5 Nov 2022 | Issue 40
Team Hemingway or Team Fitzgerald? This was a cultural war before social media, vampires, and being woke. If I could be bothered, I'd riff a joke about vampires being woke. There's potential, let me know if you concoct a punchline. It seems Hemingway's currency is fading these days. Once upon a time he was the literary heavyweight, macho mano a mano-ing himself through books about manly things. I'm hoping this signifies a cultural shift, into a world where men can cry.
Some history. Once upon a time this really was a thing, both between them, and the worlds they stood for. See www.quora.com/Who-was-the-greater-novelist-Hemingway-or-Fitzgerald and www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/e9yifl/fitzgerald_vs_hemingway. When I say between them, they actually compared dick sizes. Together. In real life. But as friends. 1
My friend Barbara and I have had a long running debate on team hemingway/fitzgerald. She, somewhat surprisingly to me, has always been #teamhemingway.
If one wanted a badly drawn analogy of today's cancel culture divide, you could get some mileage out of a Hemingway and Fitzgerald comparison.
We live in a post-structuralist world. Heaven forbid, I'm not suggesting that you read either of them. I'm talking about what they have come to represent. Fitzgerald, being seen as chronicling the excesses of The Jazz Age — most glam yah — is really for the jazz at its heart. Outsider music. His antiheroes trying to fit in, but fucked by straight society's expectations of conformity. Hemingway is the epic battle of man (literally a man, doing manly shit) fighting injustice or nature, while trying to maintain macho integrity and heroics. Mixing cocktails versus bull fighting to be superbly reductive. Let's just say #teamfitzgerald ain't going to be storming Capitol Hill any time soon.
Hemingway didn't cry. He did drink. I've read Fitzgerald and drunk Hemingway. A lot of Hemingway.
What surprised me, formulating this column, is Googling "Great American Novel" and finding Hemingway unlisted (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel). I began to question the notion of the GAM. Why is there a category specifically about America? There's no Great Italian Novel, or Great Chinese Novel. I wonder if this is a consequence of having no myths, of having no time before records. The greatest American myth of all — The Wild West — occurred after photography was invented. Neal Stephenson in his novel with Nicole Galland (mild spoiler alert) 'The Rise and Fall of DODO' proposes that photography nullified magic. The creation of an irrefutable record prohibits the bending of reality.
There's a column lurking about Hollywood's ownership of motion photography, and the reinvention of The Wild West to place America in the world. But this isn't it. What does occur to me is the need for The Great American Novel is that of a child wanting to define itself, to say "I am not a little version of you" but a new thing. Looking at the Wikipedia list, as an outsider (aka a European), those that seem relevant, both to a modern reader, and as succinctly American, are ones dealing with slavery and/or the poor. Class war in America being a civil war. There is no landed gentry, no dominions handed down from royalty. Only new money, and slighter older money. A glaring feature is there being so fewer titles by women.
Cormac McCathy is in there. Which killed my punchline. Which went like this... “Team Hemingway or Team Fitzgerald?”. I would then list each of their Great American Novels, and conclude with "No need to choose. Read Cormac McCarthy".
I don't see him being "American" specifically, with any concern in capturing the state of the nation. Rather, I see him for his interest in moral battles, strung out in the face of harsh environments which happen to be western.
Before we get too machismo, here's Lana Del Rey singing "The Next Best American Record". Most likely about producer Dan Auerbach understanding the vision for Ultraviolence, which was not received well.
I've started reading "The Passenger" by Cormac McCarthy. He's seen as an experimental writer, and the creator of very dense prose. When I say started, what I mean is I got three pages in, then found myself having a nap, an hour for each page in fact. Yep, it's pretty dense with the trademark lack of speech marks.
I am very puzzled why his script 'The Counsellor', directed by Ridley Scott, is much maligned. I really like it. It's very him. Moral bankruptcy, you can't go all Faust without getting blood on your hands. It’s a meditation on corruption and violence, both financial and physical. What, you thought Scott needed to prove he could make yet another straight action film?
