Does Ernest Hemingway still matter?
60 years after his death, the author still brings people together
Does Hemingway still matter?
When Ken Burns’ six-hour “Hemingway” documentary aired on PBS last year, a number of media outlets asked why we should care, or else wrote the great novelist off as “obsolescent."
That’s nothing new. Cutting Hemingway down to size is a cottage industry in the book world.
It makes sense.
Hemingway’s being — too macho, too swaggering — is out of favor with the present critical moment. His books are often reduced to “honor” and “grace under pressure,” so it’s no surprise that he’s dismissed on college campuses.
But in my experience, Hemingway’s writing still matters both here and abroad.
My first newspaper job was covering sports in a small town in Montana. I wrote on the sports page one day about “The Old Man and the Sea” — essentially nothing more than how much I liked it. (There were pages to fill and school sports were out of session).
Writing that story led to a long conversation with a reader named Chris, who was a veteran boxing trainer.
Chris said he knew what Hemingway was talking about in the book, how at some point in the struggle with the fish the old man Santiago had lost all sense of where he ended and where the fish began. It was a hard thing to describe, probably impossible for people who had never felt it, but Hemingway had done it and written it.
Chris said that he had felt that, too, in hard sparring sessions and certain fights when his opponent had pushed him to someplace he didn’t know he could go. It was like dancing, he said.
An invitation to “hit some mitts” followed — to box a little.
Despite my early clumsiness, I was tolerated at the gym. A year later, I left a sparring session bloodied and slathered in sweat, for a few rounds having lost all sense of dimension. The literary had become physical. I felt an appreciation and a calm, like a Buddhist upon the understanding of things.
Not long after, I went to Spain. As my girlfriend and I took our seats in the upper level of the arena for our first bullfight, someone shouted, “Eh-ming-way” in our direction.
A group of tanned old men beckoned us toward their seats. In pitiful Spanish I confirmed what was obvious — si, we’re Americans — and what was slightly less obvious: that Hemingway was a favorite author of mine and I had read his books.
What followed were introductory lessons in the dying art of the aficionado.
A few weeks later, in a smaller Spanish city, my girlfriend and I each held the muleta, the matador’s sword. We made clumsy attempts to slay bales of hay while the young students of the local bullfighting school laughed.
In an even smaller Spanish town, we walked into an abandoned-looking tapas bar, thanks to a recommendation from a friend who lived nearby. It was near closing time. The perfectly bald but thickly mustached bartender poured a round of drinks for us, his only customers.
In a brief conversation I asked what else he liked to do. Did he have another job?
He beamed. He was a poet.
Lorca, Miró, I offered, exhausting my reading of Spanish poets. When I told him I was a writer — a reporter at least — he growled, “Eh-ming-way” and grabbed my shoulder and brought my forehead close to his.
We each attempted to explain the literature we loved. And as we raised each shot, those beautiful Spanish syllables became a toast, “Eh-ming-way!”
At dawn my girlfriend and I stumbled home, the Mediterranean a dozen feet to our right and roaring against the rocks …
... I still think of my father’s office sometimes, with its dark wood bookshelves that reached the ceiling. They towered over me as a boy. In pride of place centered on a single shelf sat a handful of paperbacks all by the same writer.
Long before I was old enough to actually read it, I took down a worn, soft-cover copy of “A Farewell to Arms” from my father’s shelf and opened its creased spine, delicate as an artifact, and saw that each page had been yellowed, colored by age and handling like a sunburst — the edges were darkened, but the middle, the text, was still bright.
Any writer, 60 years after his death, who is still shutting down bars at dawn, introducing people at bullfights, and bringing strangers together … still matters.
This essay was originally published on Understandably.com