Hemingway, Love, and War (with David Wyatt)

David Wyatt: Thanks for having me, Russ. Happy to be here.

David Wyatt: You can see the Spanish Civil War as a run-up to World War II, a proxy war in which various countries took sides in the initial fight between fascism and democracy. It took place in Spain from 1936 to 1939, and it was a war that was perhaps timed at that point in history because Spain had never had its French Revolution. In France, it was a class war as well–the military, the aristocracy, the church, the bankers on one side, and a whole array of a different class of persons on the other.

France kept fighting this war, you might say, for the next 150 years. Spain never had such an outbreak. And, so, in some sense, the pressures that were released in France, and in Germany and Italy in the 19th century came to a head in Spain in the 1930s because of the growing gap, you might say, between the haves and the have-nots.

In the 1930s, mid-’30s, the Popular Front was elected to run the country and it was called a Republic; and this movement was an attempt to redistribute land, money, power. And it was resisted by the powers that be. When the Front came in, they began an attack on the clergy and the churches, and there was some killing of priests. At this point, the forces on the right decided to take arms, and under Francisco Franco, they began a rebellion against the elected government called the Republic. So, on the one hand, you had Franco and his Fascists. On the other hand, you had this newly-elected Republic. So, it was a war between, you might say, the old guard and the new. And, into this war came support from Germany and Italy for Franco and the Fascists; and the Soviet Union supports the Republic. So, it’s a proxy war in that sense.

And, what happens is that the support from the Fascists is much more effective than it is from the Soviet Union.

There’s also an American contingent: About 3,000 American soldiers or volunteers formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And, Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a kind of member of that brigade. These Americans fought for the Republic.

When I say that this Fascist support was more effective, you see this in the novel when the planes come and bomb El Sordo. These are planes–German and Italian planes, probably mostly German planes. So, Franco and his Fascists were much more well-equipped than the other side.

Hemingway loved Spain, and he had been going there since the early 1920s–probably his favorite country in Europe. When the war breaks out, he decides he wants to cover it. He’s a war correspondent. He was a correspondent in the Turkish Wars, Spanish Civil War, World War II. He went to the wars.

So, he spends four visits in Spain: gets there in 1937–about, what, half a year or so, nine months after the war begins. He sets up headquarters in Madrid, and there he falls in love with Martha Gellhorn, another war correspondent, and this is when their affair begins and will eventually lead to his divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer and his marriage with Martha.

So, he goes to the war, he goes to the front, he’s often in action. He’s not carrying a gun, but he’s very close to the front lines in many cases. He befriends the great photographer Robert Capa, the war photographer, and he says at one point, ‘We were never happier than when we thought the Republic had a chance to win.’ Of course, the Republic lost, Franco wins, and for the next 30 years, Spain exists under a kind of right-wing oppression, which eventually is lifted in the 1970s.

David Wyatt: He begins writing it in late 1938, early 1939, and he spends about nine or 10 months writing it. It’s published in 1940. It’s very well received, and a movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman is made fairly quickly thereafter. Many of Hemingway’s books were made into films. So, you might say it’s percolating inside of him during the four visits he makes to Spain, and he finally decides to sit down and write what became his longest novel.

David Wyatt: I’m not sure I can answer that question fully. I don’t recall any such comment.

[SPOILER in this paragraph] I would say this about your point, which is that, in this novel, clearly Robert Jordan has taken a side, and he’s very passionate about support of the Republic. But, in Hemingway’s treatment of the enemy, of the other–particularly Lieutenant Berrendo, who ends up riding into the sights of Robert’s rifle on the last page of the book–he gives that character, who is an enemy figure, an inner life, a kind of dignity, and a kind of respect. So that, in a strange way, this book avoids a kind of ideological side-taking. It shows a lot of the flaws in the strategy being promoted by his own side. At one point, Robert tries to call off the entire blowing of the bridge. So, he’s quite honest about the deficiencies, you might say, in the side that Robert is supporting. [END SPOILER]

And, it’s a novel, so it’s not an ideological tract, and in that sense, he wants to give even the other side the dignity of at least having an inner life. Not that he ever agreed with the ultimate values or the triumph of the Fascists. But as a novelist, it was important to him to not turn the enemy into cardboard figures.

Hemingway, in this novel, I think, masters what I’d call the art of empathy–of feeling for and with almost every character that he presents. And this is part of the reason why I love the book so much, is that it seems to me a much more full-hearted, generous, and affirmative book than anything he had previously written.

