Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "ernest-hemingway"

Then he raised his hand as he faced the bull and commanded him to go down with the death that he had placed inside him.

Having previously read Hemingway's rambling, overflowing, unforgettable book on bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, I was uncertain as to whether I wanted to bother with THE DANGEROUS SUMMER, whose very existence violated Hemingway's own rule about never chewing the same cabbage twice. It was, after all, another non-fiction book about bullfighting, and one produced near the of Hemingway's life, when he was struggling with depression, delusion, and, I suspect, a feeling that he was a has-been living in the shadow of his own legend. There is actually an incident in the book in which Hemingway is told this in so many words by a young writer he encounters in a bar. Indeed, the book's fulsome but very interesting introduction, by James Mitchner, makes a curious point of...well, pointing out that this book should probably not have been written, pointing out that Papa's conclusions about both the bullfighters profiled in the book ultimately being proved completely wrong. Not since various Ernst Jünger book introductions have I been told more thoroughly warned about what I was about to read.

Despite all of this, I found THE DANGEROUS SUMMER one of the most readable things the old master ever put to paper. For my money, which does not amount to very much, I have always found Hemingway at his absolute best not in his novels, but when writing short stories, or reportage, or non-fiction work, where his cut-to-the-bone style and absence of dialog produce the most vivid imagery and flowing pace. Such is the case here.

Hemingway loved anything that he felt reeked of manliness, and the more blood and death were involved in the manliness, the better. Hence his love, one might say lust or obsession with, bullfighting, which pits men against bulls in a contest that always ends either in death (for the bull) or blood (for the bullfighter). THE DANGEROUS SUMMER chronicles the real-life competetition between Luis Miguel Dominguín, the former undisputed great of bullfighting come out of retirement to reclaim his crown, and his brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, the classic young lion determined to put the old one back in his pasture, which took place in 1959. Though friends with both men, Hemingway made no secret of his favoritism towards Ordóñez, and the book is written from a perspective of an admiring hanger-on who accompanied the hotshot across the length of Spain and elsewhere during this epic conflict.

Hemingway was an "aficianado" of the bullfight, which to him was a tragic and beautiful dance with death, and he had a way of describing these contests which brilliantly balanced his very high technical knowledge of the spectacle with his gift of describing physical action. I know absolutely nothing about bullfighting beyond what Hemingway himself has told me, but he somehow makes this horribly macabre activity poetic and artful with his descriptions while more or less fully acknowledging its cruelty. And he does this, for the most part, without repeating much of anything he said in DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, in which he tried to explain why he found bullfighting so glorious without whitewashing its essential, visceral savagery or offering a defense of the spectacle.

I read this book in three days, for its very much written in the style of a thriller, and while there are a few faults, a few discreet displays of a man possibly trapped within the rigid confines of his own highly distinctive and unique style of prose, trapped beneath the weight of his own reputation, and in a different sense, trapped beneath what were rather faulty conclusions about both bullfighters which were arrived at due to his rather shameless favoritism of one man over the other, none of this made any real difference to me in terms of enjoyment. Hemingway is a fascinating read as much for his willingness to explore the forbidden, the taboo, the deepest darks of the human condition without any fear or shame or apology, while seldom if ever coming across as a mere provacateur, as he is for the beauty of his prose, his jabbing wit, or his bon vivant love of all things connected to life. He was partictularly artiful in finding deeper meaning in simple actions, especially ritualistic actions, such as the hunt, sailing, boxing, fishing, and war. There is an almost Buddhist quality to his ability to hold onto a moment and pluck its meaning without damaging or diminishing it. (I say "almost" because his love of violence is hardly a Buddhist quality.)

In short, I thought this was one hell of a book, something that did not aim at any lofty goal but concentrated its entire might and passion upon a single objective and achieved that objective handily. There are distinct parallels between Hemingway and his depiction (accurate or no) of Dominguín as a great man past his best, yet so stubbornly determined to reclaim his former glory that he does in fact periodically and briefly reclaim it with advantages; a parallel Hemingway may or may not have been aware of since it only heightens his tragedy; in the end though it doesn't matter. Death is for the afternoon and this summer, with Papa, will always be dangerous.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Historian Charles Whiting once remarked that Ernest Hemingway's novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" was "bitter, irrational, and cynical." This view was in keeping with its critical reception upon its release in 1950, which was overwhelmingly negative -- the first Hemingway novel ever to take a critical drubbing. And in truth it is not a very good novel, though like nearly everything Hemingway wrote, it contained more-than-occasional flashes of profundity and what might be called observational genius. But it seems to me that calling a Hemingway piece "bitter, irrational and cynical" is like calling a bomb heavy, noisy and destructive. It's an accurate description, but not an intelligent one. Nearly everything Hemingway ever wrote was bitter and cynical, and his characters seldom if ever acted in a rational manner: that was part, if not nearly all, of his literary signature. The flaws that cripple "Across the River" are not bitterness, cynicism or irrationality, but aimlessness and repetition.

