A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

If I know anything about Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I know that it contains a scene where Hemingway reassures F. Scott Fitzgerald in the bathroom of a bar that the size of his penis is perfectly ordinary. A Moveable Feast wasn't published until the 1960's, a few years after the death of Hemingway, and perhaps it's best that it much after the death of Fitzgerald, as well, who, as Hemingway depicts him here, was an anxious hypochondriac, tortured by his wife, who probably had enough anxiety to deal with in his life. The penis story is just one of many--there's a long tale about Fitzgerald's hypochondria absolutely derailing a boys' trip to the city of Lyon--and one of the charms of A Moveable Feast is the peek inside the lives of some of the great artists who were trawling around Paris at the time. Fitzgerald gets out better, perhaps, than Gertrude Stein, who's depicted as something of a stubborn battleaxe who hides petty resentments behind a thin veil of principle. That's too harsh: as with Fitzgerald, Hemingway's depiction of Stein is ultimately a loving one, because his depiction of Paris, and those years of his life, is a loving one as well.

But the most interesting depiction of any artist is, I think, the book's depiction of Hemingway himself. Hemingway's writing about a time before he's published any novel at all, and his work is all in short stories, and so the larger-than-life bullfighter and hunter who would be known as "Papa" isn't really present here. The Hemingway of A Moveable Feast is a rather vulnerable creature, battling the uncertainty of writer's block, cultivating a style of simplicity not out of masculine bravado but the need to put down on paper "one true sentence." This Hemingway marvels at his friend Fitzgerald not because his book is so good (when they first meet, he hasn't yet read Gatsby) but because he had the ability to write a novel at all. I thought A Moveable Feast was an interesting counterbalance to the popular image of Hemingway as an icon of machismo. Certainly the vulnerability and the incertitude of Hemingway here involves a lot of self-fashioning, but isn't "self-fashioning" the complaint that people level against Hemingway in the other direction? All of which is to say again that I think those who resent Hemingway for his masculinity haven't read him, or haven't read him closely enough.

It's impossible, I feel, not to respond to what Hemingway can do with a sentence. His sentences seem simple enough, but then, if they're so simple, why are they so moving? I was moved in that way often during A Moveable Feast, though I don't quite agree with those who thinks it's among his greatest works. It has the kind of muddy incoherence of something that feels unfinished, as if it were something he might have knocked into a more recognizable shape, if he'd published it during his own life time. Still, it's remarkable in the way it manages to turn real people--the Steins, the Fitzgeralds, the Pounds, and Papa himself--into Hemingway characters, so vibrant and real even though they are so lightly sketched, touched with a kind of authorial grace.

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

 A great killer must love to kill; unless he feels it is the best thing he can do, unless he is conscious of its dignity and feels that it is its own reward, he will be incapable of the abegnation that is necessary in a real killing. The truly great killer must have a sense of honor and a sense of glory far beyond that of the ordinary bullfighter. In other words he must be a simpler man. Also he must take pleasure in it, not simply as a trick of the wrist, eye, and managing of his left hand that he does better than other men, which is the simplest form of that pride and which he will naturally have as a simple man, but he must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing.

"The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word," Ernest Hemingway writes at the beginning to Death in the Afternoon, "It is not an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy..." For the bull, obviously, he explains, but for the bullfighter, too, whose life is at risk. Even the greatest bullfighters in the long list of those Hemingway names over the course of the book, like the infamous Joselito, eventually die at the horns of the bull. And those who don't die from being gored, from having their lungs and groins punctured and their intestines drawn out, die from the mental strain of this demanding profession, or from their own crippling cowardice. The bullfighter gives up his life to an exercise of pure aesthetics, of delivering a death so beautiful people flock to the ring to see it.