David Wyatt: Two responses: one about the point about killing. Early on, Anselmo, the old man, he says, ‘I’m an old man who will live until I die,’ and eventually, he is killed near the end. Anselmo raises the issue of killing, and he asks a question early on of Robert: ‘Who forgives?’ ‘Who forgives,’ Anselmo says, ‘since we no longer have God?’ A pretty astonishing thing for a Spanish–not a peasant, exactly–but working man, to say. And, the novel takes up the whole issue of forgiveness, or what I would call self-forgiveness. That is, how do you live with the things you have done that you–for which you might need to seek forgiveness? Killing among them.

But there are lots of other sins, if you will, that Robert and others contemplate in their own lives. Pablo, as you mentioned, Pablo is the great figure of change. I think this novel is about whether or not people can change, or grow, or learn. It’s a novel of education, and that’s one of the words Robert applies to himself. He says, ‘I was learning very fast,’ near the end.

[SPOILER in this paragraph] Pablo gets three chances. Not just two, he gets three chances. Two times he betrays the band. And he finally comes back, and then, when he finally comes back, he comes back with the detonators and with some more men. So, he helps out a bit at the end. And he fights well at the end, although he loses all of his men. [END SPOILER]

So, through Pablo, I think Hemingway is exploring the whole issue of change, and in Pablo’s case, he doesn’t change: he vacillates. Change, for Hemingway, is when you turn against the self you have been, and you learn–you’re educated–to live differently. And, this is what Robert undergoes in this book. He undergoes it because, unlike any other character in the earlier novels, he is given a past. Hemingway gives him memory. He gives him memory.

David Wyatt: Well, that’s a brilliant description of the two tensions at work. On the one hand, it’s a book about the proper timing of an explosion–the blowing of the bridge–and that’s going to be the climax. On the other hand, it’s 470 pages. It’s only 70 hours of time that are covered. So, it’s a very long book about a very short time.

Hemingway’s earlier novels have been fairly short books, or modest in length, about months or even years. So, here he takes up the challenge of how to fill the time, which is, for him, an important step, because Frederic Henry had talked about killing time: ‘I just want to be with Catherine. The rest of the time I was happy to kill.’ Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises can’t really enter time. He’s been cut off from it literally.

So, this is a book which immerses us in the moment–in very quotidian moments of eating stewed rabbit, mushrooms, of drinking absinthe–but especially the time in the book: there’s the present, of course, the very intense present and the waiting you talk about.

But there’s also these recursions into memory, into the personal past, into dreams, into stories–the great story that Pilar tells about the taking of the town in Chapter 10.

So, in all kinds of ways, Hemingway has to find a strategy that will allow him to fill the time rather than to kill it. And, for me, the most important examples of that are Chapters 30 and 31, where Jordan remembers his father and his mother, and his [inaudible, grand-?]. And then the next chapter with Maria, their last night together, where she tells him her personal story.

People are given a story, and we therefore learn what it is that they need to learn, based upon what they have come out of.

David Wyatt: Well, I think he wanted two things. He wanted the sense of apprehension you’re talking about, of expectant waiting, and he also wanted to show how life goes moment by moment–the quotidian, the everyday, the banal, the cooking, the looking, the savoring, and the lovemaking, of course. Time is always made for love in Hemingway, although it rarely goes as well between two people as it does between these two. It’s kind of a magical thing, this love affair. It happens very suddenly. They fall in love without any prelude, they’re quickly in bed, and you believe in this because you understand this is a heightened experience given the apprehension, the pressure which they’re up against.

And so, people have complained about the love affair. They’ve complained about the characterization of Maria, who is quite young. But my sense is this is a romance. Hemingway was a great partisan of romance, which is to say of a heightened reality to which many of us may in our lives aspire, but rarely reach. And he’s giving us, therefore, an image of what might be possible for them, and maybe for us.

David Wyatt: Well, he talks very explicitly about time. He talks about the difference between duration and intensity, and you can argue that duration has been a problem for his characters heretofore, especially for Jake and for Frederic. Intensity is what Frederic experiences in almost every moment. And so it’s a model of how to penetrate duration and to live a full life.

