Monthly Archives: April 2021

By Michael F. Duggan

“The word hip was used in those days to mean “knowing,” not to mean what was fashionable.” -Pete Hamil

I posted a version of this short essay in April 2019 as a part of a longer piece on language and usage (I originally wrote it two or three years before that). For the past day or so I have been revisiting the essays of Norman Mailer, and felt compelled to put it up again by itself.

Present rant triggered by a routine stop at a coffee shop.

I appreciate that language evolves, that the meanings of words emerge, evolve, disappear, diverge, procreate, amalgamate, splinter-off, become obscure, reemerge and overshadow older meanings, especially in times of rapid change.  I am less sanguine about words that are appropriated (and yes, I know that one cannot “steal” a word) from former meanings that still have more texture, resonance, authenticity, and historical context for me.

For example, over the past decade, and probably going back to the 1990s, the word “hipster” has taken on a new, in some ways inverse, but not unrelated meaning to the original. My understanding of the original meaning of “hipster” was a late 1930s-1950s blue collar drifter, an attempted societal drop-out, a modernist descendant of the romantic hero, and borderline antisocial type who shunned the “phoniness” of mainstream life and commercial mass culture and trends and listened to authentic (read: African-American) jazz—bop—(think of Dean Moriarty from On the Road).¹ 

He/she was “hip” (presumably an evolution of 1920s “hep”)—clued-in, disillusioned—to what was really going on in the world behind the facades and appearances. This meaning stands in contrast to today’s idea of “hip” as being in touch with current trends—an important distinction. It was a modern echo of Byron’s being “among” the crowd rather than “of” it. The hipster presaged the beat of the later 1950s who was more cerebral, contrived, literary, and urban. In the movies, the male of the hipster genera might have been played by John Garfield or Robert Mitchum. In real life, Jackson Pollock will suffice as a representative example. Hipsters were typically flawed individuals and were often irresponsible and failures as family people. But at least there was something authentic and substantial about them as an intellectual type.

By contrast, today’s “hipster” seems to be self-consciously affected right down to the point of his goatee-ed chin: consciously urban (often living in gentrified neighborhoods) consciously fashionable and ahead of the pack, dismissive of non-hipsters (and quiet about his/her middle-to-upper-middle class upbringing in the ‘burbs and an ongoing childhood once centered around play dates), a conformist to generational chauvinism, clichés, and dictates.  It is therefore snobbery or reverse snobbery (if snobbery can be thus qualified). Today’s hipster embodies the calculation and trendiness that the original hipsters specifically stood against (they were noticed, not self-promoted).  It sees itself as ahead of the pack, but most are squarely in its middle. Admittedly, hip talk was adopted by the Beats and later cultural types and elements of it became embedded in the mainstream and then fell out of favor. Today it seems affected and corny (as Hemingway observed “…the most authentic hipster talk of today is the twenty-three skidoo of tomorrow…”).²

I realize that this might sound like a “kids these days” grouse or reduction—and I hope it is not; upon the backs of the rising generation ride the hopes for the future of the nation, our species, and the world. I have known many young people—interns and students—the great majority of whom are intelligent, serious, thoughtful, and oriented toward problem solving and social justice. They are also angry, and there is a strong current toward rejecting the trends of previous generations among them (perhaps an echo of the disdain of the original hipsters with mainstream life). The young people these days have every right to be mad at what previous generations have done to the economy and the environment. Perhaps the hipsters among them will morph into something along the lines of their earlier namesake or something better.

If not, then it is likely that the word will continue to have a double meaning as the original becomes increasingly obscure or until another generation takes it up as its own with its own new meaning. And then old dogs like me will growl about it.

1. For the best analyses and commentary on the original meaning of “hip” and “hipster,” see Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” “Reflections on the Hip,” “Hipster and Beatnik,” and “The Hip and the Square,” in Advertisements for Myself.
2. See “The Art of the Short Story,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Library Edition, 2.

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

Everybody has his or her own Hemingway, and someone else’s Papa will never be entirely your own.

A part of the problem is that I waited a year for this film.  Although it would be a overstatement to say that my anticipation for this documentary got me through the first year of the pandemic, I did look forward to it and sought out and watched the new trailers as they were issued. Biography, as a subset of history, is selective, and readers all have their own Hemingway. No account will appeal to everybody.

Full Disclosure: I like Hemingway’s better novels and stories and I consider his blend of stoicism and Epicureanism to be one of the most satisfactory replies to the modern void that followed in Darwin’s wake.  I find him to be a commentator on life of the first order.  I also like the films of Ken Burns, who, like Hemingway, has produced a handful of classics and larger number of good efforts (of course Hemingway also had some notable failures).  

