arrogant racist misogynist narcissist
self-absorbed self-centered who is being
described in these deeply unflattering
terms Ernest Hemingway yes Ernest
Hemingway the most famous American
writer as an English teacher every year
I think about why do we still teach
Hemingway I have published three
scholarly books on Hemingway and I
published most recently three books on
teaching Hemingway on the topics of war
modernism and gender and yet every day
I’m asked how can you still be teaching
Hemingway who was Hemingway born in 1899
in Oak Park Illinois he was brought up
in an upper-middle-class family with the
physician father and an opera singer
journalism boxing and football he
enlisted in the Italian ambulance corps
and in 1918 he was the first American
wounded on the Italian front he was
twice decorated for valor he wrote about
Paris in Spain in the Sun Also Rises he
wrote about the great war in a farewell
tarz he wrote the first english-language
guidebook to the bullfights in death in
the afternoon he wrote about hunting in
green hills of Africa and covered the
Spanish Civil War and wrote for Whom the
Bell Tolls after buying his boat Pilar
he had four World Records in big-game
fishing
the old man in the sea he was married
four times and had numerous girlfriends
he covered the d-day invasion the Battle
of the Bulge and he died by suicide
after winning the Nobel Prize for
Literature yet Hemingway comes to us as
a conflicted figure somebody who
performed masculinity at a time when
gender roles were shifting in American
culture and women were taking on a more
dominant role and men felt the need to
strengthen their role
so Hemingway established his reputation
in many ways through the manufacturing
of different images here we see
Hemingway as the wounded soldier he had
54 pieces of shrapnel in his knee he
looks heroic but he was blown up while
passing out chocolate and cigarettes
here’s Hemingway on safari in Africa you
can now buy kudu horns like that for $20
on eBay
here’s Hemingway pursuing his passion
for big-game fishing on the Gulf Stream
the meat from that 486 pound Marlin went
to waste he passionately pursued the
bullfights in Spain for many the
bullfights are needless cruelty and not
a cultural celebration he covered the
wars in Spain in Italy and in France and
afterwards suffered post-traumatic
stress disorder he had many encounters
with women and was married four times he
was not a good father and of course
there was the drinking his alcoholism
contributed to his manic depression and
so Hemingway learned to perform
masculinity
he created a manufactured image that
told the viewer that he was living life
to the fullest that he was living an
authentic life in you sitting at home
perhaps we’re not and this image was
sold in the media
Hemingway’s face appeared on magazines
that were aimed towards educated
audiences such as time and life but more
significantly Hemingway’s image was sold
to mass audiences in these glossy slick
magazines for many he became a
representative man again at a time when
what it meant to be a man was being
contested as women were emerging in the
workforce and there was transitions in
thus with all that is so problematic
about Hemingway why do we still teach
him today I turned to a farewell to arms
in many ways as the best example of why
we still teach Hemingway to today’s
students it has the literary themes and
the style to help students best
understand Hemingway’s world for
students to read Hemingway is a sign of
something that is cool
cynical perhaps self-destructive
something that they’re attracted to for
reasons they may not quite be able to
articulate but once they are dropped
into the rainy war-torn landscape of
Italy and understand the troubled world
of Frederick and Catherine they
recognize that a farewell to arms is a
great novel what makes it great well for
many of us it is because Hemingway
incorporates the the aesthetic
principles of Paul Cezanne into his
aesthetic code in 1924
Hemmingway first saw seasons paintings
at the salon of Gertrude Stein in Paris
at a time when he’s forming his own
aesthetic philosophy when he was trying
to decide what he wanted to do with his
own brand of art he wrote he wanted to
write like cézanne painted Cezanne
started with all the tricks then he
broke the whole thing down and built the
real thing
it was held to do he wanted to write
about country so that it would be there
like Cezanne had done it in painting he
had to do it from inside yourself
there wasn’t any trick nobody had ever
written about country like that he felt
almost wholly about it it was deadly
serious you could do it if you would
fight it out if you’d lived right with
your eyes Cezanne was a French
post-impressionist painter right and in
his paintings he’s using short
repetitive concentrated brushstrokes to
break down the plane of the painting
it’s a lesson that Hemingway was to
learn from him could turn first to the
opening pages of A Farewell to Arms in
the late summer of that year we lived in
a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains
in the bed of the river there were
pebbles and boulders dry and white in
the Sun and the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels
troops went by the house and down the
road and the dust they raised powdered
the leaves of the trees the trunks of
the trees too were dusty and the leaves
fell early that year and we saw the
troops marching along the road and the
dust rising and leaves stirred by the
breeze falling and the soldiers marching
and afterward the road bare and white
except for the leaves notice a
repetition of Hemingway’s language he’s
repeating words like Cezanne
is using brushstrokes we have the word
water twice dust three times leaves for
white twice notice two we have things
that are rise and are raised fall and
are falling Hemingway is showing the
interconnectedness of the natural world
because of the way that the dust Rises
the leaves fall early that year showing
us how the war has disrupted the natural
cycles nature is damaged by war notice
too how Hemingway uses motion this is
part of the trick of Cezanne to capture
life in motion on a canvas right we have
the soldiers marching we have the water
flowing we have the dust rising and we
have the leaves falling and afterward
everything bare and white Hemingway is
trying to capture a dominant idea of
nature to show how everything is
elementally connected from Cezanne
hemingway learned that these short
concentrated brushstrokes right would
just in the same way be employed in his
writing as you look at a saison canvas
you can see how his brushstrokes give us
a house perhaps a roof perhaps a tree in
the same way that Hemingway’s words dust
leaves wind give us that same sense of
motion as we get in essays on canvas so
as we think about why we still teach
Hemingway’s fiction we see with students
that they embrace Hemingway’s realism as
their own they hear it and it echoes
as they navigate the cold world of
adults and the treacherous world of
teenagers they find lessons in Hemingway
in the words a legendary English teacher
at Phillips Exeter Academy Harvard
Knowles in giving us stories that root
us in our own experiences
Hemingway shows us not only who we are
but also forces us to consider what we
may become what greater teacher could we
possibly want for our young fully racist
narcissist misogynist obnoxious and
self-centered yes we have to reconcile
the tension between an image that is so
ugly and an art that is so beautiful and
the role of regressive masculinity in
American culture yet Hemingway endures
his best writing endures because he
teaches us lessons about how to live
according to our values and what it means to be human today thank you