When Bobby Warren, friend and co-worker, returned from his annual pilgrimage to Boston, I knew there would be stories. What I did not know was he would ask me to do a guest blog post for his better half’s popular blog based upon their visit to the Ernest Hemingway exhibit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. He was aware I was a fan, but prodded and challenged me to explain… why?
Initially, my mind swirled. I knew I wanted to write the definitive Hemingway piece. It had to live up to the legend himself.
“Papa,” for those who do not know me, is one of my two favorite writers, a man whose work I am constantly studying and in awe of and a man of action I aspire to be. Stories recounting his exploits, biographical works, and photographs make up one of the handful of things these days I stop what I am doing just to consume.
The easy thing for me to do is to sit here and recount his famous works. Classics such as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea are some of the very few reads I dive back into every other year or so. Yet, anything with his name attached are atop my reading list.
He is a staple of American literature for his tight, and to the point, prose. Hemingway penned stories out of world events and grand themes of love, death, courage and more.
He was also a character in his own right.
Writers are notably more widely known and read once they have passed; Hemingway was a giant amongst men during his lifetime. He was a storyteller himself; a larger-than-life figure who is still synonymous with all things masculine to this day.
He loved bullfighting, boxing, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing. He constantly sought the next adventure and cheated death on more than one occasion.
But perhaps most important for me as a newspaperman (remembering Hemingway himself started out in the industry, too), his influence is constant.
Hemingway wrote in an era where the norm was to write novels in periodicals and for authors to be paid by the word. He managed to flip the script, though, and instead focused on writing novels and stories that said so much more than what was merely on the page. Everyone could read his stories (he never sought the big, fancy word when a simple one would do) that were more complex and layered than scholarly works.
Papa is a character from a bygone age, a time when the world was undergoing unprecedented change in the midst of an all-time event spanning the globe. He managed to capture the angst, the pain, and the hope from those events in ways anyone could understand and through this created the “iceberg” theory on writing. Hemingway believed the truest stories were borne of a writer penetrating the deepest crevices of his mind and experiences to create … people. And ones everyone throughout the ages knew to some extent.
He was the first “blue-collar writer,” shunning the type of writer who merely wanted to show how educated he was, or knew, or attempted to spout ideology through caricatures.
Hemingway had the distinct talent of taking complex world events and dwindle them down to tell stories on a personal level; to illustrate how individuals matriculated through them with their own issues and come out the other side with their own motivations, and worked to find the right word and sentence to get the reader there.
These are ideals I try to bring into my writing for The Daily Record, and hopefully beyond.
He put in the work — and always touted how hard writing actually is, even though he made it look easy — and Hemingway has stood the test of time … not to mention influenced me personally and professionally every day since I first delved into his works more than a decade ago.
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.” — From Death in the Afternoon.
“A writer who appreciates the serious of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” — From Death in the Afternoon.
