The Woke Reich is adding childish, offensive, condescending trigger warnings to books written by Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel Prize winner.
“The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein,” warns Penguin Random House about two Hemingway books: the short story collection Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises, which is widely considered one of the great novels of the 20th Century.
Hemingway biographer Richard Bradford told the Telegraph:
The publisher’s comments would be hilarious, were they not also alarming. They state that despite reprinting the book unaltered they do not wish to endorse the ‘cultural representations or language contained herein’. This would be understandable had they brought out a new translation of Mein Kampf. They seem to imply that, because it’s a literary classic, they’re willing to take a deep breath and warn readers with delicate sensibilities that something in it might unsettle them. Scrutinize any novel or poem written at any time, and search for a passage that could create unease for persons who are obsessed with themselves, and you’ll find one. And then every publication will need to carry a warning like this, the verbal equivalent of photos of cancer ridden lungs which now decorate cigarette packets.
He concludes: “Publishers and the literary establishment as a whole now seem to be informed by a blend of stupidity and bullying regarding what readers should be allowed to think.”
Bradford’s quote about covers it, but I’m also troubled by a population that embraces being treated and coddled like over-sensitive babies with these kinds of warnings. This is a very different label than, say, the G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings given to movies. While plenty of people complain about that rating system, there’s no judgment attached. We are merely being told what kind of content to expect, not what to think of that content or what the Motion Picture Association thinks of that content. When Penguin Random House smugly distances itself with a “not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language” virtue signal, that’s a judgment; that’s a fascist, multinational corporation telling us what to think. Worse, we are being shamed should we disagree.
Not having read either book, I can’t say whether I agree or disagree, but whether one agrees or disagrees is not the point. Reviewers, scholars, critics, etc., are supposed to judge books; publishers are not. That pathetic and childish warning is a slap in the author’s and readers’ faces.
Sadly, many readers will appreciate that warning without realizing what that appreciation says about them.
And, of course, this is a form of censorship. The warning basically says, Don’t read this. This is bad. This is racist. And if you enjoy it, you are bad. You are racist. It’s outrageous behavior from the one industry that should be standing tallest against such things: the publishing industry.
These types of warnings also take away the reader’s enjoyment of the work in question. By telling the reader how to interpret and judge these books, the thinking is done for them. As I’ve already explained a hundred times and will another hundred times, grappling with complex emotions not only matures us but is also one of the great joys of art. I loved this book, but the author expressed some terrible ideas. So why did I love this book? Was the author expressing those ideas or the characters? Why did I admire a character who believed such things? What does it mean? What was the author trying to say? What does all this say about me?
The world is a complicated place filled with flaws, contradictions, and complexities. The best art makes demands of us that help us emotionally navigate this flawed world. Hemingway isn’t only a giant because he told great stories. Lots of people tell great stories. Hemingway is a giant because you think about what he wrote long after you close the book. Decades ago, I read The Old Man and The Sea and whenever it comes up, I remember and think about it. I should read it again, the version without this trigger warning.
One of the biggest problems with “woke” is that it spoon-feeds the answers. We’re told what’s good, what’s bad… What we should think about this or that… Where’s the fun in that? There is no fun, which is why woke entertainment never fails to fail. People enjoy engaging in critical thinking even if they don’t know that’s what they are doing.
Like something straight out of Orwell, Penguin Random House is rewriting Hemingway. The rewrites might not be literal, but adding moral instruction to classic books is just as bad.
I completed Ernest Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees.” The work seems like an idea for a magazine article stretched out to book length. A short book, an alleged novel. The main idea is that a crusty fifty-year-old US Army colonel is in Italy and he has a beautiful nineteen-year-old woman who is hopelessly and inexplicably in love with the crusty old codger.
