{"id":10456,"date":"2017-11-13T18:31:34","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T18:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=10456"},"modified":"2017-11-13T18:31:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T18:31:34","slug":"how-a-young-ernest-hemingway-dealt-with-his-first-taste-of-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-a-young-ernest-hemingway-dealt-with-his-first-taste-of-fame\/","title":{"rendered":"How a young Ernest Hemingway dealt with his first taste of fame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Verna Kale<\/a>, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When he published \u201cThe Sun Also Rises<\/a>\u201d in 1926, Ernest Hemingway was well-known among the expatriate literati of Paris and to cosmopolitan literary circles in New York and Chicago. But it was \u201cA Farewell to Arms<\/a>,\u201d published in October 1929, that made him a celebrity. <\/p>\n

With this newfound fame, Hemingway learned, came fan mail. Lots of it. And he wasn\u2019t really sure how to deal with the attention. <\/p>\n

At the Hemingway Letters Project<\/a>, I\u2019ve had the privilege of working with Hemingway\u2019s approximately 6,000 outgoing letters. The latest edition, \u201cThe Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 4 (1929-1931)<\/a>\u201d \u2013 edited by Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel \u2013 brings to light 430 annotated letters, 85 percent of which will be published for the first time. They offer a glimpse at how Hemingway handled his growing celebrity, shedding new light on the author\u2019s influences and his relationships with other writers. <\/p>\n

Mutual admiration<\/h2>\n

The success of \u201cA Farewell to Arms\u201d surprised even Hemingway\u2019s own publisher. Robert W. Trogdon, a Hemingway scholar and member of the Letters Project\u2019s editorial team, traces the author\u2019s relationship with Scribner\u2019s<\/a> and notes that while it ordered an initial printing of over 31,000 copies \u2013 six times as many as the first printing of \u201cThe Sun Also Rises\u201d \u2013 the publisher still underestimated the demand for the book. <\/p>\n

Additional print runs brought the total edition to over 101,000 copies before the year was out \u2013 and that was after the devastating 1929 stock market crash. <\/p>\n

In response to the many fan letters he received, Hemingway was typically gracious. Sometimes he offered writerly advice, and even went so far as to send \u2013 upon request and at his own expense \u2013 several of his books to a prisoner at St. Quentin.<\/p>\n

At the same time, writing to novelist Hugh Walpole<\/a> in December 1929, Hemingway lamented the amount of effort \u2013 and postage \u2013 required to answer all those letters:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhen \u2018The Sun Also Rises\u2019 came out there were only letters from a few old ladies who wanted to make a home for me and said my disability would be no drawback and drunks who claimed we had met places. \u2018Men Without Women\u2019 brought no letters at all. What are you supposed to do when you really start to get letters?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Among the fan mail he received was a letter from David Garnett<\/a>, an English novelist from a literary family with connections to the Bloomsbury Group<\/a>, a network of writers, artists and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf. <\/p>\n

Though we don\u2019t have Garnett\u2019s letter to Hemingway, Garnett appears to have predicted, rightly, that \u201cA Farewell to Arms\u201d would be more than a fleeting success. <\/p>\n

\u201cI hope to god what you say about the book will be true,\u201d Hemingway replies, \u201cthough how we are to know whether they last I don\u2019t know \u2013 But anyway you were fine to say it would.\u201d <\/p>\n

He then goes on to praise Garnett\u2019s 1925 novel, \u201cThe Sailor\u2019s Return\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026all I did was to go around wishing to god I could have written it. It is still the only book I would like to have written of all the books since our father\u2019s and mother\u2019s times.\u201d (Garnett was seven years older than Hemingway; Hemingway greatly admired the translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy by Constance Garnett, David\u2019s mother.)<\/p>\n

An overlooked influence<\/h2>\n

Hemingway\u2019s response to Garnett \u2013 written the same day as his letter to Walpole \u2013 is notable for several reasons. <\/p>\n

First, it complicates the popular portrait of Hemingway as an antagonist to other writers. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a reputation that\u2019s not entirely undeserved \u2013 after all, one of Hemingway\u2019s earliest publications was a tribute to Joseph Conrad in which Hemingway expressed a desire to run T.S. Eliot through a sausage grinder. \u201cThe Torrents of Spring<\/a>\u201d (1926), his first published novel, was a parody of his own mentors, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein and \u201call the rest of the pretensious [sic] faking bastards,\u201d as he put it in a 1925 letter<\/a> to Ezra Pound.<\/p>\n