Aside from the “catfish” scene, once seen not forgotten (you can search for it on Youtube if you need), it's worth the admission price for Javier Bardem's hair and Versace shirt. And cheetahs.
Cormac McCarthy acknowledges Hemingway as an influence. What you probably didn't realise is, so too is Ludwig Wittgenstein. And you thought there was no way I could shoehorn "the world is all that is the case" into a post about flappers and the jazz age.
Cormac McCarthy's Veer, an excerpt, a film by Karol Jalochowski 2
It makes complete sense. America's greatest living writer isn't impressed by words. Only actions.
I want to repeat that. Forget Kant. America's greatest living writer is not impressed by words. Only actions.
I find Lana Del Rey and Cormac McCarthy kindred spirits, their exaggerated Americana set-piece stagings, desperate actions, cults, redemption, poetry. All a cinematic backdrop for finding out who you really are.
Is it ironic or serendipitous that Lana bats for #teamfitzgerald? I'm referring of course to her being picked by Baz Luhrmann for The Great Gatsby soundtrack. Luhrmann understood that Fitzgerald was a modernist, and wrote about Jazz as street music that broke from tradition. A counterpoint to how money was betraying the American pursuit-of-happiness dream . It's also ironic or serendipitous that her lyrics are often focussed on heroic fatalism and disillusionment after love. Replace love with warfare and you have Hemingway's themes. Stir the whole pot together and you have McCarthy.
I was pleased to find this quote in Pitchfork's review of 'Norman Fucking Rockwell!', the album that houses Lana's The Next Great American Record. 3
In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead. For a woman whose songs are like miniature syllabi in American Studies—saturated in references to jazz, girl groups, heavy metal, Springsteen; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; money, power, glory; excess and loss; Whitmanian multitudes—it felt like an act of defiance.
I'm going to take some poetic licence and ask we interject McCarthy's writing on nature for Whitman.
I've never read Hemingway but I know him through the full stop. Ian Fleming, also a journalist, used short punchy sentences to drive the action. A tradition McCarthy continues. The full stop is to Hemingway what the speech mark isn't to McCarthy.
Wired journalist Clive Thompson has written a marvellous little tool for stripping out everything but the punctuation from a novel 4. A ready-made visual lesson in Fitzgerald versus Hemingway's prose style, the florid versus the minimalist (think Jason Spacemen versus Sonic Boom for all you Spaceman 3 fans).
just-the-punctuation.glitch.me
Punctuation only from (left) The Great Gatsby, and (right) To Have and Have Not
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 47,094 words
To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway, 52,624 words
Punctuation only from The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 58,702 words
I somehow want to drag Robert Altman into this, but the whole thing is tenuous enough as it is. But since we have Baz Luhrmann whose Elvis biopic is deeply sensitive, minimalist punctuation versus flowery embellishments, the existentialism of the lost generation, hope and disillusionment, my closing gesture is Spiritualized's 'Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space'. Which, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to even myself, in the same way Lana represents McCarthy, sums up Team Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Remembering even though they now represent different camps, they were in actual life, friends. Both writing about love, and the betrayal of dreams. 5
Spiritualized — Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
The actual last word goes to Barbara, who replied to me yesterday on the subject of whose team is it.
Yes, I think I still am Team Hemingway. For the same reasons as before. While I do think that Hemingway was not a warm and fuzzy guy to women, he did at least write women characters as actual people. Rather than Fitzgerald’s objectified cardboard cutouts. I know Hemingway was problematic, but I still appreciate his writing. Fitzgerald was a Hollywood hack who hit the target once and then dove into a bottle of despair. Because of women of course.
"The Passenger" by Cormac McCarthy Buy here
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This week featured
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lana_Del_Rey
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacemen_3
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
No colons?
For Great American Novel can I be on team DeLillo? or not American enough?