INTRODUCTION

A recent item in the Billings, Montana, Gazette has a photograph of Sgt. Dan Baker, of Miles City, being deployed for a second time to Afghanistan. His wife and two daughters cling to him sobbing in the airport lobby. “With emotions running at fever pitch all around him, the 39-year old father … flipped through the pages of his e-book immersing himself in the words of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a semi-autobiographical novel about the events during the Italian campaigns of World War I almost a century ago.”

Sgt. Baker may have only a vague idea of who Ernest Hemingway is. But it’s obvious the words mean something personal to him, as he and the ex-soldier-author have a shared experience, the experience of war:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Sgt. Baker, on his way to an unwinnable war, as Hemingway was nearly a hundred years ago, must have read the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, and it likely touched him through the emotional truth of his own hairy situation.

It matters if you stumble across Hemingway by accident or as “required reading.” If Hemingway had known as a young man that his fate would be as a classroom Assigned Great Writer he’d probably have shot himself long before he did in real life. I was lucky. At 15 I stole a copy of A Farewell to Arms from my local public library. A street pal had told me there was a lot of sex in it (he lied). The story read so differently from other books, especially the assigned ones, that at first I felt there must be a mistake with using such simple words in short sentences and easy-to-grasp imagery, the opposite of what my teachers had taught me.

I’d had crushes on girls but had never fallen in love with a writer. I grabbed every Hemingway book I could get my hands on, even shoplifting from the library’s special section designated “ADULT—REQUIRES CHIEF LIBRARIAN’S PERMISSION TO CHECK OUT.” Chicago library officials shared the view of Hemingway’s father, the respectable Dr. Clarence Hemingway, that his son’s books were not fit for polite society. This only made Hemingway more glamorous to me because forbidden. His world seemed both more realistic and more romantic than my usual literary diet of Robin Hood, King Arthur’s knights, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and Treasure Island, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Hemingway’s scenes of battles, love, bull fights, hunting, deep sea fishing—his realistic treatment of violence, not glamorizing it, appealed to both sides of me, the anti-war adolescent and soon-to-be-soldier. All I understood at 15 was that he was as easy and exciting to follow as my favorite movies, the latest Charlie Chan or Four Feathers. I loved how he put words together. Since then, I’ve read and reread his books, articles, war correspondence, novels, and short stories, finding something new—or new to be rejected—every time. If tended, he’s a plant that never stops growing.

Like many writers, Joan Didion among them, I have typed and retyped his stories in the hope of catching his disease. The FBI agents who once were a constant presence on my doorstep, even as they also shadowed Hemingway for much of his life, were amused by the sound of the keys like pistol shots of my Corona #3 typewriter. “Whatcha doing in there, Clancy,” one of them would mock through my locked screen door, “you the next Hemingway?” If only.

If you’ve seen the actor Corey Stoll’s caricature in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris or Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in HBO’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, you may think of Hemingway mainly in terms of his drunken buffoonery, jealous narcissism, or disloyalty to rival writers, being a slob and bully in his worst moments. Such portrayals—and his happy hobby of night clubbing with gossip columnists—have set in cement an image of Hemingway as a big-game hunting, hairy-chested, racist, gun-crazy hyper-macho who hates and fears women in equal parts and who kills himself when he can no longer write. You may also think he despised politics. There’s “no left or right in writing only good and bad writing,” he once said, thus contradicting his own history.

This chest-thumping Hemingway is real enough. But there’s another quieter side to him too: bookish, bespectacled (due to hereditary bad eyes), generous to young writers, a literary explorer armed only with a #2 pencil and a Royal Corona #3 typewriter, who risked his life and mind trailblazing uncharted territory that should have been marked, as on medieval maps, “Here Be Dragons.” After publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, a reviewer wrote in the Atlantic that Hemingway “writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.”

In fact, Hemingway was a terrific reader of almost everything: books, magazines, newspapers. He usually slept alongside two bedside tables piled seven-high with books. As he told an interviewer (George Plimpton), “I’m always reading books … Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling … it would take a day to remember everyone.” (Hadley, his first wife, reports them snuggling up in bed: obsessive reader Hemingway embraced her warm body while reading a newspaper behind her back.) Reading stirred his imagination and set limits beyond which he was destined to go. He took American prose to where it had never been. Singlehandedly, he freed our language to express more feeling and emotion than previous writers—Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, all of whom he read and respected—whose styles tended to obscure with wordiness. His glass-clear, “simple” sentences strike some readers as “hard boiled” and tightlipped. The opposite is true. His simplicity camouflages deep, hard-to-control passion. He wrote as if he’d taken a screenwriting class, and his short, sharp, adjectiveless phrases are like camera “shots.” Twenty of his works of fiction have been made into movies.

CONSUMER WARNING: reading Ernest Hemingway for the first time can be a health risk. It’s like listening to a song that saturates your head even after it stops. There’s hardly a writer, living or recent, whose style—not “technique,” but a tool for finding your emotion—does not show him or her to be one of “Hemingway’s children.” It’s impossible to read Salinger, Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal, Garcia Marquez, Ann Beatty, Charles Johnson, Terry Tempest Williams, Nadine Gordimer, Norman Mailer, Elmore Leonard, Annie Proulx, Russell Banks, or Walter Mosley without hearing the Hemingway voice. Each of these very different writers owes a debt to Hemingway. He’s like the god Zeus up there in the clouds hurling his thunderbolts long after he’s supposed to be gone.

This small book aims to place Ernest Hemingway “in our time.”