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Hemingway. The Lost Generation. Lost Generation. Gertrude Stein WWI; propaganda; language untrustworthy Hemingway’s style=iceberg, omission of details and adjectives; deceptively simple Expatriates escape wounds of war through drinking, sex, danger Death = end, nada, inevitable
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Hemingway The Lost Generation
Lost Generation • Gertrude Stein • WWI; propaganda; language untrustworthy • Hemingway’s style=iceberg, omission of details and adjectives; deceptively simple • Expatriates escape wounds of war through drinking, sex, danger • Death = end, nada, inevitable • War = perpetual battle that cannot be won, but surviving is a game of formal moves (code hero)
Colloquial; short, common words, simplicity of diction and sentence structure Writer provides stimuli not answers to readers who must make their own interpretations “Mindless” in some ways like Huck, understatement, over-simplified Hemingway poses with his family in Oak Park 1916 and his favorite English teacher. Prose Style Importance of Syntactical Choices
On Writing • Like Hawthorne writing becomes boring and rehashed: “humans linger and haunt ghostlike the spot of some great event and especially those with darker significance.” • Old Man: Hemingway’s career like Santiago; nothing significant in last 9 years after that; then he wins Pulitzer • Nobel 1954: “powerful self forming mastery of the art of narration”
Tragic vision of Man Man v. fear, himself, death How does man handle death? Physical reaction and courage or retreat into rituals? Theme
Characters • Mindless, over-simplified, no moral resources, react like animals caught in trap, no social commitment or concern for masses, only one’s personal relationship with death • Women = playmates who give pleasure, no intent on man’s part to love or commit to them; dominate men with wealth which is venomous and emasculating
Hemingway’s Women (Clockwise from top left: The nurse he fell in love with in WWI, 1st wife, 2nd wife, 3rd wife, 4th wife)
“In Our Time” • “Give peace in our time, O Lord” because there is no peace in life • Key to all works • Development of Nick Adams through short stories • “Indian Camp” = effect on young boy who is later a badly scarred young man; discussion of suicide (Hem in 1960; father 1928); preoccupation with violence and death • WWI and Nick = physically and psychologically wounded; makes separate peace with enemy; wound intensifies and epitomizes earlier wounds while growing up
“Big Two-Hearted River” = fishing to escape/recover from shell shock “Fathers and Sons” = troubled by thoughts of father’s death “A Way You’ll Never Be” = goes out of his mind For Whom the Bell Tolls = “no man stands alone” Old Man and the Sea = “You lose of course; what counts is how you conduct yourself” The Sun Also Rises = 1st true novel; futility of life; sun rises and goes back to its origin A Farewell to Arms = man is trapped biologically and socially Stories and Novels
Quotes by Hemingway • “On the Star, you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. That’s useful to anyone.” • “I had no more loyal friend than Scott Fitzgerald when he was sober.” • “The world breaks everyone and afterwards 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.”
Quotes by Hemingway cont. • “There is no lonelier man,” he wrote in a discarded draft of his Nobel acceptance speech, “than the writer when he is writing except the suicide. Nor is there any happier, nor more exhausted man when he has written well . . . and he faces another morning when he must do it again.”
Hemingway v. Fitzgerald In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” (Esquire 8/1936), Ernest Hemingway said that "poor Scott Fitzgerald" was "wrecked" by his "romantic awe" of the rich. The comment referred to Fitzgerald’s series, “The Crack-Up” stores, also in Esquire where he talked about his “emotional bankruptcy” and feelings of failure. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were rivals and sometimes friends. In a letter to Hemingway he responded, "Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn't mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse." When Scribners published “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in a collection in 1938, editor Maxwell Perkins insisted that Fitzgerald’s first name be changed from “Scott” to “Julian.”