Hemingway has been on sale on Audible one of the audiobook services I use. Librivox is free, but the readings vary from professional volunteers who just have to work to show what they can do… to people who remind me of being in a classroom hearing one of the students standing and reading to the class, charming in its own way, but…
Because of the sale I got a number of Hemingway works I’ve been meaning to get around to. When I was in high school Hemingway was a top choice for students because his books were short, respected, and easy to understand. A favorite was one of the shortest novels by Hemingway ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ which won a Nobel Prize.
I just recently read and listened to ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ I have seen a couple of movie versions, so I had a good idea of the narrative. An old man thinks about the past and catches a big one, but the sharks eat his catch. Life explained in a short boat story.
One movie version I have on DVD and re-watched as I listened to the story. The 1978 version in the film has a script that is bored with Hemingway apparently. The script writer puts a writer in the story and a nagging wife to show how women are the unsung heroes who should have been at the center of Hemingway’s stories because really they provided all the plots at breakfast and over drinks after dinner.
Having read ‘War and Peace’ and a few other long novels over the last few years I start to look at Hemingway’s novels as one story. Like a ‘War and Peace’ of the First and Second World Wars as the reporter Hemingway makes his way among the ruins and survivors.
The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s novels about World War Two and the German invasion of the Soviet Union all start to seem like sections of one big novel.
So, I look at the character in ‘Across the River and Into the Trees’ as a version of Hemingway. At one point the main character army colonel and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend note a writer who is like Hemingway in a hotel restaurant and wonder if he will put them in a story. Get it. They are in a story. This is the story.
The book ‘Across the River….’ came out in 1950 and was a commercial success as lots of people wanted to read what the famous Hemingway’s latest book was about. Critics thought that not much happened in the book. The critics are right, not much happens.
A few summers ago I reached out to my bookshelf and pulled out one of my unread Hemingway books, ‘The Green Hills of Africa.’ I read the book and was impressed by the simple reporting Hemingway did in the work which was not a novel, but a report of his hunting trip. Hemingway was paid to write four long magazine articles about his month long Africa safari. One of the incidents I like was when Hemingway meets a German in the bush and the man says one should not hunt and kill animals unless one must because one is hungry or in danger from the creature. Hemingway disagreed with the man, but was an honest enough reporter to accurately report what the man said so the reader could judge for himself.
In ‘Across the River…’ Hemingway is fictionalizing a series of encounters he had with a young nineteen-year-old woman in Venice, Italy. In the novel I find it hard to believe the young woman who is described as beautiful and accomplished would be so in love with the cranky American colonel. I have little problem understanding how a young woman would be attracted to the famous novelist Ernest Hemingway in 1947 Italy. Throughout the novel I kept wondering what the actual interaction between the famous writer and the young woman was like and not the pale baffling reflection in the story on the written page. Rather than illuminating life, Hemingway was hiding it and disguising it and running on past reputation with his audience.
The young woman in the novel seems like something from fan fiction. She just loves, loves, loves, the beaten down alcoholic American soldier because…. why? Because of his great ‘war stories’ about how the lowly soldiers defied the useless leaders and won the day by going to the left, and then the right, and then the left again to win on the battlefield. Fascinating for a nineteen-year-old in 1947 Venice in the summer. I also notice that in Hemingway’s stories there is a lot of talking to waiters, hotel staff, and sea captains of hired boats. That takes me out of my little world, I never talk to those kind of people lately. I’ll never get a Nobel Prize in Literature for a ‘fish story.’
Next stop in this self negation? The man who spent so much time thinking about chasing creatures to kill, chased himself into a corner and killed himself, so they say. Hemingway reported that people where following him in his last days in Idaho. Friends thought he was crazy. The FBI was following him, for some crazy reason. Hemingway had been pro-Communist in the Spanish Civil War and was always vaguely populist and pro-working class. Hemingway was perceived to be pro-Castro as the Cuban Revolution became increasingly pro-communist. So… the FBI was on his trail when he got a bullet in the head.
Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Left’s Narrative
Manufacturing a book-banning crisis where none exists only serves to undermine public discourse and fails to protect democratic freedom.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
It is simply false that 2,532 books were removed from schools during the 2021-2022 school year.
For example, PEN America says that “The Hate U Give” was banned in Goddard Public Schools in Kansas, yet that district’s card catalogue lists nine copies.
Classic works of literature continue to be available…while we have some disagreements over a limited number of graphic works.
…………………
“What we’re seeing here is a resurgence of widespread censorship in America,” Nadine Farid Johnson recently told The Wall Street Journal. Johnson is the Washington director of PEN America and co-author of its report claiming to identify 2,532 books banned in public schools during the 2021-2022 school year.
PEN America advocates on behalf of poets, essayists, and novelists, and it shows: Its report is almost as fictional as the work of the writers it represents.
It is simply false that 2,532 books were removed from schools during the 2021-2022 school year. We know this is false because we examined online card catalogues and found that 74% of the books PEN America identified as banned from school libraries are actually listed as available in the catalogues of those school districts. In many cases we could see that copies of those books are currently checked out and in use by students.
Among the books that PEN America alleges were banned are classic works, such as “Anne Frank’s Diary,” “Brave New World,” “Lord of the Flies,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Color Purple,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In every school district in which PEN America alleges those books were banned, we found copies listed as available in the online card catalogue.
For example, PEN America claims that “To Kill a Mockingbird” was “Banned in Libraries and Classrooms” in the Edmond public school district in Oklahoma. Edmond’s card catalogue indicates that the library has 10 copies of the book, two of which were checked out at the time we looked.
PEN America suggests that racism is a major factor driving censorship. The organization reports that “659 banned book titles (40 percent) contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color” and “338 banned book titles (21 percent) directly address issues of race and racism.”
The book “The Hate U Give,” which was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and primarily features black characters, is listed as one of the most frequently banned books, reportedly removed from more than a dozen public school libraries during 2021-2022.
But when we examine the online card catalogues in those school districts, we find copies of “The Hate U Give” available in every one of them.
For example, PEN America says that “The Hate U Give” was banned in Goddard Public Schools in Kansas, yet that district’s card catalogue lists nine copies of the book; three were checked out at the time we examined it. Similarly, the book was supposedly banned from the Indian River School District in Florida, but the card catalogue in that district shows 20 copies available, with several checked out.
We were unable to find 26% of the books that PEN America claimed were banned in school district card catalogues, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those books were banned. Given how sloppy and error-prone the PEN America report is, it’s unclear whether the books we were unable to find in school district card catalogues had ever been listed and then removed.
In addition, many of the books we were unable to find in card catalogues were works that would strike most reasonable people as unlikely to be age-appropriate for school libraries. Works like “Gender Queer,” “Flamer,” “Lawn Boy,” “Fun Home,” and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health” either contain images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.
People who don’t want these books available to children in school libraries aren’t book banners. And people unwilling to defer to the unilateral authority of teachers and librarians to decide what children should have access to without democratic oversight or parental input are not fascists.
Determining what books are age-appropriate and educationally valuable enough to be purchased and kept in school libraries is inherently contentious even among well-intentioned people. But having a productive process for adjudicating these disputes is rendered impossible by false and hysterical claims from organizations like PEN America that there is “widespread censorship in America.” The vast majority of books allegedly banned from school libraries haven’t been banned at all.
A more realistic description of the situation is that classic works of literature continue to be available in the libraries of virtually every school district while we have some disagreements over a limited number of graphic works. Manufacturing a book-banning crisis where none exists only serves to undermine public discourse and fails to protect democratic freedom.
He never goes out of print. He’s still taught in schools. But most of his novels look more ponderous and posturing (silly, even) with each passing year. Ah, but those stories.
As the light industry of books on Ernest Hemingway continue to spill over into the 21st century, we now know everything about the most famous American writer except why we still read him.
