Stein to Hemingway Begin Over Again and Concentrate

By Robert Wolf
Decorah, IA, U.s.a.

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Robert Wolf

Sherwood Anderson had published Winesburg, Ohio by the time he introduced himself to Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1921. Stein, who had published only small editions of two works, 3 Lives and Tender Buttons, was known primarily to other writers.

Anderson's praise of Stein'south piece of work endeared him to her, especially because Anderson was a major figure in American prose and Stein was struggling to brand her work known. She was, at that time, writing her more than 900-page tome, The Making of Americans, and collecting smaller pieces into what became Geography and Plays, published in 1922. Stein's editor suggested that she inquire Anderson to write an introduction to that book, which he did.

In return, Stein wrote a tribute to him in 1922, "Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson." You can hear Stein read information technology at: poetryfoundation.org/poem.

The year earlier, 1921, young Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson, visited Stein and Toklas. Anderson had provided Hemingway with an introduction, not simply to Stein but also to Ezra Pound and others in the émigré community.

Hemingway came to Paris with experience as a journalist, which gave him the ground for his craft. As a young reporter for The Kansas City Star, he knew its fashion-canvas, which began: "Use short sentences. Use brusk first paragraphs. Apply vigorous English. Be positive, non negative." Hemingway said that, "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business concern of writing. I've never forgotten them."

Ezra Pound became one of his mentors. In a letter to Lewis Galantiere, Hemingway wrote that Pound is "teaching me to write, and I'm education him to box." What Pound undoubtedly taught him were the principles of a style of writing he called Imagism—a lean, spare manner that dispenses with adjectives and adverbs and whatsoever other word not absolutely necessary to a directly presentation of the subject.

Gertrude Stein

At the same time, Hemingway was getting advice from Stein, who was not addicted of Pound. (He had broken one of her chairs by sitting on it.) In Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker described a conversation in which Stein, shortly after first meeting Hemingway, offered him criticism of one of his works-in-progress. According to Baker, ". . . she did not care for the novel. 'There is a great bargain of description in this,' she said, 'and not particularly adept description. Begin over again and concentrate.' Ernest picked up his ears."

Later on, in Spain, Hemingway wrote Stein and Toklas ". . . I'g trying to do the country like Cé́zanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a trivial bit . . . but isn't writing a hard job though? It used to exist easy before I met you. I certainly was bad, gosh, I'm awfully bad now only information technology's a different kind of bad."

Years later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote that Stein "had . . . discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable . . . . Simply she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to brand her writing intelligible . . ."

Of The Making of Americans, Hemingway wrote, "This volume began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of cracking brilliance, and so went on endlessly in repetitions that a more careful and less lazy writer would have put in the waste matter basket."

Stein began The Making of Americans in 1902 or 1903 (opinions differ), and completed it in 1911. Whether or not it ranks in quality aslope Joyce's Ulysses and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things By, it is, like them, a significant modernist experiment. Hemingway proofread the manuscript and arranged for the publication of excerpts in the transatlantic review in 1924.

The Making of Americans is not an obscure piece of work. Consider its tertiary and fourth paragraphs: "Information technology has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need just realize our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.

"The old people in the new world, the new people made out of the quondam, that is the story that I hateful to tell, for that is what actually is and what I really know."

Stein was a writer of many styles, and the language of The Making of Americans has no similarity to her experiments in pure sound, such every bit "Idem the Same." Equally noted in Part Ane of my article in Stay Thirsty (Summer 2014), Stein's earliest audio experiment, Tender Buttons, inspired Anderson to begin his own, unpublished experiments. His explorations, together with the prose of 3 Lives, opened something within Anderson that found fit expression for his sensibility.

Each of the seminal works of the three writers—Iii Lives, Tender Buttons, Winesburg, Oho, and In Our Time—has its distinctive rhythm and style. What the books have in mutual is their authors' deliberate pick to work with a limited vocabulary. With their simple words, critic Edmund Wilson wrote, the 3 writers could convey "profound emotions and complex states of mind."

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker wrote that in 1925, when Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Christian Gauss discussed their respective influences, "Hemingway named Sherwood Anderson'due south Winesburg, Ohio as his offset design."

Bakery besides reported that in 1935 Hemingway listed sixteen books that he would rather read for the first time than receive one meg dollars annually. Of the sixteen, only ii books were American—Winesburg, Ohio and Huckleberry Finn.

When In Our Time was published, the beginning edition came with a blurb from Anderson on the dust jacket. Hemingway bristled. He did not want the association. At to the lowest degree two reviewers found similarities between the writing of the two men. Hemingway'south story, "My Quondam Man," one wrote, was clearly influenced by Anderson's racetrack stories. "By this fourth dimension," Baker wrote, "Ernest was sick of existence compared to Anderson."

Ernest Hemingway

An interesting distinction between the two writers lies in Hemingway's treatment of a theme Anderson handled in Winesburg—that of a woman who gives herself to a human. "Up in Michigan" is a very early story and written from a woman's point of view, something Hemingway never once again attempted.

The human takes the woman for a walk. They sit and he touches her under her wearing apparel; she tells him to terminate. "She was frightened merely she wanted it. She had to have it but it frightened her."

He does not end and he hurts her. Afterward, he falls asleep and she works out from under him and kisses him on the cheek. When he does not respond, she cries. "She was cold and miserable and everything felt gone." And then: "Liz took off her coat and leaned over and covered him with it. She tucked information technology effectually him neatly and carefully."

