HEMINGWAY AND THE DREAD OF THE FEMININE

When I was a teenager my sisters would come back from their catholic high school with the standard literary fare intended to prepare them for college -- Hemingway and Fitzgerald figured heavily in their mix, as did John Knowles, Steinbeck, and those other writers in a realist vein that precede the later discoveries of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Mann and the perverse twists of high modernism. Because they were at a strict school for girls where wearing socks at the inappropriate length could result in detention (this was the 70s!!) , almost all of the excerpts from Hemingway's novels that dealt frankly with sexuality were literally torn or blacked out of the book. It made it so intriguing (what was behind all that dark ink the nuns had so assiduously applied over the years?) that I went out and got a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

I was struck by how little Hemingway knew women, how plastic they were in his work, and how much more mysterious they were with the power of omission rather than with his depictions of them. It's easy to rant against an over-rated icon, but it's also curious to me that somehow Hemingway endures, that he's still a mainstay in so many different kinds of curriculum, that beginning writers are still advised a la John Gardner to read all the Faulkner you can and then read all the Hemingway you can to get the Faulkner out of your system. Personally I'd rather keep Hemingway high on a shelf, like an occasional shot of Jack Daniels. There's a kick to it, but it's in the service of avoiding the dread of something he can't write about. If Lytton Strachey once felt distubed by the "lack of copulation" in Virginia Woolf's work, I think there's a greater problem with the pretense of copulation in Hemingway. Perhaps the nuns and all of that ink were right, even if for all the wrong reasons?