Many of Hemingway’s contemporaries—Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis—have faded into the twilight realm of the praised but unread while Hemingway is alive and well on the syllabuses of colleges and even high schools. We’ve had studies of his prose style, Hemingway’s Laboratory by Milton Cohen (2012); his war service, The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos and a Friendship Made and Lost During World War I (2017) by John McGrath Morris; his boat, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life and Lost by Paul Hendrickson (2011); his final trip to Spain, Looking for Hemingway by Tony Castro (2016); and collections of his letters, though he told a biographer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I write letters because it is fun to get letters back, not for posterity. What the hell is posterity, anyway?” (Bullshit, of course; if he wasn’t trying to shape his own posterity, why save all the letters?)
This year there are three more Hemingway volumes. Autumn in Venice: Hemingway and His Last Muse by Andrea Di Robilant is a fascinating story about Hemingway’s love of Venice and the affair he had there with a young woman thirty years his junior.
September saw the publication of Mary V. Dearborn’s excellent Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (the first Hemingway bio written by a woman) in paperback. And in October, there was Artifacts from a Life by Michael Katakis, a sort of picture book of his life put together by the steward of the estate.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there were no second acts in American life, which his own comebacks have disproved. Whether or not that’s true for Hemingway we don’t know. He’s gone out of fashion, but never out of print—he’s too popular to be fashionable.
Reviewing the 1977 film version of Islands in the Stream, Pauline Kael wrote, “There may be a time for a Hemingway revival, but this isn’t it. His themes don’t link with our preoccupations and… the movie version of his posthumous novel seems to belong to another age.” Kael was right, but she missed something: Another age is precisely why many still read Hemingway.
In the ’80s, writes Mary Dearborn in her richly detailed biography, “Hemingway and his place in the Western literary tradition came under full-on attack, as readers, scholars, urgently questioned what ‘dead white males’ like Hemingway have to say to us in a multicultural era that no longer accords them automatic priority. The so-called Hemingway code—a tough, stoic approach to life that seemingly substitutes physical courage … for other forms of accomplishments—increasingly looked insular and tiresomely macho.”
In the recent film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Michael Shannon’s book burner says with a smirk, as he picks up a Hemingway novel, “The feminists got to him.” But dead white male-ism survives—it elected our current president.
In the 21st century, thanks to movies, his image is more with us than ever. InMidnight in Paris (2011) Corey Stoll conjures an uncanny likeness of the mid-’20s Hemingway with a boost from Woody Allen’s spot-on dialogue: “It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that’s what war does to men. There’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it’s not only noble but brave.”
And: “No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
The next year HBO aired Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, about Papa’s tempestuous relationship with his third wife, the journalist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Nicole Kidman gives a powerhouse performance as the only one of Hemingway’s four wives who was a match for him in intelligence and temperament, and Clive Owen is the most complete and nuanced of the numerous cinematic Hemingways (though Dominic West delivers a vivid cameo in Genius, a film bio of the remarkable editor Max Perkins).
Hemingway the man, though, is pretty much cut down to size by Dearborn’s biography. Long before a subdural hematoma suffered in a 1944 auto accident, after which his alcohol-fueled behavior became increasingly irrational, Hemingway was a bully, braggart, and myth-monger. He was also, despite his lifelong flirtation with leftist politics, a bit of a fascist, temperamentally at least. (“And not,” as Sacha Baron Cohen says in The Dictator, “in a good way.”) Mussolini, he reported some time in the ’20s, “is no fool and he is a great organizer.”
His father, Ed (like his son, a suicide), “taught that it was wrong to shoot an animal or catch a fish unless it was to be eaten,” a lesson lost on a man who thrilled to the killing of lions and elephants. Dearborn acknowledges that Hemingway “seemed to need to bite the hand that fed him—or, more precisely, to hurt anyone who had helped him in any way.”