Popular opinion has moved against bullfighting, even in Spain, where it's outlawed in several provinces that Hemingway once traipsed around, seeing fight after fight, but even in Hemingway's time it was controversial. The thing most people object to, Hemingway says, is the death of the horses, who are so often gored and killed in the efforts of the picadores. Hemingway describes the appreciation of bullfighting as something that belongs to a discerning few; he's under no pretense that most people will be able to look past the inherent cruelty of it to see what makes it beautiful. He compares it, even, to the appreciation of wine: even those who do see its beauty must develop their "eye." Hemingway, of course, has that eye, and much of Death in the Afternoon is a description of the various movements and methods, the bandilleras and volapies and muletas and faenas that make up bullfighting's technical vocabulary, and describing who did them best and who did them worst. He even conjures up an interlocutor in a fictitious old lady, who is that one-in-a-thousand member of the crowd who lacks a natural revulsion to the scene and is willing to be taught. (The old lady's impatience with Hemingway's literary digressions is a funny recurring bit.)

Hemingway is Hemingway, and at times Death in the Afternoon swerves into great literature. In the center of the book is an essay called "The Natural History of the Dead," which is a kind of presentation of the various forms of death and dying that Hemingway witnessed during World War I. Toward the end, a loving evocation of the life of the Spanish countryside makes one of the book's chief rewards. (How little Hemingway might have known that the Spanish Civil War was a few short years away, and that much-loved countryside would provide many more examples for his "natural history of the dead.") Elsewhere the book is doggedly instructive and practical; it really is intended as a guide for those interested in getting into early 20th century bullfighting. I laughed when the book turned, at times, into a kind of fanboying over Hemingway's favorite fighters; it was like listening to Bill Simmons rank NBA all-timers on his podcast. I'm one of the haters--I'll never see a bullfight. But I feel like I understand a little better from Death in the Afternoon what Hemingway and others found to be worth their attention.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria. Sure. That is what you would do. You ran into her rather late, that was all.

So a woman like that Pilar practically pushed this girl into your sleeping back and what happens? Yes, what happens? What happens? You tell me what happens, please. Yes. That is just what happens. That is exactly what happens.

Robert Jordan is a Spanish professor from Montana who has joined with Republican forces in Spain to fight in the Civil War. He's earned the reputation as an excellent dynamiter, and is tasked with blowing up a bridge to help keep fascist reinforcements from arriving during a Republican ambush. The process involves reconnoitering with small bands of guerillas in the mountains around Segovia, and among these bands are a collection of indelible characters with whom Robert becomes intricately involved: Pablo, the disgraced guerrilla leader who opposes the blowing of the bridge; Pilar, his headstrong "woman" and the band's true captain; the loyal old man Anselmo; and Maria, a girl with whom--despite all his warnings to himself--Robert falls deeply in love. There is a cinematic aspect to their love, coming as it is too late, and on the evening of a mission whose chances of success are slight, and for which the odds of a gruesome death are high.

Killing and dying are the subject of For Whom the Bell Tolls. When is it permissible to kill? When is dying a noble sacrifice? The characters all carry the burden of past killing, past dyings: for Robert, it is the bullet he put through the skull of a dying comrade. For Maria, it is the death of her parents in a gruesome fashion at the hands of the fascist, and her own repeated rape at the same hands. (Her short hair, shaved by the fascists and described as unbecoming to her face, is a symbol of the still-recent torture.) For Pablo and the other guerillas, it is the massacre of those same fascists; Pilar describes in long and gruesome detail the way the band laid siege to a group of local dons, slaughtering each one in turn, and the deep ambivalence of hindsight. The Spaniards are keenly aware that, in this conflict, the people they kill are their countrymen, and yet they know that they must continue on; the principle by which they live demands it. And they know that they, too, will likely be killed in turn, and thus live in a fashion close to their own deaths.

For Whom the Bell Tolls has superficial associations, perhaps, with his other great war novel, A Farewell to Arms. Among other things, there is a keen sense of the ways that the people at the bottom of the chain of hierarchy are abused and ignored by the people at the top. A subplot involves a messenger, sent by Robert to inform the Republican brass that they've been spotted by fascists and the ambush is foiled, who gets repeatedly waylaid by checkpoint guards and even thrown in prison by a petty French general who resents the ambush's commanding officer. It's not just that war involves death on a mass scale, it's that so many of the deaths are so pointless. For every heroic death that helps obtain a strategic advantage, there are a hundred others that are the result of poor judgment or sheer accident, and which result in no strategic advantage whatever. When, in the book's final moments, the destruction of the bridge finally takes place, the advantage of surprise has been lost, and the characters know they face death for little reason other than the need to follow orders--and for the broader principle of the war in which they fight.