The story is extremely simple. In the immediate aftermath of WW2, an aging professional soldier in the U.S. Army named Richard Cantwell (who is referred to simply as "The Colonel") travels to Venice to meet with old friends and his young paramour, the 18 year-old Countess Renata. Cantwell is dying of heart disease and believes his demise is imminent, so he wishes to spend his last day hunting, dining and romancing young Renata, who is as infatuated with him as he is with her. The book details Cantwell's final day, but much of the story revolves around a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue the Colonel is having about his own past -- his service in Italy during WW1, his failed marriage, and the terrible experiences he had as a regimental and assistant divisional commander during the European campaign during WW2. Cantwell is a man trying to come to terms, it seems, not only with imminent death, but with regrets about his life.

As a novelist, Hemingway was always very strong coming out of the gate but -- I'm sorry to say this -- often not worth much coming down the stretch. A superb short-story writer, the rigidity of his style, which was based around brevity, simplicity and implication (rather than description), did not work anywhere near as well for full-length books. "Across the River" suffers acutely from this weakness; though shorter than many of his other works it "reads heavy" in second and third acts, and is full of the infuriating shallowness and ugliness that makes it so damned difficult to care about his characters. (It would be interesting to count the number of times the characters exchange sappy, sophomoric "I love yous" or how many times Renata asks her bitter old beau to be "kind.") As always, we get long passages about Hemingway's obsession, the city of Paris, and as always, there is a great deal of talk about food and drink and a lot of facetious and somewhat sophomoric banter, which is amusing in small doses but almost intolerable in the long run. I'm not exaggerating when I say the exchanges between Cantwell and Renata are almost unreadable after awhile. Doubtless this is the way Hemingway spoke to his lovers -- his biographer and friend Ed Hotchner made that clear in his book, PAPA -- but it isn't the way anyone else on the planet spoke to theirs, and it comes off as self-indulgent, creepy and boring. I am again forced to conclude that the Hemingway who wrote this book was out of touch in more ways than one, and perhaps did not grasp the degree to which his famous literary style could turn into a pastiche of itself if not handled with self-awareness and skill. His hand is simply too heavy.

The book is at its strongest when Cantwell recalls the two wars in which he has served. Hemingway served in Italy during the '14 - '18 war and as always, whenever he touches upon that time of his life his prose comes alive in a way it seldom does at any other time. I was greatly amused -- and many must have been outraged at the time -- at the "bitterness and cynicism" Cantwell displays about WW2 and the top Allied brass, especially Eisenhower, Montgomery, Leclerc, Patton, and Bedel "Beetle" Smith. After the war the deification of the top Allied leaders was in full swing and it must have come as a great shock to the readership to learn that many combat soldiers despised and even hated the public's top military idols for their venality, egotism and, yes, incompetence. Hemingway has performed a service by scraping away some of that whitewash here, and I wish he had reined in his pathological tendency to ramble and blather and written more clearly and fully on a subject he was in quite a good position to talk about. Overall I can't really say I'd recommend this novel to anyone except Hemingway fans -- those who have no experience with his work would best start somewhere else (with his short-stories, perhaps) and work their way toward this exercise in "bitterness, cynicism and irrationality." They may find it more palatable once they are warmed up to his style than they would going in cold.

In closing, I'd like to say that Hemingway's greatest strength was his ability to compress huge, profound life-truths and life-lessons into single sentences of roughly poetic simplicity, and "River" has a number of these, but not quite enough to salvage it. It's a promising book in many ways -- all of Hemingways' books contain some level of genius -- but even at its modest length it feels too long, talks too much and says too little. By this point in his career Hemingway was almost a god to many in the public, and perhaps had grown too lazy or self-satisfied for his own good. It is therefore comforting to know that despite this stumble, some of his greatest works still lay ahead of him, as anyone who has ever read A MOVEABLE FEAST or THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA can attest.