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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Last week the Supreme Council for Culture, following in the footsteps of many other countries, organised a seminar on Ernest Hemingway on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. It seemed like a clear example of cultural globalisation -- this, at least, is how I understand the word.
The speakers dealt with a variety of topics, ranging from the spirit of adventure which characterised his life to the way he tackled woman in his novels. For my part I chose to discuss his short stories, being a great enthusiast for the genre.
Following his suicide, Hemingway's death made an impact in both the Kremlin and the White House, the Vatican and the bull rings of Spain. His writing had made him, not only a famous writer, but a veritable legend. Even those who have not read a word of his work are aware of his presence as a celebrity.
One of Hemingway's biographers, Daniel Boorsh, distinguishes between a hero -- someone who has made a significant achievement -- and a celebrity. "The hero creates himself," he says, "while the celebrity is created by the media." Hemingway became the most public of all American writers. Within eight years of his death, seven biographies had appeared, the latest of which has just been published, entitled Hemingway: the Final Years. The events it covers end in July 1961, when Hemingway killed himself.
The way he took his life was a real-life re-enactment of what one of his protagonists had done. The last we see of Robert Jordan, the American hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), is Jordan looking down the barrel of his machine gun, across the bridge where the nationalist troops had passed, which he has just blown up. Michael Reynolds writes in the Sunday Times Book Supplement that with the tact that marks his best writing Hemingway left it there, with his protagonist in a freeze-frame, about to die. Hemingway describes what it felt for his hero to put the gun between his lips: "The taste of gun oil and powder solvent filled his mouth as cold steel made contact against his hard palate".
Critics have often discussed the idea of suicide -- a misfortune that seems to have beset all of Hemingway's family. His father, for example, committed suicide at he age of 61. Apparently Hemingway had a paranoid belief that he would have to follow in the footsteps of his father. Reynolds, the author of the newly published biography, recounts how Hemingway, when he drank with people he knew, "often regaled them with scenarios of his own death, sometimes demonstrating with an unloaded rifle or shot gun exactly how he would place the muzzle against the palate and trigger the shot with his toe."
Hemingway's work as a journalist, at the beginning of his career, affected his style significantly. He worked as a correspondent for a number of newspapers, covering such important events as the Greek Turkish War, the First World War and the Spanish Civil War.
The influence of journalism on Hemingway can be detected in his first collection of short stories and vignettes, In Our Time, in which he developed a whole literary style on the basis of his news dispatches, allowing him to incorporate dialogue and character development with a complexity of perspectives, as well as a voice closer to conversation than reportage. He used many of the stories and techniques acquired through journalism to create his first full-length work of fiction.
In 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He could not go but he sent a statement about "the loneliness of the writer and how he should always try for something that has never been done before or that others had tried and failed."
