Morgan Library exhibition presents an Ernest Hemingway for the twenty-first century

Library of America fans are strongly encouraged to visit the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City for the new exhibition Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars, a revelatory re-examination of a writer whose outsized fame has often threatened to overshadow everything that’s best about his work.

Organized in partnership with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the show is a bonanza of manuscripts and typescripts, first editions, correspondence, and personal mementos. It follows Hemingway from his service as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, where he was badly wounded, to his stint as a war correspondent accompanying Allied troops across France in 1944–45. (Hemingway’s October 1944 dispatch for Collier’s, “How We Came to Paris,” is included in the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II: Volume Two: American Journalism 1944–1946.)

Hemingway’s 1923 passport (detail).
The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

With an emphasis on his Paris years (1921–28) and on the craft of writing, Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars is unmistakably meant to supplant memories of Hemingway’s later public persona—the overbearing “Papa,” who starred in ads for Ballantine Ale and Parker 51 pens and who was invariably photographed in the pages of LIFE and Look with a shotgun or fishing rod in hand.

Instead, the exhibition foregrounds the ambitious young talent with avant-garde leanings who adopted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as his mentors soon after arriving in Paris and who claimed he learned how to write from studying Cezanne paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg. These were the years when he set about forging the deceptively simple prose style that would become an inescapable influence on generations of American writers.

Stein’s advice after reading Hemingway’s work for the first time was “Begin over again and concentrate.” The most illuminating aspect of the Morgan exhibition is how keenly he took those words to heart. Manuscript pages on display reveal a determined self-editor who could cut eight pages from the beginning of the story “Indian Camp” in 1924 and two entire chapters from the opening of The Sun Also Rises two years later. These and the other revisions documented in the exhibit make it clear we can all be grateful Hemingway made the choices he did. (Another revelation: the author had to fight to convince his squeamish publishers to keep the term “bed pan” in A Farewell to Arms.)

Three Stories & Ten Poems, [Paris]: Contact
Publishing Co., 1923. The Carter Burden Collection of
American Literature, The Morgan Library & Museum,
photography by Graham S. Haber, 2014.

For Hemingway devotees, there will be a special appeal in seeing physical copies of his rare early publications like 1923’s Three Stories & Ten Poems (printed in an edition of 300) and the first, 1924 version of In Our Time (printed in an edition of 170). Meanwhile, many of the other items on display—such as the ticket stubs from bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid, and an encouraging letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald written on ocean liner stationery—are redolent of an old-fashioned expatriate glamour.

Winding down at the close of World War II, the exhibition sidesteps the saga of Hemingway’s later years, when drinking, depression, and a staggering number of medical problems took their toll on both his writing and his psyche. Yet the Morgan’s curator, Declan Kiely, manages to close on a fascinating forward-looking note.

One of the last items on view is a 1945 letter to Hemingway from J. D. Salinger, written when the latter was recovering from what was then euphemistically known as “combat fatigue” in a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremburg, Germany. The two men had met briefly in Paris just after its liberation in 1944, an encounter Salinger recalls as “the only helpful minutes of the whole business.” It’s increasingly a critical commonplace to read The Catcher in the Rye as a kind of sublimated war novel, but the less obvious parallel is between the stark purity of Hemingway’s early stories and the Zen distillations of Salinger’s short fiction, which date from more than a generation later. By drawing that line, the exhibition hints at some tantalizing potential affinities that can enhance our appreciation of both authors and of American writing over a forty-year period.

Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City through January 31, 2016. Visit themorgan.org for complete exhibition information.

Related posts:

• Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises
• Errol Louis on Ernest Hemingway, Westbrook Pegler, and other great “deadline artists”
• Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe

Errol Louis on Ernest Hemingway, Westbrook Pegler, and other great “deadline artists”

Guest blog post by Errol Louis, co-editor with Jesse Angelo and John Avlon of Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns (published last month by Overlook Press)

The opportunity and obligation of the newspaper columnist, Finley Peter Dunne once said, is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Columnists are supposed to be truth-tellers—literary private eyes working for the public good.

But what sets the newspaper column apart is its improvisational nature: the near miracle that stories composed on a daily deadline can resonate with beauty and power decades later.

A long list of literary masters honed their craft writing newspaper columns, including Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Langston Hughes, Damon Runyon, and Mark Twain. Generations of students have pored over works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and For Whom the Bell Tolls, unaware that their authors also tackled the issues of the day—war, crime, sports, politics—in thoughtful, delightful essays that hold their own alongside better-known works.

