Why Hemingway Still Matters - Video Essay

Does Ernest Hemingway still matter? When Ken Burns' six-hour Hemingway documentary aired on PBS last year, a number of media outlets asked, why should we care? Or else they wrote the great novelist off as obsolescent. That's nothing new. Cutting Hemingway down to size is a cottage industry in the book world. It makes sense. Hemingway's being too macho, too swaggering, is out of favor with the present critical moment. His books are often reduced to honor and grace under pressure, so it's no surprise that he's dismissed on many college campuses. But in my experience, Hemingway's writing still matters both here. My first newspaper job was covering sports in a small town in Montana. I wrote on the sports page one day about the old man in the sea. Essentially, nothing more than how much I liked it. There were pages to fill and school sports were out of session. Writing that story led to a long talk with a reader of the newspaper who was a veteran boxing trainer. The boxing trainer said he knew what Hemingway was talking about in that book, how at some point in the struggle with the fish, the old man Santiago had lost all sense of where he ended and where the fish began. It was a hard thing to describe, probably impossible for people who had never felt it, but Hemingway had done it, and he had written about it. The boxing trainer said that he had felt that too, in hard sparring sessions and certain fights when his opponent had pushed him to someplace he didn't know he could go. It was like dancing, he said. An invitation to hit some mitts followed, to box a little. Despite my early clumsiness, I was tolerated at the boxing gym. A year later, I left a sparring session bloodied and slathered in sweat for a few rounds having lost all sense of dimension. The literary had become physical. I felt an appreciation and a calm, like a Buddhist upon the understanding of things. Not long after, I went to Spain. As my girlfriend and I took our seats in the upper level of the arena for our first bullfight, someone shouted at us, Hemingway! Hemingway! A group of tanned old men beckoned us toward their seats. In pitiful Spanish, I confirmed what was obvious. Yes, we're Americans. And what was slightly less obvious, that Hemingway was a favorite author of mine and I had read all his books. What followed were introductory lessons in the dying art of the aficionado. A few weeks later, in a smaller Spanish city, my girlfriend and I each held the muleta, the matador sword. We made clumsy attempts to slay bales of hay while the young students of the local bullfighting school laughed. In an even smaller town in Spain, we walked into an abandoned looking tapas bar, thanks to a recommendation from a friend who lived nearby. It was near closing time. The perfectly bald but thickly mustached bartender poured a round of drinks for us, his only customers that night. In a brief conversation, I asked, what else did he like to do? Did he have another job? The bartender beamed, he was a poet. Lorca, miro, I offered, exhausting my reading of Spanish poets. When I told him I was a writer, a reporter at least, he growled, Hemingway! And grabbed my shoulder and brought my forehead close to his. We each attempted to explain the literature we loved, and as we raised each shot glass, those beautiful Spanish syllables became a toast, Hemingway! At dawn, my girlfriend and I stumbled home, the Mediterranean a dozen feet to our right and roaring against the rocks. I still think of my father's office sometimes, with its dark wood bookshelves that reached the ceiling. They towered over me as a boy, in pride of place, centered on a single shelf sat a handful of paperbacks all by the same writer, Hemingway. Long before I was old enough to actually read it, I took down a worn, soft cover copy of A Farewell to Arms from my father's shelf, and opened its creased spine, delicate as an artifact, and I saw that each page had been yellowed, colored by age and handling like a sunburst. The edges were darkened, but the middle, where the text was, was still bright. Any writer 60 years after his death, who is still closing down bars at dawn, introducing people at bullfights, and bringing strangers together, that writer still matters.