I’m thinking of writing a book with that title, about how to look death in the face and then run like hell. Hemingway was the most important writer of the twentieth century—not the best, but the most important. Too schoolboy-magazine, really, but of world-class stature.
Well, what does “not the best” mean? The novels haven’t held up. I love The Sun Also Rises, but it’s the only one that works these days, at least for me.
But the stories are up there with the greatest: Scheherazade, Boccaccio, Chekhov, Kafka, Hemingway. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—is there a wilder, more gripping story? Gable and Peck both starred in film versions.
But that’s not the point. The importance of Hemingway was that he defined the American man, for the first time. Tom and Huck defined boyhood, not manhood. Arthur Dimmesdale and Natty Bumpo are versions of the British gentleman, meaning the British aristocrat, like Tarzan—and were the only model American men had, and the world had, of American men.
Look at the heroes of the movies of the twenties. The most popular was Douglas Fairbanks, an American version of the British gentleman. Barrymore, Adolpf Menjou—ersatz Brits. Ronald Coleman—a Brit.
But in the thirties, when everybody’s read the novels, or heard of them, we have the emergence of Hemingway Man: Gable, Bogart, Cooper. Tough guys. "If you want to call me that, smile." The British aristocrat, all old-world aristocrats, trace their lineage back to myth, to heroes and gods who slew monsters. Hemingway slew his own monsters—bulls, lions, charging buffalo, giant fish—he traveled the world seeking them out. It was very strongly felt by the young men who fought in Korea and Vietnam that you couldn’t be a man unless you had stood up under a shelling—“that chastening,” as he called it.
It is no exaggeration to say that what we call “the sixties,” the movement and broad social feeling roughly between 1966 and 1975, was a reaction against Hemingway, the minting of post-Hemingway man. (Nor is it any exaggeration to say that the feminist movement that gathered such strength then was a reaction against the courtly love tradition, but that’s another story.)
There had always been guys like Teddy Roosevelt, “big-stick” guys, macho guys. Indeed, Graham Greene says that machismo is an inheritance from the Romans, and exists only in places that had been part of the Empire, and their colonies.
But Papa wore macho with a glamour that seduced the world, and gave America, and American men—and their women—a specialness, an identity, a global profile.
Fitzgerald, who wrote the finest English prose since Shakespeare, and was a more generous man than Hemingway, who despised him, was shouldered out by Hemingway Man, and knew it, and resented it, and forgave it. Fitzgerald was the opposite of a tough guy, and therefore in competition with the British gentleman. He wrote very little that wasn’t designed to show that American class had more class than British class.
But by the thirties, nobody cared. Indeed, who cares now? Name a recent American president, up till the sitting one, who isn’t cut from Hemingway’s cloth.
Ironically—for we must have irony, I can’t live without it—he finished life as a lesbian.
He became fascinated by lesbianism, put it in his novels and stories, and asked of his women that they treat him as one of them in bed. Well, it takes balls.
One of my English professors told us that the Hemingway mystique was false if it came down to blowing your own head off, but that’s unfair. Papa had been concussed and internally damaged in two back-to-back small-plane crashes in the jungle, and must have been in enormous pain, and in pain like that you can’t tell whether it’s physical or spiritual. Drugs, booze, shock treatments, going blind, I mean come on.
You’ve got to get out from under your heroes, and I think I have moved on from Hemingway. My characters are as wimpy as I am. But his presence is still there. Norman Mailer carried it for us until a few years ago. I leave you with this:
The accidental monkey ‘S a metaphysics junkie With bothersome abysses on his mind;
Preoccupied with dying, Interminably trying To turn around and glimpse his own behind.
His finger in his yin-yang He contemplates the Big Bang, The earliest ancestor he can find,
Unless it’s all that room The Bang had to go boom— Or does it create space as it unwinds,
A spreading dance of gravity In a potential cavity Like that in which his finger is entwined? Reality extrudes him; Its structure still eludes him, His probing finger warmer but confined.
A cosmos so anonymous, How can it but be ominous That such vast masonry was left unsigned? Enigma born of distances And exquisite resistances— Too seamless not to seem that way designed.
Theisms, whether mono Or other sorts of guano, Have left his spirit largely unaligned.
Perusing Darwin’s Theory He feels a little leery Of sepia-toned free-market states of mind.
Amino acid soup-erman Whose wake-up call so overran ’S the one myth all the apes have not maligned;
But too unscientific To offer much specific, As willing as he is to be resigned.
