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Neil Gaiman’s dog has a weird leash, while Hemingway looks just jaunty as hell.

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Simple declarative sentences, the banal horror of war, endless rounds of booze, and…whimsical schoolboy-style doodles?

Hemingway’s fellow ambulance drivers drew him some cartoons to cheer him up while he was in the hospital, and Slate has posted them in all their goofy glory.

Don’t worry—they involve plenty of short sentences, war, and liquor.

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One such exceedingly-Hemingway gem is from an article about getting a free shave from amateur barbers: “For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death.” Hilariously hyperbolic? Yes. Very, very awesome? Even more yes.

The website hosts 70 of Hemingway’s articles for The Star from when he was 20 to 24 years of age.  The articles cover the gamut, from wartime Europe to the new exotic gambling games of the Toronto high society. In yet another highlight, Hemingway’s two most iconic interests, boxing and women, appear in an article aptly titled Prizefight Women about the first prizefight ladies were allowed to attend in Toronto. (Warning: Highly Provocative Maleness.)

It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

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“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”

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Maybe what I’m saying is that I enjoy the macho posturing, but in, you know, a subversive way.

One example: in 1936, Stevens was in Key West visiting a business friend, as he often did in the 1930s. Evidently he and Hemingway had not been getting along. “He came again sort of pleasant like the cholera,” was the latter’s remark in a letter to Sara Murphy (a wealthy American who would later be immortalized by Fitzgerald as Tender is the Night‘s Nicole Diver),

and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura (Ursula) was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ”All right, that’s the third time we’ve had enough of Mr. Stevens.” So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing [sic] just said, I learned later, ”By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.’

Stevens saw his moment, and swung at Hemingway. But he missed, and Hemingway struck back.

Some important bits of context: Stevens was 56 years old, and worked a day job as an insurance executive. He had the build you’d expect, solid but forgiving. Hemingway was twenty years younger, lean and sun-weathered from recent adventures in bull-fighting-and-African-safaris-and-Carribbean-sailing. When Stevens finally did land “his Sunday punch bam,”very late in the game, he broke his hand on Hemingway’s jaw. Nonetheless, they were of about the same height, but Hemingway tries to flip the disadvantage to his corner in his letter to Murphy:

Was very pleased last night to see how large Mr. Stevens was and am sure that if I had had a good look at him before it all started would not have felt up to hitting him. But can assure you that there is no one like Mr. Stevens to go down in a spectacular fashion especially into a large puddle of water in the street in front of your old waddel street home where all took place.

Hemingway makes half-hearted quasi-apologies for being such a gossip:

So I shouldn’t write you this but news being scarce your way and I know you really won’t tell anybody will you really absolutely seriously. Because otherwise I am a bastard to write it. He apologised to Ura very handsomely and has gone up to Pirates Cove to rest his face for another week before going north. I think he is really one of those mirror fighters who swells his muscles and practices lethal punches in the bathroom while he hates his betters. But maybe I am wrong.

But he tells her anyway, really absolutely seriously.

Stevens, for his part, wrote a postcard to his wife blaming his bad penmanship on a fall down a flight of stairs. That happens to be the same cover story Hemingway reports he and Stevens agreed on, after making up. Which I guess they did after Stevens had spent the five days recuperating in his room,”with a nurse and Dr. working on him,” Hemingway points out. One of Stevens’ biographers says he later told his own version of “That Time I Punched Hemingway” story in full to others. We might presume from that that his pride recovered.

I was telling this story to a friend who hates Hemingway once and he looked at me gravely and said, “We are all Wallace Stevens today.” At the time I sort of agreed but now I don’t know. Stevens is one of my favourite poets, but while I admit there are few of Hemingway’s books that have managed to enchant me on the level of personal taste, I do love A Moveable Feast. And if Stevens was indeed the aggressor then he was engaging in the exact sort of feather-puffing that I don’t usually have much time for — and which are, not too coincidentally, the parts of Hemingway I suffer through. After all, what does this insult mean, “no man”? Nothing I or anyone else should care to find out, I tell you what.

But you don’t have to take sides.

We are always saying, behind closed doors, that women are so terrible to each other. We tear each other down, we say. We fail to build each other up in the press, we commit the verboten “girl-on-girl crime.” The implicit assumption is that men don’t do this. That they don’t talk out of school or gossip or backbite, which virtually all of my reading in biographies of literary and cultural figures has taught me is absolutely one hundred percent not true. The truth is, the woman meeting my eyes across the crowd watching these fights, we’re smiling because we see the insecurity in this, the grasping, the vicious high-schoolity of it all. Because we recognize it, and it’s good to know that even the highest-on-high aren’t immune to it.

