Why 2011 was Hemingway's Year

Looking back on 2011:

With the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death on July 2nd, the release of Paula McClain's THE PARIS WIFE and Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, 2011 seemed to be the Year of the Comeback.

Why? and Why Now?

Certainly, what's compelling the novelist Paula McClain and the legendary Woody Allen to revive Hemingway has to be more than an opportunity to exploit the anniversaries for publicity or marketing. Sure, it's another round of nostalgia (the central subject of Allen's Midnight in Paris, which may end up his most successful film ever) and it might even be the result of a desire to resurrect the masculine male hero in a culture where the men have become boys - think Owen Wilson in Woody's movie as the sputtering Gil, unable to set his fiancé straight. (I wonder what the current ratio is between men who own a hunting gun vs. men who have Facebook.) But I think it's more than that. In a cinematic atmosphere of explosions, chaos and excess (think Transformers) and an era in literary history in which post-modern flourishes (faux footnotes, every-changing point of view, text manipulation, etc.) grab the attention of critics, Hemingway's revolutionary prose style shows us how great writing can be if a writer remains focused on what is essential, simple and true.

The author of The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and the favorite of high school English departments everywhere (at least in the Chicago suburbs circa 1979) The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway developed a lean, muscular style in which no sentence, no word, no piece of punctuation was superfluous. Look at these lines from For Whom the Bell Tolls, as the hero Robert Jordan lingers at the edge of death:

He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind.

Notice the momentum created by no commas, the power gained from the stripped-down prose. It's simple, it's elegant, and it has, as many critics have noted, muscle. It relies on the essentials of the scene, nothing more.

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (now on DVD) is a movie about nostalgia, about wishing for a more vibrant, intoxicating time. For Allen, as it is for many, it's Paris in the 1920's, a time in which Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso and Degas gathered in cafes, bars and Gertrude Stein's living room to discuss art, life and Fitzgerald's wife Zelda.  Owen Wilson's Gil, suffering writer's block and a shrew of a girlfriend (Rachel MacAdams is usually terrific but boy, is she one-note annoying here), is whisked back to the 1920's where he becomes, to his surprise, a player in Stein's salon. Allen never tells us exactly how Gil time travels but that's a plus -- do we have to have everything explained? Gil wants to stay there until he realizes that wishing yourself back in time prevents you from living in the present. The movie is worth seeing but it's got some problems. Just in case you don't get what Allen is trying to say, he gives Gil a speech in the last act of the movie in which he says, "I have an insight," then goes on to state Allen's theme. Wasn't Woody more nimble with Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors? Oh wait, then there's Bananas, Interiors and Annie Hall? All classics, yes, but I wouldn't call them subtle. When he's not over-explaining, Allen is reminiscing about a time where things, like art and truths, actually mattered. (In the Q & A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast -- a fantastic series of interviews with screenwriters and directors available through iTunes -- Woody Allen said he likes to imagine himself living in great periods of the past until he remembers there was no Novocaine.)

Hemingway even pops up as a character in the film. Played by Corey Stoll (I've never heard of this guy but he makes an impression), Ernest on the screen remains nothing more than a caricature but in a conversation with Gil, he says some interesting things.

HEMINGWAY (to GIL): You liked my book
GIL:  Liked? I loved all of your work.
HEMINGWAY: Yes. It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it's not only noble but brave.

"Brave", "honest", "noble" : qualities not many contemporary characters possess. Recently, bumbling anti-heroes have gotten all the starring roles. (Walter in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom to name one fascinating, but flawed individual.) As complicated as Hemingway was, his work did not suffer from a lack of strong central figures.

Nancy McClain, the author of this year's The Paris Wife, presents a convincing 3-dimensional portrait of Hemingway from his early Chicago days through Paris and Spain and in a heartbreaking epilogue, his final days in Ketchum, Idaho. Through the voice of Hadley, his first wife, we see Hemingway as a young artist developing his craft. The city of Paris here is as inspirational and as creatively fertile as Woody Allen's City of Lights but it's also cruel and shallow and dangerous to Hadley and Ernest's relationship. There's no nostalgia here, just two people deeply in love who can't survive the dangerous allure and excess of an artist's European education.

McClain, like others, explores Hemingway's connection to the truth. When things are still good in Paris with Hemingway writing "My Old Man" and "Up in Michigan," stories that will later be collected in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), Hemingway says, " I want to write one true sentence.... If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I'll be satisfied." Hadley, who nurtures the artist and gives birth to his first son Bumby, is written to be a model of simplicity, and the success of their early relationship is evidence of Hemingway's commitment to the truth. Here's the voice of Hadley:

I wore what was easiest and required the least maintenance, long wool skirts and shapeless sweaters and wool cloche hats. Ernest didn't seem to mind. If anything, he thought highly costumed women were ridiculous. It was part of the way he favored everything simple—good, straightforward food, rust and almost chewy wine, peasant people with uncomplicated values and language.

Later, when Hadley flees Paris, Hemingway writes a letter of goodbye:

You are everything good and straight and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you've carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You've changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am.

Hemingway's art may have continued to mine the truth but in his life, the artist became lost in the myth that hardened around him. And it seems to me these current efforts to revive the figure of Hemingway are attempts to see behind the shell of nostalgia and caricature. More than a creative coincidence, these appearances of the young Hemingway in two popular works remind us that as as complicated as the man was, his art did not suffer from bloated prose and literary embellishment covering for shallow ideas.

Note: In another bit of Hemingway nostalgia: a new film, HEMINGWAY AND GELLHORN, will premiere on HBO later this year, starring Clive Owen as Papa and Nicole Kidman as Wife #3 (of 4).