Despite this, For Whom the Bell Tolls reminded me more of The Sun Also Rises, another story about a small group of people, set over a few days. Its scope and scale are so reduced, save for a few memories, stories, and gestures toward the wider war, that it feels almost like a closet drama. It's within this space that Maria and Robert live an entire romance, which they do with the special intensity of those for whom life seems very short. Hemingway haters, no doubt, may find much to despise in Maria, who attaches herself to Robert in a way that might seem naive. But you can't ignore the image of Maria with her shorn hair, taking up a machine gun and expressing her keenest desire to kill the fascists who murdered her parents, either. Nor do the haters have a response, I think, to Pilar, a battle-hardened badass whose resolve is the anchor of the small band of guerillas--whereas her husband, Pablo, represents the fickle Judas.

As I understand it, the novel's dialogue has come in for a lot of criticism over the years: Hemingway puts a lot of high-flown anachronisms in the mouth of the Spaniards, like "thees" and "thous." But I thought this worked. Partly, it's a way of elevating the guerillas, who are largely poor, rural people cast into world-significant circumstances they have not chosen, to the dignity of epic heroism. Partly it's an interesting way of transliterating the Spanish usted for an English audience. The novel--whose central character, if not sole viewpoint character, is a professor of Spanish--makes some really interesting decisions about how to present Spanish as English, relying on several false cognates and overly literal translations that I read as quite purposeful, and far more effective than trying to colloquialize everything they say. Among other things, it emphasizes the way in which Robert, though fluent in their language, is not quite of them, a stranger.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Jake Barnes is an American, a Catholic, an expatriate living in Paris, a working man but a hard partier, living with a war injury that's left him unable to have sex. He's deeply in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a sexually emancipated, very droll "new woman" of the 1920s, but Jake's injury--maybe--has made their relationship an impossible one. Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish boxer, has also fallen in love with Brett--people tend to do that. When Jake, Brett, Robert, and Brett's fiancé Mike head down to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermin and the Running of the Bulls, the passions and resentments that they share boil over into conflict, especially when Brett goes off with a dashing young bullfighter.

The Sun Also Rises was the first Hemingway I ever read, way back in college, or maybe high school. I remember liking it, but I also remember feeling like I didn't get it, like there was something just beyond the page that I was missing. Reading it now, I think that my first impression was fairly dead on. There really is something subtle about The Sun Also Rises, even moreso when compared to the other Hemingways I've read, that seems inaccessible, just past the veil of the plainspoken language. You can see it emerge volcanically, when one of the characters--Mike, or Brett, or even Jake--blows up at poor pathetic Robert Cohn, the hanger-on that nobody really wants around, and who manages to puncture the smooth irony of their conversation and bring out the real anger and despair that's just beneath the surface.

I was just saying to Brent the other day that, to hear people on Twitter talk about Hemingway, I sometimes worry that we're at risk of losing or diminishing the real legacy of these novels. The objections you hear are rarely artistic ones, but moral ones: old Papa, nasty macho chauvinist. You know the ones. Without a doubt there's a ring of truth to them. There's a whiff of conservatism around the character of Brett, whose sexual emancipation seems to lead only to desperation. That conservatism is echoed by a sense that cultural revolution, like in Fitzgerald's novels, has not served the "Lost Generation" well, who spend their idle days in Pamplona pickling themselves and resenting each other. And Jake--and Hemingway--really do have an aficion, a passion, for the bloody, violent sport of bullfighting. You can call that machismo, if you like. And the antisemitism charges around the character of Cohn, an unwanted Jewish outsider called "k-ke" by Mike, certainly stick.

