apologizing for him. That may say as much about contemporary times as about Hemingway, but it’s nonetheless ingrained. Even his publisher, Charles Scribner III, allowed recently that Hemingway “has a lot to answer for.” But maybe not as much as he once did. Many of Hemingway’s influential artistic contemporaries were long ago allotted a place in history, where they remain more or less fixed: James Joyce is century’s preeminent prose experimentalist; F. Scott Fitzgerald, a storyteller whose tragedy matched his triumph; John Dos Passos, but a footnote. By contrast, Hemingway remains quicksilver in our imaginations.

The cycle of public attitudes goes something like this:

In the 1920s and 1930s, when the baroque romanticism of the English-language novel was brushed aside, he was a dashing literary liberationist. Hemingway swept the last of the 19th century into the gutters of Paris at the time when more creative energy was concentrated in the smoky cafes of Montparnasse than anywhere in the Western world.

His 1926 novel of a foursome’s escapades in Spain, “The Sun Also Rises,” was, in the words of biographer and novelist Anthony Burgess, “one of the rare books able to influence the way people behaved and talked. Brett became a model of speech and behavior for a whole generation of college girls.”

Hemingway’s achievement, his influence, almost requires a pause to appreciate. The essence of writing in English had been transformed. There would be no going back. His 1936 tale of a writer on his deathbed in Africa, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” remains one of the greatest short stories ever.

In the ensuing decade, his innovations were so widely copied as to become standards of American fiction: with action driving the narrative. He came to be regarded less as a pathfinder than a literary fixture with his ups and downs. His 1937 book about a down-and-out Key West smuggler, “To Have and Have Not,” disappointed many. His 1940 account of Spain’s civil war, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” ranked with his best.

By then, Hemingway was far more than a writer. His persona grew even when his work did not. Forget that his World War II journalism was lackluster, Papa “liberated” the Ritz in Paris and threw parties that are still talked about. He was a robust man when other writers were bookish and effete. He made serious work of a life at hard play.

In 1950, he bombed with “Across the River and Into the Trees,” a self-parody about an old soldier’s love for a younger woman in Venice. Fans were embarrassed, and critics said he was washed up.

His comeback was remarkable. These days, while some people remember the hedonism of Hemingway’s personal life, they forget his relentless devotion to his art.

He went back to work. From a large, unfinished manuscript, he retrieved one section and recast it as a novella. “The Old Man and the Sea” proved his stuff anew, and he was showered with tribute.

For the remainder of the decade, he was Papa the Lionized. Barrel-chested and white-bearded, he embodied myths of manhood and style that were already under stress in a restless new era of jet planes and television.

Van Gordon Sauter, the writer and former president of CBS news, is a keen student of Hemingway and came of age during those years. He recalls, “My crowd missed the great days of the 20th century by a generation, but, through Hemingway, we got a whiff of them.”

The baby boomers who followed turned a cold shoulder to Hemingway. Feminism, racial struggle, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, war protest--these were social movements born of rebellion against the culture that celebrated Hemingway. Besides, Hemingway was an anti-Semite,misogynous and homophobic.

Many who expressed these views never bothered reading him closely, if at all--for his best male characters were vulnerable, scarred men who took the side of the underdog. But the personal myths that excited their parents repelled many boomers, and it didn’t help much that Hemingway glorified blood sports.

In the mid-1980s, a reassessment began upon posthumous publication of his novel “The Garden of Eden.” Never mind arguments over how well this unfinished manuscript was edited: Here was Ernest Hemingway writing about the murkiness of gender and the sensuality of gender-bending in a novel about a newly married writer at work and at play on the Cote d’Azur. Here was the great hunter writing about the unbearable sorrow of the kill. Here was a wife vying with Mr. Macho himself to be the man in the boudoir.

Plainly, the Hemingway legacy embodies many things--but simple stereotype is not one of them.

Charting an Expansive Literary Terrain

Paris, Spain, Key West, Cuba, Ketchum, East Africa. His sense of place was sharp as an ice pick, and he favored locales that were easy to like: blue skies, clean water, cozy cafes, rollicking saloons.

People have been tracking his footsteps ever since. His houses in Key West and Cuba are museums. His corner bar stool at the Floridita restaurant in Havana is roped off as a shrine. His haunts in Paris and Spain are the subjects of books. Plaques still dot the countryside where he was wounded, or where he slept or drank or wrote. His grave in Ketchum, Idaho, and even the hotel room where he worked on “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” No. 206 at the Sun Valley Lodge, are known terrain.

Not so Africa. His return to Kenya in 1953 was a much-postponed romp that ended in misfortune. This trip probably brought on his demise. But for reasons of logistics and expense, as well as the closed social circle of safari life, Africa is the skimpiest part of his biographies.

He tried to fill in the story himself. His first trip to the continent, 20 years earlier, brought forth “The Green Hills of Africa,” which he called an experiment in trying to write facts with the power of fiction. In truth, it was an old form then and commonplace today, and the book never stood as one of his larger achievements.

After his second safari, he returned to Havana and again tried to capture the experience in autobiographical fiction. Working in what his most accomplished biographer, Michael Reynolds, called a “white heat,” Hemingway ran up 200,000 words on his Royal portable with penned corrections. Then, as sometimes was his habit, he put it aside for other work. It appears he never returned to it.

From 1971 to 1972, Sports Illustrated published a series of three excerpts totaling 55,000 words, calling it “An African Journal.” The material involved hunting and bush adventures in the vicinity of what is now Amboseli National Park, Kenya, near Mt. Kilimanjaro.

There are always mystical countries that are part of one’s childhood. Those we remember and visit sometimes when we are asleep and dreaming . . . . In Africa when we lived on the small plain in the shade of the big thorn tree at the edge of the swamp at the foot of the great mountain we had such countries . . . .

