A Rant About Hemingway: Don’t Be Jealous That You Can’t Be Him

Seriously, Just Read the Books

I try my best not to rant in my articles (unless you consider my unapologetic worship of one Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen a rant), and I try even harder not to rise to the bait of the more infuriating things I read across the internet. However, this one has been simmering for a while, and an article I read last night raised the temp well past rolling boil to volcanic eruption meets Category 5 hurricane.

The article was innocuous enough: one of the myriad rankings of books you find online (something I have often done myself). After roughly 12 hours to calm down, I realize that the majority of this rant is not about that article specifically, but let’s start there. The article ranked the Top 10 books by Ernest Hemingway, a man whom you know, if you’ve read enough of my stuff, I admire almost as much as Bruce.

Any reader who knows anything about Hemingway, whether they like him or not, knows that the debate over which book was his greatest centers around the Big Four: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. I tend to include A Moveable Feast as well, but sticking with his fiction, those are the acknowledged contenders for his best work.

The article in question placed The Sun Also Rises at #1 (a totally acceptable decision), and even put A Moveable Feast at #2. I thought to myself: ah, a kindred spirit. But no, not kindred at all if the writer actually believes that A Farewell to Arms belongs at #9 and The Old Man and the Sea at #10. Number ten. The novel that won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize and basically solidified his Nobel Prize came in behind Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon. Madness.

But as I said, this ill-advised ranking is not really the focus of my ire, it simply pushed that ire over the edge. What has me almost apoplectic is the attempted deconstruction of Hemingway by so many critics and readers today. It is often couched in the guise of woke political correctness, but in reality the reason is the same today as it was in 1926 when The Sun Also Rises was first published: jealousy.

It is very much in vogue these days to judge everything from the past through the lens of our supposedly far more enlightened 21st century values. This isn’t new, as every generation has believed they were wiser than the one that came before. In 100 years, people will consider our current time to have been inhabited by knuckle-dragging imbeciles, with ample evidence to support that view. Literature is not immune to this rewriting of history, and Hemingway has suffered from it perhaps most of all.

There have been a spate of reviews, books, documentaries, and general commentary in recent years slamming Hemingway’s work as everything from misogynistic to homophobic to pro-communist to whatever, all based on our current view of the world. Ignoring for the moment whether that current view is correct or not, the idea of judging someone writing in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s by the values and societal norms of 2021 is not only unfair, it’s insane.

In the case of Hemingway it is also dishonest, because many of these revisionists could care less about Hemingway’s worldview. They don’t hate him because he enjoyed bullfighting (the supposed reason one of my friends refused to join my Hemingway book club a few years back) or because of the macho image he cultivated or because he was married four times. They hate him because he wrote better than they ever will. As I said earlier, jealousy.

No one alive today can begin to grasp the impact Ernest Hemingway had on both literature and journalism, any more than anyone under the age of 65 can truly understand how much the Beatles changed music in 1964. For most of us, both Hemingway and the Beatles have always been there, and the more time that passes the less groundbreaking their arrival appears. With Hemingway the term groundbreaking really isn’t sufficient.

His influence on journalism is rarely discussed today, but his reporting on the Greco-Turkish War for The Toronto Star in 1922 forever changed the way wars are covered and written about. For an excellent article on the subject, read this story by Steve Newman, and be sure to check out his extensive series on Hemingway while you’re there.

His influence on literature is even greater, to an extent that it’s nearly impossible for me to covey in a single article (whole books have been written on the subject). He was the first modernist to be widely read, though he also fell squarely in the realist movement as well. Since the publication of his first novel, every writer who has come after him falls into one of two categories: those who try to copy his style and those who run in the opposite direction from it.

His harshest critics come from that first group. They strive in vain to write like him, believing that with minimal description and spare prose they can duplicate his brilliance; they nearly always fail spectacularly, and even those who imitate him well know they are, in the end, imitating him. At least the guys playing in the Led Zeppelin cover band at your local bar love Zeppelin while recognizing they will never be as good. The Hemingway imitators, amazingly, resent him.

Hemingway himself had this to say about literary critics while he was still alive: “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors.” I think a lot of creative people feel this way about critics, whether they’re writers, artists, or musicians. Certainly, there are times when negative reviews are justified, and many are both well written and well reasoned. The subject of critics (both good and bad) will be dealt with in a future article.

If you have stayed with this meandering rant this far, let me try to wrap it up with what I would love to see going forward. First, for you writers out there, stop trying to write like Hemingway, or like anyone else for that matter. Write like yourself; no one else can do that. And try your best not to resent the ones who are successful at it; we’re a small, lonely group most of the time, and we need to stick together.

For you readers, what I long to see is a return to at least the bare minimum when it comes to Hemingway: actually read his novels before you declare him an overrated, egotistical fossil to be avoided in our current day. We were no more capable of appreciating The Old Man and the Sea in 9th grade than we were of understanding The Great Gatsby as sophomores. Our schools often unwittingly do a disservice to the literature they try to teach, so give him (and Gatsby) another shot.

As for my own favorite Hemingway novel, that tends to swing back and forth between The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. What I know for certain is that my favorite last line of his sums up my hope that everyone will eventually appreciate his greatness: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”