Last year I became intrigued with Ernest Hemingway. I had read The Old Man and the Sea in high school but that's all. It was after I read The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, a fictionalised but very moving account of his first marriage, that I wanted to know more about the man, his life and his writings. I found a fairly basic biography ( Ernest Hemingway: A Writer's Life by Catherine Reef), but it was Paul Hendrickson's amazing Hemingway's Boat that pulled me in. It's a detailed portrait that shows the man in all his personas: charming, romantic, a macho big-game hunter and fisherman, a bully, neurotic.
I was then given the hefty The Hemingway Women by Berenice Kert, which totally absorbed me and provided information from a different perspective.
I then read A Farewell to Arms and was captivated by the writing.
I also loved A Moveable Feast, written later in life when he reminisced rather romantically about his time in Paris in the 1920s.
But I then discovered a copy of one of his earliest books The Torrents of Spring, written in 1925. This is a bizarre book unless you know why he wrote it, a fact that shows a perverse and mean side to his character. A friend and mentor, Sherwood Anderson, had just written a book that critics praised, saying he was America's greatest writer - a label Hemingway wished to have. So he wrote a parody of the novel, poking fun at the simple style and in some cases actually paraphrasing paragraphs. Everyone told him not to publish such a cruel book, but he went ahead anyway. Not surprisingly the friend never spoke to him again. Modern readers, like me, are likely to find it silly and pretentious, though I did read a review that praised it as 'clever and witty' and Hemingway scholars will find clues in it that foreshadow his very characteristic writing style.
On my shelf, still to read, is Hemingway's last novel, True at First Light, an account of hunting in Africa, and a book I found in a secondhand shop in country Victoria for $5: My Brother Ernest Hemingway by Leicester Hemingway.
George Orwell
My second obsession is with George Orwell, aka Eric Blair. I read a marvellous biography Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation by Jeffrey Meyers that, while being extremely detailed, was a powerfully penetrating portrait of the man, culled from contemporary accounts interviews, archival documents, photographs and his body of short stories, articles, non-fiction books and novels.
Evidently he had a peculiar relish for discomfort and a need to be thoroughly unhappy, not a hard task as he was permanently weakened by bronchitis.
I loved facts such as:
- Animal Farm was rejected by five publishers before being accepted
- Nineteen Eighty Four was described by one critic as 'cynical rot'.
These classics are well known, so it was a pleasant surprise to read the semi-fictionalised account of his time in Burma as a police officer in Burmese Days. It is an unsettling tale of life in British-held Burma in the 1920s, a scathing attack on imperial bigotry, racism and corruption with many scenes incredibly moving in their intensity and honesty, yet balanced with evocative descriptions of the heady scents of the exotic plants, the dry, dusty roads, the stifling humidity and the alien native customs.
Next, was Coming Up For Air, another one of his early novels.
There's little plot but a lot of captivating descriptive writing: a man reminisces about his past and decides to revisit the scene of his childhood. Orwell's whole approach to this novel is unorthodox and intriguing as he describes the minutae of everyday life, but it shows his early confidence and command of the English language.
Similarly, Keep the Aspidistra Flying shows Orwell's ability to write about ordinary people in ordinary situations that grips the reader and propels them into the lives of his characters.
While not a man who was easy to like, his often tortuous life experiences coupled with his social conscience have left us with works of immense power that continue to move us.
