Books, Arts & Manners: Hemingway Reconsidered

Time is bearing down on the quartercentury mark of the death by suicide (on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho) of Ernest Hemingway. It is into time itself that Hemingway’s reputation is receding, almost at the same pace at which some of his more dismissive critics have consigned him to a dead and irrelevant past. We therefore needn’t wait in any formal sense for the 25th anniversary of his tragic death to attempt an updated evaluation of Hemingway’s place in our literature.

It is without any evasion whatsoever that we can all agree on the Hemingway of the short stories—they are there forever, or at least for as long as the literate tradition survives among steadily dwindling numbers of readers in this non-linear-minded age. Incidentally, in my own view, there has never been a successful movie made from any of the Hemingway literature, long or short, for the basic reason that the moviemakers have not yet realized that style, Hemingway’s raison d’etre, can be suggested only by producing similar clarities of the photographer’s art. There is thus the paradox that though Hemingway’s style is clearly cinematic, the cinema itself has failed to catch in its own art-making any similitude of his language.

TM

About the Author

Thomas P. McDonnell

Featured Tags

Time is bearing down on the quartercentury mark of the death by suicide (on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho) of Ernest Hemingway. It is into time itself that Hemingway’s reputation is receding, almost at the same pace at which some of his more dismissive critics have consigned him to a dead and irrelevant past. We therefore needn’t wait in any formal sense for the 25th anniversary of his tragic death to attempt an updated evaluation of Hemingway’s place in our literature.

It is without any evasion whatsoever that we can all agree on the Hemingway of the short stories—they are there forever, or at least for as long as the literate tradition survives among steadily dwindling numbers of readers in this non-linear-minded age. Incidentally, in my own view, there has never been a successful movie made from any of the Hemingway literature, long or short, for the basic reason that the moviemakers have not yet realized that style, Hemingway’s raison d’etre, can be suggested only by producing similar clarities of the photographer’s art. There is thus the paradox that though Hemingway’s style is clearly cinematic, the cinema itself has failed to catch in its own art-making any similitude of his language.