With the exception of Ezra Pound, whose fascism he chose to ignore, this was true of nearly every writer who ever influenced him, from Sherwood Anderson (whose work he parodied nastily in The Torrents of Spring), Gertrude Stein, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose critical acumen greatly improved the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. “Fitzgerald had rescued Hemingway’s novel,” Dearborn writes, “and Ernest would never forgive him for it.”
He once took a swing at Orson Welles, who criticized lines in a script Hemingway wrote for a story of life during war in a small village, The Spanish Earth. Ernest told him, “You effeminate boys of the theater, what do you know about real war?” to which Welles responded by lisping, “Mister Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are!” Welles told the story of his uneasy friendship with Hemingway for Michael Parkinson:https://www.youtube.com/embed/NyTi9v9QPxE?&enablejsapi=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=0
Hemingway boasted that during World War II he killed 26 “krauts,” including a 17-year old German (how he determined the soldier was 17 was never explained). In truth, he may not have fired his gun at all, and as a war correspondent shouldn’t have been carrying one. Martha Gellhorn thought, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”
Did—does—Hemingway qualify as a genius? He certainly thought he did. But perhaps his greatest lie was to himself. In a letter to one of his editors, he wrote that if writing was boxing, he had a chance to beat “Mr. Tolstoy,” and “I fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal …” I saw those fights and Stendhal won two unanimous decisions and Tolstoy by a third round KO.
His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), still reads with the freshness of an open wound (when I say first, I’m excluding the unreadable The Torrents of Spring). But it’s tough to read the big books on which Hemingway’s reputation has so long rested—A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)—without noticing how stagey and melodramatic they seem.
I loved the scene in Silver Linings Playbook when a furious Bradley Cooper throws his copy of A Farewell to Arms out the window because, “She dies. I mean, the world’s hard enough as it is, guys. Can’t someone say, hey, let’s be positive?” (The character was reading it because it was on his ex-wife’s high school English class syllabus.) And some of the language in For Whom the Bell Tolls might cause anyone to throw the book through a window: “Did thee feel the earth move?” and “I am thee, and thou art me.”
To Have and Have Not (1937) also doesn’t survive a rereading. Film director Howard Hawks liked to tell the story that Hemingway confessed that he wrote it only because he needed money. Hawks supposedly told him, “I can take the worst piece of crap you ever wrote and make a good movie out of it.” The novel is dishonest hack work; with the help of William Faulkner (and how that must have galled Hemingway) and Jules Furthman and some adroit improv from Bogart and Bacall, Hawks made a piece of first rate hack work. (The immortal line, “You know how to whistle, don’t you? You put your lips together and blow,” isn’t in the book.)
The reputation of The Old Man and the Sea (1952) hasn’t fared much better. Dwight Macdonald scored easy points when he said it was “written in that fake, biblical prose which Pearl Buck used in The Good Earth… Miss Buck also got a Nobel Prize out of it.” Macdonald knew very well that even at his worst, Hemingway was in a higher class than Buck and that The Old Man and the Sea isn’t Hemingway at his worst. Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and the two novels published after his death, Islands in the Stream (1970) and The Garden of Eden (1986), are Hemingway at his worst. They are worthy of comparison to Buck, and I’m not sure Hemingway gets the decision.
Gellhorn, after reading Across the River, said. “It has a loud sound of madness and a terrible smell as of decay.” John Dos Passos, another former friend whom Hemingway had alienated, wrote in a letter, “How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?”
Surely it’s his short stories that will keep Hemingway’s literary reputation alive. Even his severest critics concede a value in the stories lacking in the novels. Nabokov told an interviewer, “I read him for the first time in the early ‘40s, something about bells, balls and bulls …” Nabokov considered Hemingway and Joseph Conrad “writers of books for boys.” But Hemingway was better than Conrad: “He has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story ‘The Killers.’” He also thought that the “description of the iridescent fish and its rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb.” Go fish, Dwight Macdonald.