One example. Here is Hemingway, writing for the Toronto Star in 1921—years before he published his first short-story collection—displaying the punchy trademark style so many writers later sought to imitate:

Anthony d’Andrea, pale and spectacled, defeated candidate for alderman of the 19th ward, Chicago, stepped out of the closed car in front of his residence and, holding an automatic pistol in his hand, backed gingerly up the steps.

Reaching back with his left hand to press the door bell, he was blinded by two red jets of flame from the window of the next apartment, heard a terrific roar and felt himself clouted sickeningly in the body with the shock of the slugs from the sawed-off shotgun.

It was the end of the trail that had started with a white-faced boy studying for the priesthood in a little Sicilian town. It was the end of a trail that had wound from the sunlit hills of Sicily across the sea and into the homes of Chicago’s nouveau riche. . . . It is all part of the unfinished story of the gunman’s political war that is raging in Chicago at present.

The column, called “Chicago Gang War,” is as fine a piece of writing as you’re likely to find anywhere, and an intriguing true-to-life precursor to “The Killers,” Hemingway’s celebrated 1927 story about two hit men hunting down a doomed prizefighter in a Chicago suburb.

But it’s remarkably difficult to find “Chicago Gang War” online or in print. The same is true for literally thousands of fantastic works of short nonfiction by great columnists that get published in newspapers, only to vanish forever the next day. Few anthologies of newspaper columns have ever been published, and a great many are now out of print.

Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises

The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
(Viking, 2011)

Author of the just-published The Magician King, Lev Grossman joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry with this appreciation of what Ernest Hemingway accomplished in his first novel—and never quite did as well again:

I’m going to try to do something that is becoming increasingly difficult, which is to praise Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway has already been thoroughly praised, of course, but that's only part of the difficulty. After he was praised he was encrusted with a layer of bad Hemingway imitations, some of which he wrote himself, and then the whole package was thoroughly tarnished by damning allegations against his politics, his attitudes toward women, and his personality, a good many of which are probably quite true. So you can see the problem. 

But if I were to pick a single American author who has influenced me, it would be silly to skip Hemingway, and if I were to pick a single book it would be ridiculous to skip The Sun Also Rises. The discipline of the writing alone is astounding—that’s the kind of thing Hemingway would have said, but it’s absolutely true. Nobody working in English, or at least in American, had seriously attempted to put the lessons of Flaubert into practice before Hemingway. His prose is so unadorned and unshowy it’s practically ego-less—not a thing one usually hears said about Hemingway, but it's true. He’s absolutely determined to get out of the way of what’s going on, to make the verbal membrane between you and the action so thin you can almost touch it, and he does. 

(And yes, I suppose Hemingway's obsessive un-showiness is its own kind of showiness. But nobody’s going to solve that conundrum. Not you, not me, not Flaubert, definitely not Hemingway.) 

This makes The Sun Also Rises sound like some kind of technical exercise. But what I really like about it is that nobody else describes the kinds of moments Hemingway does in that book: the interstitial, throwaway moments that are what life is mostly made of. You could redact all the stuff about bullfighting, and Jake Barnes’s missing penis—which let’s face it is all fine as far as it goes but it gets a little ridiculous—and you'd still be left with one of the most overwhelmingly human books ever written. You’d be left with the pretty prostitute who smiles, showing her unexpectedly bad teeth; and the Spanish peasant who takes a little more than his fair share of the wine; and Mike, husband of the faithless Brett, losing at poker dice and having to admit he can’t pay up; and the fat count twirling the bottles of champagne in the bucket of salted ice, and yanking up his shirt to show off his arrow scars; and Jake promising to be there at five in the morning for the start of a bicycle race, then waking up the next morning after the cyclists have already been on the road for three hours. The heart of the book isn’t bullfighting. It’s people doing their human best to have a decent time of it even as the abyss of sadness and death yawns beneath them, preparing to swallow them. 

Hemingway’s entire oeuvre is veined and marbled with magnificent stuff like this, but I don’t think he ever wrote another book as good as The Sun Also Rises. He never worked that hard or made himself that vulnerable again. But a book like that, any writer would be proud to retire on. Here's one final perfect touch: Wilson-Harris, the Englishman whom Barnes meets on a fishing trip in Spain. He’s an extra, a disposable character who won’t reappear in the book. (If it were me I would have had Jake run into him at the hotel at the end, and they’d have a nice closing moment of bromance, but that’s because I’m not as disciplined a writer as Hemingway.) There aren’t many things harder to express in a novel than pure happiness, but Hemingway shows it to us when Wilson-Harris (the other characters get his name wrong) tries to explain what a splendid time he’s had on his fishing holiday. He can’t do it—he keeps trying and then collapsing into inarticulate babbling. "You don't know what this all means to me," he keeps repeating. And the funny thing is that in spite of everything, we do know. Hemingway knew we would.