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WRITE YOUR STORY

Most of the writers I know would have it otherwise. Though they may wear the same pair of shoes for years on end, dine regularly on Stouffer’s Signature Classics, have a soft spot as bar patrons for $2 cans of beer, and own exactly one moth-nibbled suit, the belief is that when, or if, the serious project is someday finished and before an audience, collective or individual—the play, the chapbook, the novel—their voices will register as voices of consequence. All of which depends on the belief that a writer will be taken on the verve and resonance of language alone and not as a collection of consumerist signifiers à la Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

Here’s the thing: just the other day, I encountered my consumerist doppelganger online. Through one of the people-finding engines that capitalize on information made available across the webscape, I discovered a profile sporting my address, phone number, a meter indicative of financial health, a lifted Google-street view image of the building where I live and—yes it’s true—a childhood photo. Nothing yet about what I had for dinner the night before. I requested that the page be deleted but can only expect that, like a weed, another will creep up soon. To move past what smacks of surveillance-state glomming (only, is it weird, that as paranoid dystopias go, the perpetrator is not the government but unregulated private enterprise?), it is not much of a leap to see that such sites only take the movement of social networking one step further: making profiles for those who do not choose it. As Nicholas Carr wrote in his widely referenced 2008 Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”: “Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better… It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”

As Facebook, Google and those relatively less scrupulous contend for the mantle of knowing—and hawking—who among us prefers which jelly donut, writers of tomorrow live with the risk of finding themselves announced, in effect, before they ever arrive.

***

And writers of today? The not-totally-figurative-dragging out of the writer from behind a curtain parallels the direction of pop culture at large: the decade-plus turn toward reality TV, the dwindling of mystery around the lives of movie stars, an erosion courted by Hollywood’s continuously evolving publicity apparatus. Not to mention the thinning of any pretense to objectivity in the news or broad-based interest in political consensus-making. As a way forward, it can feel pretty backwards. Since everyone who wants one has some semblance of a platform—as well as many who did not wish it so—our favorite writers register as only a Google-click away, Thomas Pynchon notwithstanding. (No, wait: he’s out there, too.) The dialectic in how the Artist is perceived sways between torch-bearer in a proud tradition and freak in a cage, as in Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There.

Many of America’s most famous writers, specifically those on the forefront of Modernism, led lives as storied as their prose: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Carson McCullers (pictured above), to name a few. Around the bend, spinning narratives from a more magisterial remove were John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. Today, magisterial remove, save in the lives of a few conservative politicians and writers (George Will, say), is a conceit besieged on all sides.

In their essay “Internet as Social Movement,” the editors of n+1 assess the internet’s impact on collective consciousness as follows: “‘One person, one computer,’ Apple sloganeered in the early ’80s; ‘the web is for everyone,’ Netscape said when it launched its first browser in 1994. From the mechanism of our mass administration, the computer would be the means of our individual liberation.” The paradox here is pronounced, a point made clear by flipping the last sentence: seeking freedom, a feeling of “connectivity,” we flock to be mass administered, everyone a visible node. In the resulting information overflow, much pours through the mind’s sieve, as David Foster Wallace suggested:

The general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof expands at roughly the rate of Moore’s Law. (Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007)

With the proliferation of choice, so heightens the necessity of drawing boundaries, for withholding attention. And the perception that a speaker’s point of view does not include us, or a fair recognition of who we are (as opposed to, say, our consumerist doppelgangers), is usually enough of a reason to click away.

Maybe it is the tendency to conflate a distant narrative voice with snobbery (e.g. a knock on Henry James), but in our near-universal platform culture, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and McCullers are threshold figures for American literary fiction. They offer visitors welcome to a capacious, echo-ridden structure that is said, like the mansion on which The Great Gatsby was based, to be scheduled for demolition. In part, their power seems a function of how easy it is to identify, to see oneself in the intelligent woman committed beyond all reason to a tragic relationship, the golden, high-jumping boy whose flight was broken in time, the iconic adventurer whose radical individualism led ultimately to despair.

My fascination with the figures Fitzgerald and Hemingway cut, some notion of heroism, transfixed me with the still face of the page that somehow breathed, and it was in their narratives that I began to meditate on who I was and what I wanted in life. As do many by McCullers, the stories of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, especially some of their earliest (The Beautiful and Damned and “Big Two-Hearted River”), dare the reader to identify protagonist with author, and in this identification of author with hero, these Modernists abide. It is no error to spot Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon, enraptured with his own fall, and Hemingway in Old Man and The Sea: as writers, they never outgrew casting a thinly veiled version of themselves as protagonist. They spun narrative in life; in the aftermath, their lives are enwombed by it.