And of course, Hemingway needed the pressure of war very often–most of his novels deal with it–to kind of create that back-pressure, which heightens the intensity and the importance of the love. At one point, he says, ‘I wish there was more time,’ and we do, too. But the great thing is, he, Hemingway, has already given us that. This book has so much more time in it, in the sense of incident, memory, dreams, and all the rest that make it such a rich experience.

David Wyatt: Well, yes. Pilar tells the first story, and Maria tells the second.

Chapter 10, Pilar gives this beautiful rendition of how the Republicans in Pablo’s band took the town, and then they march the Fascists out–people they deem to be Fascist–between two lines of men holding flails. They beat them, and then they throw them off the cliff. And, this is an example of where Hemingway allows the other–the enemy, if you will: the Fascists in this case–to become humanized. Each one has a story. Some behave badly, some behave well.

But, Don Guillermo is a Fascist, as Pilar says, ‘Because of the religion of his wife,’ and he honors that. So, he takes that side. When he is marched out between the two lines, his wife yells out something about, ‘I go with thee, I want to go with thee,’ and he turns with tears in his eyes and gestures toward her, and then he’s mocked by the men with the flails. And, at this point, your sympathy is clearly with him. This is a man who, because of his loyalty to his wife, has perhaps chosen the less sympathetic side. And, we sympathize with the two of them as she witnesses him going to his death.

And, the terrible thing about this whole incident is that it seems like a victory, because the chapter ends with the line about, ‘And, the next week or the next day, the Fascists came and retook the town. So, much for that victory.’ And Pablo later feels true regret about what he did. So, that’s an example of Hemingway complicating side-taking.

If I might, I just would turn to Maria’s example. When Maria tells Robert about her rape and the hair-cutting that she endured when the Fascists took her town. And there again, they kill her parents. And, this is an amazing echo: When Maria’s mother sees her husband being dragged out and about to be shot, she yells out to him in the same way that Don Guillermo’s wife had yelled out to him. So, there’s a parallel being drawn; and suddenly the differences between these two sides collapse in this moment, you might say, of filial or of marital loyalty. We’ll get back, I hope, to Maria’s story because I think it’s a very important part of the book. But, you’re right: these are both stories told by women.

David Wyatt: Pamplona. Yeah–

David Wyatt: Well, it’s a phrase that Hemingway deployed. I don’t think he used it in one of his novels. I think it might have been in Death in the Afternoon, the bullfighting book. I’m not sure where the phrase–I can’t locate where it arose. But it’s become a real shibboleth in Hemingway studies.

I both admire the ambition behind the phrase, but I also am aware that his characters often failed to achieve it, and he’s interested in showing them failing at it. For instance, Francis Macomber runs from the lion in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and then is given a second chance to stand firm when the buffalo charges. That’s a story about change, and acquiring grace because you’ve been publicly shamed. So, there’s often a failure to meet the standard that then allows a character to try again.

[SPOILER in this paragraph] Hemingway’s–rather, Jordan’s–father you mentioned is a good example of the case. He shoots himself, and the gun is given to Robert Jordan, who rides up to this lake in Montana and tries to drop it into the lake. But, as he holds the gun in front of himself before he drops it, he sees himself holding the gun, and that image is mirrored so that he’s looking at himself as if he were trying to shoot himself. This is a rehearsal. This is a chance for the young Robert to rehearse for the moment in which he will have to contemplate taking his own life as well, which comes near the end when he’s been wounded. He’s in so much pain, he’s not sure he can stand it. ‘Should I do that business my father did or not?’ he asks himself. And, he really seriously contemplates, and he understands he may be driven to it by pain. It’s not graceless; but it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing. He finally manages to compose himself. The pain somehow lessens. [END SPOILER]

And, earlier on, he talks about being embarrassed by his father, and being embarrassed by the farewell at the train where his father weeps. So, the father is a male figure who constantly falls short of this norm, and yet Robert finds himself forgiving him, and also sees himself being tempted to imitate him.

But, finally, not so much through grace of his own, but the simple bodily grace of the pain retiring, he is allowed to remain alive until the end. And that’s important. Robert does not die in this book. We know he’s going to die. We almost know from the beginning because very early on–I think it’s Pablo, one of the characters in the cave–who says, ‘If you are wounded in this thing of the bridge, would you be willing to be left behind?’

That utterly forecasts what’s going to happen. So, we’re told–virtually told–right away what’s going to happen, and we’re back to this issue of waiting. We have to live with this apprehension for the entire book.

