The preface of Hemingway’s book is just such a communication. From this odd preface, we have to wonder, who really was Hemingway’s audience? Was this a journal, a memoir, an autobiography, a novel, or what? The preface makes it somewhat unclear. I asked my students this question and we discussed this half-page preface for nearly an hour, which utterly confused them. What was this odd American professor doing? Why are we spending so much time on something that doesn’t matter? This is not paranoia, for they later told me that this is what they were thinking, and saying.
But, what is the importance of a preface? Consider also that this was the last thing that Hemingway wrote before committing suicide and never saw it published. And yet, he felt the need to write a preface to somebody. I don’t think that it is a stretch of reality to suggest that Hemingway was well into his plans for suicide at this point and, in fact, no one was overly surprised when he actually carried it out. Having won the Nobel Prize for literature a few years before for The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway sunk into an alcoholic downward spiral with multiple health problems and a fourth failed marriage. But, before checking out, he gave us this unassuming book.
Hemingway is also another author who people tend to take or leave. Too journalistic. Too stilted. Too arrogant. Too full of bullshit. Too “fill-in-the-blank.” The reaction to my announcement that this would be our first author to read did not exactly bring down the house in thunderous applause. Hemingway’s reputation as such is international. But, I am also one who is known to put Aristotle and Allan Bloom on a reading list just to get a reaction, so I proceeded as planned. We began with Hemingway, and we began with the preface.
In the preface, Hemingway speaks to you, the reader. He says about the stories in the book that “[s]ome were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more.” As you will see when reading, Hemingway relates stories about meeting such people as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Wyndam Lewis, Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds. And, in fact, much has been written about some of the meetings and relationships and they inevitably fill a large portion of survey courses of modernism, creating the paradox of the idea of modernism killing the individual, but from modernism, we have such fascinating individuals who still hold our attention with their adventures in Paris.
We see Hemingway move from one vignette to another, sometimes with connections, more often not. We see the subtle evolution of Hemingway the unknown upstart fresh from War World One to Hemingway the writer who moves among the moveable feast as a regular player. We see relationships rise and fall as in the case of Miss Stein and Hadley, Hemingway’s first wife as well as the gradual ascent of Hemingway among the “generals” of writing such as Joyce and Pound. Hemingway relates scenes that appear to mean nothing, but in light of scholarship on these writers and the fact that most were dead by this time, these scenes take on a different shade of significance. When Hemingway is asked by Joyce (in the previous scene involving Joyce, Hemingway was only able to look wistfully through a restaurant window watching the Joyce family enjoy one of Joyce’s infamous spending sprees in a fancy dining place) to share a drink, Hemingway notes that Joyce did not drink white wine. As a Joycean, you realize the subtleness of this. Inevitably, Joyce’s habit of only drinking white wine seems to come up and you can’t be in the “club” if you aren’t aware of every idiosyncracy of Joyce before you can read him. Hemingway is aware of this, even in 1960, and reminds us that we were not there. Perhaps we don’t always know as much as we think we do in the academy.
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