Don’t ask me why, but a few weeks ago I got the notion into my head to re-read the books that I had read in my late teens and early 20s that had gotten me “hooked” on literature. I’m talking about the usual suspects: Steinbeck, Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevski, among many others.
I started with Hemingway and Faulkner, those twin titans of American literature; I mean, I withdrew some of their novels from the library because some years ago I had purged the house of books I hadn’t read in 20 years or more, which was a lot. I chose Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms to begin my endeavor. When I first read Hemingway, I was in awe, really, like a lovestruck girl (later, Faulkner would make me feel unworthy to ever try to put something into language). I read “Farewell” for some intro to lit class, and then read one novel, one short story after another. I saw the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls with Ingmar Bergman and Gary Cooper just after reading it and, no lie, it choked me up.
I don’t know what I expected when I read “Farewell” again over 30 years later, but it has proven to be a huge disappointment. What was all the fuss? Hemingway wasn’t yet 30 when he wrote that novel and it shows. It’s pretty boring, at bottom. There are many — “many” is a favorite Hemingway word, as is “very” — pages of no-consequence dialogue, some lame stream of consciousness, a lot of eating and drinking (cheese and wine, mostly), some half-baked nihilism, macho bull — and not much happens. Ok, it’s true that some of Hemingway’s sentences are like diamonds, meaning they can’t be broken apart without losing their integrity, and you do get a clear picture of the way a place or a landscape looks, but so what if that’s pretty much all you get?
I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Hemingway. I can see where a young person would find his work powerful. And maybe that’s the point: I’m not so young anymore. The “simple” writing at times seems to have been written by a simpleton. It’s all surface. And maybe, as an older man, I’m more taken with complexity, with layers, with dimensions, because, hey, isn’t that more life-like?
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Have you decided to continue with re-reading the books you read in your youth? I am curious if it’s just a Hemingway thing or if you’ll be surprised by how your perspective will have changed in the time since last reading works by other authors.
No, I’ve got Faulkner in line. I read 13 of Faulkner’s novels in one year (I was maybe 20), so I want to start with his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and read all of them all the way through to The Rievers. Cockamamie idea, I know. Actually, I tried this before, reading the books of my youth. I had more success with Catcher in the Rye, and a lot less success with The Great Gatsby. Well, I never really thought much of Fitzgerald, as I never really felt much about Cheever. I just wasn’t that interested in suburbia or the upper classes. I couldn’t get why they were so unhappy when they had lived such priveleged lives, why they drank so much, and couldn’t seem to please their women and vice versa. But I’m getting away from the original thought about the books of my youth. I’ve got a lot of Bellow to deal with, and there’s that colossus in Thomas Pynchon. Next week, I’ll probably come to my senses and just read whatever’s on Oprah’s list.