Teaching Hemingway: so ugly, so beautiful | Mark Ott | TEDxDeerfield

Dr. Ott compares Hemingway's carefully constructed public persona to the careful construction of Hemingway's prose. A true master of the topic, Mark Ott draws connections between Hemingway's style, Cezanne's paintings and the idea that composition applies similarly to painting, writing and life.

Mark Ott is the author of "A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography," co-editor of "Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory: New Perspectives" and "Hemingway in Italy: Twenty-First Century Perspectives." He is also the editor of the “Teaching Ernest Hemingway” series for Kent State University Press and was the co-director of the XVI Biennial Ernest Hemingway Society Conference in Venice in 2014.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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)