The Chris Hedges Report: Hemingway’s Shadow

now you talk about terror [Music] what about for me [Music] i've been terrorized [Music] all my days [Music] the writer mark karlanski by a series of coincidences spent his life as a journalist and author in the shadow of ernest hemingway starting with his presence in idaho on the day hemingway died mark would reside in work during his career in paris the basque region of spain cuba and ketchum idaho all places where hemingway lived and where his myth remains firmly implanted and celebrated mark struggled to free himself from the haunting presence of hemingway whose life starting with the tales he told of being an ambulance driver in italy in world war one was a confusing blur of fact exaggeration hyperbole and lies and yet hemingway was undeniably one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century more importantly he believed that writers should go places and do things living with the writer and journalist martha gellhorn in the hotel florida during the siege of madrid during the spanish civil war hunting big game in africa fishing for marlin off the coast of key west and cuba or joining american combat units as they fought in france and germany in world war ii mark and i pursued this life as foreign correspondents for newspapers something hemingway also did throughout his career although badly hemingway could never disentangle fact from fiction in his life and his writing including his journalism there is much in hemingway's life and writing to admire and much to reject joining me to discuss his new book the importance of not being earnest my life with the uninvited hemingway is mark karlanski uh so mark in your book that you have some i thought very wise comments about writing i want to ask you about that you say that writing is about establishing rhythm and rhythm is often established by repetition if a writer seems flat and without appeal the problem is usually not that he or she does not use the right words as is often believed but that the writer is a rhythmic and i thought that captured the essence of hemingway's power as a writer it's not the parody of the staccato sentences it's that almost jazz like rhythm and i wondered if you could talk about that yeah i mean establishing a rhythm and setting up and setting up the lie um i've i found it very rewarding that uh once in an interview later in his life he listed bach as one of his great influences and i was thrilled to see that because i'm a classical musician not a very good one um but i regard bach as a tremendous influence on writing i committed an influence on everything um and you know takata infused that's that's what we do we have a theme you set it up against another theme we have uh rhythms sometimes you change the key but you then you get back to the theme musicologists say that bach uh did semen variation both horizontally and vertically it was a very complex thing but if you if you really study what bachmann's doing you can learn a lot about writing well you even say in the book don't listen to music while you write oh absolutely it's a terrible mistake if you because you you have to establish the rhythm of what you're working on if you're listening to music you know um you know you don't want your piece to come out sounding like motown right now it's nice but it's not what your piece is supposed to be uh you write in the book that you are very influenced by the beats allen ginsburg poetry of course like great writing is i think a form of music and you say for this reason uh you should write when you write that poetry should not be completely understandable that it expresses a truth that we can sense but is slightly beyond us uh i thought that was a wonderful kind of insight and i wonder if you could just talk about that yeah william carlos williams one of the great modernist poets was giving a reading somewhere and uh somebody complained they didn't understand the poem and he said i'm not asking you to understand it i'm just asking you to listen um and uh this is actually very much in line with uh hemingway's thinking about prose which has famously become known as the iceberg theory um where he didn't believe that everything should be explained i i think this is a very very important idea a very counter-intuitive idea if you've spent time as a journalist newspapers kind of like you to explain things but uh um you know life is if you're if you're recreating the experiences of life everything in life isn't explained you don't understand everything you see you say in the book don't go to school to learn how to write that if writing is any good it's too personal and endeavor to be taught by someone else i i also thought especially with the proliferation of all these uh uh um masters of fine arts this was pretty wise advice yeah i uh on the rare occasions when i find myself giving a writing course i always begin by talking about a conversation i once had i used to know isaac besheba singer and he taught a course at the university of miami and i said to him once what is it you teach there and he said i teach what can't be taught let's say you can't really you can't really teach writing so when i give a writing course i mean the worst thing you could do to somebody who's struggling to become a writer um is to tell them how to write they have to find it in themselves what i do in a writing class is i ask everybody to write something and read it and everybody else criticizes and what i'm doing is i'm trying to teach critical thinking and how you evaluate criticism that you receive also but also just how you regard things critically and i think that's all you can do you can't you can't tell somebody how to write but would it be fair to say that you can teach someone to write clearly uh but to write lyrically would be a difference yeah you know what i teach i mean lyricism is something you know if you're not irish forget it but uh yeah i mean you can't what you shouldn't do and what is done a lot in writing classes is you cannot teach you cannot teach people how to develop their prose style your pro style is your voice everybody has their own some voices are better than others and yet i think all writers like many artists begin by imitation in in your case i think it was hemingway in mind it was faulkner i was trying to write a lot of drivel that sounded like go down