Writing in The New York Times, Polly Shulman decided that Grossman’s second novel Codex (2004) belonged “on the shelf of self-referential, bibliophilic page turners like The Name of the Rose, Possession, and A Case of Curiosities, and it’s as entertaining as any of them.” Other readers agreed; it became an international bestseller. Cory Doctorow marveled that The Magicians (2009), the first of a trilogy, “may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I’ve read this century.” Judged a best book of 2009 by The New Yorker, it became a New York Times bestseller. Its sequel, The Magician King, has just been published and Alexander Chee has already hailed it on NPR as a “bravura performance . . . a triumphant sequel, surpassing the original. . . I can’t wait for the next one.” Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Also of interest:

• Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included The Sun Also Rises among Time’s 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present in 2005. See the entire list and read Time’s 1926 review of the novel
• On the Huffington Post Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley lead off Grossman's list of his "favorite cocktails in literature"
• Previous Reader’s Almanac “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, and Emma Straub 

Related LOA works: Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight (includes Hemingway’s “A Paris-to-Strasburg Flight Shows Living Cubist Picture”); Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism 1944-1946 (includes Hemingway’s dispatch “How We Came to Paris: August 1944”)

F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack in Hollywood seventy years ago today

In 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald was in his fourth year working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, although with fewer assignments and less pay. He hoped the novel he was working on, The Love of the Last Tycoon, would revive his literary reputation. Few people were still reading him. His August 1940 royalty statement from Scribner’s reported sales of forty copies of his works (including seven copies of The Great Gatsby and nine of Tender Is the Night) for a total payment of $13.13.

The writer he introduced to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1925 was the current rage. Ernest Hemingway’s latest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, would sell more than 270,000 copies in its first year. Fitzgerald had received a copy inscribed “To Scott with affection and esteem Ernest” and responded with a note on November 8:

Congratulations on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoeifski (sic) with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

Fitzgerald’s notebooks record a different opinion: “a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of Rebecca.” The Love of the Last Tycoon would be quite different:

I want to write scenes that are frightening and inimitable. I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest who as Gertrude Stein said, is bound for the Museums. I am sure that I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.

That same month Fitzgerald received a scare when he had a mild heart attack in Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard. His doctor ordered him to stay in bed. Fitzgerald was then living on the top floor of a three-story walkup. To avoid the stairs, he moved into the ground-floor apartment of his lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

His estranged wife Zelda was then living with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama. Fitzgerald wrote her weekly. His December 13 letter read:

The novel is about three quarters through and I think I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of my time in bed where I write on a wooden desk. . . The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.

As biographer Matthew Bruccoli recounts in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Fitzgerald suffered a dizzy spell following the premiere of a new film he and Graham attended on December 20. Because his physician was coming to see him the next afternoon, Fitzgerald chose not to see a doctor. Reading about the German-Italian pact in the newspapers the next morning, Fitzgerald told Graham that he’d like to cover the war from Europe after he had completed his novel. “Ernest won’t have that field all to himself, then.” Moments later he started from his chair, clutched the mantelpiece and fell to the floor. Graham called the fire department. Fitzgerald was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. of coronary occlusion. He had completed the first draft of five of the projected nine chapters of his new novel. He was forty-four years old.

Also of interest:

• Read more about Fitzgerald’s last days at The Writer’s Almanac
• Read about Fitzgerald’s last dinner party with Nathanael West on December 13, 1940, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Read “The Cut-Glass Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an LOA Story of the Week
• Listen to Garrison Keillor’s tribute to Fitzgerald at the 25th anniversary celebration of The Library of America

Related LOA works: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920–1922

Wallace Stevens: on his birthday enjoy his walk and his words but watch out for his fist

Wallace Stevens worked by day as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company of Connecticut and often composed his poems as he walked to and from work. In 1998 the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens created the Wallace Stevens Walk with thirteen granite markers along the 2.4 miles of his daily regimen. Each slab is inscribed with a stanza from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” one of his best-known poems. Each year on his birthday, October 2, fans of his poetry gather to enjoy the walk. A gala Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash will occur on November 6 this year, with a talk by Stevens biographer Joan Richardson. Connecticut Museum Quest offers a helpful (and sometimes witty) commentary on the walk and where to find each marker.


Photo: Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens

The marker in front of 118 Westerly Terrace (left), Stevens’s home, displays the thirteenth stanza:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.