So, we know this. And Hemingway loves to predict his endings at the very start, and then we have to live with that pressure.

David Wyatt: Well, that’s a key point.

My argument in my book about Hemingway is that the early style, which is the style for which most people remember him, is something that changes. And by the mid-1930s, with the two non-fictional books, Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon, he’s already shifting away from that clipped style of omission and of short sentences to a much more meditative, reflective, recursive style, which finally culminates in this book.

What this book is about is thinking. There’s not much thinking that goes on in the earlier books in the sense of willful going into the mind. Robert, or rather Frederic and Jake Barnes, each only have one memory in the entirety of their novels–a memory of home–and it sort of befalls them. But ordinarily, they try not to think because there’s too much that they’re haunted by, and they don’t want to allow themselves to go there.

Robert is given an immense freedom to think. He even talks to himself. He talks to himself in the second person, in the third person. He’s fully allowed an inner life. Hemingway calls this–he calls thinking ‘mental conversation.’ And he uses that phrase at the end of “Big Two-Hearted River,” which is the last story in In Our Time, in a passage he eventually cut–a passage at the end of the last story in which Nick is walking back from fishing, and he begins to think–and he’s a writer, it turns out–and he thinks about Cézanne and wanting to write the way Cézanne painted the country. And, he has all kinds of fantasies about his future writing career. Hemingway cut that all out. He says, ‘This story does not need mental conversation.’

Robert gets mental conversation, and that’s the difference. We get to go inside of a person and watch how a mind works.

David Wyatt: Well, I’m so glad you chose that because I was thinking of reading it myself today. That’s El Sordo. That’s El Sordo thinking about the fact that he’s going to be bombed to death, and he, too, is given this extraordinary passage.

And, look at those sentences. They each begin with the gerund ‘living.’ That’s the repetition for which Hemingway is so famous. But, in this case, it’s not a sense of being trapped in a capturing pattern: it’s a celebration of the Spanish Earth. And, this is a book not about–it’s certainly a book in which people die, but it is really a book about how to live. That’s what Hemingway is finally coming to be able to show us. And, there are so many instances in which there’s a kind of sense of fullness of experience, even though it’s shadowed by what we know is coming, because it’s been announced from the beginning: We are given more time.

David Wyatt: Well, Hemingway loved landscape and writes about it as powerfully as anybody who ever lived. And, to situate yourself in a place and to take it in visually, orally, its taste, its smells–he’s a great poet of sensation, Hemingway. And, he loves food and drink. There are many wonderful meals concocted in this book.

David Wyatt: And so, it’s given to someone like El Sordo who, as you say, is not a major character, but he’s a compelling one because he is up on the top of the hill, taking his stand, because Berrendo and his men will eventually come and overrun the hill, and the planes have done their work for them. And, yet he’s given–this is an example of what I mean by the generosity toward characters–he’s given this, as you call it, a very poetic meditation.

David Wyatt: Here it is. It’s on page 51:

Robert Jordan pushed the cup toward him. It was a milky yellow now with the water, and he hoped the gypsy would not take more than a swallow. There was very little of it left.

And, he calls it a ‘warming, idea-changing, liquid alchemy.’ And then, I guess this is not where he remembers Paris, but–yes, he does. Yeah, you go on, and he remembers Paris–the chestnut trees and all the rest.

David Wyatt: Okay:

There was very little of it left, and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, of kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guarantee Trust Company, and the Île de la Cité, of the Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten, and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing, liquid alchemy.

Now, that’s an example of that kind of sentence you were talking about. It’s almost a run-on sentence because the mind keeps associating, and recalling, and re-experiencing this catalog of memory. The style, therefore, has to capture that motion of mind.

David Wyatt: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Memory is so important in this book because it’s been a fugitive commodity for most of Hemingway’s characters–male characters. And, to be given the privilege and the power of recall–the reason that Robert and Maria can have their last night, and he can open himself up to her story, which is very painful for him–he says, ‘Don’t tell it. Don’t tell it.’ He doesn’t want to listen. ‘Nay, I must tell it.’ And, she makes him listen, and he finally surrenders. The reason he can listen to her memories, which are mostly painful, is because in the prior chapter he has had his reckoning in memory with his father. He has been embarrassed once again by all that went on between them, by how his father ended his life, and yet he’s also forgiven him.

