[.ca] The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (ISBN 052145574X)

Hemingway scholarship:
The essays in this book will show you everything wrong with modern Hemingway scholarship. Critics today seem to be in a love-hate relationship with Hemingway; they pay lip-service to his greatest works, yet disparage him at every opportunity. This in a volume of essays ostensibly dedicated to a great writer. I would prefer insightful essays that try to help the reader understand Hemingway, not the didactic ones that say "This aspect of Hemingway is bad." Scott Donaldson's introductory essay "Hemingway and Fame," is good, yet blemished by his snobbery toward "popular" writers. If writers like Hemingway or Mark Twain are still popular and widely read by general readers, Donaldson says that they "have been admitted to the canon despite the off-putting aroma of publicity that surrounds them." A more charitable observer would say that the popularity that still surrounds them is a testimony to the universal chords they both strike, and if those writers still succeed in reaching out to readers decades after their deaths, then it signifies their power. Perhaps the best essay is Robert Fleming's "Hemingway's Late Fiction: Breaking New Ground." Fleming discusses Hemingway's much maligned post-war fiction and convincingly argues that even in his old age Hemingway still had vitality and was exploring new territory, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but to call that period a literary failure is superficial and unjust. "Hemingway never stopped attempting to grow," Fleming concludes. Kenneth Kinnamon's essay "Hemingway and Politics" attempts to prove that "Hemingway was always on the left," contrary to the general belief that Hemingway, if anything, was right-wing. Kinnamon fails. He makes a big deal of the fact that the only man Hemingway ever voted for for President was Socialist Eugene Debs in 1920. Yet the only explanation Hemingway ever gave for his vote was that Debs "was an honest man and in jail," which suggests to the undogmatic reader that the individualist Hemingway saw Debs not as a leftist but as a man of integrity. He voted for Debs's willingness to suffer for his beliefs, not his beliefs, in other words. Kinnamon plays up Hemingway's participation in the Spanish Civil War on the Republic's side, although by Hemingway's own account this was motivated by his antifascist and pro-republican sympathies, not communist. "This was not a Stalinist experience," Hemingway wrote. "These were episodes in defence of the Spanish Republic." To Kinnamon's credit, he quotes Hemingway's frequent nose-thumbing, disparagement, and dismissals of the left, but he doesn't brush them off very well. In fact, a reading of his essay leads the reader to a different conclusion than the one Kinnamon makes. There are several "gender-orientated" essays in here. All are pretty uninsightful. Hopefully when these critics grow up and mature Hemingway will get some insightful treatment that he is usually lacking in this day and age.