Nathaniel

Shockey

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May 5, 2008

I Can’t Compete With Ernest Hemingway, But I Still Win

I have a love/hate relationship with Ernest Hemingway.

When I hate him, it’s because I’m jealous. He was in a war.

In addition to his outstanding gift with languages and his amazing and relentless struggle with syntactical efficiency, he saw lots of dead people.

No, I don’t really want to be in a war, but Hemingway asserted that any writer who has witnessed the awesome images and realities of warfare has a distinct advantage over the field. It makes sense. A soldier has more interesting things to write about than a college intern.

I jump-started my writing aspirations by moving from Philadelphia to Seattle, thinking it would significantly broaden my horizons. Hemingway, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to be a part of WWI. When told his eyesight was too poor to be a soldier, he settled for nothing less than driving an ambulance containing injured soldiers. I went from watching sports with hardcore Philadelphia fans to surrounding myself with college students whose passion for sports went about as deep as a bong hit. Hemingway went from week-long camping trips in Michigan, fishing for his dinner, to driving an ambulance through minefields. I lost my old Oldsmobile to a lousy transmission. He nearly lost his leg to a mortal shell. It’s not much of a competition.

Hemingway was born in 1899, which means he was 21 at the beginning of America’s dry decade. I think that’s a bit funny. Happy 21st, Ernest! Want a soda? It’s no great wonder why a life-starved man like Hemingway felt the need to get away from America. And so he did.

He spent many years in Europe, and naturally, learned quite a few languages. They say the best writers know more than one language. I took five years of French in high school, and having lived for a few years in California, have inevitably picked up a few Spanish phrases. Hemingway wins again.

When he wasn’t writing poems, columns, short stories or, eventually, novels, he was out drinking, fishing, watching bullfights or even boxing. He liked to drink. In his stories, the protagonist generally seems to have the combined liver capacity of about six defensive ends. I doubt he had the same ability to hold his liquor as his main characters, but he obviously enjoyed drinking, and considered it worthwhile to drink frequently, in large quantities, and without getting completely belligerent. My recent stay in Mexico taught me that I ought to limit myself to no more than a few drinks late in the evening. That is, unless I want to pass out at two in the afternoon and miss dinner completely.

Hemingway wrote beautiful love stories, usually in the midst of war, always cut short by inevitable, impending tragedy. He seemed to think love was something to be luckily discovered. His last novel, The Garden of Eden, was similar to his first marriage to Hadley Richardson and subsequent divorce upon meeting Pauline Pfeiffer. Man meets woman, falls in love, meets another woman, falls in love again, tries to maintain two loves until first love gets really pissed off and leaves.

And that’s another reason I sometimes hate Hemingway. His notion of love – responsible for the most beautifully written stories I’ve ever read – was a foolish one. Sometimes I discover a figure, usually of the past, whose artistic visions seem truly heavenly, and it destroys me to think that these came from broken families, relationships, foolish ideals, utter selfishness and, in Hemingway’s case, suicide. How could this be?

The story of Ernest Hemingway hurts me deeply.

But there is much to learn from the beautiful tragedy of his fiction, sprung out of his beautiful and tragic nonfiction. Hemingway loved life so much that I think he often neglected the most important things.

It seems he desired nothing more than to discover new sensations. But his various, exciting exploits took their toll, as he was married four times and divorced three. His thrilling yet tainted life was vividly recorded in all his stories.

If the jealous writers can surpass him in one thing, it is in learning to soak up the pleasures of life, to honor their craft, but to do both with utmost caution, never overlooking the responsibilities that make life worth living.

And if I never become half the writer Hemingway was, I might learn to love his books with gratitude, not jealousy. Because I don’t think writing would be nearly as fun without having something, or someone to admire.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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