So, by having Robert go into that, you might say, unresolved past, which he at least in imagination now resolves, he can then turn to the woman he loves and allow her to bring up her memories, and then facing those. Part of what Hemingway was getting at is that in a mature love, the male character has to face the fact that the woman has a prior history–in this case, a sexual history, a terrible assault, and a trauma that she carries with her. And, he, if he’s going to really love her, has to be willing to listen, to take that in, and to not be derailed by the fact that she’s had a prior life.

David Wyatt: It’s a really good question. I was looking over those four chapters. There are four interpolated chapters that follow Andres as he tries to get through the lines to bring the message that Robert wants to send to his superiors.

You used the word ‘digression,’ and that’s exactly what it is. Hemingway is learning the art of digression, which is another way to extend the time. The last day–the sort of beginning of the assault on the bridge and all that happened subsequently–fills 70 pages. The last 70 pages of this book are given to this fairly brief interval. How to heighten the tension, as you suggest? Well, you interpolate these four digressive chapters, through which we have to wait to get back to what it is we really are, at this point, most caring about. And I think it’s, again, giving everybody more time. And, you could argue all of the memories, all the great meals, the story that Pilar tells about the taking of the town–these are all digressions, in a sense, from the linear momentum of the assault on the bridge.

The actual action of the story could be reduced to a short story. So, the rest of the book is this filling out of Robert’s experience–both his immediate, his past experience, and his future expectations. Because the night with Maria, they talk about, ‘We’ll go to Madrid. We’ll cut your hair. You’ll look like Garbo,’ and it’s a complete ‘making believe.’ That’s the phrase Hemingway uses. They’re both making believe because, at some level, they both expect what’s going to happen. And, yet they’re given this beautiful interval. Hemingway describes it as a complete embracing of what would not be. And this is about believing in a fiction.

And, Hemingway is coming to understand the value of this. He’s always known it, but the ultimate fiction that these characters live out and believe in is romantic love. The other one, I suppose, is, shall we say, historical change–trying to fight a war to change a country for the better.

And so, he’s highlighting for us how any of us who are involved in a love relationship have pitched into a fiction–a thing we only make true by continuing to believe in it. It’s something we make up. It’s not a given. It’s made, and they make love in the very brief time they have. And, it’s real, it’s true, insofar as they believe in it.

David Wyatt: Well, I think Orwell is very good, too, on the whole chaotic nature of this resistance–the shifting alliances, the strange cooperations. It’s a civil war, and it attracts all kinds of hangers-on as well as competent supporters. So, I think that the larger strategy of the war, even the kind of principled aims, were so often compromised–as they are in all wars–but this one in particular was a very ugly, destructive civil war, which of course ended in more than 30 years of Fascist repression. Hemingway couldn’t go back to Spain for almost 15, 20 years. He goes back finally in the late 1950s to write a book about bullfighting, but he was denied, you might say, the ability–or denied himself the ability–to return to his most beloved country because he was so heartbroken about what had happened.

David Wyatt: He continues, “And, you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life.” And, later on in that same paragraph, he talks about: “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.” Which is, for him, a major thing to say–for Hemingway and for Robert both–because it’s a movement away from a kind of credo or a rigid code to accepting, I suppose, all kinds of experiences and points of view.

What you just read us reminds us of how much time we spend inside of Robert’s head. He’s been injured now, and he’s thinking back on his life, and it’s a beautiful and prolonged meditation. At one point, he says, “I hope I’ve done some good in it. I’ve tried to with what talent I had,” and then he corrects it and he italicizes the next sentence, “Have, you mean. All right, have.” He brings it into the present tense. Whatever we had, we have; and he has it to the end.

[SPOILER in this paragraph] He accepts it all. He forgives what he can forgive, and he affirms how good it was. That word ‘good’ is one of Hemingway’s favorite words. He’s often seeking–his characters are seeking–for the good place. The phrase occurs in this book, too. And so, he’s able to say farewell. My favorite saying in the book is, ‘I go with thee,’ when he says to [inaudible 00:54:21], ‘I go. You must go. You must go. I’m wounded. You must go. I go with thee,’ and she says, ‘No, no. I stay. No, I go with thee.’ [END SPOILER]

What he means is it’s a literal statement, he says–I want to be accurate. It’s literally true. If she leaves and she survives, he goes with her–thee–and the ‘thee’ of course reflects the head quote from John Donne, ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’ So, he’s the ‘thee-ness’ in the book rather than ‘you’–Hemingway uses ‘thee,’ the formal ‘thee’–It’s a kind of echo of Donne. But, it’s a beautiful thing to say to somebody because it’s true. People go with other people who survive them and remember and love them, and that’s what Hemingway’s affirming–that kind of immortality.