The spiral strands of rubble He surveys through the Hubble May possibly bear others of his kind.
Would that be any better, To get an email letter From some strange breed of orphans just as blind?
Abject on a conveyor, Hunched over as for prayer He’s hummed through life bowed down by double bind.
The horizontal motion Admits no meta-notion, His view cut off both forward and behind.
A bas with this banality! He opts for verticality— His heart leaps up and stands in him star-high!
A fallen god no longer, Already he feels stronger, Astral banana peeling off the rind!
Abyss-wise up is down though And starry heaven’s clown so Has raised his head it’s lodged in his behind.
Divine but rather stupid, Of Morpheus and Cupid, And to this grosser matter self-consigned,
The accidental monkey At least is his own flunky, And buoyed by this he hop-turns to the grind.
"That which has always been accepted by
everyone, everywhere, is almost
certain to be false."
—Paul Valéry
Darwin was a Romantic. The Romantic is impatient with mystery. He must identify himself, and that means to identify with something, or someone—to be able to say, “That’s me”—which requires indulging in metaphysics, as who can help doing? The usual Romantic choice is Nature. De Sade identified with a Nature that was bloody, murderous and, well, sadistic (see The Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France); Byron, with the storm; Shelley, with the west wind—“Be thou me, impetuous one!” (perhaps he's punning; péter is French for fart); Marx, with history, which he thought behaved rationally; Darwin, with the orangutan; and Freud with Darwin: the id is the ape within. For the Romantics, and for much of the nineteenth century, time was an absolute. The ancient Greek absolute was space, three-dimensional Euclidian space. The Greeks knew the diameter of the globe, and one idea moving behind appearances gives the parallax of rational thought. This same enthusiasm was unearthed in the Renaissance. Three-dimensional painting became an optical science, Baroque perspective dominated everything from Versailles to the ruler-drawn borders of America, and Newton built his universe in Euclid’s space. The inward-looking Romantics were in love with one aspect of this space, infinite time. An object is inert in that it doesn’t move unless acted upon, and in motion continues forever unless it meets another force. That line describes infinite time. Space, said Kant, is our outer sense, time our inner sense. Likewise for Godard the shot is a glance, montage a heartbeat. In all of literature, said Northrop Frye, there are only two books that go from the beginning to the end, the bible and The Communist Manifesto. Darwin stopped in the present, but his time-line was infinite. This absolute collapsed, however, in the 1870s and 80s, when our telescopes became strong enough, and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, and we saw that their placement doesn't fit three-dimensional space. Of this arrangement we cannot construct a model—cannot imagine it. Euclid’s laws, it turns out, are the laws of the mind, and we can’t think outside them. (See on this Catholics and Puritans.) We call intergalactic space “curved” as a metaphor derived from Mercator’s projection: if Moscow and Saint Petersburg are the right distance apart, Nairobi and Mombasa can’t be, and vice versa. (There’s more on this in What We Know.) But if space is skew, so is the now perhaps finite time-line. And the nineteenth-century view of things has survived. Is it therefore the fittest? That esteemed entomologist Vladimir Nabokov said, “Perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.” Evolution is our myth, our default belief about ourselves. Ask any jerk walking down the street and he'll tell you the score. Have a banana. The “scientists” who publish daily base their speculations on it, as do the literary Naturalists, from Flaubert and Zola to Norman Mailer. Poor disappointed Strindberg wondered if men and women were not descended from different monkeys. It's a version of the medieval Great Chain of Being, from God and the angels down to minerals, lain on its side and extended in time. Stanley Kubrick, that stern satirist, was having none of it. In a gesture of victory an ape throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of montage, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed—our myth, and therefore invisible. But if being the fittest were just a matter of incremental circuitry the computer HAL (read IBM) would win. (See also Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, in many ways an exemplary thinker, said, “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.” But it isn’t a “theory.” Scientific method requires of a theory that it be testable, “verifiable,” as Karl Popper put it. Nothing in the Theory can be tested. “Science,” said Paul Valéry, “means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. The rest is literature.” And there are other ways to read the fossil record. "Facts"? Turn a fact a little this way and a little that and it will show you a different face. The proper concern of science, as Edgar Poe said, is not with facts but with laws. Why do I quote artists rather than scientists? Because they're better. Poe, with his take on Newton, and his understanding that physics is metaphysics, anticipated much that a later century found revolutionary. "Space and