T.S. Eliot may have been the most unavoid­able force in Amer­i­can let­ters in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, but he was prob­a­bly not a very lik­able per­son. At least Ernest Hem­ing­way didn’t think so. The burly nov­el­ist, often in the habit of telling fel­low writ­ers to “kiss my ass,” wrote in a July 1950 let­ter to writer and edi­tor Har­vey Bre­it that Eliot could do just that “as a man,” since he “nev­er hit a ball out of the infield in his life and he would not have exist­ed for dear old Ezra [Pound], the love­ly poet and stu­pid trai­tor.” Of Pound’s “stu­pid” trea­son, Hem­ing­way had pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten some choice words; Of Eliot’s sins—in addi­tion to his fail­ing to mea­sure up to Yogi Berra, despite both of them hail­ing from St. Louis—Hemingway includ­ed the fol­low­ing: “Roy­al­ist, Anglo-Catholic and con­ser­v­a­tive”

Despite all this, how­ev­er, Hem­ing­way, like most of his mod­ernist con­tem­po­raries, owed a debt to Eliot, whom Papa almost-grudg­ing­ly admit­ted was “a damned good poet and a fair crit­ic,” though “there isn’t any law a man has to go and see [Eliot’s play] the Cock­tail par­ty” [sic]. Writes Wen­dolyn E. Tet­low, author of Hemingway’s In Our Time: Lyri­cal Dimen­sions, “despite Hemingway’s acid com­ments, how­ev­er, he could not escape Eliot’s influ­ence.” Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for Hemingway’s terse, ellip­ti­cal style was the Eliot doc­trine of the “objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive,” some­thing of a refine­ment of Pound’s imag­ism. In Hemingway’s rumi­na­tions on his own process, it seems he could not have done with­out this poet­ic technique—one of encap­su­lat­ing abstract con­cepts and fleet­ing, insub­stan­tial emo­tions in the amber of con­crete, dis­crete objects, sym­bols, and acts.

“Find what gave you the emo­tion,” Hem­ing­way wrote in “The End of Some­thing,” remark­ing on a schooner mov­ing through a ruined mill town, “then write it down mak­ing it clear so the read­er will see it and have the same feel­ing.” Eliot would nev­er have been so vul­gar as to plain­ly spell out his method in the text itself, like a set of instruc­tions, but Hem­ing­way does so again in Death in the After­noon:

I was try­ing to write then and I found the great­est dif­fi­cul­ty, aside from know­ing tru­ly what you real­ly felt, rather than what you were sup­posed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what real­ly hap­pened in action; what the actu­al things were which pro­duced the emo­tion that you expe­ri­enced.

Com­pare these pas­sages with Eliot’s def­i­n­i­tion in his 1919 essay on Ham­let: “The only way of express­ing emo­tion in the form of art is by find­ing an ‘objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive’; in oth­er words, a set of objects, a sit­u­a­tion, a chain of events which shall be the for­mu­la of that par­tic­u­lar emo­tion.” The influence—if not out­right borrowing—is unmis­tak­able. Yet Hem­ing­way remained leery of Eliot “as a man.” In 1954, Robert Man­ning of The Atlantic vis­it­ed Hem­ing­way in Cuba and found him surly on the sub­ject and “not warm toward T.S. Eliot,” pre­fer­ring instead to “praise Ezra Pound.” Hem­ing­way would go so far, in fact, as to claim that Pound deserved Eliot’s Nobel.

We shouldn’t take any of this salty talk too seri­ous­ly. After all, Hem­ing­way, the great boast­er, liked to trash peo­ple he envied. Even Joe Louis, whom you would think aspir­ing box­er Hem­ing­way would hold in high­est esteem, “nev­er learned to box,” though he was, Papa admit­ted, “a good get­ter-upper.”

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

Ernest Hem­ing­way Writes of His Fas­cist Friend Ezra Pound: “He Deserves Pun­ish­ment and Dis­grace” (1943)

Ernest Hemingway’s Delu­sion­al Adven­tures in Box­ing: “My Writ­ing is Noth­ing, My Box­ing is Every­thing.”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image by Marie Maye, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a pre­vi­ous post, we brought you the voice of Ital­ian fan­ta­sist Ita­lo Calvi­no, read­ing from his Invis­i­ble Cities and Mr. Palo­mar. Both of those works, as with all of Calvino’s fic­tion, make oblique ref­er­ences to wide swaths of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture, but Calvi­no is no show-off, drop­ping in allu­sions for their own sake, nor is it real­ly nec­es­sary to have read as wide­ly as the author to tru­ly appre­ci­ate his work, as in the case of cer­tain mod­ernist mas­ters. Instead, Calvino’s fic­tion tends to cast a spell on read­ers, inspir­ing them to seek out far-flung ancient romances and strange folk­tales, to immerse them­selves in oth­er worlds con­tained with­in the cov­ers of oth­er books. Not the least bit pedan­tic, Calvi­no pos­sess­es that rare gift of the best of teach­ers: the abil­i­ty to make Lit­er­a­ture cap­i­tal “L”—an intim­i­dat­ing domain for many—become won­drous and approach­able all over again, as in our ear­ly years when books were mag­i­cal por­tals to be entered, not oner­ous tasks to be checked off a list.