Let me start with what I liked about Hemingway.  Unlike Burns’ treatments of topics with fewer contemporary images (e.g. Lewis and Clark), this one is not all just sunrises and scenery.  The collection of photos, film footage, and audio recordings, is impressive.  I was bowled over by a short clip of footage showing a young Hemingway with other convalescent soldiers and a nurse (who is not Agnes von Kurowski) in Italy in 1918.  As someone who has read a lot by and about Papa, I had no idea that this even existed. There are also some insightful observations about less obvious influences on Hemingway’s art, like the music of Bach along with more well known influences, like Cezanne. It also emphasizes the importance of rhythms in his writing.

The declarative narration of Peter Coyote is spot on (thank goodness writer, Geoffrey Ward, did not lapse into something like “Hemingwayese”).  Jeff Daniels is more than adequate as the voice of Hemingway (who did not have a good speaking voice), and Meryl Streep, as Martha Gelhorn, once again proves to be the paragon of accents. Hemingway also gives a good chronological outline of the events of the writer’s life for those who are not familiar with it.  His various books, injuries, marriages, and wars stand like mileposts in a high-intensity life that quickly burned out.

I also like what I took to be the film’s tagline: “the man is more interesting that the myth.”  It effectively shows Hemingway’s complicated relationship with the truth: the life-like truth of his fiction and the omissions of his journalism, and of course, the myth, based on lies and distortions to impress those who expected to meet the legend. Herein too is the most interesting aspect of the film, the not entirely original thesis that the persona Hemingway created took over and smothered what was good about him (see also: Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas/”Instant Dylan”).  Some biographers mark the arrival of the Hemingway avatar with the swaggering narrator of Death in the Afternoon.  Gertrude Stein places it much earlier, believing that he had been ruined by the age of 25 or about the time his first book of short stories, In Our Time, appeared.¹

What the film does well, it does extremely well. Its ambiance is wonderful. The soundtrack is pitch-perfect and nails the atmosphere of the times and places depicted. The film captures the writer’s personality through illustrative quotes and excerpts from Hemingway’s own works and from those who knew him. For a subject of this complexity, three two-hour segments feels just right and the film is nicely paced.  It is a well-crafted documentary.  And yet by focusing predominantly on Hemingway’s personality and relationships, there are important omissions in other areas.

For instance, although the film mentions the influence of the writing guidelines of the Kansas City Star on the budding reporter, it skips over the 1922 Genoa Conference where, as a young journalist, Lincoln Steffens and George Seldes taught Hemingway how to write “cablese”—a style of writing for the wire services using a bare minimum of words.  Hemingway himself references the cable style of writing and regarded to be “a new language.”²  Nor does the film mention his “iceberg” theory of writing—his most important structural/stylistic contribution to literature and the reason why he won the Noble Prize for Literature. It does quote period critics and clips of scholars commenting on his minimalist style.

The film does mention Hemingway’s admiration for Theodore Roosevelt and Jack London, but not Rudyard Kipling or Stephen Crane (another war correspondent whose cut-down journalistic style in “The Open Boat” reads like Hemingway and who is mentioned by name in The Green Hills of Africa),³ and contemporary influences such as Ring Lardner and other sports writers of the period.⁴  It mentions important friends in passing, but does not investigate why those who were not driven away defended him and his friendship to the end of their lives.  These accounts, from people now mostly dead, in books like Denis Brian’s classic The True Gen, shed more light on Hemingway’s frequently contradictory character than guesses at cryptic sexual references in letters and novels unpublished in his lifetime (The Garden of Eden, Islands in the Stream, and True at First Light are merely a suggestive apocrypha).

Even more important than his writing style is the Hemingway Code, its hero, and the Hemingway philosophy (there is a brief discussion of his outlook in the segment on The Old Man and the Sea).  Where most protagonists of the modern canon are helpless victims (e.g. the Kafka protagonist) or outright pathetic (e.g. Leopold Bloom, Willie Lohman, and J. Alfred Prufrock), the Hemingway hero stands in defiance, a modern cousin of the Byronic hero.  He may not push the limits of human potential like the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, but he does push back and stands up to the modern void on his own terms and without illusion.  He is a beer-drinking version of the Nietzschean aristocrat of merit. To be fair, by using so many excerpts from Hemingway’s novels and stories, Burns may be cleverly employing an “iceberg” approach of his own, letting the philosophy emerge through inference.

As much as his lean style, it is Hemingway’s outlook that explains his continuing relevance. Traditional stoicism can be construed as morally austere and life-denying. Hemingway’s importance therefore, is not only placing stoicism in a modern context, but in showing how life may still be enjoyable without illusions. He affirms the pleasure of the physical, the appetites, and that even in a world without intrinsic meaning, life may still be heroic. And he does this in the most unique of voices and with clipped impressionistic description.    

