The Certainty of a Young Hemingway

At some point in the years after I graduated college, I realized on my own, that I had completely missed the point of school from about the fifth grade on. 

I spent much of my high school years protesting against the unfairness of standardized testing. This included various acts of self-harmful civil disobedience that included, but were not limited to, purposely sabotaging the results of my SAT exams. This, and other facts of my life, including a family indifference toward higher education, ensured my college options were limited.

When I got to college my only goal, for the entire four years, was to complete my courses as quickly as possible so I could go out into the world and get a job. If you were to find the book covers of my textbooks from back then, or some of my old note books, you would find doodles and hand drawn charts mapping the number of credits I had achieved and how many semesters (including short intersession courses) I needed to graduate.

I knew what I wanted to do when I got out of school and I viewed getting a degree as nothing more than a required credential. I did not know, and there was no one around to tell me, that the point of school, especially college, was to learn as much as possible, explore new ideas, look into subjects that might not normally be accessible to me, and make myself a more well-rounded person. I paid my way through school by working twenty to thirty hours a week at a part time job at Sears. As I consider what I got for my money, I realize I short-changed myself, because I settled for learning the basics of my chosen trade, got a diploma, and moved on. All the other benefits of a four year college education - including a social life - I left on the table. I was very focused. Too focused.

Ten or so years after graduating, I came to the realization about just how much I had skipped. I was missing a lot of the basic building block information that everyone should have as a foundation for the big moments we all face in life. You can learn a lot from literature, philosophy and the arts, because - as it turns out - any problem or challenge you face today has been similarly faced by many others over time. History does not begin when you are born. Humankind has not changed much over thousands of years. If you learn from those who have come before, you can save yourself considerable anguish, trial and error.

I enrolled in the university of the bookstore. I began to read everything I could about politics, because it was a subject I had become interested in, and I began to read as much classic literature as possible. And then I began to read the collected works of well-known authors. I would start with the first book and read through everything that author had published before moving onto the next one. If one author I was reading referenced another, I would take that mention as a fork in the road and follow the first author’s direction.

Early in this period of my life, I got to the works of Ernest Hemingway. Over a period of a year or so, I read all his writing and most of the biographies of his life. Although I am sure I did not understand the subtlety of his writing I did feel a connection to it, because it was grounded in journalism both in terms of style and subject matter. War. Travel. Politics. Foreign affairs, of various kinds. I could do without all the bullfighting, but I could appreciate it as a means of explaining the importance of being open to other cultures and other ways of life.

There were times when the simplicity of Hemingway’s writing struck home and knocked me back. I memorized a few passages, but as the years have gone by, their utility has faded and I can no longer recall them on demand.

There is one I return to occasionally for inspiration. It is probably an example of what Hemingway experts would call “bad Hemingway,” but when I first read it - it stopped me. I could not believe what Hemingway had achieved in one long sentence. The picture he painted and how he did it. I could imagine him standing at this desk and saying to the world; “watch this.”

It is a sentence from the posthumously published, three part book, Islands in the Stream. It is highlighted in faded orange, on page twelve of my dogged-eared edition. The main character, Thomas Hudson, is on Bimini. He has just taken a shower and is heading out for the morning:

He put on a clean pair of shorts and an old Basque shirt and moccasins and went out the door and down the slope and through the gate in the picket fence onto the white glare of the sun-bleached coral of the King’s Highway.

Reading that paragraph long sentence, I believe was the first time in my life I experienced a scene described by a writer as if I was in it. As if I was watching from the house across the street. I noted the lack of punctuation. I noted how it moved me from the front door, across the front yard, through the gate and onto the road. I noted how Hemingway chose to describe certain details and leave out others that he felt the reader could deduce, based on the clues he did provide. From Hemingway’s description, for instance, I believe I know the approximate temperature, the humidity, where the sun is in the sky, and how Hudson’s shorts and shirt must have felt on his skin. Skin that is tanned by the sun and weathered by age as skin often is in Hemingway stories.

The Hemingway collection of books and short stories still rests in the upper left hand corner of the bookshelf in my dining room, but I very rarely go back to it, except to occasionally re-read the Old Man and the Sea, because it is short and inspirational. But it was with a sense of excitement that I looked forward to learning something more about Hemingway when I heard of the documentary series currently running on PBS. I marked the premiere date on my calendar and put “watch Hemingway doc” on my daily to do list for three consecutive days in early April.

I am not going to bore you with what I thought of the documentary except to say I thought it was good. It follows the many paths of Hemingway’s life both in linear fashion and in parallel, and the parallels are important, because it is in the parallels where we find the mistakes and the flaws and the themes in all our lives. 

But here is what stood out for me. 

I am often struck by how young they are when artists produce their greatest work. Some get better with age, or produce quality work throughout their lives, but many - especially writers and musicians - seem to burst into the world with piercing insight, change the world, and then fade. At times this is a function of commerce. At other times it is a function of art.

When contemplating why Truman Capote, despite all his talent, wrote only one major book in his career, it was observed that for some artists, it takes everything they have to produce one great work, and when they are done there is nothing left to do it again.

Hemingway’s career was one of waves from the viewpoint of his critics. His early works were praised. Toward the middle, the critics said he fell short, and questioned whether he was ever any good at all. Toward the end he rallied and after he left, some of the work published after his death, was viewed as unfortunate.

Watching the PBS documentary, I was struck by how Hemingway, in his mid-twenties was able to so accurately describe so much of life. To point out the fundamental truths of life, war, love, loss, and pain and suffering in different contexts and different forms. How is it that such a young person can achieve such clarity when most can spend their entire lives failing to learn those same lessons? What separates the talent to see from the rest of us?

Part of it must be the combination of the innocence and certitude of youth. A young artist has the courage to reach conclusions based on very little evidence. To fall in love once and be so bold as to think he understands love. To see one battle and believe he understands all war. To witness the hardship of another and claim to have experienced it himself. The rest of us wait for confirmation. It is the waiting, or maybe it is the hoping, that your worst assumptions about the human condition will be proven wrong, that allows you to reach old age without ever achieving the certainty of a young Hemingway, or the courage to claim understanding, or the confidence to write it down and share it with the world as if your experience is the universal truth.

As I trip through the decades of my life, I stop often to wonder how it is I make the same mistakes over and over. Perhaps not exactly the same mistakes, but close enough to those that came before that I should have known better. Why do we not learn our lessons? Why don’t we write down everything we are certain we know at age twenty-six - like Hemingway - and live our lives accordingly? Because even the most pessimistic among us is optimistic at the core. Because no matter how many times we disappoint ourselves, or are disappointed by someone else, there is always an opportunity to try again, to make things right, to prove fate wrong, to show history that not every story ends the same way.

Hemingway’s own story ended in the tragedy of suicide by shotgun. Many, including his parents, his critics, and his rivals; might have seen such an end as the inevitable result of a life lived testing boundaries, seeking the far edges of human experience, and the dangers of fame. Hemingway’s fame came at a point in history when being famous meant you were known to the entire world, not a few thousand followers.

Contemplating the question of how artists hold such clear views on the truths of life, at a young age, I conclude for myself, that Hemingway’s work is not the product of complete understanding. It is only the work of someone trying to understand. He wrote, in great detail, what he thought he knew at the time. In his twenties, thirties, forties, and on to his death. But like the rest of us, he was always seeking confirmation. The next story. The next body of evidence. Looking for the proof that would allow him to write the one true sentence. Sometimes the truth he found manages to match our own. Whether any artist manages this feat is as accidental as it is deliberate.