But I think the other side of each of those impressions is more powerful: First of all, it's not Brett's fault that men pounce on her like she's some kind of meal. There's a whiff of Daisy Buchanan in her, a woman who has learned to develop irony as armor to deal with the way that men attach themselves to her because of her physical attractiveness. (Though Brett is always in more control than Daisy, and never lets that irony curdle into put-on helplessness.) The bullfighting is violent, but the language that Hemingway uses to describe it rarely seems taken from the vocabulary of macho domination and power: the gifted matador Pedro Romero succeeds through self-control, precision, and even grace. Compare Pedro's skill to Robert, the boxer: when a jealous Robert socks Pedro in the face, Pedro defeats him just as he does the bull--not by hitting back with a powerful jab, but by outlasting the short-lived burst of masculine anger and violence--until Robert leaves the room crying. There's more to the antisemitism, maybe, but the way Mike, seizes on Robert's Jewishness to affirm his status as an unwanted outsider doesn't do Mike, a mean son of a bitch and a "bad drunk," any favors.

Frankly, Hemingway's best defense against the haters is just how talented he is. You could never reduce The Sun Also Rises to machismo because you can't reduce it to anything. The characters are simply too rich and too real, they contain multitudes, like real people do. I loved Brett's cleverness, and the way it conceals a deep vulnerability, and I really enjoyed the convivial wit of Bill Gorton, the final friend on the Pamplona trip. I even liked Robert Cohn, who's so persuasively pathetic. But the heart of the book is Jake Barnes. Unlike Mike, who lives on credit up and down the Mediterranean, or Brett, who lives off of what she's been able to get from the nobleman she's divorcing, and the other idle expatriates, Jake has a job. His sense that things must be "paid for" might be seen as the book's moral sense: the beauty of the bullfights are paid for by cruelty, and the freedom someone like Brett enjoys is paid for by loneliness. Hemingway thought it was a hopeful novel, and I think that's right; the lifestyle the friends enjoy really may be worth the price paid in money, labor, and loss. It really isn't The Great Gatsby, where you get fleeced and the world is a rotten bargain.

In the end, Brett runs off with the matador, but telegrams Jake at the last minute begging him to come to Madrid, where she's been abandoned: once again, the men in her life have wanted something she can't provide them. Except for Jake, that is--the only man, it seems, who Brett has wanted, and who hasn't been able to provide. Jake's impotency is a crushing blow to the Hemingway machismo theory, I think, because The Sun Also Rises doesn't really depict him as diminished by it. Rather, it enables him to be a friend to Brett when she needs it most, and novel's moral center. He pays dearly for the intimacy he enjoys, and the integrity he's developed, but perhaps that's worth it in the end, too.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious and had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Frederic Henry is, as Hemingway himself was, an ambulance driver in World War I. Henry is an American serving in the Italian army, seemingly for no other reason than he was bumming around in Italy at the time that the war began. In the novel's beginning, he falls in love with a British nurse named Catherine Barkley; when he's injured by a shell, Catherine is able to tend to him during his convalescence. Convalescence is itself a kind of idyll, a reprieve from the drudgery of war--even with the injury, Henry has not seen much that could be called horror--and Catherine ends up pregnant. When Henry recuperates and it cast back to the front to endure the bloody chaos of a long retreat, one in which the ashamed and defeated Italians have begun to shoot their own officers. It is a long and horrible road back to Catherine, and even once reconciled, they must hatch a plan to escape Italy.

Hemingway's writing seems so simplistic, and its character has become such a truism, that it's easy to forget how remarkable it is. No one has ever invented a better style than Hemingway's plain language for writing about war, an experience whose sheer awfulness cannot be emphasized, only concealed, by stylistic tricks. The wearying, interminable nature of Henry's journey from the alto piano back to Milan through the driving rain is reflected in that language, which at times seems like the writing of a man for whom all pretense has at last been stripped away. It belongs to the "proclamations" on billboards. And Henry/Hemingway cut through such pretense with horrible lucidity:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one 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.

I'm no Hemingway expert, but I've often thought that his lit-Twitter critics often fail to understand him. He led a macho sort of life but his best works are often trenchant critiques of machismo, and A Farewell to Arms is one of the best critiques of the machismo that leads to war I've ever read. Its message is actually, at its heart, sort of simple: war is extremely stupid. Henry is absolutely unable to articulate to anyone why he participates in it, much less why he joined the army of a foreign country. Over and over again he is mistaken by Italians, who know no better, for something other than American: even a doctor at the hospital refuses to talk to him because he thinks he is an Austrian. By the end, it doesn't even matter; the alliances have broken down and the Italians, having failed to shoot the Austrians, simply settle for shooting other Italians.