Duration are one," he said. Whereas scientists, so numerous, so earnest, are as guilty as the rest of us of scientism, the confidence that science knows it all, can know it all, will know it all. Most of them are kids publishing or perishing, and have no time to think things all the way through—nor would they dare commit heresy. Sponsor spank. And so the Theory assumes the rigidity of religious dogma. Doubt "science" and you can go to the stake. Just look at the comments on this essay. Must we be saddled with the effort to imagine one thing turning into another, and to explain the existence of “stuff,” that from which we “evolved”? Or was it always there? Always will be? Are we flirting with a model of God? Are we creationists? Darwin was a creationist. And the pope is a Darwinist, no problem there. The Scopes monkey trial baffled literate onlookers. Only fundamentalists could insist that the world was created five thousand years ago like it says in the bible. In the movie, Spencer Tracy (marvelous man) shouts “I don’t give a damn about right and wrong!” “What do you give a damn about?” “TRUTH!” Well, truth is hard to come by, and overrated. We know how things behave, but what they are is a closed door. Is our local Euclidian time-line long enough to accommodate the Theory? Godard, to come back to him, says no, it’s too short to get all the way from the amino-acid soup to us. “Our ignorance of our nature,” he says, “is total.” And Valéry, to come back to him (he had what Nabokov calls “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”), says: Humanity is very young and its memory short. Hence it is quite legitimate to surmise that the known physical laws are no more than hasty conclusions drawn from too brief observation and that the human race as we know it (Homo sapiens) has so far existed only between two manifestations of prodigious, discontinuous “laws,” between two gaps in the order of the universe. But a man who watches a church clock from five past to fifty-five past twelve cannot know that it strikes the hour; cannot even guess this. It is not impossible that certain inexplicable phenomena, such as the appearance of life on our planet, are the effects of intermittent laws, laws whose successive manifestations we have not yet had time enough to observe. Of course that opens things up to uncomfortable speculation. (See Some Notes on God.)
Perhaps I’ve been living too long in Greece. These Mediterraneans are classicists, rock people, as Dalí says, and he evokes Mantegna to prove it. Romantics are Nordics, forest-and-fog people, music-and-flowers people, gazing inward at evanescent visions. “My moustache is the contrary of Nietzsche’s, which is depressive, with plenty of music. Mine is a pair of erect scissors, the rocks of this country.”
And indeed, Romantic depth can usually be traced to indigestion.
"Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?...It was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form."—James M. Barrie
I’ve got English and Irish in me, and they hate each other.
Actually it’s English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh—the whole catastrophe.
But it doesn’t stop there. You have two parents, four grandparents,
eight great-grandparents, etc. Counting thirty years per generation, as
genealogists do, three hundred years ago you have one thousand
great-times-nine grandparents. Six hundred years ago, you have a million. Nine hundred years ago, you have one billion direct mothers and fathers.
Now, nine hundred years ago there were only two million people in the
British Isles, which means everybody there had to be my straight-line
parent—let me do the math, here—five hundred times over.
And as genealogists tell us, the only thing we know for sure about our
ancestors is that they slept around. What pours down through that
bottleneck that kept mine so busy?
Going back to the beginning, there seems to have been an aboriginal
people on those islands before the arrival of the invaders from Siberia,
a short people Tolkien immortalizes as Hobbits, and that’s as
scientific as we’re likely to get about them. Whatever happened to
them?
The land of my father’s people was occupied by the Picts, about whom
much has been written but nothing is known, except that rather than
conquer them the Romans simply built a wall across the thinnest part of
the island to keep them out.
The various waves of Celts that swept in seem to have left them intact
until the Irish, who, when Ireland was called “Scotland,” invaded
Pictish territory and took over the Highlands. But that was later.
I gave my first novel to an old Belgian painter, and when he finished it he said, “You’re a Celt!”, though my name might have tipped him off.
The first traders to come to the remote British islands ("British" is a
Celtic word) were those adventurous Phoenicians, who must have left
behind some of their seed—what sailor doesn’t?—so there’s Syrian blood
in my background.
Britannium was a Roman province for four centuries, a long time
by any standard—street lights, highways, libraries, museums, swimming
pools, a police force, central heating—yes! The Romans built their houses over pits of live coals so the heat came up through every part of the floor. They
knew how to live there. Not till the Americans took over was it again
possible to be warm and clean at the same time in Britain, though they
still don’t have the hang of it.
