Reflections on Ernest Hemingway

Yousuf Karsh's iconic portrait of Ernest Hemingway, 1957.

In January I saw the play Mr. Hemingway by Kevin Kautzman as part of the History Theatre’s Raw Stages series. Raw Stages presents staged readings of plays that the History Theatre might present in future seasons. Mr. Hemingway was a fascinating look at the last months of Ernest Hemingway’s life. Hemingway spent some of those final months at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he underwent electroshock therapy treatments. 

Seeing Mr. Hemingway caused me to reflect on my thoughts and feelings about Ernest Hemingway, and his life and work. When I was a teenager I went through a Hemingway phase, during which I read many of his short stories, The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I also read A.E. Hotchner’s 1966 biography Papa Hemingway. As a 16-year-old who had dreams of becoming a famous writer, I was fascinated by Ernest Hemingway’s life and his fiction.

After I went through my Hemingway phase, I came to the conclusion, as a wise 17-year-old, that Hemingway was overrated. I still admired some of his writings, but I didn’t think he fully deserved his place at the top of the literary pantheon. I remember reading his short story “Hills Like White Elephants” in college for American Literature. I had read the story before, so I knew what it was about. (Spoiler alert: a man and woman are discussing her having an abortion.) In class, I asked my classmates, “Who figured out what this story is about?” I can’t remember if anyone raised their hand or not, but the point I was trying to make is that Hemingway’s style is so opaque as to be nearly indecipherable. Sure, it’s the “iceberg theory,” the idea that everything is under the surface, but if you don’t even tell me there’s an iceberg, how do I know what the story is about? 

I don’t know if I would still call Hemingway overrated or not. I’m not sure what his place in the pantheon of American writers is in 2017. Something I’m coming to terms with as I gracefully enter my mid 30’s is that all of these mid-century artists who I just completely venerated as a young man are year by year falling into obscurity. You mean the kids these days aren’t reading Truman Capote? What about John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw? They must know Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, right? So I don’t really know how Hemingway stacks up against contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. I would suspect that Fitzgerald and Steinbeck are more hip right now than Hemingway, because of Fitzgerald’s beautiful lyricism, and Steinbeck’s commitment to social justice. Fitzgerald is still widely read, in part because nearly every high school student in the United States reads The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s themes of love and class might seem more timeless than Hemingway’s obsessions with war and masculinity. As a writer, Fitzgerald is almost the opposite of Hemingway. Where Hemingway goes for the short, staccato rhythm of a telegram, Fitzgerald spreads out his sentences like a beautiful quilt for the reader to lie down on and enjoy. He’s lyrical in a way that Hemingway was not, and for me, that makes Fitzgerald more of a pleasure to read. 

For me, Hemingway’s style is better suited to short stories. His style works in small doses, but I think it’s very difficult to sustain over a long novel. Plowing my way through all 470 pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls was when I started to become irritated with Hemingway’s style. Here’s an example:

“Robert Jordan put his hand to his mouth, and the gypsy looked startled. He slid over behind the rocks to where Robert Jordan was crouched beside the brush-shielded automatic rifle. He crouched down and laid the hairs in the snow. Robert Jordan looked up at him.” (p.274)

470 pages of “Robert Jordan did this. Robert Jordan did that.” He never calls him “Robert” or “Jordan.” Always “Robert Jordan.” It drove me nuts. 

I think Hemingway’s fame got in the way of his work, and has continued to affect his reputation long after his death. I think fame was part of the reason that he found it so hard to finish anything he wrote after For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. Hemingway lived another 21 years after For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, and yet he only published two more books during his lifetime. I think his fame and his reputation became a distraction. They took his focus off the work, which was the important thing. Alcohol and depression may also have played significant parts in his inability to successfully complete books as well. 

John Updike warned of the dangers of fame for an author in his 1989 memoir Self-Consciousness: 

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer.” (Self-Consciousness, p.266) 

I think Updike makes a great point, and certainly Hemingway’s career follows the trajectory of brilliant early work followed by a long decline. 