One of the conceits that holds up is his comparison of himself to Cezanne. In the introduction to the recent Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, his grandson Sean writes, “My grandfather liked to compare his writing to Cezanne’s painting. He said that he learned how to write landscapes from Cezanne, whose work he saw in Paris as a young man.”
And, pretty much, he’s right. This edition offers multiple drafts (from the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston) that show how the author polished his jewels. He learned from many sources, from the great and underrated Ring Lardner (whose name he adopted for his high school newspaper), Stein, Ezra Pound (who, Dearborn says, “taught him to be leery of adjectives, a mistrust that would become an essential part of the Hemingway style”), and not the least, from the style manual he learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star—use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English. Also, and surely one of few rules he and Nabokov both adhered to, avoid words that end in “ly.”
In an early draft of “Big Two-Hearted River,” he pays homage to Cezanne: “He wanted to write like Cezanne painted.” But he excised that sentence from his final version. In his early stories he succeeded in capturing the literary quality of Cezanne’s technique of focusing on background, subordinating central objects and outlines to detail.
In another deleted passage in the story, almost identical to the prose in the final, he mentions Cezanne again: “Nick, seeing how Cezanne would do the stretch of country, stood up. The water was cold and actual. He waded across the stream, moving in the picture. It was good. He kneeled down in the gravel at the edge of the stream and reached down into the trout sack… Nick opened the mouth of the sack and skimmed it back. He slid the trout into the shallow water…”
In his introduction to the new volume of short stories, grandson Sean writes, “Short stories were the medium that Hemingway began with and favored early on in his career … [In 1925] Hemingway wrote to his future editor Maxwell Perkins: ‘I don’t care about writing a novel and I like to write short stories… Somehow the novel seems to me to be an awfully artificial and worked out form …’”
The art of Hemingway, the innovation that marked him—along with Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and other post-World War I modernists—is to be found in his stories, not in the increasingly archaic-seeming novels. Hemingway subscribed to the “iceberg principle” of writing: “The dignity of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” As Sean Hemingway notes, “Big Two-Hearted River” is a story about World War I in which the war is never mentioned.
Applying it to fiction, he meant that an author must keep his narrative short as the very nature of the medium dictated compression. In his Poetry Notebook, Clive James found from a lifetime of studying poetry “the intensity of language that marked the real difference between poetry and prose.” Open one of Hemingway’s novels just about anywhere and you will find language that is flowery and overwritten; flip to any pages in one of his great short stories and find poetry (much better poetry than Hemingway managed in his verse).
Yeats liked to quote a remark attributed to John Stewart Mill: “Rhetoric is heard. Poetry is overheard.” Hemingway’s stories seem overheard. You can see this demonstrated in the versions reprinted in the Short Stories, where each draft becomes more concise and better as he revises.
Alas, even great Hemingway lends itself to parody. He dismissed parodies of his writing by saying, “The greater the work of literature, the easier the work to parody.” (Though he certainly didn’t feel that way when he parodied his mentor, Sherwood Anderson.)
Raymond Chandler, himself a Hemingway admirer and quite possibly the second most parodied American writer: “Hank unscrewed the top of the toothpaste tube, thinking of the day he had unscrewed the lid of the coffee jar, down on the Pukauuk River when he was trout fishing. There are larches there, too. It was a damned good river, and the trout had been damned good trout. They liked being hooked. Everything had been good except the coffee, which had been lousy. He made it Watson’s way, boiling it for two and a half hours in his knapsack. It had tasted like hell. It had tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man.”
