The Lost Generation

Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and the Lost Generation – a fiction

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“I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place.”

“So Hemingway was twenty-three, rather foreign looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and looked.”

“Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway talked then, and more and more, a great deal together. He asked her to come and spend an evening in their apartment and look at his work. Hemingway had then and has always a very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities and good femmes de ménage and good food. This his first apartment was just off the place du Tertre.”

“We spent the evening there and he and Gertrude Stein went over all the writing he had done up to that time. He had begun the novel that it was inevitable he would begin and there were the little poems afterwards printed by McAlmon in the Contract Edition. Gertrude Stein rather liked the poems, they were direct, Kiplingesque, but the novel she found wanting. There is a great deal of description in this, she said, and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate, she said.”

Extracts from Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

I became fascinated by the writings of Gertrude Stein after reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which she assumed the persona of her partner, Alice, to tell her own life story. There is nothing straightforward about Stein’s writings, many of which represent an insurmountable challenge to most readers, not excluding, at times, myself. Nevertheless, it is always worth persisting with genius.

Over the years I have learnt to read her texts and discovered that to do so, one really has to read them out aloud to capture her breath, much as one has to do with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Stein was a very close friend of Picasso and Matisse and Cézanne and other artist contemporaries in the early part of the 20th century, and the salon which she held at her home, 27 rue de Fleurus, in Paris, was frequented by many of the leading avant garde writers from Europe and the United States. It was supposedly Gertrude Stein who coined the term ‘the Lost Generation’ referring to Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

The story I am posting today, although entirely fictitious, was inspired by my reading of the relationship Gertrude Stein had with Ernest Hemingway as hinted at in the quotations above.

At one point in the Autobiography, she speaks of her agreement with the writer, Sherwood Anderson in these terms: “But what a book, they both agreed, would be the real story of Hemingway, not those he writes but the confessions of the real Ernest Hemingway. It would be for another audience than the audience Hemingway now has but it would be very wonderful.”

 

 

 

The Old Man and the Sea

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Hemingway_book“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

I first read the opening lines from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea, in 1963. My father had come home from the school where he taught English and handed me a brand new copy of the book. He said: “John, I think you’re going to like this. Give it a read.” I still have that book (pictured) and have read it many times since, and it is a text that never ceases to bring me great pleasure. It is the last book Hemingway wrote and quite different from any of his previous work. It has the stature of a book from the Bible.

Hemingway tells the tale of Santiago, an aging fisherman who, having gone for such a long time without landing a big fish, has lost all credibility in his community and all faith in himself. Fishing all alone one day, he does finally hook a huge marlin. After a fierce struggle, he defeats the fish and lashes it to the side of his boat, but he then has to battle the elements and ward off the attacks from predatory sharks that wish to feed off the fish. By the time Santiago reaches the harbour, little more than a carcass survives, though the head, the backbone and the tail remain as testimony to the immensity of his catch. The following day, Santiago’s fellow fishermen congregate around the skiff to applaud his achievement.

There are many ways to interpret this parable of persistence, but to me the novel has always been about Hemingway’s struggle as a writer, the struggle against writer’s block, the struggle to defeat the blank page and to land a big book that could stand alongside his earlier successes.tribe

By coincidence, in August 2003 I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Passo Fundo in the south of Brazil during a weeklong literary festival. I chose to talk about the inclusion of women in literature, focusing briefly on the writings of Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys. On the coach trip taking various participants in the festival from the city of Porto Alegre to Passo Fundo, a Brazilian academic came up to me and introduced me to the writer, John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest. In the course of the week we spoke very little, but on the return coach trip we sat together and in a journey of three hours, we became very good friends and have remained so to this day. John wrote a magnificent memoir of his relationship with his father, Gregory, entitled Strange Tribe. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the Hemingway clan.

Following our first encounter, I did not see John again until I caught up with him in the first week of July this year when I travelled to the San Fermín festivities in Pamplona. But more of that further down the line.

Tomorrow I will post a story I wrote in 1996, centred on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.