Jennifer Brown

Note from Jennifer: This month's MTJM has been a weird one. My task is to read a book that is, apparently, impossible to find. The library has ordered it and I'm 1st in line to receive it once it gets in, but in the meantime, I have nothing. Bummer.

Scott's mission was an "I Enjoy" mission, and he was to read Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (one of my absolute all-time favorites that I think all writers should read and re-read frequently) as well as Papa's short story, "Hills Like White Elephants." Below are Scott's reports. As you'll see... he totally rocked this mission.

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Hemingway & Zen: a Psychological Autopsy

I take pride in this blog, if for no other reason than the fact that the above phrase has never been previously written.  Hemingway, PaPa, if you will, is spinning in his grave and 3,274 Zen Masters are hearing the silence of their serenity screech into the scream of Piagetian accommodation.  I imagine that Hemingway had as much interest in Zen as John Wayne did in Sencha tea and Zen Masters value traditional male principles like ZaZa Gabor did elk hunting.  I do have to admit that I had not previously read Hemingway and that The Old Man and the Sea was not high on my list.  I was wrong.

This relatively brief novel has jumped like a flying fish to the top of my list to join works such as Huck Finn, Don Quixote, and even the philosophical crown, Atlas Shrugged.  Unfortunately all great works find themselves subject to the sharks of literary analysis attempting to understand by devouring and forgetting to savor the enjoyment of the work itself.  In fact, it is my understanding that many have said that the sharks in Hemingway’s novel represented the critics, working to tear away at his work; sort of an angry and futile lashing out on Hemingway’s part, like the Old Man with the oar, attacking foes as relentless as they are stupid.  Just as Forrest taught us, “Stupid is as stupid does.” The critics didn’t get it. 

They didn’t get it.  Hemingway was a writer.  He weathered critics like the battles of World Wars and equated 10 dollar words with megalomania and Faulkner.  He wrote.  Writing was what he did.  Like the Old Man it was all about writing (fishing).  The fish was a story, was his brother whom he loved and slayed.  Fishing was just what he did.  He could tell a male from a female porpoise by the sound of their blowing and use a pen (knife) like an extension of his own hand.  Experience or intuition taught him just how much line to let out to catch the best reader and then how to make the catch work to join with him in the experience.  When his craft hurt him, he dipped his injury into the very water whence came his pain and knew that it would heal him.  He understood that the joy of his craft and its pain were inseparable and that this was beautiful pain.  He knew that, while he must oppose him, the shark, too was beautiful for it was a part of writing.  Even when he did not bring in the big fish, he knew that he had written and that he had lived and that he would fish another story from the deep water on another day.  He knew that the boy was the only one who understood him and, for this, he loved the youngster.  I imagine that he died in his shack, of loneliness, of not being understood. 

Dorothy Parker said that she hated writing but that she loved having written.  I don’t know if she got it.  Hemingway’s writing was metaphor.  Let’s be clear here.  I am not saying that he wrote in metaphor but that his writing was metaphor: metaphor for living, for him, for his life.  If God breathed life into Adam, he breathed writing into Hemingway.  He loved and hated it.  For each of us, the marlin is that process that absorbs us, defines us, is us.  The sharks are those things that are urgently unimportant.  If we fight them then we accept them as a part of the process and continue to write our story.  If we give in to them then they become “come’ santos” or saint eaters, taking our sainthood by destroying our purpose and our identity.   

I sit here at 1:29 in the morning having just fallen more in love with my wife and my children.  They are my marlin and my sharks are fears about money, career, and my own adequacy.  If I surrender to my fears then they eat me and I forget the importance of the very reasons that I fear them.  If I fight with them, then I live to fish another day in the deep waters and fishing, writing, husbanding, parenting is my life.

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What Hills Do You See?

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

                                                                                        Henry David Thoreau 

I am not a writer.  My muse did not find me in the halls of Raytown High School; admittedly, those halls were quite crowded.  Nor has she found me at any of the other fine institutions of learning that I have had the privilege to attend.  I am without muse.  Question:  Does this make me “a-mused”?   

Nevertheless, I can find my way through my green fog to say that I admire writers – and not only because I am married to one, but I truly admire the art.  Writing empowers all the other gifts: creativity, prophecy (social critique), education, even love.  Hemingway seemed psychologist, anthropologist, and writer.  He brought real life to his writing and then brought his writing to life.  In doing so, he engendered a sense of identification with the characters and a real empathy. 

“Hills Like White Elephants,” is remarkable (especially for a 1927) publication, as a couple struggles with an unspoken painful issue.  In addition, the story contains a remarkable amount of dialogue, demanding that the reader move further into the story and into the characters in order to fully understand the subject and the conflict.  The man and woman describe hills that they see in the distance; while looking at the same hills their focus and perceptions differ.  Due to the dialogue and the setting, the reader moves beyond the rightness or wrongness of the issue and into a more thorough understanding of the anxiety, sadness, and anger of each of the characters. 

Hemingway’s style is courageous in his willingness to deal with a socially loaded moral issue and in his use of dialogue.  Courage was an earmark of his.  Courage to write about life, to write life.  It may be this very courage that led Hemingway down the path of isolation to loneliness and eventually to suicide. 

If Thoreau was right, life must be lived before it can be written about.  Hemingway lived.  His characters live.  His writing draws the reader into a place of understanding for the characters.  The understanding fashions a sense of connection and empathy that carries one into an emotional understanding of the characters’ humanness and perhaps awareness that the breadth of human experience is greater than the moral difference between us.

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Note from Jennifer: Yes. Yes it does suck to be the stupid spouse. Why do you ask?