Well, I thought the question would be whether we had got the wrong man all those decades in the twentieth century.
The wrong man being Hemingway, I suppose. Have I read anything by the guy? Yes—in high school, where Mrs. Dowling passed out copies of To Whom the Bell Tolls, to her students. The books were cheap, glued-together paperbacks (called, with Trumpian hyperbole, “perfect” bindings). I read the book pretty much at the bus stop, which may be why it didn’t make much of an impression on me. I know—the guy was the “best” author of the 20th century. He had thrown out the long, stylized sentences of the Victorians. He had tapped into the American speech as well as he had pierced its psyche. He was the dude.
So I skimmed the novel, since it seemed to invite it. The wonder, of course, is that he wrote it at all—it must have been such an effort, to maintain the myth of Hemingway. It takes a lot of time, being a drunk, and there were all those bullfights to get to as well.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s longest novel—over four hundred pages. It read, as I remember it, somewhat like an extended web of telegrams. I read the novel and passed the test on it. Whether the novel itself had even passed the test with me….well, you can guess.
There were two camps, as it were, in the 20th century. The heavy weights read Hemingway and scorned his principal rival: John Steinbeck. One of the heavy weights, Flannery O’Connor, in fact claimed never to have read Steinbeck at all, though I seem to remember reading that she scoffed at Steinbeck’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1962.
I read Hemingway enough to know (I believe) what he was about. I googled him, and discovered that AI felt the same way. Here’s the verdict:
Hemingway was all man, or so the story went. And like many he-men, he took all the air out of the room. He couldn’t even die like the rest of us—decently in our beds, or in a hospital, surrounded by loved ones. He killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun in the foyer of his home. The death was described as an accident, though it was widely assumed it wasn’t. Hemingway was an expert on guns, according to The New York Times, which casts doubt on the accident theory. Hemingway’s own father had killed himself with an old Civil War pistol, which all but confirms the suicide theory.
Steinbeck apparently admired Hemingway’s writing, and though the two met (only once, apparently) the evening didn’t go particularly well. The two have been paired, though, and may be for as long as anyone remembers 20th-century American fiction.
How many great men have spent their creative lives in someone else’s shadow?
There’s Handel and Bach, Beethoven and Haydn, Mozart and Salieri. There’s poor Trollope, having to cope with Dickens. Chagall and Picasso.
In many cases, I like the underdog, and if I could barely read Hemingway, I was more interested in Steinbeck. He could be funny, for one thing, and even if Tortilla Flat isn’t the greatest literature, does it have to be? I remember stories from the book, although perhaps it was Cannery Row. I remember the old lady, sitting in the Catholic Church, broke and hungry. The crops had failed that year, and she had been desperate enough to sell her last bag of beans in order to buy a gold candlestick, an offering (though perhaps a bribe) to the Virgin Mary. Even so, the crops had failed, the kitchen was bare, and all she had was her bitterness in the dark, musty church. She looks up at that wretched Virgin and thinks…
“…my Dolores didn’t know who it was, either.”
Steinbeck’s recipe for an avaricious bank? Buy a fresh fish and put it in your safe deposit box. Leave town for a couple of months, and when you get back, they’ll still be talking about it.
This was a guy a high student had to read, and fortunately Travels with Charley had come out just as I was entering ninth grade. Steinbeck, like Hemingway, had been ill, but he chose to leave his wife and home behind for three months, while he traveled across the United States in the vehicle below.
Rocinante, by the way, was Don Quixote’s horse.
Steinbeck was off trying to find out what in the hell had happened to his country, and though it’s easy to write him off as naïve, he wasn’t. Today, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are history. But imagine the horror of seeing what we had created. We’re no closer to peace than we ever were, but we sure have perfected killing.
That scared him. Then there was the racial issue, and Steinbeck is there watching as the Little Rock Nine tried to walk into school. They were nine little black kids, and they got into the school, all right. But it took the National Guard to get them into it.
I remember all this, and I remember Steinbeck’s description of his farewell to his wife, Elaine. Neither of them wanted to be the one left standing, watching the tail lights recede in the distance. So they had driven their vehicles to another location. They kissed hurriedly and gunned their car / truck to their respective locations.
Steinbeck knew what he was doing, as did his wife, to some extent. He was 58-years old, and he had had a medical scare. His doctor had given him the sermon: cut out the cigarettes, the booze, the salt, the cholesterol. Settle down and die.
Steinbeck opted to go on the road, to see the country he had lived in all his life. He took his dog along, a standard French poodle named Charley. They hit the road.
And they met a stranger, who told them that nobody was talking. Folks were getting together, drinking their morning coffee together in the same spots they always had, laughing and joking. But nobody was talking about anything controversial, by which he meant important. Instead, the illusion of goodwill was more important than speaking honestly, and figuring out where that led to.
I read this now, and I remember reading it half a century ago. I thought then—how terrible, yes, truly terrible that we’ve let the national discourse sink so low. Now, of course, I think ‘what the fuck?’
I mean, how bad was it, in the early sixties? Haight Ashbury was still just a couple of streets nobody knew about in San Francisco. The war in Vietnam was just a gleam in President Johnson’s eye. Nobody had stormed the capital, nobody was taking Mexican farm laborers out of their lettuce fields and sending them to El Salvador, with no due process. Nobody had systematically defanged the government, so that the grift and corruption could spread like toad stools after a rain. Nobody had arrested the mayor of Newark, handcuffed a senator from California, killed the ex-speaker of the house in Minnesota, or set fire to the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, hours after he had celebrated Passover.