moses and it's a kind of trap i mean you need to break free from it but talk about those initial stages because i think that is how you learn how to write and how you learn perhaps any kind of artistic expression is beginning through imitation yeah i suppose so and i suppose when i was really yeah i mean you know i explained something like third grade i decided and when i was young well i mean heavyweight was a huge influence lawrence ferlingetti was a huge influence but um you eventually just have to find the voice that's within you and you know a good way to do this is um don't try to write you know just tell somebody the story listen to how you're telling it because for some reason we almost always use our own voice when we when we tell a story uh when we speak but we have this if we're you know novices and experienced people have this tendency to imitate great writers when they're when they're writing if they just listen to how they speak they basically most people do write the way they speak hemingway did if you've ever heard recordings you know you read hemingway and you know people are it's sort of odd the way people are talking but he talked like that well hemingway was a very stilted public speaker he didn't like public speaking but he wasn't very good at it no he wasn't it it's funny because he he worked so hard at having a public persona but uh you know he just he hated getting up and speaking uh he claimed ill health and not going to his nobel prize speech but i i think he just didn't want to do it let's talk about hemingway uh who's this kind of shadow character in your book uh he began very early on to turn himself into a myth into a celebrity uh he came back what was he 19 or something after and as you pointed out in the book by the way only spent a week i believe uh and in the front lines in italy and not as a combat soldier although he uh rapidly inflated his role um and you you write that he that that he essentially made himself a fictional character and i and would dog dogged him throughout his life as he became more famous in the same way that i think it did a figure like hunter thompson i want to speak about that idea of artist becoming myth because i think it's very dangerous well it is it doesn't make you happy hemingway towards the end of his life was complaining a lot happened nobody knew who he really was and well you know whose fault was at him but he did create this this mythical person that wasn't him uh but he was also a very complicated person uh which becomes clear when you talk to people who do it which are not many around there were still a few when i was working they're all talking about a different person you know the hemingway who hunted in idaho was not the hemingway who hung out in the family and you know who was the real hemingway you know he was i think he was an intellectual uh dorothy douglas who was his uh secretary and later his daughter-in-law said when you really got to see the real hemingway is if you get him to sit down and talk about writing and painting that's who he was an intellectual thought about these things you know hemingway who talked about fishing and hunting and boxing and that wasn't who he was right well it was this kind of hyper masculine myth and yet if you read i think some of his best stuff was written in his early 20s a clean well-lighted place these are incredibly cat in the rain these are very sensitive stories uh that i think show exactly what illustrate the point you're making you heard a story that the title of it escaped me at the moment he wrote a story one of his earlier stories about this guy who comes back from the war it's one of the nick adams stories he comes back from the war and he makes up all sorts of stories about his verado and his war experience and they're all lies and he can't face himself or deal with his his guilt over the things that really happened because he lied so much isn't it interesting that hemingway wrote that story right so you and i both worked as newspaper reporters and you write in your book that newspaper writing can crush creative expression and that's why as you say the pros of many fine journalists if stretched a book length induces real pain and then you quote the novelist william kennedy who also worked as a newspaper reporter who says that while journalism gave him entry into a world he had no right to enter up which i think is one of the reasons to be a journalist it also pounded into him the voice of literary objectivity which he calls quote a journalistic virus that paralyzes the imagination and cripples the language so uh i think there are benefits to having worked as a newspaper reporter part of it is being able to go places and do things as hemingway correctly points out it also teaches you to write cleanly and quickly but i think that that transition to being a book writer also that newspaper ethos as you correctly point out can you just talk about that yeah i mean uh when i was writing for newspapers i mean i i loved it but i never intended to remain a newspaper writer uh you know it was so it was more formulaic than it is today you know it was like the lead and the done graph and then you know i always felt like if i wrote a good lead in a good nut graph you know the other 600 words would just be there and you were done we used to call it b matter it was just vomiting up which you'd written a few days before remember once uh talking to uh my editor foreign editor in the chicago tribune who was one of my favorite editors he's a really great editor and an experienced foreign correspondent a and he called me up one day and said you have just written a 50 word lead and the only thing i could think of to say to him was have you never read proust right well proofs did not write for newspapers i believe no i don't think but you know yeah newspaper writing for newspapers exactly like bill kennedy said you know it teaches you how to get in places talk to people you'd never get to meet otherwise and it's a great experience but the writing part is not a great although a clever lead i mean we used to spend a lot of time on our leads because it's a hook and it's something that graham greene would always do at the front end of his novels is use a very clever well-thought-out lead to hook you into the novel hemingway too look at hemingway's short stories every one of heavenway short