I also thought Catherine was a marvelous character for an author who has a reputation for not writing well about women. I can see how others might disagree: she copes with war service by living inside of fantasies, and her relationship with Henry, while not a fantasy itself, becomes a vessel for these. When these fantasies break down we find behind them terrible presentiments of wreck: "I'm afraid of the rain," she tells Henry, "because sometimes I see me dead in it... And sometimes I see you dead in it." What's more, there's no doubt that what Henry and Catherine have is really love, the head-over-heels Hollywood kind.

I wasn't prepared for the ending of this book. I won't spoil it, even though I don't think you really ought to care too much about spoiling books that are a century old, because it hit me very hard. The world has seemed, to varying degrees, to be so heavy with death over the past year, and this past week has felt like this even moreso. I'm not sure I've ever read an ending that is so pitiless or without redemption. But that, too, is Hemingway's clear eye: war and death are pitiless and without redemption. There is no point to them, and when they come, there really isn't anything left to say.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

So now it was all over, he thought.  So now he would never have a chance to finish it.  So this was the way it ended in a bickering over a drink.  Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it.  For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity.  For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself.  It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew well enough to write them well.  Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either.  Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the tarting.  Well, he would never know, now.

Hemingway is one of those blank spots for me--I read The Sun Also Rises eons ago, in high school, and nothing ever sense.  I don't know why.  Perhaps it seemed like the one notable thing about Hemingway, the extreme terseness of his style, was easy enough to appreciate without ever actually reading his work.  I get the famous iceberg metaphor--most of what happens in a story is beneath the surface.

But even still, appreciation is not reading, and the stories of The Snows of Kilimanjaro really do conceal remarkable deaths.  "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is only a couple of slim pages, but the story it tells is tremendous: two waiters gossip about a deaf patron who, they understand, recently tried to kill himself.  The younger waiter wants to go home; the older one knows what the cafe being open might mean to the deaf patron.  It is a "clean, well-lighted place," and a bastion against existential terror:

Turning off the electric night he continued the conversation with himself.  It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant.  You do not want music.  Certainly you do not want music.  Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.  What did he fear?  It was not fear or dread.  It was nothing that he knew too well.  It was all a nothing and man was nothing too.  It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.  Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y nada y pues nada.  Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.  Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.  Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.  He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

Like the best writers, Hemingway captures a familiar feeling with words we didn't know were available.  Someone who can't sympathize with that feeling I do not understand, and suspect they must not read a lot of books.

Elsewhere, Hemingway uses this style to a different effect.  I especially enjoyed the story "A Day's Wait," about a boy who has a fever of 102.  He becomes silent and contemplative, until, at the story's end, he asks his father when he will die.  His French boarding school friends, you see, have told him that you can't survive a fever past 44 degrees--Celsius.  The reveal is funny, but the boy's steely reserve is, like the quiet resignation of the gangrenous vacationer in the title story (quoted above), subtly profound.  The concept is clever, but there is no sense of gimmickry.

I also found that Hemingway's reputation for unchecked machismo was overstated.  It seemed to me, from these stories, that Hemingway was as familiar with the hollowness of masculine posturing as much as anyone--just look at the final story, "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber," about a stuffed-shirt so embarrassed by his running from a lion while hunting in Africa, that he gets himself killed by a water buffalo.  That outcome is not so surprising, but Hemingway, in his staccato way, fills the story with other kinds of dread: the dread that Macomber might be killed by his wife, who is disgusted by his cowardice, or by their guide, who sleep with Macomber's wife--or that he might kill them.  When it ends the way you thought it might, you find yourself surprised anyway, and a little sad about the inevitability of self-destruction.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March begins with America:

I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

And ends with it, too:

Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

In his introduction, Christopher Hitchens identifies Augie's opening assertion as essentially radical. Augie, a Jew and the descendant of immigrants, claims an American birthright, unthinkable in the 1920's of the novel's opening and not much less so when it was written in 1953. We are inheritors of this assertion and will not find it strange; most of us will take it for granted that America is land of opportunity, an immigrant nation, where the ladders of social mobility can be scaled quicker.