The author John O’Hara, a friend and contemporary of Hemingway’s, had some perceptive comments about him. In a letter written to his daughter Wylie less than two weeks after Hemingway’s suicide he wrote:

“The Old Man and the Sea was a minor work of art, but no more, and it was a safe work of art. It was lavishly overpraised and unreasonably overdefended by Hemingway himself, and he knew that if that was all he had to show for so many years of being respected and applauded, he was cheating, capitalizing on his legend, and he drove himself crazy with his fear of work.” (The Life of John O’Hara, by Frank MacShane, p.198) 

O’Hara’s quote intrigues me, especially what he calls Hemingway’s “fear of work.” One could say that O’Hara’s career followed the same trajectory as Hemingway’s, youthful brilliance followed by lackluster middle and late work, but unlike the “fear of work” that plagued Hemingway later in life, O’Hara became more prolific the older he got. In the last fifteen years of his life, from 1955 to 1970, O’Hara turned out an astonishing 18 books. What plagued Hemingway those last two decades of his life? Fame? Fear of work? Alcoholism? Depression? Some combination of those things? 

There’s so much macho bullshit that comes along with Hemingway. It comes off as so much posturing, like he always has to prove how big his dick is. O’Hara was also very perceptive about the machismo of Hemingway’s writing. In a 1960 letter to New Yorker editor William Maxwell, O’Hara critiqued Hemingway’s series of articles about bullfighters for Life magazine, posthumously published in book form in 1985 as The Dangerous Summer: 

“And all the while there is this cheap, vulgar thing I spoke of: the heartiness, the rough play, the feats of strength, the explicit hint of sex orgies, the boy-did-we-raise-hell stuff, did-we-give-it-to-that-cunt, that reminds me of John Ford and John Wayne and Ward Bond on location.” (MacShane, p.198-9) 

Hemingway’s machismo is one of the most unappealing things about him. Real tough guys don’t have to keep reminding you of how tough they are. 

I also wonder if Hemingway had a death wish. I remember as a teenager reading his preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories. It begins: “The first four stories are the last ones I have written.” What? The last ones? You’re not writing any more short stories, ever? Did you retire? No, he just means “latest.” Hemingway closes the preface with, “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.” And you think, holy crap, is this guy sick, does he have some disease that might shorten his life? And then you look over at the date underneath the preface, which reads “1938.” And you figure out, holy crap, he was only 39 years old and he was seriously worried that he might not live another ten years? Yikes, that’s some serious fatalism. 

For all of my criticisms of Hemingway, I would still argue that he wrote some great things. Read The First Forty-Nine Stories, read The Sun Also Rises. There’s beauty and greatness in those books, and much to admire. If you’re interested in American fiction of the 20^th century, he’s a writer you simply have to read.

Book Review: The Big Laugh, a Hollywood novel by John O'Hara (1962)

The simple but elegant cover of The Big Laugh, by John O'Hara, 1962.

John O'Hara at his desk, circa 1960. Can you tell from his sweater vest that he never went to college?

After reading John O’Hara’s short story collection, John O’Hara’s Hollywood earlier this year, I decided to dive into his novel about Hollywood, 1962’s The Big Laugh. O’Hara was one of the most successful American writers of his generation, coming to prominence with his masterpiece of a first novel, Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934. O’Hara remained a best-selling author until his death in 1970. O’Hara is well-known for his superb short stories, and he holds what is probably an unbreakable record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker: 247. 

The Big Laugh is not one of John O’Hara’s major books. It’s well-written, but the narrative isn’t that compelling. Like his short stories about Hollywood from the 1960’s, it is set in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and is heavily dialogue-driven, with a somewhat meandering plot. In 1961 O’Hara published a book of five plays, unimaginatively titled Five Plays, which might help explain his love of dialogue-heavy stories from around this time. Much like Tom Wolfe, O’Hara was an avid chronicler of the social status signifiers of his era. O’Hara would be able to tell you exactly what it said about a man if he wore an Arrow shirt with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Because of his keen eye for telling details and social behavior, I think O’Hara would have excelled at the same sort of non-fiction that Tom Wolfe wrote: profiles of notable people, or examinations of trends in popular culture. But O’Hara remained firmly in the fiction camp, and as far as I know, never dove into long-form non-fiction. O’Hara did have a newspaper column at various times in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in which he held forth on the issues of the day. In a column from 1964, O’Hara expressed his opinion that Martin Luther King Jr. should not have received the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not a column that anyone will be rushing to reprint anytime soon.

Because so many of O’Hara’s greatest works were written during the 1930’s, it feels a bit sad to read a book like The Big Laugh, which is set thirty years in the past. It’s as though O’Hara knows that the 1930’s were really his decade, and rather than analyze the current state of America, he continues to rush into the past to reexamine the time that he knew the best. It makes O’Hara seem out of touch. Which he probably was, judging from his opinion of Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Big Laugh tells the story of Hubert Ward, a young man drifting through life who happens to discover that he is good at acting, or at least good enough to become a movie star. The novel follows Hubert’s rise to the top of the film industry. Hubert is an unsympathetic character who is often described as a son of a bitch, which seems about right to me. I never really cared if Hubert was successful or not because he’s so unlikable. I don’t need my leading characters to be paragons of virtue, but they need to at least be interesting, and Hubert really isn’t that interesting. Like a glass of champagne, The Big Laugh goes down smoothly, but doesn’t leave much of an aftertaste. 

