Macho macho man! I wanna be a macho man...:banana:
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Macho macho man! I wanna be a macho man...:banana:
Wounded veteran is not a punchline, and in my family we respect the men and women who put their lives in harms way for the sake of their loved ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
This is a punchline. Many veterans did not fight at all for their loved ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Well, like I said I don't dislike his books (though personally I think he is very overrated), but there is something nauseatingly adolescent about him. Many people who met him found him an overbearing braggart and liar. I read once that the story about rescuing the wounded man is now thought to have been grossly exaggerated. He covered the Spanish civil war, but he was a non combatant (as in WW1 and WW2). I'm sorry, but why didn't he go to Britain and sign up to fight the Nazis when Britain was all alone in 1940? People like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon would have pissed themselves laughing if they'd been swapping war stories and all Hemingway could come up with was "well, my Hotel got bombed in Spain". Probably no hot water either! He always reminds me of John Wayne- both macho posturers who never really experienced the full horror of war (which was why they never grew out of the macho nonsense- the men who really had to do the fighting just wanted to forget it).
As for the hunting/ bullfighting, it doesn't take guts to shoot a lion. D H Lawrence (a much better writer) shows up the bullfight for what it is in 'The Plumed Serpent': an ugly, barbaric little piece of human cowardice and cruelty.
I do think he wrote well about the spiritual emptiness/ loss of meaning of the 20th century and he was right to try and find a solution in a more primitive, natural, authentic way of living. I also thought 'Fiesta'/ The Sun Also Rises was excellent but I can't take the posing and exaggerating. Had he been a piolet in the Battle of Britain or an infantry officer at Verdun then I'd maybe see it differently.
Hey, you forgot to mention the latest fad, F.R.E.E.D.O.M :flare:Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Probably because he was in his forties, walked with a limp, and had a history of other ailments which made him 4F. As far as his contribution not being dangerous or meaningful, I remember a little thing called 9/11. You might have heard about it. You see, a bunch of "ambulance drivers", fire fighters, and policemen ran into a burning building to pull survivors from collapsing wreckage. Well this "ambulance driver" went to a place every bit as scary as that. He took out the maimed, the bleeding, the dying, the groaning remains of humanity; let it seep into his clothing and fester in his mind. He dropped them off at the hospital week after week, and then he went back over and over to do it again. That's a patriot. That's a hero who's service does not deserve to be slighted or mocked by men who weren't there and didn't do or see half of the things he did.Quote:
Originally Posted by WICKES
I think he joined the ambulance core for three reasons. 1)The United States hadn't declared war by the time he went overseas. 2)His father was a doctor, and he wanted his father to be proud of him as a preserver of life, not a destroyer. 3) Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings had already done the same thing. I think he wanted to be where the action was, unlike Faulkner who joins the Royal Canadian Airforce, never sees combat, crashes a plane after hostilities are over and then tells wild stories for years about his dogfights over Germany.
I read a number of Hemingway's books in my early twenties, and thought his writing was highly overrated. Being that I am older now, and hopefully possess a bit more experience and wisdom, I thought I might actually give the guy's books a second chance.
But after reading about his "exploits" just now, I think I'll pass. I'm even less impressed with him than before. I tend to agree with Wickes. Hunting (any animal) is hardly heroic. The fact that he hunted innocent animals and pointlessly taunted bulls indicates to me a severe disconnect with nature, a sheer lack of compassion for fellow creatures, and a desire for unnecessary bloodshed or pain. Boxing?...dear lord...if two dumb mugs want to beat the **** out of each other for "fun" and silly looking belts, let the morons have at it.
Arming a fishing boat with a bazooka?! It sounds to me like he wasn't just a war hawk of sorts, but a dramatic pea head to boot. Good thing he realized how goofy he appeared to be, and pulled himself together enough to go shoot some real people. Apparently, non-human animals were not enough of a challenge for him.
Seems to me he canceled out whatever merits he gained as an ambulance driver by performing other various bloodthirsty "feats" of ignorance and apathy.
Mate, if such thing makes you dislike an author (and not his writing) then you've just dismissed a ton and a half of good literature. I'm not sure I see the connection in the fact that you will not read the books of a dead author because he happened to hunt and did some crazy things.Quote:
Originally Posted by integrity
Might as well say: "I'm not going to read Borges, he never did anything in his life, so his writings are going to be boring!"
If we are taking Hemmingway's life into account, as we probably shouldn't, since it is his work which is important, then we must not forget his misogyny, alcoholism, and the fact that he seems overall to be a bit of an a@#hole. But that isn't the point. His prose has its importance, but many of his works are rather rubbishy. For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and his Short Stories seem to be the most enduring, with the rest being sustained by the fact that a) he didn't die too long ago, and b) the popularity of the other works keeps him in print.
