2021 is some sort of Hemingway anniversary. But mainly, my cynicism tells me, its a chance for a publisher to re-market a back catalogue in classic literature. Hemingway is everywhere. An excellent six part documentary and a repeat of Michael Palin's retreading of his adventures. So much of what we know about him, mythologised by himself in his own lifetime. Its worked though. Here I am realising I've never read any Hemingway, so I dived in to read a generally accepted Hemingway masterpiece.
The first thing I had to adjust to was the language. The famed sparseness, his 'iceberg' theory of writing. Not a lot happens for a large part of For Whom The Bell Tolls. There is, nonetheless, a tenseness in the dialogue. Robert Jordan, an American, has joined a republican group hiding in a cave behind fascist lines. He is there to blow up a bridge, on a particular day, at a particular time. Plans are made and unmade in response to events. The dynamics of the Spanish Civil War are revealed through the individuals in this group of guerilla fighters.
No one really trusts anyone, there are infiltrators, anarchists and local tribal loyalties everywhere. Who can say what they will do in the end? Who is really in charge? All Jordan knows is that no one trusts Pablo, he"s the obvious loose cannon. They sit around camp fires and tell tales of the best way to die. We learn of the atrocities they've seen or partaken in. These are damaged people. Including Maria, a woman who Robert has unexpectedly fallen in love with.
I struggled for half the novel with the lack of overt emotion coming from the narrative. You learn everything reading between the lines of what they say or don't say. Once the blowing of the bridge starts to happen the intensity ramps up. We are given all that's going on in Robert's mind as he lays the explosives. His doubts, his panic, his talking himself down, his fearful rationalisations, trying to calm himself as the outcome of the bridge attack begins to go wrong. Suddenly we get terse but really gripping writing.
Over time the myth of Hemingway the man has come to drown out Hemingway the writer. But in Civil War Spain there is no 'Boys Own' daring do, lives hang by a thread, one mistake and its curtains. No one is under any illusions about what is happening in the Civil War, its a tangle of intrigue and counter bluff, a complete mess. Roughly thrown together bands left to fight against the advance of fascism. People are afraid, behave stupidly, they fuck up all the time. There is a lot of self doubt and uncertainty, over a mission that's to be carried out blindly. Who can you rely on?
I'm left questioning whether the supposed machismo of Hemingway is useful to know when reading his books. You appear inevitably to end up talking about him, the larger than life character, and not the book before you. As a man Hemingway, the extrovert, macho, hunter, womaniser, he has come to represent a type of masculinity that is more problematic these days. There were aspects of him that were, in the modern parlance 'toxic', undoubtedly cruel and abusive. But that was not all that he was. He was also, at his best, able through his writing to express great sensitivity for ordinary human motivations and frailties with a rare honesty and frankness.
Hemingway undoubtedly was flawed, bullied by his Mother, tormented by his Father's suicide, spending his life overcompensating by taking these 'heroic' but mostly foolhardy risks. He had several close calls with death. Repeated head injuries did start to alter his personality, you can see it in his face in the photos of the time. His behaviour becomes more akin to someone suffering from Alzheimers, with unpredictable mood swings, violent, and verbally lashing out. The quality of his writing also begins to suffers, until eventually he can't write at all. Then he takes his own life. The toll that living up to his own ultra masculine reputation took, is rarely assessed. However, the potency of that image and myth lives on all this time later. Able still to put his writing in the shadows, because his written words tell a slightly subtler, more nuanced and less stereotypical story.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
No comments:
Post a Comment