Book Review: Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970)

The cover of Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970.

She read the book quickly. It did not seem to matter much how the sentences were arranged, or whatever exactly the sentences said, because they all seemed very long and emotionless and the kind of sentences you could read for a very long time without really absorbing much of anything. The main character was an actress, but she didn’t seem to do much acting, and her agent was trying to get her to take more acting jobs so she wouldn’t be so depressed, and finally she did take this one acting job on a TV show, and that was the only time during the whole novel that she actually did some acting, but it was clear she didn’t like doing the TV show. The character was really depressed and isolated and bored, and that seemed to be the whole vibe the book was giving, depression and boredom. Ennui, that was it. Everything sounds better in French. Maybe instead of saying we’re depressed we should just start saying we have ennui, which made her think of Alain Delon lying around the swimming pool in La Piscine, and she thought of how gorgeous Romy Schneider was in La Piscine, and how if Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had a baby together it would have been so beautiful but they didn’t have a baby together and after Romy Schneider died so young Alain Delon never watched La Piscine again because it made him too sad, and that sounded very romantic and very French to her, to deprive yourself of a beautiful movie because it made you too sad and she thought of Alain Delon’s beautiful blue eyes filling with tears and that made her very sad.  

The one thing the actress liked doing was driving her car on the freeways, and that did seem like it would be pretty cool. She imagined if she had an old Corvette like this actress had and like Joan Didion had, you know, the kind with the long sexy hood and a T-top roof, but those old cars probably got really terrible gas mileage, and they probably weren’t good for the environment with their powerful, gas-guzzling, sexy V-8 engines that put out 300 horsepower. But they must have been fun to drive. She had never owned a car with 300 horsepower.  

She understood some of the reasons why the actress in this book was so depressed, because literally everything in her life was really terrible and awful. The actress was getting a divorce, and her husband seemed self-absorbed and egotistical, and there were probably a lot of men like that in Hollywood in those days, and the actress had this gay friend that she hung out with a lot, but he wasn’t like a fun gay best friend, he seemed like a drag as well, and he had a lot of money and his mother paid him money to be married to a woman, and that didn’t seem like too bad of a deal, really, because he was still doing whatever he wanted to and his wife didn’t really seem to care very much and he bought her expensive jewelry and she seemed pretty okay with this weird kind of bargain they had made.  

The one time this actress actually seemed to enjoy something, besides driving her car on the freeway, was when she went to the Hoover Dam. The actress wanted to lie down on the main water pipe in Hoover Dam, and as she read the book she wondered if there was something sexual about the Hoover Dam for the actress. Also, as she read this part about the Hoover Dam, she thought about how Joan Didion wrote about the Hoover Dam in her book The White Album. Joan Didion wrote: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize...” (The White Album, p.198) And that sounded kind of weird and nutty to her. The Hoover Dam was just a big, giant slab of concrete, it sounded much more fun to have a yellow Corvette in your dreams.  

And this actress had an abortion, and that part of the novel was really, truly, awful and she thought of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and she remembered reading that in high school and how the questions in the short story book told you that it was actually about an abortion, and she couldn’t quite remember if she had realized when she was reading it that it was about an abortion and she remembered reading “Hills Like White Elephants” again in an American Literature class in college, and she remembered asking the other students if they knew that it was about an abortion and it was her little dig at Hemingway because sometimes he was spare and close to the bone and beautiful and other times he was just abstruse and she wondered if it was hard for Hemingway to say what he actually meant and she thought how she liked F. Scott Fitzgerald better because he could write those beautiful gorgeous sentences that would just stop you in your tracks because they were so beautifully crafted and perfect.  

She didn’t know how many stars she should give this book. She could really justify any number from 1 to 5. One star because all of the people in it were really pretty awful and there wasn’t really anybody to sympathize with, although she did kind of sympathize with the actress because everything was so awful for her, but it was more like a kind of pity for the actress and you never really got to know any of the characters well enough to feel much emotion for them, but maybe that was the whole point of the book but then why go to all the trouble to write a whole book about these people if you weren’t really supposed to feel any emotion for them? Five stars because the book did what it was probably supposed to do, which was make you feel pretty awful and rotten and be glad you weren’t as depressed as this actress was, so it was effective in doing that, and other people had thought this book was good too, and that was part of the reason she had read the book was because other people said how good it was. She had read the book really quickly, over just two days, so that was good, but she hadn’t really enjoyed reading the book, although she figured that was part of the point, that the book wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. She finally settled on three stars. 

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.