But in the letter to Garnett we see another side of Hemingway: an avid reader overcome with boyish excitement. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou have meant very much to me as a writer,\u201d he declares, \u201cand now that you have written me that letter I should feel very fine \u2013 But instead all that happens is I don\u2019t believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter also suggests that Garnett has been overlooked as one of Hemingway\u2019s influences.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why Hemingway liked \u201cThe Sailor\u2019s Return\u201d (so well, it appears, that he checked it out from Sylvia Beach\u2019s Shakespeare & Co. lending library and never returned it<\/a>). <\/p>\n

A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune<\/a> praised Garnett\u2019s \u201csimple but extremely lucid English\u201d and his \u201cpower of making fiction appear to be fact,\u201d qualities that are the hallmark of Hemingway\u2019s own distinctive style. The book also has a certain understated wit \u2013 as do<\/a> \u201cThe Sun Also Rises\u201d and \u201cA Farewell to Arms.\u201d <\/p>\n

Garnett\u2019s book would have appealed to Hemingway on a personal level as well. Though it\u2019s set entirely in England, the portrait of Africa that exists in the background is the same sort of exotic wilderness that captured the imagination of Hemingway the boy and that Hemingway the young man still longed explore. <\/p>\n

Imagining Africa<\/h2>\n

But Hemingway\u2019s praise of Garnett leads to other, unsettling questions. <\/p>\n

From its frontispiece to its devastating conclusion, Garnett\u2019s book relies on racial stereotypes of an exoticized, infantilized Other. Its main character, an African woman, brought to England by her white husband, is meant to command the reader\u2019s sympathy \u2013 indeed, the choice she makes in the end, to send her mixed-race child back to his African family, hearkens to an earlier era of sentimental literature and decries the parochial prejudices of English society. <\/p>\n

However, that message is drowned out by the narrator\u2019s assumptions about inherent differences between the races. Garnett\u2019s biographer Sarah Knights suggests<\/a> that Garnett was \u201cneither susceptible to casual racism nor prone to imperialist arrogance,\u201d yet Garnett\u2019s 1933 introduction to the Cape edition of Hemingway\u2019s \u201cThe Torrents of Spring\u201d claims \u201cit is the privilege of civilized town-dwellers to sentimentalize primitive peoples.\u201d In \u201cThe Torrents of Spring<\/a>,\u201d Hemingway mocked the primitivism of Sherwood Anderson<\/a> (cringe-worthy even by 1925 standards), but as Garnett\u2019s comment indicates, Hemingway imitated Anderson\u2019s reliance on racial stereotypes as much as he criticized it.<\/p>\n

What, then, can we glean about Hemingway\u2019s views on race from his exuberant praise of \u201cThe Sailor\u2019s Return\u201d? Hemingway had a lifelong fascination with Africa, and his letters show that in 1929 he was already making plans for an African safari. He would take the trip in 1933 and publish his nonfiction memoir, \u201cGreen Hills of Africa,\u201d in 1935. The work is experimental and modernistic, but the local people are secondary to Hemingway\u2019s descriptions of \u201ccountry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Late in life, however, Hemingway\u2019s views on Africa would shift, and his second safari, in 1953-4, brought what scholar of American literature and African diaspora studies Nghana tamu Lewis<\/a> describes<\/a> as \u201ca crisis of consciousness\u201d that \u201cengendered a new commitment to understanding African peoples\u2019 struggles against oppression as part, rather than in isolation, of changing ecological conditions.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Hemingway went to Africa in 1934.<\/span>
\n John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But back in 1929, when Hemingway was wondering what to do with an ever-growing pile of mail, that trip \u2013 along with another world war, a Nobel Prize and the debilitating effects of his strenuous life<\/a> \u2013 were part of an unknowable future. <\/p>\n

\"TheIn \u201cThe Letters 1929-1931\u201d we see a younger Hemingway, his social conscience yet to mature, trying to figure out his new role as professional author and celebrity.<\/p>\n

Verna Kale<\/a>, Associate Editor, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Assistant Research Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Verna Kale, Pennsylvania State University When he published \u201cThe Sun Also Rises\u201d in 1926, Ernest Hemingway was well-known among the expatriate literati of Paris and to cosmopolitan literary circles in New York and Chicago. But it was \u201cA Farewell to Arms,\u201d published in October 1929, that made him a celebrity. With this newfound fame, Hemingway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":10457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[174,2944,206,2130,3507,2143,3505,1740,3506,498,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10458,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10456\/revisions\/10458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}