One thing leads to another. I recently went on a Hemingway kick, rereading books I hadn’t opened since college. I always liked Hemingway’s terse style, rarely a wasted word. I started with For Whom the Bell Tollsset in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a rousing war story with typical early Hemingway melancholy over unattainable love. And the death of the hero, to boot. Thoughts of that war led me to pick up George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, about his year in the Spanish trenches in 1937. I went back to Homage because Orwell is one of my favorite writers and because I wrote a paper on that war for a college history class. The marginal notes by my twenty-year-old self range from almost-on-the mark to embarrassing. I giggled when I remembered my earnest efforts to keep straight all the political acronyms – P.O.U.M., P.S.O.C, C.N.T., U.G.T. But Orwell’s clarity as a writer kept me on track. And his ability to picture both the boredom of the trenches and the political backstabbing in Barcelona still enthralls me.
That led to re-reading a collection of Orwell’s essays. Clarity, clarity, clarity. Little wonder this book was used in a freshman rhetoric class. (AI will ensure this never happens again!) I especially liked his “Inside the Whale,” a view of fiction in the last century, up to 1940. Orwell’s praise of Henry Miller led me to re-read Tropic of Cancer. Oh, what an exercise in diamonds and chaff! Where Hemingway’s Paris of the Twenties was about eating, drinking, and writing, Miller in Thirties Paris throws whoring into the mix. With Miller, I should add “starving” to the list. Whereas Hemingway nearly always had money to frequent Paris cafés, Miller, as he tells it, was always hitting up friends, acquaintances, even people he didn’t know, for a meal. He says he was often starving, like Jacques Prévert’s Parisian drifter would come to experience.
it’s terrible
the faint sound
of a hardboiled egg cracked on a tin counter
it’s terrible this noise
when it stirs in the memory of a man who is hungry
Prévert wrote this in the Forties during the Nazi occupation. Things would go further downhill after Miller returned to America. But in Tropic Miller was always able to turn his meal-cadging into scenes of wonderful character studies (of men anyway.) His portrait of the pompous East Indian fellow who squirreled away crusts of bread, often moldy, is Orwellian clear. The anecdote of the bidet is pure Rabelais whom Miller revered. Interspersed with these sharp observations are Miller’s Whitmanesque “barbaric yawps.” Orwell praised Miller’s purple passages, but they only made my eyes cross. Fortunately, my Grove Press paperback edition of Tropic was so yellowed with age that I was spared reading my ancient marginal notes.
But I still love Orwell. Even so, I can’t pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t need any more dystopia these days.
I should add that my Hemingway binge began with The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. More melancholy—it’s the temper of the times. One of my favorite Hemingway stories is “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I like it so much that I wrote a short story, “The Ongoing Life of Margot Macomber,” which picks up where the Hemingway ends, after Margot “accidentally” shoots her husband, Francis, while they are on Safari in Kenya. “Ongoing Life” has been published in History Through Fiction.
My Hemingway journey continued with a book I hadn’t read before–To Have and Have Not. My only familiarity was with the Bogart-Bacall movie. It’s the one where Lauren Bacall says, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Melts me every time. The only similarity between the novel and the movie is that both have a fishing boat and Tommy guns. Both are good adventure yarns. Then there’s The Old Man and the Sea. Another fishing boat tale. Fortunately, as far as I’m concerned, it was short.
After Hemingway, why not Fitzgerald? I’d read The Great Gatsby twice before and never liked it. This time, I took a running start with This Side of Paradise. Turned out to be a good way to get into Fitzgerald’s head. He had matured since Paradise, so this time, I really liked Gatsby. Third time’s a charm.
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Gary Carr is a writer of plays and short fiction. His work has appeared in Big Pagoda, SFist, The New Fillmore, Lightwood, Callboard, The Metaworker, and The Journal of Irreproducible Results. His “The Ongoing Life of Margo Macomber” appeared in History Through Fiction magazine. His collection of short fiction, The Girl Who Founded Nebraska, was published by EXIT Press (San Francisco.) His book on one of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten,” was published by UMI Press (Ann Arbor.) Plays include Bocque’s Blues, Jenny Gets Her Wheels On, about a wheelchair-bound stand-up comic, and Phyllis Wheatley, The Poet Who Wrote Her Way Out of Slavery. His new book of short stories, Furies’ Daughters: Four Feisty Women has recently been published by Lightwood Press. He holds a Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas at Austin. In San Francisco, he owned a publicity firm that specialized in arts and entertainment. He now lives in North Texas.
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