Still, we can appreciate Augie's bold claim to exhibit a new conception of our national character. Augie is an American, that is to say, democratic. He tells us early on that the phrase "various jobs" is the "Rosetta stone" of his existence, and indeed his "adventures" can be summed as a series of tasks: He is a dog groomer, a union organizer, a petty thief, a sales clerk, a ship's pharmacist, an assistant to more than one millionaire. In one of the book's greatest sections, he spends a long period in Mexico training an eagle to hunt lizards. Some of these jobs are menial and low-class and others come with fancy wardrobes, but the overall line of progression is fluctuated, not upward as in some Horatio Alger story. When I say that Augie is democratic, this is what I mean--the dogged insistence that meaning and fulfillment, though not likely to be found, can be approached from all sides and all stations:

"How is your campaign after a worthwhile fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in the progress, a mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie! Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.

Democratic, too, are Augie's attitudes toward people. On his ship during wartime he becomes a sort of confidant and advice-giver for his shipmates and tells us, "I advocated love, especially." Love is democratic because it regards social class, like all other concerns alien to mere personhood, as irrelevant. Augie's attitude reminds me of the King of France from King Lear, who remarks that "Love is not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from th'entire point." So it happens that, in my favorite section of the book, Augie risks estrangement from his heiress girlfriend, Lucy, in order to help a a friend obtain an illegal abortion. Lucy's parents believe he is mixed up with the girl sexually, not that it would matter if he weren't, and Augie mistakenly expects from Lucy the same kind of inconsiderate love that he gives freely:

Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the coutns were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had only to do with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love.

But love for others is not always the same as love for Augie, who has no conception of the love of money or the love of power. When he calls himself, at book's end, a "Columbus of those near-at-hand," he celebrates the love of people, the personal, individual life as opposed to the "big machine" which only has the power to oppose.

No wonder, then, that Bellow rejects the prose of Hemingway--who might be called typically American in that he exalts the stark, shorn pioneerism of Emerson and Thoreau--in favor of a looser, more exuberant style that is democratic in the sense that no word seems to excessive to leave out. Augie March is dense and allusive, delighting in its metaphors. The hem of a dress is "stiff as a line of Euclid." Elsewhere "the wheat looked like the glass of wheat." The human heart "circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps." It is easy to lose the thread, and such long-windedness fails perhaps as often as it succeeds, but one comes to feel that, like Augie, such failures must be permitted.

Hitchens refuses to call it "The Great American Novel," though apparently Martin Amis does so freely. I myself categorically reject the existence of such a thing, but I will note that Augie March is obsessed with the reason that such a novel is impossible: America is too vast, too broad, too pluralistic to be pinned down. It is, in short, like Augie.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

On F. Scott Fitzgerald:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

A Moveable Feast is a minor work by Hemingway, a travelogue/memoir of his years in Paris as a young writer. Apparently Hemingway hung around the cream of the literary crop, even before he changed from a writer of manly fiction to the towering literary figure he eventually became, because A Moveable Feast is full of amusing anecdotes about various writers Hemingway knew and associated with. Among the highlights:

- Gertrude Stein was insecure to the point of rudeness, and was virtually unwilling to compliment any work but her own, which she held in very high regards.

- Ford Maddox Ford stunk and was annoying.

- James Joyce was friendly but reclusive. Also, apparently, Irish.

The first half of the book, from which most of these stories come, is enjoyable but light, a list of the things Hem's doing and the people he's spent time with. The second half takes a darker turn, and spends most of its time delving into Hemingway's relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby. Like virtually all the writers in A Moveable Feast, Fitzgerald was insecure, even, at one point, asking Hemingway to check his prostate to ensure that all was well. Hemingway obliged, which finally gives credence to my theory that real men administer prostate exams. For all interested parties: the prostate was fine, and I think Fitzgerald was just showing off.