Still, it’s the novels that have inspired the most satirical scorn. In Fifty Works of English (and American) Literature We Could Do Without, Brigid Brophy mocked A Farewell to Arms, “In place of Gertrude Stein’s varied cadences, Hemingway ties one short, blunt instrument to another by means of and: ‘She had a lovely face and body and lovely smooth skin too. We would be lying together and I would touch her cheeks and her forehead and under her eyes and chin and throat with the tips of my fingers …’”
I don’t have to read Stein to know that that passage is bad. It’s time to acknowledge that Fitzgerald came nearer to greatness as a novelist than Hemingway, and that Hemingway never wrote a novel as good as The Great Gatsby (which T.S. Eliot thought was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”). Hemingway ended his career as he had begun, as an inspired adolescent. He burned with a hard gemlike flame for perhaps ten years, roughly from 1925 to the mid-1930s, and what he wrote after that coasted on the momentum of his extravagant influence. Is it even possible to imagine Faulkner doing an endorsement for Ballantine Ale, as Hemingway did in 1952?
But I also know that there’s an art in Hemingway’s stories that surpasses the novels, one that can’t be explained simply by reciting influences like Stein, the KC Star Style Manual, or even Cezanne. In his stories, Hemingway lit a torch to the path of literary modernism. As a novelist, his attitudes were those of an earlier time. Like a beefy, bearded Janus, his image will always stand at the crossroads of 19th and 20th century American literature.
Galileo, the audiobook arrived in May 2023. A book of Galileo Galilei’s writings had been on my shelf for decades and decades, waiting for me to read the pages. I knew I’d get around to it. Eventually. I had read excerpts in a college colloquium. Whatever that is. A gathering, a conjuration.
So, when I noted on my Audible audiobook online service that a reading was set to come out in May 2023 I was interested. I vaguely remember that the effort was ‘crowd funded’ meaning a number of individuals donated a certain amount of money to help pay for the work of creating an audio file of the works. I thought it was interesting that one could pre-order the file so one could hear it the day the work was released. For me it brought back the ‘excitement’ of listening to the latest song from a popular music artist, or an anticipated movie. I love audiobooks, but most of the ones I am waiting for are hundreds of years old. Go figure.
I had the paperback copy on my shelf, and then on my desk as I looked at page on the computer screen. I was just searching through my house for my paperback copy of the book. I found the book in by bed, under my pillow. Will any ideas seep through to my brain. Yeah, sure.
The title is “Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo” Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Stillman Drake. The 1957 text of the work is online. https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-741
Anne G, who is nine years old, was visiting when I pointed out the book on my desk and told her of the upcoming release of the audiobook.
“Why don’t you just read the book?” she asked.
I was flummoxed. I had waited decades for the audio. The wisdom of the ages speaking to me. And, she wanted me to pick up the book in front of me and just “read it?”
I thought back to the numerous confrontations I had had with my older sister when I was a child. My sister was two years older than me for most of our lives. A ‘know-it-all’ who delighted in pointing out some obvious practical solution to a problem right in front of me. I hate that. Who did she think she was. Did I look like someone who wanted to solve problems?
For many years I have enjoyed audiobooks. Once I got vinyl discs from the public library and made copies on cassette tape to add to my collection and hunger for stories. When online files of audiobooks became available I got a few current titles on Audible, but mostly listened to the public domain readings for free on Librivox and other places. When I finally broke down and paid $240 a year for Audible I was very pleased with the audiobooks and extra classic works available in addition to the ones I ‘paid’ for with what Audible calls credits. I listen to so many audiobooks that I use up credits and bought even more just as the Galileo book came out.
I thought of getting even with Anne G by getting the work and listening. Somehow I also felt like I was standing up to my older sister, too. I had skates on and I was moving around listening to the introduction explaining how Galileo stood up to the Church authorities and scientific ‘consensus’ of 16th century Europe. I was standing up, too, buy getting the audiobook.
Galileo ended up being under ‘house arrest,’ after being convicted of ‘wrong think’ and I think we all can relate to that after lockdowns.
I took off my skates and got into bed with the cat purring beside me when I opened my copy Galileo in paperback.
“What?”
The text was exactly the same. The 1957 edition I had was the one used in the audiobook reading. I had the script in my hand all along.
Ann G was right. My sister Mary right again.
My family asks me if I ever get tired of being wrong. I point out that I am right 49% of the time.
xenagoguevicene 