Some More Heming Away

I am re-reading some of Ernest Hemingway’s books. Being non-literary, I came to him late, within the last ten years.

As always, I struggle to see why he is regarded as one of the great American writers. He writes mostly in simple, declarative sentences. There is no fancy stream-of-consciousness stuff like Virginia Wolff or James Joyce use. He often repeats himself, and the dialog can seem stilted at times.

On the other hand, his characters are authentically larger than life. When he writes about the front in Italy in WWI, he knows. He was there. He was wounded. Okay, so he recycles those experiences in at least three books, but he owned it. When he writes about the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s, he captures the moment because he was there, hanging around with people like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. When he writes about the aimless dissipated characters wandering from bar to bar, clinging hopelessly to one another, he knows whereof he speaks.

Hemingway’s characters are larger than life because he was. He was in the middle of at least three wars. He ran with the bulls at Pamplona. He fished for trout in streams and lakes across America and Europe. He fought marlin in the Caribbean while living out of Cuba and Key West. He hunted big game in Africa.

He remembers the sights, sounds and smells of all those things, but his spartan writing style doesn’t leave much room for vivid detail. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. When his character Frederic Henry walks into the hospital in Milan, he refers to the smell of marble. What does marble smell like? I don’t know, and he doesn’t provide any similes or metaphors to guide me.

As a writer, my problem is that I haven’t been to those places. I haven’t done any of those things. I can’t write about them from memory like he does.

For his readers stuck at home yearning for adventure, this is not a problem. He provides vicarious thrills in abundance. Only writer wannabes may care about the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s, but when the Italian Battle Police are shooting at him, we’re scared too. When he battles a great marlin at the back of a small cabin cruiser, our muscles ache too.

My challenge is to embroider adventure and danger from the boring blank fabric of my own life. The raw material is there. For car nuts, the interior lives of people in the car business have a certain cachet. There were events and people that had the makings of larger than life stories. But it’s a little more involved than writing down what actually happened.

Maybe if I use a bunch of fancy words, no one will notice that none of it actually happened.