As I read John O’Hara’s Hollywood, I was intrigued by how O’Hara would use the same characters in different stories. In that book, the actress Doris Arlington appeared in three short stories, and I was glad to find her making an appearance in The Big Laugh as a supporting character. In The Big Laugh she’s given more of a distinct personality, as a savvy, career-driven actress who is a blunt dispenser of truths. She’s more interesting and more likable than Hubert, so maybe O’Hara should have made her the main character of The Big Laugh.

Book Review: John O'Hara's Hollywood, short stories by John O'Hara (2007)

Cover of John O'Hara's Hollywood, 2007.

John O'Hara at work, circa 1960. He's looking you over to figure out which brand of shirt you're wearing and what that says about you.

John O’Hara was one of the most successful American authors of his generation. O’Hara rose to fame during the 1930’s through his short stories in The New Yorker, and from his first two novels, Appointment in Samarra, and BUtterfield 8. O’Hara spent varying amounts of time in Hollywood from 1934 to 1955 as a screenwriter, and his time in California informed the short stories in the 2007 collection John O’Hara’s Hollywood. The book collects all of O’Hara’s 22 stories about Hollywood and the movies. It’s an excellent collection for fans of O’Hara’s writing, but it’s not without its faults. 

Most of O’Hara’s early short stories from the 1930’s and 1940’s were very short, with many being under 1,000 words. O’Hara was a master at creating a mood in just a few words in these super short stories. O’Hara’s stories don’t really have endings that resolve the story; they just suddenly come to a halt. In this way, they capture the rhythm of real life. 

Personally, I found the early short stories in John O’Hara’s Hollywood to be the most interesting. I thought that some of his later stories from the 1960’s were just too long and lacked narrative drive. The longest stories in the book are “Yucca Knolls,” “James Francis and the Star,” and “Natica Jackson,” and those are the three stories I found most disposable. They range from 50-80 pages in length, and they’re overly reliant on dialogue. Not much happens in them, and it seems that the only reason they are so long is just because they could be. O’Hara also seems stuck in the past in these stories, as they re-hash the 1920’s and 1930’s, the decades which he was most comfortable writing about. 

The last piece in the book is one of the most fascinating; it’s a non-fiction piece titled “Hello Hollywood Goodbye,” that O’Hara wrote in 1968 for the magazine Holiday. Unfortunately, the introduction doesn’t mention it at all, so we don’t get much context for this piece. From what I know about O’Hara’s writings, it was fairly unusual for him to write an autobiographical non-fiction essay. 

John O’Hara’s Hollywood was edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the leading scholar of John O’Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bruccoli’s introduction is excellent, but someone in the proof reading department was asleep at the wheel, as the introduction states that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote What Makes Sammy Run? and The Disenchanted, while Budd Schulberg wrote The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, when it’s actually the other way around. 

I noticed some interesting things as I read John O’Hara’s Hollywood, and one of them is that O’Hara really had a thing for fake movie titles with the word “strange” in them. In “The Magical Numbers” the fake biopic of President John Tyler is called Strange President. (p.22) Strange Courage is the movie the actor in “Adventure on the Set” has just finished. (p.27) Strange Virgin is the name of the movie that Kenyon Littlejohn is making a test for in “Drawing Room B,” (p.49), and it’s also the name of the movie, adapted from a novel, being made in “The Industry and the Professor.” (p.62) I wondered if all these fake movies with “strange” in the title was supposed to be an in-joke for movie fans. Were there a lot of movies with “strange” in the title being made in the 1930’s and 1940’s? 

O’Hara might be making some in-jokes as he re-uses some character names in different stories. “The Answer Depends” name checks Sidney Gainsborough, who appears in the first story in the book, “Mr. Sidney Gainsborough: Quality Pictures.” The fictional actress Doris Arlington is mentioned in “The Answer Depends,” “Yucca Knolls,” and “James Francis and the Star.” 