Writing one’s own biography into fiction speaks persuasively to the immense, unguarded joy a writer must once have taken in representations of life on the page, and in that respect, these authors are much more readily identified with by readers who take a similarly immense, unguarded joy. As opposed to the magisterial remove of a Dos Passos, Dreiser, Ford or Stein, authors who conflate biography and fiction offer both the drama of a story well-told and a sort of meta-drama around it: to see them fly, or fail to, inside the imaginative machines they fashioned for negotiating civilization’s atmosphere.

In a world held at center, and destabilized, by MTV-out-and-grab-ya jump cuts, as likely to be a viewer’s own between web-pages as a music video director’s, hunger for the behind-the-scenes story can circumvent the ornate concentration of an author, the fiction proper. Lionized authors become champions of excess, shadows at the furthest reaches and, keeping that corridor distant, we free ourselves to babble on. The inclination, for those who would lower the boom of disdain, is to diminish their accomplishment, the endurance of their aesthetic, by reducing each to an easily dismissed tag, as in the cases of the three previously mentioned: Carson, the willful depressive, Scott, the antic drunk, Ernest, the woman-hating blowhard.

Maybe having something to do with the autobiographical impulse that is general across the social network horizon, where status updates promote a synecdochal regard for experience, glints among glints, a double-edged desire grows for a more comprehensive representation of experience, complemented by a disdain for the same.

Why should that be? The desire to share, share all, is central to the birth of the fictional impulse, and it is a hallmark of young writers to conflate autobiography with fiction (for a knowing spoof on this, somehow both satiric and deeply in earnest, see the opening sequence of Wallace’s Infinite Jest). Could it be that the number of would-be writers who venture out with autobiographical stories only to return chastened having renounced the writing of fiction has something to do with the intense regard of contemporary authors’ biographies over and above the fact of story itself? Could it be that the presence of a Fitzgerald, Hemingway or McCullers in our minds weighs on the decadence, or perception thereof, in a living author’s continued existence? See how the floodgates of popular embrace opened on Wallace’s passing.

T.S. Eliot

Old school criticism has it that apprehension of the work must go before any judgment of the writer. “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” writes T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a critical masterpiece that still somehow bored me to tears in high school. Because, you know, I couldn’t tell what it had to do with me. Eliot obliged my feeling of being ignored: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

There are contemporary views that hold with Eliot’s sense of discernment. n+1 critic Elizabeth Gumport’s tangentially fascinating essay “Gentrified Fiction” relays [my italics]: “If the first generation of gentrification novelists worked to some degree in the self-reflexive tradition of American symbolism, the second generation proves itself to be less concerned with the novel than the novelist and his lifestyle: where he lives, how long he has lived there, and what bars he frequents.” Gumport is focused here only on urban novelists, but as cities take ever more precedence in American lives, the metropolitan, for better or worse, acts as fiction’s most visible practitioner. Turning up the volume on Gumport’s distinction between artist-known-for-the-work and artist-known-for-being-an-artist, critical giant Harold Bloom opined in a recent interview with the New York Times: “I don’t want to take part in this madness in which sexual orientation, ethnic identity, skin pigmentation, gender, origin of one sort or another, is deemed to be the most crucial element in apprehending a poet or a playwright or a storywright or a novelist or even an essayist. I guess I’m very old-fashioned.”

In contrast to Bloom, one writer almost synonymous with his city said in conversation with The Paris Review, “When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art.” “Humanity,” here, appears to mean embraceability as a social being as opposed to, say, the lordliness of literary construct. Comedian, filmmaker and fiction-writer Woody Allen suggests that an artist’s humanity ought to be considered as much as, if not more than, the work itself—and, reciprocally, that the artist must consider the impact his or her work will have on the lives of others. (There is some irony here.) Placing humanity first, Allen votes for the company of people over books. And, really, except for the mad and the artists and everyone in between—except for just those guys—who wouldn’t?

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“Courage was ‘grace under pressure,’ he said, and the head that he kept putting in the way of car windshields, bullets, and plane fuselages was terribly full of self-generated destructive forces.  Why it was that way none of his biographers has ever adequately expressed.  That so large and memorable a personage was so entirely without hope so much of the time awakens compassion.”

(via The Millions)

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Zachary German’s debut novel, Eat When You Feel Sad, is funny, readable and sincere—which is curious, since it is also experimental and stylistically extreme. Centered around the life of a young man named Robert, the novel is comprised of short vignettes, which themselves are comprised of short, declarative sentences, which in turn are comprised of simple, repetitive words and phrases. Robert eats hummus. Robert cleans his juicer. Robert speaks on Gmail Chat to Mark, Sam, Kelly, Steve, and Lydia. Robert walks to the Laundromat. He feeds his cat. He says something mean to his cat. He touches his cat. The tone is emotionally flattened and yet deeply sad.

With its combination of humor, deadpan, and ennui, Eat When You Feel Sad calls to mind writers like Anne Beattie and Tao Lin, but also writers like Bret Easton Ellis and, in certain ways, Ernest Hemingway circa In Our Time, had Hemingway’s interstitials been about Laundromats and Broken Social Scene rather than fishing trips and soldiers. Throw a few strands of Andy Warhol and early Pavement into the mix and you might get something like German’s novel.

Eat When You Feel Sad is uncompromising. It flouts chronology and conventional ideas of narrative arc, character development, and plot. To call it episodic would be an understatement. Peripheral characters appear and disappear. Actions in one scene appear inconsequential to the actions and motives of the next—although this sense of randomness is humorously acknowledged in the novel’s index, where one may handily reference the numerous occurrences of “Lil Wayne” (five), “They Might Be Giants (band)” (one), “They Might Be Giants (album)” (one), “Lydia” (nine), “Robert’s cat” (twenty-four), “Robert’s parents” (six), “Robert’s parents’ dog” (three), and so forth.

Zachary German

The stakes are low. There are no life-threatening illnesses in Eat When You Feel Sad; no suicides, no ailing parents or grandparents, no self-destructive habits or tendencies, minimal interaction with people outside the ages of 15-27, and only throwaway mentions of employment (indexed mentions of “work” – zero). Even in the stories of Joy Williams, one of German’s influences, violence and death reside. The same is true for Hemingway’s In Our Time which, oddly enough, German’s novel resonates with quite a bit—both are semiautobiographical books about young, confused men, told in stark, minimalist prose with intermittent fractures. Yet, even Hemingway’s most idyllic moments, the scenes of camping and fishing and fending off mosquitoes in “Big Two-Hearted River,” are set in relief against moments of intense violence—ministry officials facing firing squads in the rain, enemy soldiers “potted” while scaling a wall. In Eat When You Feel Sad, German puts no Chekhovian guns on the wall, set to go off in the last act. The propulsion comes not from plots of danger or death, but from voice, the pure and myopic perspective of a young and confused middle-class person in a city in America. This voice is neither howl, yowl, nor whisper, but something more like a quiet monotone, slightly ironic and yet also depressed, lonely and, at times, compellingly vulnerable.

It makes sense, then, that the most poignant and beautiful moments of book occur when Robert is left alone, simply to exist. Through German’s effort to colloquially document the most ordinary of movements, a sense of the narrator’s nearly mechanical self-consciousness is conveyed and, moreover, shown to be surprisingly emotional.

Robert takes a six-pack of eleven-point-six bottles of Elephant malt liquor out of the plastic bag. He looks at the six-pack of eleven-point-six-ounce bottles of Elephant malt liquor. Robert touches one of the bottles. Robert’s fingers become moist. Robert opens one of the bottles of Elephant malt liquor. He looks out the window… Robert looks out the window. The sun is out. Robert looks at the park across the street. He looks at people in the park across the street. He thinks “I’m sorry that everyone has problems. I don’t know what to do. I’m vegan”… Robert plays the song “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene. It’s warm. Robert thinks “I feel okay.” He drinks Elephant malt liquor. He thinks “I want to call someone.” He rubs a pillowcase against his eyes. He drinks Elephant malt liquor. He thinks “I like Broken Social Scene.” The song “Cause = Time” by Broken Social Scene is playing. Robert thinks “I’m glad I don’t have any disabilities.” Robert finishes drinking Elephant malt liquor. Robert is asleep.

Despite the deliberate emotional flatness of the prose (or perhaps because of it), there is a relentlessness, a compulsiveness to these actions. Repetitions such as “six-pack,” “bottles” and “Elephant malt liquor” contrast with statements that only occur once—“I’m sorry everyone has problems. I don’t know what to do,” “I’m glad I don’t have any disabilities”—the result of which is taut and quietly startling. Even a seemingly inauspicious line like “Robert touches one of the bottles” can be intensely sad in its simplicity and quickness, as if it were a unconscious tic, this desire to touch something and to feel something, even if it’s just a wet, cold bottle of cheap alcohol. When the paragraph concludes with the quietly beautiful leap from “Robert finishes drinking Elephant malt liquor” to “Robert is asleep,” there’s a sense of completion, of release and finality. And it’s calm in that final place. Calm, yes, but also lonely.

Certain readers will find this novel’s repetitive and willfully surface-dwelling voice frustrating. Others will enjoy it for its fantastically ordinary beauty and resonance. Eat When You Feel Sad is a slight, strange, yet ultimately hopeful debut: a slender, idiosyncratic document of what it’s like to be twenty and bored and alive in 2010.

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