Just so we're clear and you can take offense if needed, let me present a haiku I just wrote
Life is too precious
(and too short) to waste it by
reading Hemingway
There, with that warning up front to you that I have never in my life had any use at all for Ernest Hemingway's writing ... :
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450848/f-scott-fitzgerald-ernest-hemingway-new-biographies-explore-novelists-differences
...
The trouble with Hemingway, seen from the privileged vantage point of hindsight, is that he looks increasingly like a great influence but not a great author in his own right. No 20th-century writer would leave a deeper mark on his contemporaries [emphasis added], and as late as 1948, Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputations, unhesitatingly described him in print as “one of the most original and powerful of living writers.” Yet all but the very finest of his short stories now sound mannered and artificial, while the novels come off as little more than sustained exercises in mirror-gazing and pose-striking. I would like to like him more than I do, but the truth is that I find him almost unreadable, and my chronic distaste for his work is more than merely an allergy.
What is it about Hemingway that so many of today’s readers find so off-putting? The fact that he proved to be so imitable is a big part of the problem, and it didn’t help that most of the imitation was popularization. Among other things, the author of “The Killers” inadvertently invented the detective story, not to mention film noir, and inspired a generation of hack writers, all of them men, who longingly mistook his self-constructed legend for reality. [emphasis added] Herein lies the real strength of Dearborn’s book, which is that she has, as she puts it, “no investment in the Hemingway legend. . . . I cannot see what the legend has to offer to a female reader.” All she cares about is how a hack reporter came to write such exquisitely wrought stories as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Hills Like White Elephants” and, in time, to blow his brains out, and she tells that story clearly, intelligently, and with a realistic but disillusioned sense of admiration for so sadly flawed a man and writer. Hemingway, she says,
seemed to find it difficult to give and receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, perhaps most tragically, to tell the truth, even to himself. By the end of World War II, and while still in his forties, he had done himself out of many of the rewards of the good life: He had three failed marriages behind him, had few good friends, was not writing well, and had surrounded himself with flunkies and sycophants. . . . Even at his peak, sentimentality and a garrulous streak sometimes crept into his writing.
Though being a man myself I never had the slightest use for either the literature or the legend of Hemingway. I suppose Emma Woodhouse had the line for this, that half of us take pleasure in things the other half can't understand. But then one of my grandest literary summers had me reading through The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka's The Metamorphosis and then wrapping up the summer reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness between midnight and 6am. I was also binging on the music of Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. Whereas I admit that when I read The Great Gatsby I enjoyed that. In a way I suppose my impression in my reading life is that ultimately everybody ends up being a moralist and a scold and that those who loathe moralistic scolds do so not because they are not themselves capable of being moralistic scolds, the complaint is what flavor of moralism the hater of scolds is being scolded about, to be deliberately sloppy about it.
and Teachout moves along to F. Scott.
...
At the same time, there was far more to him than his craftsmanship. Brown is squarely on the mark when he says that Fitzgerald’s work embodies “the disquieting notion that we have drifted far from our inheritance as the children of pioneers to fashion a culture that teaches its young to love too much the privileges and protections of wealth.” That is why it retains its immediacy: If anything, we have drifted farther still in the same disorienting direction, and Fitzgerald, like so many moralists, knew that he was himself exemplary of the flaws of the culture whose frivolity he chronicled and indicted. This knowledge is the source of the gravity that heightens the force of his best work, whose lightness of touch cannot conceal its ultimate seriousness, a seriousness that makes the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms look like a mere merchant of self-pity by comparison. Yet he remained a romantic to the last, as well as a true believer in the promise of the Midwest that spawned him and that he regarded to the end of his life as “the warm center of the world.”
The Midwest doesn't seem like a warm center of the world but then I'm a native Pacific Northwesterner. It's wonderful here, temperate and beautiful brimming with greenery ... although there's been plenty of racists here and mountains have this history of blowing up on us.
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