Like all early Hemingway information technology is written in an almost clinical manner. We don't care most Liz, considering she is non fully alive. This is partly due to Hemingway'south youth, and partly a outcome of his artistic vision, which at the fourth dimension focused on the essential exterior of things. But most of all information technology is considering Hemingway has no sympathy for the woman.

For whom did Hemingway have sympathy? In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner quotes Pound as saying, " . . . Hem . . .never knew one man being from some other . . . and never much cared."

Anderson, on the contrary, had a deep interest in people, in what they idea and felt. One of the early on stories in Winesburg contains an episode that I believe formed the germ of "Up in Michigan."

In "Mother," a young woman seeks out the company of traveling salesmen and goes for walks with them. "She did not blame the men who walked with her and later on she did not blame Tom Willard. It was always the same, get-go with kisses and ending, after strange wild emotions, with peace and then sobbing repentance. When she sobbed she put her hand upon the face of the homo and had e'er the same thought. Even though he were large and bearded she thought he had become all of a sudden a little boy. She wondered why he did not sob also."

Wanting to altitude himself from Anderson, Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Bound, a parody of Anderson's way and vision. Anderson, heed you, had gotten Hemingway a contract for In Our Time with his publisher, Boni and Liveright. To suspension his contract, which included hereafter works, and to further altitude himself from Anderson, Hemingway offered the firm The Torrents of Spring. The firm naturally declined the book and the contract was severed.

Stein responded by breaking with Hemingway. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote: "Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway. The concluding time that Sherwood was in Paris they frequently talked about him. Hemingway had been formed by the ii of them and they were both a fiddling proud and a niggling ashamed of the work of their minds."

But with characteristic charity, Anderson never replied to Hemingway in kind. After his decease in 1941, Anderson's friends and swain writers contributed essays to Homage to Sherwood Anderson. Stein contributed a piece in which she wrote, "Aye undoubtedly, Sherwood Anderson had a sugariness, and sweet is rare. One time or twice somebody is sweet, but everything in Sherwood was fabricated of sugariness."

Theodore Dreiser wrote, "And and then sometimes the things he wrote . . . had the value of a poetic prayer for the happiness and the well beingness of everything and everybody . . ."

New York music critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote, "… through the Chicagoan'due south personality and his work a beautiful, extraordinarily humanizing forcefulness was active in American life."

Anderson's empathy and understanding of what lay beneath the surface in others (qualities he said he developed in the regular army) allowed him insight into people. Hemingway acknowledged this empathy in A Moveable Feast when he wrote, " . . . I liked some of his short stories very much. They were but written and sometimes beautifully written and he knew the people he was writing about and cared deeply for them."

In1937 letter of the alphabet Thomas Wolfe wrote to Anderson, "I think yous are ane of the most of import writers of this century, that you ploughed another deep furrow in the American earth, revealed to united states of america some other beauty that we knew was in that location but that no one else had spoken. I recall of you with Whitman and with Twain—that is, with men who accept seen America with a poet's vision and with a poetic vision of life, which to my mind is the only mode ultimately it can exist seen."

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Of the three writers, Stein is the fountainhead. Through the influence her earliest published writings had on Anderson and Hemingway, Stein indirectly influenced endless other writers.

Today Stein is lionized by contemporary poets for her nonsensical writings, which are called "hermetic" by those who want to enshrine her reputation as a master. But "hermetic" is a misnomer: "hermetic" indicates that which has inner meaning, and much of Stein's work has none. Her experiments with sound and her unexpected juxtapositions of words, nevertheless, have fabricated her a writer's writer.

Sherwood Anderson

Stein and Anderson preserved their friendship through messages and rare visits until Anderson's death in 1941. By that time, Anderson's literary reputation had faded, equally Hemingway's continued to rise. The irony is that Anderson is the much more sincere and honest writer. After Hemingway's first brilliant short story collection, his work slowly fossilized. Hemingway'south characters exercise non speak as real people; they talk like Hemingway characters. The author who was so consumed with "getting things right," including atmosphere, sights, sounds and smells, did not create living characters.

To repeat what his friend Pound said, " . . . Hem . . .never knew one human existence from another . . . and never much cared."

From an early age Hemingway carried deep wounds within him—his father'southward suicide and his own war injuries, which, added to his alcoholism, surely account for his frequent spiteful behavior and nihilism. The nihilism reached unfettered expression in an essay cum story, "A Natural History of the Dead," published in his 1933 story collection, Winner Accept Nothing. Reading Hemingway from the perspective of his nihilism and self-disgust, his suicide makes sense.

Anderson, by dissimilarity, was, as Paul Rosenfeld wrote, a powerful humanizing force in America. Anderson is now known to the reading public exclusively for Winesburg, Ohio, but two of his other books, his novel Poor White and his memoir, A Storyteller's Story, need to be read. Similar Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry Finn, they are quintessential American works. His style is rooted in American speech and his overarching business organisation is with the American landscape.

His works are meditations on the transformation of the American graphic symbol under the influence of the automobile. He is not, as J.B. Priestley claimed, longing for a pre-industrial idyllic existence. Anderson had seen too much and lived as well much to fall for that.

He, possibly, was the first of our writers to make loneliness and the individual's inability to connect with others a major theme in American literature, one that later became central with Thomas Wolfe. One wonders what course American culture might accept taken had more writers had Anderson'due south concerns and sensibility.

Links:

Stein, Hemingway and Anderson – Part One by Robert Wolf

Robert Wolf
Free River Press

All opinions expressed by Robert Wolf are solely his own and do not reflect the opinions of Stay Thirsty Media, Inc.

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