With all of the film’s preoccupation with gender and the Hemingway women, it is striking that there is no mention of Pilar, his most interesting female character and a pillar that allows For Whom the Bell Tolls to stand (it does mention more conventional, if idealized, love interests like Catherine Barkley and Maria as well as the thoroughly modern expatriate bad girl, Lady Brett Ashley, the thinly veiled Lady Duff Twysden).

Above all, I wish the filmmakers had spent more time focusing on his philosophy of life rather than trying to psychoanalyze him and speculate about his sexuality, as has been so often done in various decades-old debates.  This is the kind of head-shrinking that Hemingway so despised: the reduction of an artist or philosopher by a critic or psychiatrist to his constituent parts and why he might have done the things he did. Beyond biographical trivia, why is a person’s sexuality even that interesting?  Are we allowed to like him more if there are hints in his oeuvre of a view of sexuality that is in keeping with those of a more enlightened time? Are we really that insecure and intolerant?

I don’t believe that an ability to write a plausible character of the opposite sex (e.g. Flaubert/Madam Bovary, Mary Shelley/Victor Frankenstein) necessarily makes you androgynous. It does mean that you are a perceptive and empathetic writer. Also, the wont of the filmmakers to reference so many of his comments about death and suicide makes the course of his life seem as inevitable as a Greek tragedy or a bullfight.⁵

On a side note, I found it curious that Jeffrey Meyers, one of the most notable Hemingway biographers did not appear in the movie. It is also odd that no mention is made of Lillian Ross’s hatchet job, “How do You like it now, Gentlemen?” that appeared in the May 6, 1950 number of The New Yorker, and which portrays a Hemingway already in steep decline. In a similar vein, Burns uses a long quotation of the worst lines from Hemingway’s worst book, Across the River and into the Trees—lines that are read aloud by Daniels and appear on the screen as they are spoken to underscore the rambling inferiority of the writing. Like Ross, or a clever prosecutor, Burns thus allows Hemingway to hang himself with this own words. This struck me as unnecessary and mean. It inspired me to reread the book, which I found to be better than I had remembered.

It is best that the discussion of his suicide was brief.  Was it purely psychological?  Was it heredity or physiological—the byproduct of hemochromatosis, a blood disease?⁶  Was it an obsession with death and his father’s suicide that he could no longer resist?  Was it the result of his many concussions?  Was it alcoholism?  Bipolar disorder?  Was it an expression that seamlessly flowed from his philosophy of life, given his appalling physical and psychological state near the end (if a brave man like Frederic Henry could run away from a war that meant nothing to him, why couldn’t a man leave an intolerable life?)?  Was it some or all of the above?

As a realist with some romantic inclinations, I prefer to believe that when life no longer allows for any of the things that give it meaning, the Hemingway Code allows, perhaps requires, that you leave it on your own terms.  Hemingway loved hunting, fishing, traveling, drinking, storytelling and reflecting on his life, sex, and above all, writing.  None of these things were possible for him by the summer of 1961.

Finally, for those viewers who might be turned off by Hemingway’s shortcomings as a human being (“seldom has a man written so well yet lived so poorly”), I think it is important to separate the man from the art and its prescriptions.  The fact that he could be a horrible person who often failed to live up to his own Code does not detract from his work or its comment any more than the behavior of Mozart, Beethoven, Byron, and van Gogh spoils their art. To be great is to be abnormal, and oftentimes the art of highly flawed people is important and pure.  Show me a well-adjusted person, and I’ll show you a mediocrity.

My reading of the Hemingway Code is that in a world without intrinsic meaning, what matters is the courage and dignity with which you face it.  Then, when you are beaten, you will not be defeated.

So, Hemingway really wanted to be a girl, eh?  My God, who cares?  I give the film an A-.

Notes

1. See Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 277-278.
2. Hemingway talks about the function of cablese in his Esquire article “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba,” Esquire, December 1934.  Reprinted in Byline Earnest Hemingway, 177.  George Seldes tells the story of Hemingway at the Genoa Conference in his memoir, Witness to a Century, 312-313. Seldes also writes: “[l]ater he spoke of this as the time he discovered a new language.” Denis Brian, The True Gen, 37.  See also Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway, A Biography, 94.
3. Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa, 17.
4. Brian, The True Gen, 17.
5. This may be justified. As Norman Mailer writes, “The story [of Hemingway’s boxing match with Morley Callaghan] offers a fine clue to the logic if Hemingway’s mind, and tempts the prediction that there will be not definitive biography of Hemingway until the nature of his personal torture is better comprehended. It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread that sits in the silences of this short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back into the agonizing demands f his courage.” See “Punching Papa,” in Mind of an Outlaw, 169.
6. Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester, references this condition in a interview with Denis Brian. It is unclear what he is attributing to the imbalances resulting from this disease as opposed to the shock treatment that Hemingway was receiving near the end of his life. The True Gen, 252.