Once the humorous stories end, though, Fitzgerald's tale takes a sad turn, as pressure to follow up Gatsby and even greater pressure at home keeping Zelda, his psychologically-disturbed and insanely-jealous wife, happy, drove him further and further into drinking, leading to his premature death at the age of 44. Throughout Fitzgerald's decline, Hemingway's descriptions are matter-of-fact and all the more heartbreaking for that.

Interestingly, A Moveable Feast was published posthumously, and Fitzgerald's surviving family recently collaborated with the publishers to release a new edition of Feast with some Fitzgerald's less flattering biographical bits excised. I say they're making a mistake. Nothing humanizes a man like his weaknesses, and A Moveable Feast is a tribute to Paris, to writing, to love, and to friendship.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway's first major novel, focuses on a group of American expatriates living in Paris, and their subsequent trip together to Pamplona, Spain for fishing and bullfighting during the Running of the Bulls. The narrator, Jake Barnes, is a veteran of World War I whose war injuries have left him impotent and harboring an unfulfillable desire for Brett Ashley, an insecure, promiscuous woman. Other characters in include Michael Campbell, Brett's Scottish veteran fiancée, Robert Cohn, a friendly but disliked Jew who can't get over the weekend he once spent with Brett, and Bill Gorton, the group's most lighthearted member and also the only one with no obvious interest in Brett. The tension between the characters comes to a head when Brett begins an affair with a young Spanish matador, and chaos ensues, or as close as the story ever gets to chaos.

The Sun Also Rises is often cited as the greatest novel ever written about the “Lost Generation”, those whose lives were wrecked by World War I. The characters that inhabit the novel are all aimless or incapable of achieving the aims they do have. Jake's emasculating war injury serves as a symbol for his own feelings of powerlessness to control even his own life, let alone to better himself. Robert Cohn is incapable of moving on past a conquest in the past, and incapable of gaining the respect of the others since he didn't serve in the war in any capacity. And so on. Brett herself is probably the most complex character and symbol in the work, hailed as a goddess by virtually every mans she meets and eventually uses. In spite of her cavalier attitude toward those she hurts, however, Brett is a sympathetic character, acting more like a junkie who can't live without a new fix than a seductress who enjoys toying with men's hearts.

There are interesting ideas and excellent scenes in The Sun Also Rises, such as the scene Robert Cohn's assault and subsequent attempt at reconciliation with Jake, or the closing lines, which embody the crushing sadness of the novel in seven words. Ultimately though, I'm not sure The Sun Also Rises was a great fit for me. Aside from Jake and sometimes Michael, none of the characters was particularly sympathetic and, although their constant drinking and talking about nothing at all did a good job of demonstrating how little joy they received from life, it provoked more sympathy than interest from me. I enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea more, but I'm definitely still interested in checking out more Hemingway.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

"I kissed her and saw that her eyes were shut. I kissed both her shut eyes. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backwards as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with other officers."

A Farewell to Arms seems to follow Hemingway's typical format for both novels and short stories. All the essential components are present with his stoical and somewhat autobiographical man along with an unreasonable woman struggling to satisfy these same unemotional demands.

Many critics feel that it lacks the emotional punch of its predecessor, Hello to Legs, but I think it was actually better, possibly because arms are easier to relate to than legs. Have you ever known anyone without arms? How about without legs? I rest my case.

Parts of the book do strain credibility. For example, it's hard to believe that a nurse with all four appendages intact would fall for a double-amputee, but when we learn later in the book about (SPOILER) her lack of a pelvis, it explains both her attraction and Hemingway's description of her as "an amorphous blob, beautiful and fragile, a vision of boneless beauty." Hemingway's prose, by the way, is as brief as always, with all of the sentences in the second half being three words long or shorter.

But seriously folks, Hemingway is far too caught up with emotionless undeveloped characters, drinking, women, sex, war, and Americans living in foreign countries. I did think his minimalist style was creative and unique and the frequent dialog told the story well. Obviously Hemingway was obsessed with his own experiences, and although he wrote them simplistically, his attempts to unveil his emotional pain paints a beautiful picture. His story is sad, bitter, and depressing, but it is a story he tells with sincerity.