stories is a great opening line he really understood that idea that you hook them in the first line in the in in the fall the war was still there but we didn't go to it anymore yeah being live in another country and you know it's often said there's a lot that's been written about what hemingway learned from writing for newspapers i don't think he learned much from writing for newspapers you read his newspaper copy he didn't even learn how to write for newspaper no it's pretty bad that's the interesting i mean i don't know how he got away with it no editor i ever would have taken copy like that um but what he learned from is that he was an avant-garde writer part of the modernist movement and it's modernism that that made him so clean and concise it's not this cable is how they say that how he you know cabled stories to newspapers is how he got this style it's not true you got this style from um ezra pound and even gertrude stein in an interesting relationship with gertrude skye he uh he thought that her writing was really interesting but hopelessly unreadable and he kind of admired the way you know she didn't care that she wasn't commercial but of course she came from a wealthy family so she could do that um but uh you know hemingway hemingway wanted to be that kind of experimental modernist but do it in a way that he would be popular and have readers and that's really what shaped his writing style not not newspaper well we forget that he was quite close to joyce uh and they would all go out drinking and joyce loved drinking with hemingway because he was a big guy so when they both got obnoxious in some french bar people would leave them alone although as you point out in your book his bravado as a boxer again was a myth he used to fight ezra pound of all people because pound knew nothing about boxing uh and he liked to knock people down but he couldn't actually fight anybody who was a boxer you and i by the way both boxed yeah i i um i boxed enough to know he wasn't i wasn't either i was not a i was not a great boxer it was the opposite of hemingway i really didn't want her that's the whole point of boxing mark i know [Laughter] that was the difference between you and me um you know if i if i planted a good punch that would be a part of me i'm going to pull back okay so you make the point in the book that i thought was also really true and interesting that hemingway really didn't know spain or cuba but that he created these powerful fictions of these places that still we're still grappling with in many ways we still can't uh overcome yeah you know he may have known spain but he didn't know he's the best right that you were specific about that yeah he had no idea who the baskets were and that you know as someone who spent a lot of my life around baths you know i read heavyweights it's a little strange that's not who baskets are you know never met a basketball you got a blind skin um he uh yeah i mean he he was a fiction writer and he he created fiction uh but you know as you say um in through the bell tolls a pretty good portrait of what spain was like in the civil war and you know one of the interesting things for mean i didn't go to spain because of hemingway uh i went to spain because it was an incredible experience to see the last 1930s fascist dictatorship still in power and i it was it was a fascinating place it was very different from any place else in the world because it was in this time warp um but it was you know the paris that i went to was completely different than the paris hemingway went to and the cuba i went to you know his cuba was pre-revolutionary on his post you know everything was different except spain spain i went to because i went to spain when franco was still in power and the spain i went to was really the same spain that he left i want to talk about spain so he had a rupture with john dos pasos in spain uh jose robles uh pazos he was had taught at john hopkins he translated dos pasos he was a colonel in the republican army during the war he was arrested in december of 1936 by the principal communist hatchet man and homicidal maniac andre marti he was the political commissar of the international brigades credited with the executions of 500 people uh that he suspected of being spies hemingway knew about the executions and he knew about who marty was in his novel for whom the bell tolls he said that he has quote his face looked as though it was modeled from the waste material of his victims that you find under the claws of a very old lion uh and yet during the war hemingway would do not not denounce the crimes in the way that orwell did uh because of course it would have made him a pariah and he was a fetid and a celebrity uh in spain would have shattered his privileged status and he turned his back on robles he turned his back on das pasos and i want to talk about that dishonesty that cowardice and that betrayal well i mean let's be honest he um you know so there's all these reporters there and he is getting better information better sources than anyone because he's a celebrity most of his sources are from communists and um if uh if he reported on the bad stuff they were doing he'd lose his sources now you and i both know this is not a unique thing this often without naming names you know in in every war in every difficult situation there are reporters who um gloss over truths so that they won't offend the people who are feeding them information it's it's actually in a way it's the most journalistic thing he ever did unfortunately and then he wrote a novel and told us revealed all the truth because he didn't need his sources anymore um yeah it's it's completely dishonest it's it's it's interesting that you know because he was around a lot of good reporters like herbert matthews sort of accepted that he would do this but you know basically the civil war was covered the new york times and herbert matthew for the republic and they had somebody else from fascists and um you know matthew worked his side some guy worked his side they filed stories and i think it must have been extremely confusing for new york times readers to try to figure out what was going on in spain because you're getting two different versions all the time they've won the battle they lost the battle i mean it was just completely opposite well that's how the new york times works so you know