In a preface, editors disclosed that unpublished portions of the work broadened into themes of African culture and Hemingway’s infatuation with a Wakamba woman, “a commentary on the graces of age,” religion, the politics of the Mau Mau revolution against British colonialism.

His son Patrick went along for part of this safari to Kenya and Tanzania and Uganda and other places whose names have changed over time. Patrick stayed in East Africa for 20 years as a hunting guide.

The new book, then, will be the product of a son who knows the country and its people reliving events through the eyes of his famous father 45 years after the fact.

“It was a wonderful experience,” says the courtly and graying Patrick. “It was a second chance to see a first-rate writer working on the experiences I had. That part of my life has come alive for me again.”

Later, things went bad in Africa. Hemingway and his wife, Mary, were reported killed in a plane crash in Uganda in January 1954.

Actually, there were two crashes. The first, near Murchison Falls on the Nile, was alarming but injuries were limited to pride and the Cessna 180. After a river rescue, the Hemingways fetched up at the village of Butiaba, where a second airplane would fly them to Kenya.

In fading sunlight, as the pilot took off down a washboard runway, Hemingway recalled, there was the usual sound, with which we were all now familiar, of rending metal.

His injuries were so severe that fluid leaked from inside his head. He never entirely recovered. This crash began a seven-year descent that dried up his creative confidence, engulfed him in paranoia, delivered him to electroshock treatments and rendered him frail. The words, he said, just wouldn’t come anymore. Supposedly he wept.

On the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1961, in the foyer of his Ketchum home, he took his life just as his father had, with a gun.

“He lived by a fast clock,” says Patrick. “So many people come into this world and leave it, and have never been alive. By 61, Ernest Hemingway had done a lot of living.”

New Book Receives a Cool Reception

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon . . .

Snippets have already emerged from the new book. Magazine editors have read the finished work, and it now makes the rounds on the literary circuit.

The first reception has not been welcoming.

Joan Didion, writing in the New Yorker, and Jonathan Yardley, in the Washington Post, denounced the very idea of publishing a leftover draft. Hemingway was too great a craftsman to edit an unfinished work under his name, Didion wrote. Yardley called the prose self-caricature and said the motive today could only be profiteering.

But consider the alternative: If not published, then the last known significant work of Ernest Hemingway would remain locked away forever, privy only to scholars and the literati. Why ask that?

A painter’s study sketches are not shameful. They are a source of wonder and insight into creativity. They are not judged alongside finished work. Why not the same with a writer? Hemingway used to ask that himself.

This will be the fifth full-length work to be published after Hemingway’s death. Is our appreciation of him diminished?

“I don’t believe a man can write from the grave,” says Patrick. “This book cannot be compared to ‘The Sun Also Rises’ or ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ But it’s very much him.”

For so rich an afterlife, Hemingway’s fans will be grateful.

His Works Stand Test of Time

He wrote in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems to be lived through and made to come alive. The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That’s all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is?

Hemingway endures for another reason: He is an illuminating teacher of writing. One of the finest.

Many of his works explore and glorify his solitary vocation, among them “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Green Hills of Africa” and “The Garden of Eden.” His posthumous memoir of Paris, “A Movable Feast,” celebrates the writing life. In 1984, Scribners collected some of his sutra in a small volume called “Ernest Hemingway on Writing,” which is also to be reissued for the centennial.

Stephen Plotkin, curator of the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library, says the writer wanted his papers public to demonstrate the difficulty of writing well, even for someone with an abundance of talent and drive.

So, among artifacts like his old steel trunk and the shrapnel taken from his legs in World War I, the archives contain thousands of pages of manuscript drafts and revisions: the study sketches of a literary master.

Among them, a file folder containing the famous 40 different endings to “A Farewell to Arms.” It took that many drafts, some typed and others handwritten, before he was satisfied with the mood created on the final page of the novel.

Or take the classic opening paragraph of the book. Through successive drafts, a simple scene of wartime Italy was transformed into a prose poem that drove the tone of the novel until the concluding sentence. No new information was added as he rewrote, but by the selection and rhythmic rearrangement of words, he created a passage as unforgettable as any in literature: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains . . . .

At Hope College in Holland, Mich., English professor Kathleen Verduin assigns students to write in the style of a master. Usually they choose to mimic Hemingway instead of, say, Faulkner. “They think it will be easy,” she says. “But, of course, it’s not. The short sentences are there, but not the emotions he is able to pack into them--that’s the art of it . . . .”

Hers is not an abstract lesson. Unlike baby boomers, today’s youth communicate by writing. They swing dance in retro clothes while drinking martinis, and they likewise share with Hemingway’s generation the exquisite pain and pleasures of putting down words with their hands.

The Internet poses the very challenge that Hemingway grappled with all his life: How do you make your thoughts and experiences interesting in a sea of words muddied by hyperbole, cliche and convention? How can you convey emotion and subtlety without facial expression, vocal intonation or volume control? How do you know truth until you distill it from the thin broth of everyday encounters?

Hemingway’s example begins with his mastery of “cable-ese,” a language where every word is weighed, where the glint-edge of style comes by polish, not adornment. He sometimes credited newsroom guidelines he learned at his first newspaper job at the Kansas City Star. “Use short sentences,” the newspaper pamphlet said. “Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness.”

Later he needed a more sophisticated tenet. In a reminiscence of his Paris years, he wrote: I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them . . . it was a secret.

The secret has engaged millions of readers for most of a century. It has inspired thousands of writers to believe words and the cadence of words are not only power, but beauty.

Hemingway: As he would have it, a single word can convey so much and for so very long.

Times researcher Anna M. Virture assisted with this story.