So there’s a lot of Italian in my mix. And into that civilized
and enlightened holiday spot for rich Romans came Diaspora Jews, Greek
high-school teachers, Alexandrian scholars, Côte d'Azur serving wenches—people from all over the empire.
Soldiers guarding Hadrian’s Wall brought in their wives and families
from Spain, North Africa and Asia Minor. Archeologist are still finding
their jewelry and kitchen stuff. Moors, Arabs, Egyptians,
all in my family tree.
Then came those Hell’s Angels in boats, the Angles, the Saxons, the
Jutes (pronounced “Yutes”)—collectively speaking, the Germans. Bastards. They burned it all down, pissed on the ashes and slaughtered,
raped, enslaved and married the Celts. The rest they chased into the
Welsh and Cornish hills, where they still are. Sort of like what the
Scots did to the Picts and what we did to the Indians. And Britain, for
the next thousand years, was more or less a camp.
Courtesy my mother’s father, William Parker, I’m an Englishman—and a Welshman, thanks to my mother’s mother, Eliza Evans.
And from all directions, a Viking. More bikers in boats. They filled
eastern Britain (King Mark of Norway complained that his country was
empty because everyone had gone to England), and built Dublin.
They went everywhere, and their habit was to take prisoners to row for
them; those they didn’t work to death they dropped at the next landing
and captured replacements. They must have brought in some Chinese,
because they came back with at least one carved Buddha; and some Russians. The
climate was warmer then, so sailing across the top of Asia wasn’t a
problem, any more than negotiating the ice mountains floating in Hudson
Bay. One of those turns over and it’s a tidal wave. Ah, the Vikings!
And they probably imported some North American Indians; we know from a
particularly vivid saga that they met them and fought them. And some
sub-Saharan Africans. International people, the Vikings.
But not sweethearts. They used to sail down to the French coast, beach the boats and run (run!)
to Paris, where they raped, killed, pillaged and burned, and then ran
back to the boats. One of the most aggressive of them was Rollo, and
King Charles made a deal with Rollo: take this strip of coast,
but defend it; keep the other Vikings away. He did, and when they
sailed down from Blondland they began making a right turn before they
got to “Normandy”.
Here's Winston Churchill on Rollo's great-grandson, who saw the daughter of a tanner doing laundry in a stream: "His love was instantly fired. He carried her to his castle, and, although already married to a lady of quality, lived with her for the rest of his days." Out came William the Bastard, and he was exactly that. If there’s one thing more to be feared than a Viking it’s a Christian Viking, a Viking married to a Frenchwoman. Chilling. From across the little channel his eyes fell on Angleland. I’m having that, he said.
He organized Britain for war, which is what feudalism is. Aristocratic
titles are military offices, and from the ground up the purpose of the
smallest farm was to put a knight, or a share of a knight, in the
field. He counted every square foot in the country—they thought he was
nuts!—and wrote it all down in what by an exquisite piece of sarcasm was
known as the Doomsday Book. Only God knew as much. He made Hitler
look like a Boy Scout. (Actually Hitler did look like a Boy Scout.)
And for the next four hundred years the British aristocracy spoke
French; which is why we have two words in the language for every kind of
meat. “Boef!” called the lord. What’s that? What’s that? Cow, cow, give him cow. “Mouton!” What’s that?
“Parker” is a Norman name; it means “keeper of the park,” or the forest,
a high office because only the king was allowed to shoot the deer,
except for Robin Hood. And there are lots of Parkers, just as there are
lots of black people in America named Jefferson. Our fathers took the
name of the manor they were attached to, and came by it honestly because
the lord had had his way with their mothers.
Which brings us down to the two-million bottleneck. Of course people have poured in since then, which renders precious even these speculations.
According to tradition the Black Irish, those of us who don’t have
Nordic coloring, were fathered by Spanish sailors who swam ashore when
the Armada was wrecked. My father's mother's uncle didn’t know where in
Ireland he was from: one morning as a small boy he just got up and
walked down to the port, boarded a ship and sailed away. Where you
from, kid? Ireland.
So there I am, a pure-bred
Celtic-Pictish-Syrian-Italian-Jewish-Greek-Moorish-Arabic-Egyptian-Gallic-Anglo-Saxon-Viking-Chinese-Russian-African-Amerindian-Spanish-English-Irish-Scottish-Welshman,
with a trace of Hobbit.