as a foreign correspondent i'm writing one thing in el salvador and the washington bureau is writing another uh based on administration sources and it's that old iaf stone line that people who have sources to the powerful he said they know more than i do unfortunately most of it's false and hemingway spewed propaganda i mean he talked about how they were winning the war on the eve of the republican defeat yeah i i mean yeah it's the whole thing about journalism i mean but one thing i always struggled with was the reporters who took everything the us government told me and sometimes the us government had their own propaganda reasons sometimes they were just completely misinformed but these guys would just take what they were being fed there's laziness you know you don't have to go out and find someone right well that's the difference because most reporters in a war zone the war zones i've been in they don't want to go out there they want to get the handouts and they're used against the rest of us that do go out uh and hemingway wrote a lot of his stories at the bar he didn't go out no he did go out he did both i mean all the material for um for whom the bell tolls was from a story he reported on you know those things actually happened about blowing up the bridge and stuff and it was a story that the communist party put him up to you know they said you know you go to this place and you'll get a good story but did he go or did he interview the people who did it no he actually went he went he went out a lot he'd go out with uh herbert matthews and they they go to places i mean he uh you'll appreciate this in nicaragua that you know he had a great advantage that he had a car and plenty of gas right but when i was in nicaragua i mean it was pathetic i just couldn't get anywhere unless i befriended somebody um who uh you know had a car and a tank full of gas right i was saying in your new book you talked about how you avoided working with people who were who were green and didn't know what they were doing um in in principle i agree but the truth is you know nicaragua i would work with anybody who had the gasoline right so i want to talk about world war ii he hemingway blurred the line between correspondent and combatant and you and i both know that that's exceedingly dangerous for those of us who attempt to report in a war zone he because hemingway of course carried a weapon uh and perhaps used it uh and uh it's already dangerous enough right don't shoot at me i'm not a combatant oh but this guy over here is really bad but it's not clear how much of that he actually did well that's the other thing we can't tell which i think you acknowledge in your book since he's an unreliable source yeah i don't think he had nearly the role in the liberation of paris that he claimed he did i know he didn't liberate the rifts there were no germans in the ritz by the time he got there which if you think about it you know the allies have have come down from normandy they've certainly parish the troops have come in and the germans are sitting around in the ritz hotel really um so he would just make these things up but you know one of the interesting things is that the other correspondents got fed up with him you know doing this stuff and having weapons and acting like a combatant and they complained about it and he was uh they had a hearing they examined him they were considering throwing him out of the uh out of the front for violating the rules for the correspondent and he denied everything oh i never did this stuff you never know when heaven was telling the truth i want to talk about he had this is from hemingway i mean he and he's dead on he in the book is from your book he said writers should work alone they should see each other only after their work is done and not too often then otherwise they become like writers in new york all angle worms in a bottle trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle i thought that was kind of brilliant it is and as a writer who lives in new york i have to tell you that my saving grace is that i live in manhattan whereas all the other writers live in brooklyn um i want to talk a little bit about his uh fiction um and i i think before we went on the air you said uh the only time he's honest is in his fiction what do you mean by that yeah well i mean he had this code about his fiction out of being true and honest but he didn't have a lot of his his journalism so you know you see in for whom the bell tolls he talks about the atrocities on both sides uh he has this book that was published posthumously in which they're game hunting big game hunting in africa there's this character named hemingway who's talking about how really awful it is these white guys going to africa and killing all their natural resources and uh and really questioning the whole role of hunters and uh you know he he he would bring up lots of issues and lots of points of view and he he really in his fiction he wasn't really trying to um indoctrinate indoctrination he was trying to just show how it is would it be fair to say that that's because he wasn't writing about himself that that when he wrote about himself in a way he was you know building this kind of mythic uh uh idea of who he was but when he when he stepped out of himself he could be honest yeah i don't know you know it's not clear when he was writing about himself because you know in his fiction he has all these characters nick adams for example uh all these characters that uh clearly seem to be heavyweight or some aspect of him and then you know he writes about them in in ways that are often uh uh critical big and small ways jake barnes who you know you really feel is his hemingway uh cheeks is a fly fisherman and uses bait uh something probably heavenly wouldn't have done um he was just very complicated i want to thank the real news network and its production team cameron grenadino adam coley dwayne gladden and kayla rivera you can find me at chrishedges.substance.com [Music] you

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 27,934

Keywords: Chris Hedges, Hemingway, Mark Kurlansky, Ernest Hemingway, Journalism, fiction, Literature, real news, the real news, real news network, realnews, the real news network, therealnews, trnn

Id: fQFEzZbrAyI

Length: 32min 53sec (1973 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022