Keys to Hemingway - Paperback

by Ernest H. Lockridge Phd (Author)

A Guided Tour Things may not be immediately discernible in what Hemingway writes in part because he seems so transparent. Where other twentieth-century "greats" can be exasperatingly opaque, Hemingway is a sheer pleasure to read. The prose is crisp, clear and exciting. Hemingway is user-friendly out of the box, no manual required to read and enjoy The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. His finely spun, deliberate masterpieces read easily. Hemingway is elusive because 1) he disarms the reader by seeming so plain and simple, and 2) he deliberately omits "things, for example, "I omitted the real end of a very simple story called "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." This grants the reader more than a mere hunting license for the meaning underlying Hemingway's writing, it constitutes a direct order. Hemingway criticism has long-since filled the void, so to speak, with elaborate symbolism-a literary convention that Hemingway, himself, eschewed as utterly foreign to his artistic method and design: "Carlos Baker"-prominent literary critic, and a biographer of Hemingway-"really baffles me," wrote Hemingway. "Do you suppose he can con himself into thinking I would put a symbol into anything on purpose? It's hard enough just to make a paragraph." Hemingway jettisoned symbolism as an antiquated literary convention that gets in the way of depicting life as it is. For Hemingway is "trying . . . to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing." A further reason "things may not be immediately discernible in what Hemingway] writes" is his technique of indirection and irony, which as a result demands a considerable effort from the reader. "I know how damned much I try always to do the thing by three cushion shots rather than by . . . directstatement. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and Green Hills of Africa provide a Harvard-Classics-Bookshelf's worth of incomparably brilliant trick shots. Hemingway broadly hints at how he must be approached by anyone wishing to "discern" "things," and provides us with a couple of specific examples as guidelines: 1) the "true" ending of "Out of Season" (above) and 2) this, about his long short story "Big Two-Hearted River": "Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting . . . I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook . . . The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it."

Author Biography

ERNEST LOCKRIDGE (b. November 28, 1938) graduated Phi Beta Kappa with High Honors from Indiana University in 1960. A Rhodes scholarship finalist he was Woodrow Wilson and Lewis-Farmington Fellow at Yale University where he earned "Honors" in all his graduate courses, was awarded an Inaugural Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1962-3) and completed his MA and PhD in English within three years (1960-3). Hired by Yale's Department of English (1963-71) during the Golden Age when its English Department was internationally rated Number One, Lockridge was selected Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1969-70). In May, 1971 Yale's seven undergraduate literary prizes were won by his students, for work written under his supervision. He is author of three novels, one of which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby remained in print for a quarter century. His ground-breaking work on Ernest Hemingway has appeared in The Hemingway Review and in anthologies. His essay "Sterne and Camus, a Vision of the Sentimental Absurd" (The Sewanee Review, 1964) has been widely praised and anthologized. From 1971-1991, Lockridge taught English at The Ohio State University where in 1976 he was promoted to Full Professor and in 1985 received the University's premier honor for teaching excellence, The OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. He took "early retirement" after 28 years in full academic regalia (1991). Travels with Ernest, co-authored with his famous wife, sociologist and poet Laurel Richardson, was published in 2004. He delivered The OSU Department of English Fifth Annual Emeriti Lecture, April 8, 2010. Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at The Ohio State University, Ernest is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings that have appeared in solo exhibits, galleries, and on the covers of books. He is father of three, stepfather of two, grandfather of eight.