Arrogant,
racist,
misogynist,
narcissist,
self-absorbed,
self-centered.
Who's being described in these deeply unflattering terms?
Ernest Hemingway.
Yes, Ernest Hemingway, the most famous American writer.
As an English teacher,
every year I think about, Why do we still teach Hemingway?
I've published three scholarly books on Hemingway,
and I've published, most recently, three books on teaching Hemingway,
on the topics of war, modernism and gender.
And yet every day,
I'm asked, "How can you still be teaching Hemingway?"
Who was Hemingway?
Born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois,
he was brought up in an upper middle-class family
with a physician father and an opera-singer mother.
He pursued fishing, hunting,
journalism, boxing and football.
He enlisted in the Italian Ambulance Corps,
and in 1918, he was the first American wounded on the Italian Front.
He was twice decorated for valor.
He wrote about Paris and Spain in "The Sun Also Rises."
He wrote about the Great War in "A Farewell to Arms."
He wrote the first English-language guidebook to the bullfights
in "Death in the Afternoon."
He wrote about hunting in "Green Hills of Africa,"
and covered the Spanish Civil War and wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
After buying his boat, Pilar, he had four world records in big-game fishing
and wrote "The Old Man and the Sea."
He was married four times and had numerous girlfriends.
He covered the D-Day invasion,
the Battle of the Bulge,
and he died by suicide
after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yet Hemingway comes to us as a conflicted figure,
somebody who performed masculinity
at a time when gender roles were shifting in American culture
and women were taking on a more dominant role
and men felt the need to strengthen their role.
So Hemingway established his reputation
in many ways through the manufacturing of different images.
Here we see Hemingway as the wounded soldier.
He had 54 pieces of shrapnel in his knee.
He looks heroic,
but he was blown up while passing out chocolate and cigarettes.
Here's Hemingway on safari in Africa.
You can now buy kudu horns like that for $20 on eBay.
Here's Hemingway pursuing his passion for big-game fishing on the Gulf Stream.
The meat from that 486-pound marlin
went to waste.
He passionately pursued the bullfights in Spain.
For many, the bullfights are needless cruelty
and not a cultural celebration.
He covered the wars - in Spain, in Italy and in France -
and afterwards suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.
He had many encounters with women and was married four times.
He was not a good father.
And, of course, there was the drinking.
His alcoholism contributed to his manic depression
and perhaps to his suicide.
So, Hemingway learned to perform masculinity.
He created a manufactured image
that told the viewer that he was living life to the fullest;
that he was living an authentic life,
and you, sitting at home, perhaps, were not.
And this image was sold in the media.
Hemingway's face appeared on magazines
that were aimed towards educated audiences,
such as Time and Life.
But more significantly,
Hemingway's image was sold to mass audiences
in these glossy, slick magazines.
For many, he became a representative man,
again, at a time when what it meant to be a man was being contested,
as women were emerging in the work force
and there were transitions in home and in the workplace.
Thus, with all that is so problematic about Hemingway,
why do we still teach him today?
I turn to "A Farewell to Arms," in many ways, as the best example
of why we still teach Hemingway to today's students.
It has the literary themes and the style
to help students best understand Hemingway's world.
For students - right? -
to read Hemingway is a sign of something that is cool, cynical,
perhaps self-destructive -
something that they're attracted to
for reasons they may not quite be able to articulate.
But once they are dropped into the rainy, war-torn landscape of Italy
and understand the troubled world of Frederic and Catherine,
they recognize that a "Farewell to Arms" is a great novel.
What makes it great?
Well, for many of us,
it is because Hemingway incorporates the aesthetic principles of Paul Cezanne
into his aesthetic code.
In 1924, Hemingway first saw Cezanne's paintings
at the salon of Gertrude Stein, in Paris,
at a time when he was forming his own aesthetic philosophy,
when he was trying to decide
what he wanted to do with his own brand of art.
He wrote, "He wanted to write like Cezanne painted.
Cezanne started with all the the tricks.
Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing.
It was hell to do ...
He wanted to write about country
so that it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting.
You had to do it from inside yourself.
There wasn't any trick.
Nobody had ever written about country like that.
He felt almost holy about it.
It was deadly serious.
You could do it if you would fight it out.
If you'd lived right with your eyes."
Cezanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter,
and in his paintings,
he's using short, repetitive, concentrated brushstrokes
to break down the plane of the painting.
It's a lesson that Hemingway was to learn from him.
We could turn first to the opening pages of "A Farewell to Arms."
"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."
Notice the repetition of Hemingway's language:
he's repeating words like Cezanne is using brushstrokes.
We have the word "water" twice,
"dust" three times,
"leaves" four,
"white" twice.
Notice, too, we have things that rise and are raised, fall and are falling.
Hemingway is showing
the interconnectedness of the natural world:
because of the way that the dust rises, the leaves fall early that year -
showing us how the war has disrupted the natural cycles;
nature is damaged by war.
Notice, too, how Hemingway uses motion.
This is part of the trick of Cezanne:
to capture life in motion on a canvas.
We have the soldiers marching,
we have the water flowing,
we have the dust rising,
and we have the leaves falling.
And afterward, everything bare and white.
Hemingway is trying to capture a dominant idea of nature,
to show how everything is elementally connected.
From Cezanne,
Hemingway learned that these short, concentrated brushstrokes - right? -
would just, in the same way, be employed in his writing.
As you look at a Cezanne canvas,
you can see how his brushstrokes give us a house,
perhaps a roof, perhaps a tree
in the same way that Hemingway's words -
dust, leaves, wind -
give us that same sense of motion as we get in a Cezanne canvas.
So, as we think about why we still teach Hemingway's fiction,
we see, with students,
that they embrace Hemingway's realism as their own;
they hear it and it echoes.
As they navigate the cold world of adults
and the treacherous world of teenagers,
they find lessons in Hemingway.
In the words of a legendary English teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy,
Harvard Knowles:
"In giving us stories that root us in our own experiences,
Hemingway shows us not only who we are
but also forces us to consider what we may become.
What greater teacher could we possibly want for our young?"
Bully,
racist,
narcissist,
misogynist, obnoxious and self-centered.
Yes, we have to reconcile the tension
between an image that is so ugly and an art that is so beautiful,
and the role of regressive masculinity in American culture.
Yet Hemingway endures - right? -
his best writing endures because he teaches us lessons
about how to live according to our values
and what it means to be human today.
Thank you.
(Applause)