Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

So the use of idiomatic expressions, which he often manages the best way, by giving them in the original, in contexts from which their meaning soon becomes clear, cannot be faulted. But for the flow of the speaker, all must be Hemingway’s own invention, based on his ear for the original, but surely influenced selectively by what he finds most attractive, subtle, coarse, not only in the language but his outsider’s version of the mind and spirit behind it.

A piece of theatre. When he sets himself to convey this in English, he must make casting decisions, subconsciously and subjectively : whether it is a peasant, a fascist or a bull-fighter, speaking Spanish. What one could learn from him, here, was caution: to be less sure than he of the possibility of bringing off this doubly creative act: to accept its very real limitations. Much as I have admired what to me is his masterpiece in the genre of the novel, I am always aware that the virtuoso performance I am responding to so strongly is that of Ernest Hemingway in the hired peasant outfit of Pilar or Anselmo. If the liberty he has taken can have been part of his influence on literature in English, there are doubts about its legitimacy that have not yet been solved …

‘He made the English language new. He changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would write and speak … a certain way of looking at the world.’ 98

This is Joan Didion’s claim, in a recent outstanding essay on Hemingway. I agree that he was one of those, in the English-speaking and writing world, who opened new spaces for the way it was possible to write — as for speaking, I should think that would apply only to his fellow Americans.

It was James Joyce who made the English language new, with contributions coming from Ernest Hemingway and, some would say, Virginia Woolf.

As for changing the way of looking at the world — I think we in the English-speaking and — writing countries need to ask ourselves what was happening in this way in other cultures, other uses of language and literature. Another anglophone writer and critic, V.S. Pritchett, no less, wrote of Hemingway: ‘He has defined for us the personality of our own time.’ 99

Whose time? Where?

The way Hemingway may have defined ‘the personality of our time’, ‘changed the way of looking at the world’ cannot be claimed as that of the world : the world of the Japanese, the Russians, the people of India, the people of Islam … you name the global list. Let’s keep a sense of proportion in our cultural and linguistic places in the world, whichever these may be. Ernest Hemingway himself surely would have recognised the perspectives opened up by the newly ground lenses of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Yukio Mishima, and a handspan of poets from Apollinaire to Rainer Maria Rilke. His expatriate personality would imply a certain roving itinerary of reading.

What do I mean by an expatriate personality?

It becomes necessary to explore this in the tension between living and writing from which Ernest Hemingway’s work, like that of all of us, comes. And to do this I must go back to the similarity of early backgrounds between the Middle West of the USA, and the gold-mining town on the veld in South Africa. In both, Europe was the Mecca of culture for whites; in order to live the painter’s life, the writer’s life , the far-flung devotee yearned to go and become , there; kiss the Black Rock, receive the white ring around the eye. Hemingway wrote his Nick stories, his early truth in beauty wonderfully achieved, and received some recognition. But it was Europe that beckoned, Europe that counted; I don’t believe of him, as I don’t believe of us in South Africa, that it was so much the desire to broaden our experience as it was the idea to be recognised as a writer where to be a writer, an artist, was the highest calling, far above any of the commercial or professional activities recognised in what were, not long before, frontier towns. In the Nick stories, life vibrates; but for the writer — to borrow from Milan Kundera in a very different context — life was elsewhere.

Hemingway pursued it, and never really came home again, did he?

The difference between him and the other most illustrious expatriates, Joyce, Mann, Brecht, and later followers such as Kundera, Achebe, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, is that they became expatriate through political persecution or revulsion against the particular regimes in their countries, and Hemingway had no motivation of either. What he did have, or rather developed, was the beginnings of a broader human consciousness beyond nationalistic operatives, good or bad: and he made his choice of one of the causes of justice that was threatened in the cultural Mecca of Europe.

Why and how?

I am not concerned with what Ernest Hemingway did or did not do, in his own body, his own person, out of his own courage, in the Spanish Civil War. What I follow with fascination in his work, in this geographical area of its scope as in others, is the fictional expatriate persona he so profoundly created there. Warner Berthoff says of Hemingway in his later writing life ‘he began making books out of activities and places he had elected for the sake of the pleasure he anticipated from them — Africa and the Caribbean, fishing and big game hunting’ and remarks that in these books there is a ‘palpable loss of control’. 100This is one aspect of the exposition of the persona — in decline, so to speak. But in the periods when there was full-throttle control, enormous writing skill, the expatriate protagonist Hemingway creates has become one for different reasons.

I have cited a concern for human justice, to which Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls (a cult book for my generation, published when I was nineteen) takes up a cause at great risk of hardship and loss of his life. And yet Jordan, it becomes clear as one reads, is fighting this war for personal emotional reasons rather than a dedication to justice as the ethical base of humanity itself. Jordan fights in this war because of his exogamous love affair with the Spanish people; because Spanish people believe in the Republic as something worth dying for. There is an apologist tone when he comes — it always seems embarrassedly — to define ideological motivations. I quote: ‘He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war [my italics], they were the only party whose programme and discipline he could respect. What were his politics then? He had none, now, he told himself.’

And he doesn’t reveal what these were, before .

Whenever he confronts revolutionary concepts, he does so in literary terms, thinks of them merely as clichés, not statements that, however banal-sounding, stand for convictions held. A kind of conservative individualism (there is another kind!) collides in self-satisfaction with the claims of the wider concern for humanity, however flawed that credo might be. I quote Jordan: ‘When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognised your own personal fallibility of that mutable substitute for the apostles’ creed, the party line.’

The expatriate fights for a cause — in this case the Left — while retaining the unexamined values, the buried fears of ideological choices within him — he has no politics , he tells himself: neither the Communist one he serves under nor the Democratic one, accepted like church on Sunday, that he has turned his back on, at home.

‘I would rather have been born here.’

Away; away from all the Midwests, urban or rural, of the world, which stand for what there is to be faced at home.

‘I would rather have been born here.’

Thus Robert Jordan, in Spain, formulates perfectly the credo of the self-elected expatriate. It is also the credo of those others, men and women, who are created within that second love affair of Ernest Hemingway — both of which being the only kind I think it my business to be interested in — the love affair with Africa.