What do I do with Hemingway?

“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection – a wound inherent in the nature of life itself – and it is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.” (John Gardner, A Moral Fiction)

They went back after Christmas break, and I was alone again in the deep dark Dutch winter, so I reached for the source, the images that most had thrilled me back at the beginning, images of Paris, the Bohemian life, Hemingway whom I hadn’t read since 1988, when I spent the summer drifting around the Place de la Contrescarpe, parking myself in front of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine and shuddering with the desire to live, experience, read, write, and, most of all be cultured, whatever that was. Periods of great longings are always more attractive in retrospect, and, looking back at the abundance of that summer – an apartment in the 16th and infinite time with absolutely no deadlines, no expectations, I feel some friendliness towards the incomplete and wounded person that I was. I reread The Sun Also Rises as a step backwards in time, hoping to redeem that summer and….

We are all in love with Hemingway, right? Even though it’s a terrible relationship. He is even more deeply wounded than we are, permanently exiled, ludicrous, pretentious, unreliable, self-serving, promiscuous, mean, and narcissistic. But he is the absolute coquette, and we women are jealous, jealous, jealous, of his self-sufficiency, his life of eternal wanderings in and out of cafes and bars, of writing a few “true” paragraphs here and there, of taking the train to Lausanne to cover big events for whatever newspaper, and doing whatever the f**k he wants to just because he is Ernest Hemingway, even BEFORE he is Ernest Hemingway. Like Jack Kerouac, Hemingway represents everything that we want to be but can’t because there just isn’t any attractive female version of the blazingly sexy alcoholic, suicidal maniac whom everyone lusts to be. Like Kerouac, his wound keeps him forever incomplete and on the road, looking for a cure that he will never find, and writing novels about it.

(And where did he get that great job??? “Upstairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s work. At eleven o’clock I went over to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents…” Goes back and goes to lunch with Robert Cohn.Walk up to the Café de la Paix for coffee. Office. At five o’clock meets Brett at the Hotel Crillon. Writes some letters, she doesn’t turn up. Taxi to Café Select. Driver takes him to Rotonde instead. Sees Harvey Stone. Cohn appears. Go to Select, Stone reappears. Jake says let’s go to Lilas. Frances comes. They cross Blvd Montparnasse, sit down in a café. Goes back to flat after listening to Frances complain about Robert. Brett has been there with the Count. They come back in an hour. Drink there; chauffeur comes in with basket of champagne. Go to an excellent restaurant in the Bois, paid for by the Count. Bottle of brandy from 1811. Takes Brett home in the Count’s car. He goes home.)

Like Abelard’s loss, Hemingway’s only makes him more extravagantly virile, more desirable. Jake is like Heath Ledger’s character in Brokeback Mountain. In both cases the figure behind the character – Hemingway and Heath Ledger – is playing a game with the audience. I am so overwhelmingly manly, he jokes, so over-the-top unquestionably a real man, that I can play at not wanting to have sex with women and women will only want me all the more.

It’s all a fake, he’s just pretending to be sad. Early on in the book, he thinks that Brett only wanted what she couldn’t have. “…I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I started to think about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.” It’s just that pleasant nostalgia for those early lost loves that we never really wanted anyway because we were on the way out even as we enjoyed the flurry of feelings that they aroused, but for which we will sigh, irresponsibly, for the rest of our lives, letting new loves know that they can never measure up.

And the bullfighting, my God the bullfighting. Jake is responsible for the still-current masculine conviction that talking about sports is cool but that what women use to bond (shopping, talking about clothes, weight, kids) is somehow ridiculous. Fine Jake, but I wish that someone could tell me how watching anything makes you manly. How is watching a bull get a sword thrust into its muscular shoulder manly? In other words, how does manliness equate with spectating? I had never lingered over those bullfighting passages before but forced myself to do it this time – like eating meat, I think that if you are going to read Hemingway you have a moral obligation to recognize the thing for what it is. They are brilliant passages, each pathetic detail, the bull going crazier and crazier, his eyes rolling, smoke coming out his ears. But the coolness one derives from watching is so infuriatingly tautological: “These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them that I should be an America. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. Here might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a ‘Buen hombre.’”

Is Hemingway speaking our language? Are we all talking back, self-conscious, complicit in his mythmaking? Or is it just a joke? The last few lines where Brett complains that they could have had so much fun and Jake replies that it’s nice to think so makes me think that he is. It’s a great story that we tell ourselves, but we all know that it’s a fake. Like the idea of sitting in a bar until very late at night drinking and smoking. A lovely story but in fact it just feels really bad the next day. It’s sordid, stupid and sodden. And we know and still we do it, we know it and still we love it. Like Brett. Jake tells her:
“Don’t do it.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”
“You ought to stop it.”
“How can I stop it? I can’t stop things. Feel that?”
Her hand was trembling.
“I’m like that all through.”

Me, too.

Oh well, “[u]nder the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

Exile from my own body, II

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?

(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

Well, yes, he is writing about the Civil War. Still, the new Terrence Malick movie, The Tree of Life, gives us permission to understand our pathetic little lives in cosmic terms. So the Civil War as analogue for the struggle of the middle-aged woman for mental and physical equilibrium - maybe it isn't quite so outrageous as it seems. Anyway, we have been borrowing from Walt Whitman to think about female mental anguish since Now Voyager.

Exiled from my own body, afraid to be alone, go to bed, take a shower, remove my shoes, afraid of anything that might force me to touch my own skin that does not respond, to feel dead flesh. Sitting seems to pinch the nerves running down my legs, teasing little tingles in my toes, creating a hypersensitive spot on my ankle, and other horrors. I am afraid to sit. I am afraid to lie down. I am afraid.

These are past pains, the fears of 2011. I have been nutty with pain and fear this past year.

However, this is the New Year. In 2012 I am part of my own body: I am with myself, in myself, integrated with myself. My breath is a bridge, connecting me to myself, connecting me to the universe. My fingers massage the pressure points in my legs, establishing harmony. My body is not an alien thing, but a perfectly tuned instrument that I play with my breath. This is the New Year, this a new world.

This is simply menopause, right? The dizziness, detachment, sense of doom - this is all part of it, right? I am not truly dying, right? No, no, all will be well. This is a new year. A year of getting better.