“Both Hemingway’s tight style and D.H. Lawrence’s sloppy one are now in the attic. Neither had any sense of humor whatsoever; this tells a lot. The Terribly Serious writer is serious in relation to his age, and the eternal verities wear very different clothes from one age to the next.”
We seldom
get a chance to congratulate our younger selves. More often they stir
embarrassment but part of growing up is forgiving our former callowness and
learning from it. I’m proud to have seen through Hemingway and Lawrence from
the start. Their reputations, as understood by this adolescent reader, were for
manliness and borderline smut, respectively. I hadn’t expected
their gifts for dullness. Some of Hemingway’s early stories were worth reading
once, but his style – the subject-verb-object flatness of the prose, so many
sentences strung together with and’s, the
gross sentimentality – quickly wore thin. I hadn’t expected to find The Sun Also Rises so boring, and I’m
with Max Beerbohm when it comes to the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized,
don’t you know — he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat
of a handicap to a writer.”
Guy
Davenport is writing to James Laughlin on this date, May 18, in 1993. The
letter begins with Davenport’s mention of Delmore Schwartz, “who had a great
deal of originality as well as a heaping measure of the poets of his time.” He
continues:
“It’s curious
how differences and resemblances stand out only after an epoch is over. The
famous patina of ‘period’ or junk (which can become charmingly Antique). There’s
no way of getting Aesthetics out of history. Art of the highest order is exempt
from aging—Joyce, Proust, EP [Ezra Pound], [Gerard Manley] Hopkins.”
That’s debatable.
Pound’s Cantos are a disordered junk
shop of archaisms, undigested learning and incoherence, and very much of their time. The self-consciously
modern tends to age badly. Then consider, for instance, Laurence Sterne and Charles Lamb. In a
blindfold taste, a seasoned reader could readily date them, yet their humor,
their appreciation of sheer silliness, their psychological acuity and the
texture of their prose often feel “modern,” even contemporary. Hemingway,
father of the so-called hard-boiled school, comes off as corny and stilted, and
Lawrence is the sort of guy we’re warned not to make eye contact with. In
contrast, Davenport writes:
“The most interesting
trajectories in time are those whose initial shine goes dull in a generation (I’m
thinking of Kipling, Booth Tarkington, and O. Henry), lies low, and then emerges
bright and fresh.”
I can’t
speak for Tarkington but the others remain endlessly rereadable, the finest writers of short stories after the Russians and Isaac Bashevis Singer. One of the
qualities I most admire in Davenport is his dismissal of fashion, literary or
otherwise. He doesn’t recognize it. It might as well not exist. He writes
elsewhere:
“We trust
seriousness to be the firm ground beneath our feet while knowing full well that
it is ultimately dull and probably inhuman. . . . Comedy is a free spirit, full
of fun, and has no intention of explaining herself. In fact, much of her charm
is in her mystery, in eluding the serious as successfully as a kitten who
doesn’t wish to be caught.”
[You can
find Davenport’s letter in Guy Davenport
and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.]
3 comments:
Thanks for reinforcing the right to think independently, critically and, when appropriate, iconoclastically. So few people today do the hard work of making up their own mind. My own initial experience with Hemingway was similar. I read "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Call to Arms" in succession when I was in my early 20s. At a used book sale, I found them stacked together and felt I had hit the jackpot. When I finished the first book, I thought, "I must be missing something. Hemingway is great!" By the time I finished the third, I said, "It's not me, it's you." That's not to say that all "great" artists have clay feet. Rather, it reflects that art is personal, not universal, and it's OK to have our own opinions.
I remember my enthusiasm to read "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love", the later after watching the Ken Russell movie adaptation. I also remember the subsequent struggle to finish either book, so dull and badly written they seemed. Never has inner turbulence been so boring.
I just put it down to my own limitations at the time. However, I've since learnt that my reservations are not mine alone.
I read a lot of Hemingway and some Lawrence in college many years ago and have never felt any reason to return to either. I don't know how well the "modern" writers of that period have aged. My son is now about the same age as I was then and I won't be recommending either. I suppose the reason is that I don't know that either writer has much insight into the world we live in today. Or at least that is the way I remember them.
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