something about "The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway"

This collection is divided into three parts; some stories go together like a series. I especially enjoyed the random excerpts, such as "One Reader Writes." Here, Hemingway exhibits the empathy only a writer could capture. 

My favorite Hemingway short story in this collection is "I guess Everything Reminds You of Something." The heaviness of meaning and relevance in this story, which, unsurprisingly, is an easy read, will force any reader to pause.

Note: I read an edition labeled "The Finca Vidia Edition."

something about Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms looks back at a love that fought in World War I. The lovers are Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Here is Fredric beginning his relationship with Catherine:

I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge, you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

This passage stuck with me. Through most of the novel, I wondered if Frederic and Catherine really loved each other—or, at least, whether each loved the other at the same time. I thought that maybe they were lonely and scared and just wanted to love and comfort someone. She seemed to doubt his sincerity, and he seemed to be either keeping his distance or trying to persuade himself she was something more than she was. Then, by the end, their love—which of course is borne of loneliness and fear—becomes painfully real.

Catherine may be crazy, but she is a great and complicated character. She knew all along that their relationship was doomed.

I held her close against me and could feel her heart beating and her lips opened and her head went back against my hand and then she was crying on my shoulder.

"Oh, darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"

What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying. "You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."

And one of my favorite Hemingway passages is this exchange between Catherine and Frederic:

"We won't fight."

"We mustn't. Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us." 

"They won't get us," I said. "Because you're too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave."

"They die of course."  

"But only once." 

"I don't know. Who said that?"  

"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?" 

"Of course. Who said it?" 

"I don't know." 

"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them." 

 

Note:  A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929.

something about "To Have and Have Not" by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, plays out the story of the destruction of Harry Morgan, an everyman fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. Harry, after being stiffed on a much-needed payment for chartering a private fishing cruise, finds himself with little choice but to recoup money through the black market, trafficking people and contraband between Cuba and Florida as opportunities to support his family dry up in the Great Depression Era.

I enjoyed parts of To Have and Have Not, but, most of the time, I was bored. That is probably ignorance, I know.

I did, however, enjoy a movie adaptation, "The Breaking Point," starring John Garfield and Patricia Neal. Ms. Neal, as she always did, stole the show, and the dialog at times was brilliant.

My favorite passage in Hemingway's text comes after a supporting character, American writer and expatriate, Richard Gordon, finds out his wife is cheating on him. Richard goes drinking. Here he is at the bar:

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

Note: I have not seen the other movie adaptations.

something about Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Most critics recognize The Sun Also Rises as Hemingway's best work. Published in 1926, the story follows an American expatriate traveling from Paris through Spain in the company of other American and British expatriates. Literary commentary inevitably refers to how the novel captures the Lost Generation's sense of disillusionment. Sure enough, Book I of this slim novel passes time in Paris, and there we see how unbearable disillusioned people can be, conspicuously bored and uncomedically witty. But after Book I, The Sun Also Rises reveals itself to be a potent, beautifully rich novel. Even the waste and cruelties of Book I become meaningful when recast in the violence at the fiesta.

There are so many wonderful lines. Examples:

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest.

And,

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

And that phrasing is called back later:

The bull gathered himself, then his head went forward and he went over slowly, then all over, suddenly, four feet in the air.

But maybe my favorite part is the chapter in which Jake is drunk in his hotel room, thinking through his views on life. This chapter includes the following:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

This means war

Midway through Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, two young guerrillas named Andres and Primitivo probe American expat Robert Jordan about politics and wealth in the US. Andres asks, "Do you have any big proprietors?" Then, "But there are not great estates that must be broken up?" The narrative goes on with Jordan answering,

"Yes. But there are those who believe that taxes will break them up."
"How?"
Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained  now the income tax and inheritance tax worked. "But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land," he said.
"But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here," Primitivo said.

The Sun Also Rises

Robert Jordan aims to destroy a bridge nested in the hills of Spain. He's fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and for this mission he has embedded himself within a group of cave squatting peasants who casually identify as Communist Republican guerrillas. Jordan's new local comrades are a motley bunch that includes a modestly perfect old man, a couple gypsies, a once-ruthless but now shelled guerrilla hero, their hard boiled matron, and a victimized young beauty Robert takes for a lover. All of them are on his mission now, and to varying degrees each of them knows it will bring death.

Hemingway's protagonist fights the fascists but much of the action in For Whom the Bell Tolls unfolds in Robert's thoughts. It is there a quiet battle burns between cynicism and idealism, drafting in its duration his politics, his humanity, values, lineage, and his identity. The conclusion is appropriately unresolved, situated somewhere between an existentialist's consignment and a young boy's pretending.

Hemingway's pacing can put the reader to work, but this work brings satisfaction when it's done.