Winter imagery recurs in Stevens’s poetry and is usually forbidding. Helen Vendler has noted how jarring it is to find among the many comic poems in Harmonium, Stevens’s first book, “The Snow Man,” one of the saddest. It ends with the lines:

For the listener, who listens in the snow
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Vendler remarks the poet’s many contradictions:

Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American (and more faithful to reality). He would swear off one, then swear off the other, but each was a part of his sensibility. It became a matter of conscience to him to be European and American, to relish the sensual world and yet be true to its desolations. . . very few [other poets] possessed Stevens’s intuitive sense of both the intimate and the sublime, articulated in verse of unprecedented invention, phrased in a marked style we now call “Stevensian” (as we would say “Keatsian” or “Yeatsian”).

Stevens annually fled Connecticut winters for the warm, lush climes of Key West. The tropical locale inspired some of his most celebrated poems, most notably “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Littoral, the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar, recently posted about the pivotal influence Key West had on Stevens’s poetry. It also includes a link to an account of one of his most embarrassing moments: his fistfight with Ernest Hemingway as recounted by Hemingway in a letter to Sara Murphy (including the injunction: “don’t tell anybody ... because otherwise I am a bastard to write it.”). Stevens broke his hand on Hemingway’s jaw and apologized a few days later. Six year later, Stevens even recommended Hemingway as one of the speakers for a series of lectures on poetry at Princeton. “Most people don’t think of Hemingway as a poet,” he wrote to a friend, “but obviously he is a poet and I should say, offhand, the most significant of living poets.”

Related LOA works: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose

Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe

Today is the 126th birthday of publishing legend Maxwell Perkins. In a career spanning thirty-six years as an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins discovered and published three of the giants of twentieth-century literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. He inspired a mostly unswerving loyalty in his authors. No editor has ever had more books dedicated to him—68 at the time of his death. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg explains why:

His literary judgment was original and exceedingly astute, and he was famous for his ability to inspire an author to produce the best that was in him or her. More a friend to his authors than a taskmaster, he aided them in every way. He helped them structure their books, if help was needed; thought up titles, invented plots; he served as psychologist, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, money-lender. Few editors before him had done so much work on manuscripts, yet he was always faithful to his credo, “The book belongs to the author.”

Perkins seemed to have known what he wanted from the start. In 1910, after a short stint as a reporter at The New York Times, the 24-year-old Perkins became an advertising manager at Scribner’s, esteemed publisher of the likes of Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, and Henry James. Within five years he moved up to editor; four years later he made his first career-making find. A manuscript, The Romantic Egoist, a first novel by a 22-year-old Princeton grad, arrived on his desk with negative comments from every other reader. But Perkins saw something he liked. He had to cajole F. Scott Fitzgerald into rewriting the manuscript twice before he could persuade Scribner’s to publish it. Perkins’s winning argument, as recorded by Berg, resonates with every editor who has ever pushed passionately for a book: “If we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing,” Perkins reasoned. Fitzgerald would find another publisher, young authors would follow him and, Perkins warned, “Then we might as well go out of business.”

This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920 with advertising citing Fitzgerald as “the youngest writer for whom Scribner’s has ever published a novel.” It became Scriber’s biggest seller of the season, selling almost 35,000 copies in its first seven months. In The Smart Set H. L. Mencken hailed it as “a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft.”

Perkins was right that other young writers would follow. In 1924 Fitzgerald tipped Perkins off to a “young American living in France who wrote for the transatlantic review” and two years later Perkins would publish 27-year-old Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Two years later Perkins would be the only editor in New York to discern in the hundreds upon hundreds of manuscript pages of O Lost the novel Scribner’s would publish as Look Homeward, Angel by 27-year-old Thomas Wolfe.

Many other authors benefited from the Perkins magic. When acid-penned novelist Dawn Powell left Farrar & Rinehart in 1939, working with Perkins led to her first commercially successful novel, A Time To Be Born, perhaps most notorious because its central character is based loosely on playwright-journalist-socialite Claire Booth Luce. Perkins was prescient about Powell’s staying power: when she died in 1965 nearly all of her books were out of print; then in the 1980s and 1990s she enjoyed a lively rediscovery.

In the course of his career Perkins would edit many other authors of renown: Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, Martha Gellhorn, James Jones, Ring Lardner, J. P. Marquand, Alan Paton, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edmund Wilson, and more. Writers who worked with Perkins distinguish his approach from editors who rewrite or excise an author’s work. “He never tells you what to do,” Roger Burlingame explained to Malcolm Cowley for a New Yorker profile of Perkins. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

Perkins is soon due to return to the public eye in a major way: Sean Penn is slated to portray him in a new biopic based on Berg’s biography. And he continues to be the touchstone figure for what an editor can do for an author. Just last week Joshua Wolf Shenk invoked his example in his essay for Slate about the science of creativity.

Related LOA works: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942