John O’Hara was a very interesting writer. He was clearly gifted with superb and sensitive abilities to capture the way people talked, thought, and felt, but yet in his personal life he had a knack for pissing off nearly everyone he met. Of course, he’s not the only great writer who also had a difficult personality. O’Hara had a keen sense of class and status in America, and he had a large inferiority complex about having never attended college. Ernest Hemingway supposedly once made the joke that he was collecting funds to send O’Hara to Yale. The sad part is, O’Hara might have taken Hemingway up on his offer. Obsessed with Yale life, O’Hara badgered the university to give him an honorary degree. Yale declined, because O’Hara was graceless enough to ask for the degree. O’Hara also made no secret of his desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of course, he never got it. 

O’Hara finally quit drinking in the mid 1950’s, and he became a much more prolific author, publishing 10 novels and 7 short story collections between 1955 and his death in 1970. He became a famous and wealthy author, and he gloried in the social signifiers that his status afforded him, as he drove a Rolls-Royce and an MG convertible with his monogram on the door.

O’Hara still holds the record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker, with an incredible 247! Along with those two other Johns, Cheever and Updike, O’Hara became synonymous with The New Yorker and the sophisticated short stories found between its covers. 

At his best, John O’Hara was a superb chronicler of American life and culture, and John O’Hara’s Hollywood presents some of his best work.

The Short Stories of John O'Hara

John O'Hara (1905-1970) is a largely forgotten American writer today, but during his lifetime he was one of America's most famous, and best-selling, writers. He is probably best known today for his first novel, 1934's Appointment in Samarra, a Gastby-like tale of the American dream gone wrong. O'Hara prided himself on being able to perfectly capture the moods and dialogue of the USA during a specific historical moment. We would now probably call this "capturing the zeitgeist," which he certainly did. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of his references to specific brands of products fly over the head of today's readers. (Myself included.) Someone should really add footnotes to his works, to clarify to today's reader exactly what it meant to go to Yale, rather than Harvard, in 1932.

O'Hara's work is very similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's, as both writers were concerned with issues of money and class in American society. (Okay, so they also both wrote about booze and adultery.) But class and money remained central to their work, perhaps because both writers saw themselves as outsiders to the great WASP moneyed classes. O'Hara was from a small town in Pennsylvania, and didn't have the money to go to college. Fitzgerald was from the frozen landscape of Minnesota, or what people now call fly-over land. (Although Fitzgerald did get to attend Princeton.) If you like Fitzgerald, you'll definitely like O'Hara.

I recently finished reading Great Short Stories of John O'Hara, a volume that combines two short story collections into one volume. The stories are all from the 1930's, most were published in The New Yorker, and most are extremely short. (O'Hara holds the record for the most short stories published in The New Yorker, although John Updike must be right behind him.) The first story in the book, "The Doctor's Son," is the longest in the book, and it tells the tale of an adolescent helping his father administer to sick patients during the flu epidemic of 1918-19. It's one of O'Hara's best stories, and it shows off his penchant for details.

Many of the stories are no more than two pages in length, which makes it difficult to become emotionally involved with the characters. But while the stories don't have the individual power of say, John Cheever's short stories, (which are usually about 10 pages long) their power slowly adds up. It's cumulative, you read twenty good stories in a row, and the variety is amazing. It's really a virtuosic display of talent. O'Hara shows that he had a perfect ear for dialogue, whether he was writing high-class characters or lower-class working men. He seems to have been interested in everything, as the variety of stories shows.

As I mentioned, the book is really two collections combined, and when the later collection starts, the stories become harder-edged and more fatalistic. I don't know if it's the continuing effects of the Great Depression, but the characters become involved in deeper moral dilemmas. An exception to this are the four "Pal Joey" stories, which are highly comical, and feature O'Hara's writing as it's best. Written as letters from Joey to his friend Ted, they are rife with misspellings and fractured grammar, but they get the character of a charming heel across brilliantly. O'Hara later wrote more "Pal Joey" stories, and they became the basis for the 1940 Broadway show of the same name, which starred a young Gene Kelly as Joey. Rodgers and Hart wrote the songs, two of which would become standards, "I Could Write a Book," and "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." "Pal Joey" was later made into a movie in 1957, starring Frank Sinatra as Joey, with Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. It's one of Sinatra's great performances, and you get to hear him sing some terrific tunes.

O'Hara is sort of an "author's author" now, with little name recognition among the public, but still respected by other writers. John Updike, a fellow Pennsylvanian, is an especially vocal fan. Gore Vidal also wrote a very favorable essay about O'Hara's works. (If you know anything about Gore Vidal, you'll know he's not favorable about very many things.) John O'Hara is a writer well worth reading, especially if you're a fan of similar writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Updike, and Irwin Shaw.