Calvino’s short essay, “Why Read the Clas­sics?” (pub­lished in The New York Review of Books in 1986), resounds with this sense of won­der, as well as with the author’s friend­ly, unpre­ten­tious atti­tude.

He lays out his rea­son­ing in 14 points—slightly abridged below—beginning with the frank admis­sion that all of us feel some sense of shame for the gaps in our read­ing, and thus often claim to be “re-read­ing” when in fact we’re read­ing, for exam­ple, Moby Dick, Anna Karen­i­na, or King Lear, for the first time. Calvi­no states plain­ly the nature of the case;

The reit­er­a­tive pre­fix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of peo­ple ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reas­sure them, we need only observe that, how­ev­er vast any person’s basic read­ing may be, there still remain an enor­mous num­ber of fun­da­men­tal works that he has not read.

Point one, then, goes on to argue for reading—for the first time—classic works of lit­er­a­ture we may have only pre­tend­ed to in the past. The remain­der of Calvino’s case fol­lows log­i­cal­ly:

1)  ….to read a great book for the first time in one’s matu­ri­ty is an extra­or­di­nary plea­sure, dif­fer­ent from (though one can­not say greater or less­er than) the plea­sure of hav­ing read it in one’s youth.

2) We use the word “clas­sics” for those books that are trea­sured by those who have read and loved them; but they are trea­sured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best con­di­tions to enjoy them.

3) There should there­fore be a time in adult life devot­ed to revis­it­ing the most impor­tant books of our youth.

4) Every reread­ing of a clas­sic is as much a voy­age of dis­cov­ery as the first read­ing.

5) Every read­ing of a clas­sic is in fact a reread­ing.

6) A clas­sic is a book that has nev­er fin­ished say­ing what it has to say.

7) The clas­sics are the books that come down to us bear­ing upon them the traces of read­ings pre­vi­ous to ours, and bring­ing in their wake the traces they them­selves have left on the cul­ture or cul­tures they have passed through.

Calvi­no intro­duces his last 7 points with the obser­va­tion that any for­mal lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion we receive often does more to obscure our appre­ci­a­tion of clas­sic works than to enhance it. “Schools and uni­ver­si­ties,” he writes, “ought to help us to under­stand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in ques­tion, but instead they do their lev­el best to make us think the oppo­site.”

Part of the rea­son many peo­ple come to lit­er­ary works with trep­i­da­tion has as much to do with their per­ceived dif­fi­cul­ty as with the schol­ar­ly voice of author­i­ty that speaks from on high through “crit­i­cal biogra­phies, com­men­taries, and inter­pre­ta­tions” as well as “the intro­duc­tion, crit­i­cal appa­ra­tus, and bib­li­og­ra­phy.” Though use­ful tools for schol­ars, these can serve as means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing that cer­tain pro­fes­sion­al read­ers will always know more than you do. Calvi­no rec­om­mends leav­ing such things aside, since they “are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say.” He then con­cludes:

8) A clas­sic does not nec­es­sar­i­ly teach us any­thing we did not know before.

9) The clas­sics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unex­pect­ed upon read­ing, the more we thought we knew them from hear­ing them talked about.

10) We use the word “clas­sic” of a book that takes the form of an equiv­a­lent to the uni­verse, on a lev­el with the ancient tal­is­mans.

11) Your clas­sic author is the one you can­not feel indif­fer­ent to, who helps you to define your­self in rela­tion to him, even in dis­pute with him.

12) A clas­sic is a book that comes before oth­er clas­sics; but any­one who has read the oth­ers first, and then reads this one, instant­ly rec­og­nizes its place in the fam­i­ly tree.

Final­ly, Calvi­no adds two points to explain why he thinks we should read old books, when we are so con­stant­ly over­whelmed “by the avalanche of cur­rent events.” To this ques­tion he says:

13) A clas­sic is some­thing that tends to rel­e­gate the con­cerns of the moment to the sta­tus of back­ground noise […]

14) A clas­sic is some­thing that per­sists as a back­ground noise even when the most incom­pat­i­ble momen­tary con­cerns are in con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion.

In oth­er words, clas­sic lit­er­a­ture can have the salu­tary effect of tem­per­ing our high sen­si­tiv­i­ty to every break­ing piece of news and dis­tract­ing piece of triv­ia, giv­ing us the bal­last of his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. In our cur­rent cul­ture, in which we live per­pet­u­al­ly plugged into infor­ma­tion machines that ampli­fy every sig­nal and every bit of noise, such a rem­e­dy seems indis­pens­able.

via The New York Review of Books

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Ita­lo Calvi­no Read Selec­tions From Invis­i­ble Cities, Mr. Palo­mar & Oth­er Enchant­i­ng Fic­tions

The Books You Think Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read: Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness