Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you well good afternoon I'm mark Sweeney chief of the humanities and Social Sciences Division here at the Library of Congress and I want to welcome you to another in a series of occasional lectures sponsored by HSS our division our division provides reference and research service through three reading rooms here at the Library of Congress that's the main reading room the local history and genealogy reading room and the Micra forum reading room we we invite you to avail yourself of our services we're open Monday through Friday 8:30 in the morning tol 5 p.m. and we have extended evening hours on Mondays Wednesdays and Thursdays until 9:30 and justed dispel a few myths about research here at the Library of Congress you do not need permission from your congressman to use our collections you don't need to be working on the next great American novel all you need to do is want to use our collections and services for your learning so please visit us and use our services our next scheduled lecture Syria here is with Anne peacock on the role of libraries in achieving a more inclusive information society for women and that will be next Thursday March 22nd at 1:00 p.m. in the Pickford theatre that's down on the third floor in this building today's program is being co-sponsored with the poetry and literature Center at the library the center is home to the quote laureate of the United States and produces an extensive schedule poetry readings book programs and literary events coming up on March 26th which is the be the week after is the next in a series of monthly literary birthday celebrations with an evening devoted to the memoir about Tennessee Williams by William J Smith check the Center's website for more information about upcoming events webcasts past events and their new blog which I'm sure you'll enjoy so enough about the advertisements today so today's lecture was planned by our very capable reference specialists in English and American literature at a ioke son and she will introduce today's speaker so thank you Abby for your work in putting today together today's program well I do have an unbelievably fabulous job as the literature English and American literature specialists in the main reading room if you all haven't seen it get your reader card and get on over there it's the most unbelievable place that I get to work 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of Faulkner's death we we do prefer at the library to celebrate birth dates rather than death dates but last August we did a program with Sally wolf from American Emory University about William Faulkner she had read some family Ledger's and Diaries and things they were the basis for a lot of his writing so it was a sold-out program it is on the webcast so you can go on the library's website and find that Faulkner program that preceded this one and at that time I met Joseph for shown did I get it right for Joan who who talked about this upcoming book on Faulkner and Hemingway biography of the literary rivalry and so I'm delighted to introduce him today a friend from book club who happens to be here reminded me a couple days ago that Faulkner and Hemingway fans are rabid they are like for one or the other and I thought maybe we should have wedding style uh sure 'he's here today and instead of asking you bride or groom they would set you according to which fan you went on but i think will manage to keep peace otherwise I think our speaker does not take sides he comes down neutral on this issue but maybe we'll poll the audience afterwards and see how you all feel dr. ferzaan holds a BA in English and Women's Studies from the University of Delaware his ph.d is in English from George Washington University and his dissertation there focused on the modernist dialectic William Faulkner Ernest Hemingway and the anxieties of influence and rivalry he now is an adjunct lecturer of English at Georgetown University as well as an assistant professor of writing in the University Writing Program at George Washington University I looked over his list of courses that he's taught and I want to sign up for all of them you know we English majors never quite get over that and he talks about he teaches about modernism he's also taught about Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass examining race and authorship in the 19th century and also American Civil War poetry and I was particularly interested in the adapting authors adapting author some Shakespeare courses and their adaptations I'm not going to talk much about his book because he's here to do that but there was this pre-publication review that said this study is the best most balanced account ever produced of the artistic relationship between William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway the careers dominate 20th century American literature and as this book shows the example and work of each writer informed and influenced that of the other both men recognize the value of the other and crucian goes a long way toward explicate acomplia elysee on the part of both so the way this program is going to work is he's going to speak for a little while we're going to have a question discussion session you realize that we're being webcast there's that gigantic camera to remind you so we encourage you to ask a question but by doing so you are giving permission to the Library of Congress to put you up on the web so keep that in mind and we'll turn it over now to dr. presume I want to thank you all for coming as well many more people than I anticipated so I'm going to give another thanks to Abby for although all our hard work with doing the planning the logistics the press release and everything and I should say from the beginning to any humor or laughter and what I speak is not due to me but due to the authors in this case I am just a messenger of I've worked with a lot of these letters for eight to nine years or so and they still make me laugh as I go through particularly the Hemingway who wants so with this in mind I want us to start in August 1918 this is when a young recently wounded Hemingway writes to his sister Marceline from Italy why a bright beam of an August moon have you not written me is it that you love me not or is it but neglect if but the girls of our village could see me in my dress uniform I am of a great fear that the man would be wifeless is the performer always however for them to appreciate my scars it would be necessary for me to wear no pants ie trousers where else to have flaps sewn the length of the knees that they might be unbuttoned at will to show the marks of Valor which may be many in various aha I will wear nothing but my tank suit then all then we'll all be reviewing Mizpah right among other things this letter reveals a kind of playful repose a month after Hemingway was seriously injured it also anticipates some definitive aspects of the nascent Hemingway persona the war the wounding the romance of the injured veteran the valor both real and constructed of a combat veteran the use of nicknames in linguistic play and in this case erroneous French I think he meant an essay pas but that's a lot of his work does that and the eager performance of masculinity right he's the decorated soldier he's the Casanova he's the ladies man right though he was genuinely wounded by an Austrian mortar in July 1918 Hemingway exaggerated greatly when returning home he noted among other inventions that he had served with an elite division of the Italian military and he was actually a Red Cross ambulance driver among other non-combat duties around the same time William Faulkner whoa similar fictions about his own war experiences his training with Britain's Royal Air Force notwithstanding Faulkner returned to Mississippi in December 1918 in an officer's uniform with an affected limp and a host of invented stories although he finished only as a cadet and never left Canada right performance clearly both authors felt that being a post-war figure with growing artistic aspirations implied among other things certain kinds of creativity and masculinity this of course was well before each new anything of the other as a fellow modernist and rival author and their first mutual awareness seems to have been the mid to late 1920s yet this 1918 Hemingway letter predicts a kind of epistolary persona that would inflect how they rivaled and influenced each other from the early 1930s through their deaths in the early 1960s among excuse me among other issues the rich correspondence reveals the author's a fact or performance their strong sense of masculinity competitive awareness of each other self-confidence an occasional self revelation one late Hemingway letter for instance recasts the Hail Mary prayer to criticize the religious tone of Faulkner's 1954 novel affable I'll refrain from reading that one out loud right no blasphemy for the webcast or another shows him writing a mock Faulkner passage about a mutual acquaintance The Times Book Review critic Harvey bright anyway also once referred to Faulkner as old corn drinking mellifluous an attempt to disparage him as both pro stylist and alcoholic writer to say nothing of Hemingway's own trouble with alcoholism yes despite their literary successes both authors felt the pool of the others example and professional standing throughout their mature careers their correspondence among other venues bears this out richly and sometimes humorously as we shall see and they're rich correspondence has been a valuable element of this project which began as my PhD dissertation in 2001 and is now developed into book form and these letters I hope form what I want to be one of the books richest contributions a lot of the letters I've examined particularly the Hemingway letters remain unpublished at this they will be published eventually through a major project housed by Cambridge University Press currently they are in the kennedy Presidential Library in Boston and this to me demonstrates the richness of archival manuscript study some of my recent work has been with unpublished correspondence papers documents newspapers that sort of thing and in addition to the research for the book which was not done at the Library of Congress I've studied with some of the Library of Congress as Ralph Ellison papers just on the first floor of this very building in a just-released book essay looking at Ralph Ellison's complex ways of dealing with Hemingway's influence I looked at some of his unfinished manuscripts his drafts and some of the letters that he and his wife exchanged with Hemingway's widow Mary when both were living in New York and 60s and 70s this seems a particular advantage of working with early and mid 20th century authors given their rich correspondence and typewritten or handwritten manuscripts of course well before email right in Hemingway's case his letter writing style is richly and highly analyzable there are often Corrections or strikethrough sometimes he continues in the margin way up and you have to kind of rotate the page he also you know there's sometimes he would leave things out he would cross over things of course misspelling things getting foreign languages wrong I mean they're very rich they often underscore the thematic content of his letters but they also reveal some of his professional anxieties struggles now I just want to give you a brief overview of the work I try to do in the book hopefully successfully I look at a variety of texts and works spanning the mid-1920s and through the early 60s as far as their fiction their novels and stories Faulkner tended to use those as more of a venue to discuss Hemingway to refer to Hemingway his novels pile-on requiem for a nun and the mansion have characters making conversational references to Hemingway a few of his unfinished screenplays also have the same conversational reference almost always to For Whom the Bell Tolls his story is story collection big woods it's a collection of hunting stories has a story in it called race at morning which features an aged hunter named mr. Ernest right it's from the late 50s at that point Hemingway was very well known his 1939 book the wild palms makes several Hemingway references to the Sun Also Rises a farewell to arms to the story Hills like white elephants he also a character also makes a Hemingway --vs pun in addition to another character the narrator's references to matador and aficionados right mean in this context I mentioned Matador aficionados is to call attention to Hemingway and his the persona of the bullfighter and so forth right most of what we'll talk about today is the correspondence particularly the period 1947 to 1955 this is really the richest period of their letters that it encompasses the ranking of his contemporaries Faulkner gave in 1947 the Nobel Prize the question of reviewing the Old Man and the sea and we'll we'll look a little bit from an episode of 1947 where they wrote letters to one another so far those are the only letters I've located where they are corresponding with each other and we will get to this but the sort of the infamous or famous episode depending on your own you're leaning right is the ranking of his contemporaries that Faulkner gave presumably off the cuff in April 1947 at the University of Mississippi he places himself second to Thomas Wolfe he puts Hemingway fourth and he also managed on John Dos Passos and John's and this pretty much stayed with him through his travels to Japan his professorship at the University of Virginia and his his travels to New York and also the talk he gave at West Point in April 1962 I won't talk about these today but their Nobel Prize addresses also shows strong awareness and cross reference to one another but of course in a world literary context Hemingway's major bullfighting works death in the afternoon from 1932 and the dangerous summer which she worked on in the late 50s layer bullfighting writing and this Hemingway persona the firt in the first one death in the afternoon he he has a narrator who was a very Hemingway like figure who essentially makes a crack at Faulkner for being such a prolific writer and he says in there you know but he's prolific too by the time you get them ordered there'll be new ones out right meaning that he doesn't edit well enough and I will do talk a little bit as well about how the authors framed or adapted one another Hemingway edited a collection in 1942 called men at war he included a Faulkner story turn about about what takes place during World War one but as a gesture of one-upmanship he also included his own superior material namely from a farewell to arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls Faulkner also had a hand in adapting Hemingway's work for film he worked with the director Howard Hawks in 1954 to turn to haves and have-nots into the film the one of course with Bogart and Bacall right and he did eventually give a very laudatory review of the old man on the sea in 1952 so analysis of these types of works in these types of texts in addition to relevant biographical and historical context has helped me understand this complex and multifaceted literary relationship which I read is more than a simple rivalry of course my book subtitle notwithstanding and I do want to be clear that even though mine is the first book about these two I'm not the first scholar to talk about points of conflict and contact between the two authors the my hope in it in it is that I give as full as possible a portrait of the narrative of their rivalry and influence so with that in mind now I want us to concentrate on a few particular moments in the narrative of the author's relationship specifically we can consider letters from the 1940s and 50s the early 50s marked the interim between their Nobel Prize addresses Faulkner won his in December 1950 Hemingway his in 1954 much of Hemingway's correspondence from this period reveals a strong and self-pitying element right this is kind of goes against the persona or the image of the tough worldly active writer these are he's almost narcissistic and self-pitying in these letters he was preoccupied with among other things particular aspects with which he associated Faulkner the 1947 ranking which will get to the Nobel Prize address which the Nobel Prize excuse me which he hoped would portend a loss of creativity he wanted to see it as a swan song for the any writer who wanted the religious themes of some late Faulkner works and Faulkner's alcoholism which Hemingway felt weakened his writing this is where the old corn drinking mellifluous term comes in right despite some gestures of respect and camaraderie in this correspondence language of competition and masculine conflict can be said to dominate these examples such as their horse racing boxing and baseball metaphors or in one case a duel between the authors which we will get to write a particularly complex episode stems from a relatively simple request that the critic Harvey bright made a farmer they met in New York in 1952 after Faulkner returned from Europe and bright asked him to review the old man in the sea for The Times Book Review Faulkner however rejected the offer but he took the page proves back with two Mississippi with when he returned to Oxford he wrote a statement about Hemingway and sent it to his editor at Random House he went on to give praise albeit reserved praise of such Hemingway works as a farewell to arms the story collection men without women and for Whom the Bell Tolls but he did so from a somewhat loftier place as if he then a recent Nobel laureate was in a position to defend a writer dealing with creative struggles and with tepid reviews of his novel across the river and into the trees I'll be it with good intentions ie creating dialogue between these writers Harvey bright forwarded Faulkner's comments to Hemingway who predictably overreacted as we see from two letters in late June first from June 27th and heaven an image of this tight as a long typewritten letter this is just an excerpt from it right before this passage he says As I Lay Dying stands up the best may be it and parts of pylon and then we continue if and if it's easier to read there's a type this probably a little clearer um about eight altogether of the stories stand up that longest sentence in requiem for an on doesn't stand up because it isn't a true sentence if you just omitted the periods at the end of various sentences it is damn good but it is not one long sentence anyway if you have to write the longest sentence in the world to give a book distinction the next thing you should hire Bill Veck and use midgets I remember writing is there's your baseball metaphor right I remember writing a long sentence once in green hills of Africa about the Gulf Stream but I remember how it just got started and went on and I ended it the first place the sentence under I suppose what bill meant that I had no courage to take chance in writing would be that I would not write a whole book consisting of one sentence actually I have too much respect for the English language it is a wonderful thing to be able to work with sometimes we have to perform certain operations on it that may have been good for it or bad for it but I respect it and myself too much to operate on it or anything else while drunk okay this is typical continuing to use Harvey bright as a critical sounding board Hemingway wrote again on June 29th noting and here's another image of it oops sorry back up he is a good writer when he is good and could be better than anyone if he knew how to finish a book and didn't get that old heat prostration like honest Sugar Ray at the end do we know what that refers to anyway know what that refers to Sugar Ray Robinson write a famous fight he did June 25th 1950 - in Yankee Stadium temperature was around 100 degrees and he lost to Joey Maxim in the 14th pound this had just happened four days before another sports metaphor it's hires out there's another letter where he compares Faulkner to a tiring pitcher who's been in for one too many innings right then to continue now I enjoy reading him when he is good but always feel like hell that he is not better I wish him luck than he needs it because he has the one great and uncurable defect you can't reread him when you reread it is I wish this were my humor I wish I could take credit for it when you reread him you are conscious all the time of how he fool you the first time one thing I think anyway has a mind here is the novel sanctuary that has a particularly complex and controversial episode with a corncob that's another core cop another nickname Hemingway used to use for right in truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done bill had some of this at one time but it is long gone it was one point later in this letter where he just writes criticism class is out right among other things such sports metaphors namely bill back Bill Veck excuse me as a minor-league baseball owner and manager and Sugar Ray Robinson B speak Hemingway's gender-based sense of competitiveness as well as his view of Faulkner as a threat to his professional ego and of course the ego was much more insecure and anxious than the image of the big-game hunter the big-game fisherman the world traveler the boxer the authors had anticipated this kind of writing / competition model in the 1940s in part through a topic common to their own interests and some of their work horse racing in the fall of 1945 Hemingway correspondent with the critic Malcolm Cowley about a number of literary matters including Kali's work on what became the portable Faulkner anthology in 1946 as Hemingway wrote to Kali on October sixteen I had no idea Faulkner was in that bad shape and very happy you are putting together the portable of him this is what this is when Faulkner's reputation was struggling he was struggling very much he has the most talent of anybody and he just needs a sort of conscience that isn't there and then later on but he will write absolutely perfectly straight and then go on and on and not be able to end it all right I wish the Christ I owned him like you'd own a horse and train him like a horse and race him like a horse holding and writing how beautifully he can write and as simple and as complicated as autumn for a spring consider as a compliment fall common II not I write Falkner's letter to Robert Linscott at Random House regarding the portable Faulkner the idea had been floated there that Hemingway write the collections preface both Malcolm Cowley and Faulkner objected all right not surprising cally thought it would be in his words in dubious taste Faulkner gave his own reasons on March 22nd 1946 I am opposed to asking Hemi way to write the preface it seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a preface to my stuff it's like asking one racehorse in the middle of a race to broadcast the blurb on another horse on the same running field a preface should be done by a preface writer not a fiction ear certainly not by one man on another in his own limited field this sort of mutual back scratching reduces novelists and poets to the status of a kind of eunuch cape on pampered creatures and some spiritual vanderbilt stables there is a the masculinity element right he doesn't want to be mindless he doesn't want to be a symbolic eunuch mindless possessing nothing save the ability and willingness to run their hearts out at the drop of Vanderbilt hat the woods are full of people who like to make a nickel expressing opinions on this work of novelists can't you get one of them clearly competition yes whether seeing themselves as trainers or as racing thoroughbreds who notably are not mindless and not subservient the writers further juxtapose their sense of writing and manhood as competition each sees himself as autonomous and superior to the other Hemingway wants to enact a trainer or editor role or as Faulkner once outrace the field which arguably he did and he would also attempt to outrace the field about a year later and this brings us to mid nineteen forty-seven which is perhaps the defining moment and the author's relationship in this case Faulkner sounded more confrontational than he intended to sound or perhaps more so than he wanted to seem when answering questions at a University of Mississippi creative writing class in April 1947 he was asked to rank his contemporaries after being asked by a student to include himself in the list he answered one Thomas Wolfe he had much courage and wrote as if he didn't have long to live to William Faulkner three John Dos Passos four Ernest Hemingway he has no courage has never crawled out on a limb he has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used all right five John Steinbeck at one time I had great hopes for him now I don't know and the session was part of a series of talks that he gave at the University despite his agreement with the English department faculty were present students were allowed to take notes and his comments were not restricted to the classroom instead the university's press release for these sessions was picked up by the New York Herald Tribune which Hemingway received in Cuba and May and when Hemingway receives this press release he was going through a lot of emotional and personal struggles his longtime editor max Perkins had just died his middle son Patrick had a very bad case of the flu I was sorry I had been accident and his wife Mary had a very bad case of the flu and he this is he was sort of moody enough anyway and to hear and read something like s especially when courage enters the picture right he would not have been happy so the ostensively private remark was private no longer and to unpack some of this rich episode I want to look at one of the two letters that each wrote to the other in the wake of this incident the first letter that Faulkner wrote to Hemingway and to general charles lanam one of Hemingway's wor friends has already been published in joseph blotters selected letters collection in that he's largely apologetic for what has happened here Hemingway's second letter to Faulkner which was from July 23rd has been published in Carlos baker's selected letters collection here I want us to consider two previously unpublished letters both of which are housed in the Kent in the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library they will eventually be published but probably not for some time as we might guess anyways initial reactions to Faulkner's ranking and mention of Courage entailed aggression part of his strategy was to mobilize his war friend general Lanham to write Faulkner and attest to Hemingway's battlefield composure during World War two Lanham also seems to have sent Faulkner a copy of Hemingway's bronze star citation which he received from the Army in mid-june 1947 and I'll just read a brief excerpt from it this is also from the Hemingway collection Hemingway displayed a broad familiarity with modern military science interpreting and evaluating the campaign's and operations of friendly and enemy forces circulating freely under fire and combat areas to obtain an accurate picture of conditions through his talent of expression mr. Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the frontline soldier and his organization in combat right he wasn't not he was not in Europe in a combat role per se but he was very much involved in the action and you have to imagine the Faulkner getting this as a writer who wanted to go to the First World War didn't because the war ended before his training was done but then whoa fictions about at litem he continued to lie about it through most of his life Faulkner though in his in the first letter he wrote was apologetic and contrite he noted that he intended no offense and that his remarks were incompletely printed and one sees similar civility in Hemingway's July 16 1947 reply the one also sees a particularly uncivil suggestion dear bill he opens services this is if this is a whole letter right here and I'm going to read the first third and fifth paragraphs right there I have another version if it's easier to read the hell with the whole thing I'm sorry that you were misquoted and that general buck Lanham went to the trouble of writing the letter on the misquote and that you should have to write to me in to buck thank you very much for doing so the sari is slightly disingenuous here because anyway was the one who mobilized Lanham to write to Faulkner and prove that the battlefield composure the battlefield courage now the third paragraph please know that none of it means damn to me now that we know what it was about this might be easier to read I hope would fight anytime for your right to call me any sort of son of a as a writer even though might disagree the same way would be glad to shoot it out over any personal points of honor only I hope I'd shoot to miss you on account of wanting to keep you as a writer actually I know I would when this is the final paragraph I hope you're well and that your family are and that you're working good I'd like to get together with you sometime and drink a little and talk there are very few of us left and this is typical of Hemingway's letters where Faulkner is concerned namely in its moodiness right the opening and closing paragraphs have civility there's even camaraderie with the US you know there are very few of us left in both the first and the third paragraph he says that they should get together with Lanham and drink and talk the middle paragraph though I think of this should come up yes the middle paragraph is where there's the masculinity the conflict this is the Hemingway code right here namely glad to shoot it out over any you know points of honor right and you might notice from this middle paragraph hope it's somewhat big enough to see right around here something I think is significant about this letter is what's not here that is no strike throughs emendations nothing's crossed out especially I only hope I'd shoot to miss you right which to me suggests that the violent symbolism is somewhat intentional it's also very typical of the Hemingway code right so now three days later we go to Faulkner's reply this is July 19 1947 he does reply with a note of civility but he doesn't retract their ranking dear brother H it starts right pretty lengthy letter we're going to I'm going to end up reading parts of the first third and fourth paragraph you see the handwritten bill F at the bottom this is from this is house at the Kennedy Library with with a Hemingway collection let me skip to this so it's a little easier to read I hope thank you for your letter I feel much better not completely alright I owed Lanham an apology and I hope he accepted it but the bloke I'm still eating to is Faulkner I cringe a little at my own name and printed gossip I hate like hell to have flung any other man's into it damn stupid business one of those trivial things you throw off just talking a nebulous idea of no value anyway that your test by saying it then the third paragraph or the second paragraph rather take a thing like Madame Bovary the woman not the woman the book or your Alpine Idol or that one of Joyce's about the woman playing the piano ie his story the debt he also mentions Ring Lardner within this paragraph here it's finished complete all the trash hacked off and thrown away three dimensions and solid like a block of ice or marble nothing more than even God could do to it it's hard durable the same anywhere in fluid time you can write another as hard and as durable if you are good enough but you can't beat it and the fourth third paragraph that I'm not going to read here as Faulkner is outlining this aesthetic vision of his he also mentions Dickens and Henry Fielding as as part of what he was trying to get at him in the talk and these comments excuse me in the last paragraph I wish I'd said it that way but even then it would benefit would have been misquoted probably as moths saying in the first place usually are but what I wish most is I'd never said it at all or that I could forget having done so which perhaps I could and would do if it had not been about a first-rate man right so we see here different sorts of performance or different sources of self-image here right Faulkner is more civil he's more conciliatory he doesn't respond to the idea of shooting it out right he seems to think that was sort of beneath him perhaps perhaps right but you also don't see here any kind of retraction it's kind of it seems to have kind of gotten out of his hands a little bit after Faulkner learned of the release of his apparent literary gossip he was anxious to clarify what he had said or what he had meant to say or what he wanted to appear to have said about Hemingway he had to revisit this episode in New York Japan Virginia and at West Point over the next decade he attempts clarification and amelioration here by putting Hemingway on a par with Joyce flow bear and others he's different attitudes though indicate a split in his persona his reserved side wanted to avoid open confrontation with another writer particularly one so truculent as Hemingway his private demonic side though may have wanted to disparage Hemingway's literary reputation and elevate his own I should note here that Faulkner's placement of himself second to Thomas Wolfe was somewhat misleading because Woolf died in 1938 so at the time Faulkner gives the ranking he the implication that he himself is the most important living contemporary often right so with this in mind he did feel himself to be the better writer demonstrated by subsequent commentary and by his never fully retracting the ranking or unequivocally reached retracting right faulkner shared Hemingway sense of competitiveness but not his ways of expressing or performing it and to close I want to move ahead a decade after the exchange of these letters and guarded praise we can consider something from a late unfinished Hemingway work the dangerous summer written when he was struggling both creatively and personally in the late 1950s in this nonfiction text about two rival Matadors who were also brothers-in-law competing during the summer of 1959 Hemingway viewed his writing life through the lens of masculine competition yet again as with most of his nonfiction the Hemingway persona presents and even dominates the story at one point he observes bullfighting is worthless without rivalry but with two great bullfighters it becomes a deadly rivalry because when one can when one does something and can do it regularly that no one else can do and it is not a trick but a deadly dangerous performance only made possible by perfect nerves judgment courage and art and this one increases its deadliness steadily than the other if he has any temporary failure of nerves or of judgment will be gravely wounded or killed if he tries to equal or surpass it he will have to resort to tricks and when the public learns to tell the tricks from the true thing he will be beaten in the rivalry and will be very lucky if he's still alive or in the business substituting the words writing and writers for bullfighting and bullfighters here reveals much about Hemingway's framing of his profession that's my symbolic gesture I get to do as a literary scholar imagine the above passage starting writing is worthless without rivalry but with two great writers it becomes a deadly rivalry and so on figuratively speaking Hemingway had made this move throughout his career that is to say framing writing as a contest though the wounded and killed in this sense would of course be symbolic the duel notwithstanding for him competition between various sorts of artists held a certain creative value in that such kind of such one-upmanship could lead to more innovation and more chance take early and mid-career he spoke in various letters of taking on or getting in the ring with his term such offices Melville Dostoevsky Cervantes Maupassant Henry James and others Faulkner was also competitive and driven yet any more understated way perhaps because it came from a healthier professional ego that Faulkner was more successful in the 1950s with the Nobel Prize qo surprised and to National Book Awards among other honors surely helped his professional self-image with the exception of Faulkner second Pulitzer Prize which was awarded posthumously in 1962 for his novel the Reavers Hemingway knew that Faulkner received these late awards which further weakened and already struggling hardest lastly did they ever meet each author made reference to meeting the other a handful of times but no direct biographical evidence has yet been uncovered concerning when where and under what circumstances I just have a few remarks at each as may H major based on the years of certain remarks this meeting seems to have been after November 1931 but before July 1952 in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune this is after Faulkner publishes the sound of the fury and As I Lay Dying he's very much a writer on the rise an excerpt from this interview you know he admires the work of Ernest Hemingway whom he has never met I think he's the best we got and then the Hemingway letter this is one of a series of letters Hemingway wrote in the early 50s when he was the only non Nobel laureate between them this is where there's the competitiveness and the insecurity I never met him but wants to shake hands and never to talk with an another letter Hemingway mentioned sending Faulkner a congratulatory telegram for the Nobel Prize and he says you know i cabled him how pleased I was and he would not answer right and that it's very much the sort of self-pitying element here and then one of Faulkner's last public appearances this was at West Point in April 1962 he noted the two cadets at the last time I saw him he was a sick man right so with this in mind in September 1947 though they nearly met as Hemingway scholar H R stone back has written in a 1999 essay Hemingway and his Key West friend Toby Bruce drove that month from Florida to Idaho and route Hemingway suggested that they stop in Oxford Mississippi the meeting was not to be though Faulkner was apparently being honored by Oxford on the very day this is right around Faulkner's 50th birthday and the hyper-competitive Hemingway clearly would have kept his distance as of now their mere meeting seems to be a literary moment waiting to be uncovered nevertheless the authors nearly absent social relationship is largely immaterial when compared to their very present and very complex literary relationship one that I hope can enrich what we already know of these two nuanced and multifaceted American writers thank are you going to run things yep okay I'm on spring break I have to flip in a teacher mode here yes please yes mm-hmm okay mm-hmm at this point I had none that I've discovered but for the comments about the appendix right right right I lean toward the second I mean Callie's certain in editing that certainly had his own particular sort of agenda right and some other scholars among them david earl who teaches in florida has discussed how Callie's comment in the introduction that Faulkner's works were all out of print in the early 1940s is a little bit misleading they were out of print in hardcover but they were various paperback and other versions of it so I leaned a little more toward the second where Callie did a little bit of his own reassembling to kind of because mean it yes always of course to bring the spotlight back to he himself the portable in some ways I mean I think it would it tries to make Falcor a little more accessible to a lot of his readers because we know I mean that's a challenge of his work and I've seen that when I teach Faulkner novels and classes right sometimes is that I get a little bit of an eye roll or a grunt or something because you see me with him using so many different names and Families there's even a map in the portable Faulkner that Faulkner did himself right with this apocryphal County Yakubu tava he invented a lot of this so I think it improves a little bit I mean it certainly helped bring his reputation okay yes the he-man right yeah I'm either I mean I could do it an entire another presentation on just images of him right but he's I mean one of the things I really I noticed with his especially his his unpublished letters is how those show the opposite of that they're more tender they're more insecure self-effacing right especially when particularly his third and fourth was Martha Gellhorn and then Mary Hemingway when they were away he wrote these very emotional and self-pitying letters about them leaving him alone and so forth that's one of the reasons that his marriage to Martha Gellhorn through the 30s and early 40s was so tempestuous because she was not the type to sit idly by and be the wife of the writer she was a accomplished journalist she was on one of the landing craft on d-day Hemingway was as well but she sort of got there first that's something he was very much bothered by because it's it's and one of me and that's something I talk about a lot that it's those who send to trumpet the the gender the most are the ones who are most insecure about I mean I know that's a trickier thing too with people with readers of Hemingway and even in some ways Faulkner as well he was much more understated and white and he was no less devoted a hunter and outdoorsman than Hemingway was but you don't have the magazine pictorials of him in in Mississippi right he just send it to do it was anyway the images of him in Africa and the big-game fishing and the self-aggrandizing journalism right so you have questions yeah in brief his widow Mary Hemingway was close friends with Jackie Kennedy right and at the time of Hemingway's suicide in July 1961 his reputation was was very much not not quite nil but it was really struggling and from I I hope I have all my facts right only some of them apparently she had shopped that around to various other repositories and no one seemed to want it and then that's about how they wound up at the Kennedy Library that's where the where most of his things are there are some here in the Library of Congress in the Archibald MacLeish Papers there are some at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas some are at Princeton University library along with F scott Fitzgerald's letters as well but it's a wonderful facility because it's a nice kind of small a very sunny room right off to the side of the museum and they have photocopies of all the relevant material so I'm like here where you're looking at originals there you're looking at photocopies but you can just go to the shelf and pick them up so does that answer I hope I got all my facts right if not something correct yes please mm-hmm a little bit I'm gonna try to back up if you'll excuse me one of the parts I didn't read from the typed Hemingway letter and I hope I still have it this fourth paragraph here he mentions wolf and he says you know you're so much a better writer than a wolf that I can't understand how you'd be fooled by the bulk of his stuff and he talks about Max Perkins as the editor of both wolf and Hemingway and how was really max Perkins who made Thomas Wolfe a good or accessible read it was wolf wrote so much know that you know the stories of him showing up with manuscripts of his works but just in boxes right with so much material because he just seemed to write and write and faltered he he did come back to this but as some other scholars have noted as well one of the differences in his ranking with the Hemingway selection is that he gave the annotation of its he has no courage he's never crawled out on a limb right and so that's something that kind of haunted him there always fought him but it was it was always this he you know he always was trying to sort of deflect it by saying well it was taken out of context and and but he never said I was wrong because there was always the implication that he's the better more accomplished writer does that answer ok sure hmm Beatrice was Hemingway's first editor and then she on also I coulda little me most of my work with them is later because the bonnie and live right was the was the first what published Hemingway's book in our time and then famously Hemingway wrote the parody of Sherwood Anderson the torrents of spring in part to break the contract because and sherrod Anderson was the marquee author for Bonnie and Lou Frey and Bonnie and lived right also published Walker's first novel soldiers peg in 1926 but I haven't worked as much with that that's I think it's the earlier period where they were somewhat aware of each other but not in really the rich hyper-competitive or as we saw humorous or entertaining manner right so does that that answer your question I don't actually don't know if she edited both it's possible if they were both at that point young writers trying to publish their first work they wouldn't have had kind of obviously the pool or the influence that they would have had later when because Hemingway's reason for breaking the bonnie and live right contract in the mid 20s was to go to Scribner z-- to be with at scott Fitzgerald Thomas Wolfe and max Perkins as the editor then Faulkner wound up at Random House doing most of his most of his works yes I think what he meant by that was a kind of editorial conscience in the sense of because it's in that same whatever he says you know it seems as if he had never you could never throw away the worthless remember Hemingway was so strict with stripping everything down and write one true sentence right and that's why I think with these two authors their styles are so diametrically different right so the conscience I what he's mostly referring to there was Faulkner basically writing it and keeping it as it was and not paring it down and one of the letters that Callie wrote back after the horse-racing letter he said he wrote to Faulkner and said you know Hemingway would be a good editor he'd be a good trainer because he knows how to say what he feels and to strip it down so and if I mean human you could read some of their signature works and even without an author name tag you kind of know who it is just because of their writing styles were so different so good thank you oh please yes of ironically with with Hemingway my favorite works of his or his short stories the first collection in our time and then there was men without women and winner take nothing and to me his his style works best with his stripped spare short story I do like For Whom the Bell Tolls though as things Bob might favorite Hemingway novel I think in part because it's more Aryan than anything he had done because I lean as a reader I lean more toward Faulkner with Faulkner it is go down Moses which he published in 1942 as a cycle of seven stories it has among other things his famous story the bear so what are yours yes that's that's a that's a wonderful one as well it's one of the ones it's one of the Hemingway novels that Faulkner owned right they did own some of each other's work and I haven't yet been able to track down and study their copies of each other's works I would love to see marginalia I don't know if they're there but I would like to I want to find that out yes please yes to say it all yes put it all between one cap in period he's too difficult right right right good wrongs good I tried I do try to slow it down a little bit by saying or sort of embracing the challenge and saying you're not going to read this quickly this is not something you're gleaning only from sparknotes right most recently I actually taught as I Lay Dying very successfully at an upper level course in Georgetown and that that I think was successful in part because it's a wonderful group of students on the other another part as well because that's a more accessible work you don't have as many of the two to three page sentences going there so but I've had to fill in before and teach absalom absalom which is one of his best novels but you do have the long and I try to slow it down I say of course this is not easy but most good things of quality are not simple right where you get it and we a lot of it is reading it out loud and then it's easier to get a sense of what he's doing and how you have these everything's on the head of the pin right the flashbacks the flashbacks within flashbacks and the movement in time so but that's that's something I really enjoy about him he has a reader that's something I enjoy about him said answer yes absolutely and and anyway I mean I tell this to the students who Hemingway brings his own challenges in the sense of the extreme subtlety and the implicitness right where it might seem to be one thing on the surface but when you read it reread it and reread it you notice a lot of the subtlety a lot of what's not there a lot of what's implied mmhmm yep Oh clearly even when he wasn't always intending to be right the the kind of suffer mm-hmm right yeah that's what he tries to work with but then it's funny some of his nonfiction like it the articles he did for Esquire and the 30s are that's where the celebrity kind of grew out he's always talking about himself as an expert writer editor critic fisherman hunter I mean you have a lot of these the hemic that's were the hemming with the he-man image sort of comes out all those right yeah that's it it's sort of nicely written same thing death in the afternoon right before that as well so good thing is it was another no anyone else oh yes please more so Falkner he struggled a little bit more economically a Hemingway was always the morn sort of celebrated and the wealthier writer in part because so many of his books were sold to Hollywood to make films and he also commanded large fees from Esquire and other periodicals to publish his work and there was something something that in the book I talk about whether I think there might have been some some moments or some elements in which Faulkner which just felt slightly insecure financially or economically I mean one thing I mean I enjoyed working with too was looking at the screenplay for to have and have-not that Faulkner helped adapt and for a lot of people I think the film to have and have-not with Bogart and McCall is better and more accessible than than the novel in part because it's a lot of Hollywood changes are made and it's set up and anyway you know all of his major novels were turned in to films and he he hobnobbed with Gary Cooper Marlene Dietrich and others Joe DiMaggio and others as well in New York so good thank you yes Elinor Rekha am i what mmm-hmm right I haven't I wish I could go there but I haven't right mm-hmm mm-hmm that's another book I think right I think a lot of it would have been artistic chances right because other and it's in the comments I wasn't able to read that he made in New York and Japan and Charlottesville Virginia he often said you know if I paraphrase essentially that he did one thing very well.the this despair stripped-down dialog and the clear focus but didn't try to do that he basically he a lot of his later comments have certain key words pattern method are some of the other ones where he says he tried but it was at one point where he says he didn't try for the impossible and he actually referred to both himself and Wolfe as failures in the sense that they tried to do so much more than one person could do felt they didn't reach it but he feels he says to me failures better failure is more of a success than then actually reach me but I would love to be able to go to Hong Kong and look at some of the the Faulkner papers right well that's what I noticed that means a lot of his papers are at the University of Virginia as well so does that answer okay thank you second this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

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Published: Mon Jul 09 2012