David Wyatt: The Sound and the Fury; Beloved; The Grapes of Wrath; American Pastoral, Philip Roth. I guess if you had to sort of reel off five titles. The Great Gatsby. So, yeah, those are books I teach and love, and there are many, many others, but those come to mind pretty easily.

David Wyatt: I disagree, in a sense, that I would say that the posthumous career–I’ve written a bit about this–is much richer than people realize. And, if you take A Movable Feast, which is published in 1964–Mary puts it together, his fourth wife–it’s probably the most beloved book he ever wrote–his memoir.

David Wyatt: Well, this is a posthumous book.

Then, in 1970, we get Islands in the Stream, which is a much-underrated, again, war novel set in Bimini and Cuba. Then we get, in 1986, The Garden of Eden, a very controversial book, but it changed Hemingway studies. Because of all the gender-bending in that book, all the role playing, and the switching of gender behavior, it reoriented the field and allowed people to begin to see in Hemingway–kind of looking back through the lens of The Garden of Eden–that he was not championing some kind of masculine code, but was much more interested in vulnerability and what I call the pathos of gender. The fact that we’re each assigned something called a gender at birth, which can feel very limiting as an identity.

And, there are more books than I’ve even enumerated that were being written and worked on in those last years. So, he was actually quite productive, but what he couldn’t do was finish. And so, what had to happen was that other people–editors–had to finish for him.

And, there are more books by Hemingway published after he died than while he was alive, especially if you now include the Letters Project, this beautiful project Cambridge University Press is doing of his collected letters, which are–it’s an astonishingly rich undertaking. I think there’s six or seven volumes. There probably will be 13 or 14 or more by the time we’re finished.

David Wyatt: Well, I just pulled a book off the shelf at the house I’m renting called This Is My Best, where in the 1940s, maybe the 1950s, writers pick one story or poem to have featured in this volume. Hemingway picked “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” which is a very long short story–his greatest short story. In this, again, the generosity toward a character who is given a second chance. I love “Now I Lay Me,” which is a Nick Adams story about a wounded veteran who lies in bed listening to the silkworms chew the leaves and engages in a process of remembering back, which is the beginning of this project of allowing memory to intrude. And, of course, what he remembers are his mother and his father.

And then, I guess “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is a story in which a young couple, not married, are at a train station in Spain, and they’re discussing something he wants her to do. It’s never named, but it’s an argument that builds in tension, and it’s pretty clear that it has something to do with an unwanted pregnancy. And, that story shows Hemingway–again, this issue of side-taking–siding with both parties, but especially trying to enter into the subjectivity of the female character with sympathy and understanding.

David Wyatt: Well, it’s been, I think, a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I think it fell off due to all kinds of forces and fashions. All I can say: I think it’s recovered a considerable amount of standing because of the deeper attention given to the posthumous work, and the Letters Project, and the various biographies that have continued to be generated.

When I teach Hemingway, my students fall in love with it, and especially my female students. They see a tenderness and a vulnerability that has been occluded by the myth of the Hemingway Code, which I think is a complete misconstrual of what he’s really up to. And so, if you give people a chance to be exposed to the full breadth of the career, they have the experience you’ve had in rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls. They discover a man of deep feeling, of human compassion, and of careful attention to the things that make up what we call living a life. Living, to use El Sordo’s word. Living. That’s his gift–is to make us feel that we are in it, that we’re living it as we’re reading it.

David Wyatt: I’m not sure it’ll be this one. He will be read. I just read a biography of Tim O’Brien, the author of “The Things They Carried,” which is probably–that story, “The Things They Carried,” is the most anthologized, reprinted story, I think, written in the 20th century. Of course, it’s a Vietnam War story. But, O’Brien acknowledges more than once his debt to Hemingway. So, writers survive because they are refigured by other writers, and Hemingway keeps being refigured as new talent arises, reads him, and is inspired by him. I have no fear for his survival as a major figure, and I just think it’s a matter of surrendering to the reading experience, and you’ll be carried away.

David Wyatt: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.