No doubt he was a great author, but compared to many of his contemporaries, he is quite minor in the grand scheme of American novels, though perhaps central in the development of the American Short Story.
I'm not the most seasoned reader, but of all the books I have read William Golding goes to the top of my list of the most overrated of writers. Nothing he has written is substantially deep or evocative, and Lord of the Flies isn't a very good allegory of human nature.
I tend to agree with this. Tribalism is not necessarily barbaric, nor is savagery so quaintly schematic in terms of being able to plot one's points toward regression.Quote:
Originally Posted by JacobF
Today's gangs in the US, for example, don't need to be spearing pigs to be seen as devolving off of civic respect. Guns make human life very cheap these days, and murders don't even need motives--like it has been said about Cormac McCarthy's villains "killing seems to become just part of the conversation."
Reminds me of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Honestly JBI, only a person who hasn't read much Hemingway could refer to him as a minor writer. I've seen you misread him as a minimalist several times, and I've told you that's mostly just characteristic of his early work. You'll read Finnegans Wake but you won't put the slightest effort into reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell To Arms, A Moveable Feast, or the Old Man and the Sea because you already have your opinion of Hemingway, somebody elses.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
As far as subject matter goes, when I want to know about the mating habits of Irish prostitutes, or I want to read the only book about a struggling young writer, or a book about Dublin, or Dublin, or Dublin again, I'll read Joyce. When I want to know what it's like to hunt a lion I'll read Hemingway.
And by the way, to whomever above was talking **** about boxing, I happen to like the sport.
Proust.
A couple of others like Golding, Hawthorne, Heller, Balzac, Austen, And pretty much any modern writer that is published.
Oh wait, and Twain. And most American writers. Most people who wrote in English.
And Steinback is insufferable.
His Iceberg theory was revealed to the world in 1932 with the publication of Death in the Afternoon, outlining his style, which though perhaps not as simplistic as his early work, was still minimalist. But either way, the point is whether or not he is a minor writer, or whether or not he is a major writer.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
The first thing we need to assess is his contemporaries, off the top of my head, the ones that hit me first are O'Neal, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Porter, Carter, Cather and on a stretch, Wharton.
Of those, he is obviously better than Steinbeck and Porter, but Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, and any of the major works of Faulkner seem far more enduring than even the best Hemingway. O'Neal is unique, as we are dealing with drama here, which seems outside of Hemingway, and most mainstream reading. The question then remains where is the spot for Hemingway.
In terms of short stories, as I mentioned earlier, he seems, with Faulkner and Porter, the most defining of the genre, far surpassing everyone, except for Faulkner. As for novels however, he is just one amongst many great writers, as named above. This is only American modernism however, as you mentioned above, there were a lot more writers working at the time, and I am sure there were a lot more as talented, or more talented writers we don't know about because of lack of scholarship/translation.
His place in the tradition of American literature is undisputed, but it is not a stretch to say exaggerated, as many of his works are dated (despite what you say) and the whole Lost-Generation bit which seems cemented in his early work has grown a little stale. Do I deny that he was a great writer? of course not, though I wouldn't place him above Willa Cather in my esteem.
[QUOTE=mortalterror;614301]..Quote:
As far as his contribution not being dangerous or meaningful, I remember a little thing called 9/11. You might have heard about it. You see, a bunch of "ambulance drivers", fire fighters, and policemen ran into a burning building to pull survivors from collapsing wreckage. Well this "ambulance driver" went to a place every bit as scary as that. He took out the maimed, the bleeding, the dying, the groaning remains of humanity; let it seep into his clothing and fester in his mind. He dropped them off at the hospital week after week, and then he went back over and over to do it again. That's a patriot. That's a hero who's service does not deserve to be slighted or mocked by men who weren't there and didn't do or see half of the things he did
Don't be ridiculous. Of course a man who risks his life as an ambulance driver/ fireman etc is brave and praiseworthy. I hugely admire the conscientious objectors in WW1 who served as stretcher bearers and won medals for rescuing men under shell fire. What I can't bear about Hemingway is his macho posturing, boasting and lying when he was never actually a combatant. It now seems to be generally accepted among biographers and scholars that he exaggerated and sometimes simply lied about his experiences in WW1 and Spain. Still, he needed to dramatise and exaggerate, wheras a man like Robert Graves in 'Goodbye To All That' simply tells of his time as an infantry officer in WW1 in a cool, precise, undramatic way because he had nothing to prove.
If you want to read about war, read something like 'The Last Enemy' by Richard Hillary: a British fighter pilot in the Battle Of Britain who was shot down over the channel and severly burnt/ disfigured. He wrote about the battle while recovering, rejoined the RAF shortly after publishing and was killed a few months later. He writes without a shred of self pity, sentimentality or drama. His little, almost forgotten, book is far more moving than anything that overrated bully Hemingway wrote.