Even better, nobody could have imagined that any of the shit in the last paragraph would happen. That’s because it’s America, and it can’t happen here.
I mean, by definition….
Even the term “American Exceptionalism,” is an example of…well, exceptionalism. I bind books in a store owned in part by a Frenchman. He sees his country relatively clearly—the Parisians are rude and unfriendly, he admits. He’s proud of the cultural achievements, admires the heritage and history, is proud to call it home. But he knows that France is one country among many—better by far than most, but not necessarily the winner in every contest. There’s no need to invent “French Exceptionalism” because the French have not told the world what we have.
Which is…
…we got it right, guys. We figured out democracy and human rights and protection of minorities and my God, what a country we are! We’ll be happy to send old Jimmy Carter out to monitor your elections, since we do them so well.
Shit, Jimmy Carter finally died.
The notion that anything going on in 1960 should have caused anyone to clam up is absurd. But it made sense at the time, and sadly, there’s no reason to believe that I, should I live another 50 years and still have enough wit and eyesight to re-read Travels with Charley, won’t be saying the exact same thing.
What?
All that was going on was murder of political opponents, the political oppression of enemies, the “disappearance” of farm workers, arson in the state houses? Hell, they hadn’t even started raping mothers in the streets in front of their decapitated infants while soldiers stormed the houses and confiscated every coin, bill, or valuable!
We have spent most of my life exclaiming that things are the very worst they could be, but I have learned, in these days of Trump, that blooming fascism is just like living with a drunk. It’s always worse than you think, and they never stop surprising you.
The last two or three weeks have been no exception. Five million people protested while Trump dozed through his parade. That was an embarrassment, so then we had the distraction of watching Israel attack Iran, which has been building a nuclear weapons program. Given that Iran is ruled by Islamic hardliners who would cheerfully obliterate us infidels, not one wanted that to happen.
Israel bombed Iran, and then turned to us for help, since we are the only country that has bombs that can penetrate underground to the depth needed to take out their bunkers. So we bombed them, and waited to see the response.
The Iranians sent out some planes and dropped some bombs on a large US military action. Then it all settled down, leaving everyone to wonder: what was that all about?
We don’t know, but that wasn’t the point. All crises are good, for Trump. They divert, they distract, and they keep the liberal and / or the sane outraged. Democracy may die in darkness, but along the way, distraction is vital. So it was providential, perhaps, that a black singer by many names (all of them having “daddy” or “Diddy” or “Combs” as part of them) was being tried for rape and human trafficking.
That kept the faithful occupied while the real work could be done: passing a draconian law that would gut the Federal government, throw 17 million people off health care, explode the national debt to unimaginable proportions, give tax breaks to billionaires, and screw the middle and lower classes. It was a spectacularly bad piece of legislation—well, bad if you hadn’t read the bill, horrific if you had.
Nobody read the legislation, which was being debated and voted on in the wee hours of the night. Some Republicans spoke out against it: Lisa Murkowski, a “moderate” Republican held out for some special perks that would sweeten the pill for Alaskans. She then tearfully addressed the nation and said that she had to do it. No surprise—Murkowski had come out weeks before and said the obvious: We are all afraid.
It's true, of course, but it’s maddening all the same. Nobody had specifically TOLD Murkowski that standing up to a would-be dictator was part of the job, we just assumed she knew it. She assumed, perhaps, that she would never have to (did somebody say something about American Exceptionalism up there?).
We were howling, of course, and my couch is three feet away from the sidewalk, as is my television (there is, I’m happy to say, something in between them). So there was plenty to listen to, for all those people passing by as I listened to Murkowski whine. I was shouting “BITCH!” and “FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”
J. D. Vance, the Republican that even they can’t stand, cast the deciding vote. And then, we all went back happily to whatever it was we were doing.
Always a mistake, since Trump then sent the National Guard to go “liberate” McArthur park in Los Angeles. They scared the hell out of children playing at a day camp there, and then turned their attention to the blueberry fields of California.
And so I watched as tanks rolled down the streets of LA and the helicopters landed in the fertile fields of California. The immigrants were running terrified. There were citizens standing in front of a moving tank—which moved slowly and unrelentingly at two or three miles an hour. Did the driver see the four or five protesters with their hand on the hood of the tank? Or was there even a driver?
Steinbeck had to get into his truck and go out to see it, whatever the “it” was that was afflicting the country. The reports that he got—balanced and nuanced as they were—from Walter Cronkite weren’t enough.
I am seeing it not from my truck but from my sofa. And I am seeing it as they could not—I am old than either one at the time of their deaths (neither one could have collected Social Security). I’m a gay man, and I know the story of what happened in the last half century or so.
Migrants running through fields. Bishops telling their Mexican parishioners that it’s OK to skip mass:stay home and be safe. The unstoppable tank.
You never swim in the same river twice; neither can you read the same book again.
The book may not change, but the times have, and so have you. The premise can change, too.
Travels with Charley was written with the soothing knowledge that things are bad but will get better. They always do.
I’m not so sure.
