Wondering about Hemingway

We took a break from camping and went into Mineral Point for lunch. It’s a former mining town that has become a community with art and nice restaurants in southwest Wisconsin. We poked around a mostly deserted downtown (it was Sunday in the off season), peering in the windows, guessing at the ages of buildings, and stepping around the construction (they were repaving several streets). I came across one of those “miniature libraries” — a little like a bird house with a glass front door — filled with free books. I rifled through them and on an impulse — I wasn’t really going to do much reading camping and hiking — I took a paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.

Hemingway has always interested me because he’s one of the few writers who can be said to have shaped the way an entire era wrote. His spare, short-sentenced style took over much of American literature for more than fifty years. And there is a kind of magic to what he does that I was never able to figure out when I read him last in my twenties. The writing seems so muscular, so direct. The first impression is of a very manly, very impressive authorial voice. But some undertone, some whispered aside bothered me. So when I got home I took the book — first major work, published in 1926, and — read it through again.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these people who thinks that men are inherently flawed and at the first sign of a masculine tendency a person is disqualified from being a worthy person. I’m fine with men being men. If fairness and equality is Ok between races…