Faulkner and Hemingway: America's Two Literary Dads · 1:45am Jun 21st, 2021
I don't know about you, but I've been reading some c l a s s i c l i t e r a t u r e again lately. Specifically I've been returning to two authors whom I started reading in high school, many moons ago, and with whom I've had a rather complicated relatationship ever since. They're the authors who basically introduced me to reading "serious" fiction at a time when I mostly read genre fiction. I'm of course talking about the two dads of 20th century American literature: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
Or is it Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner? I'm not sure who to place first. In studies of American literature the two are placed pretty much neck-and-neck. Doesn't help that the men themselves were famously vitriolic towards each other at times. They have one of those perpetual rivalries that has persisted even beyond their deaths, made all the more amusing because they had more than a fair bit in common.
1. Both were born, and died, within just a couple years of each other.
2. Both were Nobel lauriates (also within a short span of time), and won at least one Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
3. Both were detached from the coastal scenes, Hemingway from Illinois and Faulkner from Mississippi. As such they were not a part of the New York and Los Angeles culture hubs.
4. Both were heavy drinkers.
5. Both were prone to depressive episodes.
6. Both were committed to aesthetics, albeit different kinds of aesthetics. Faulkner with his hallucinatory pastoralism that bordered on maximilism, and Hemingway with his minimalist descriptions and terse vocabulary.
7. Both lied about and/or exaggerated their wartime experiences. They were, to some extent, self-mythologizers.
8. Both were highly masculine while also interrogating what constituted masculine behavior, each in his own way. Hemingway wrote about physical activities, such as hunting and bullfighting, that are typically considered masculine, whereas Faulkner wrote about old-school southern "chivalry" disintegrating in the decades following the Civil War.
9. Both had a curious relationship with cinema. Hemingway's stories were being regularly adapted into Hollywood features, whereas Faulkner had a fairly successful side hustle as a Hollywood screenwriter, even at one point adapting one of Hemingway's novels (To Have and Have Not, which funnily enough Hemingway really liked).
10. Both were inspired, early in their careers, by Sherwood Anderson, although both would soon ascend and even turn their backs on their one-time mentor.
11. Both suffered accidents that, on top of their alcoholism, led to them being in a good deal of physical pain at the end of their lives. Faulkner had a horse-riding accident that probably contributed to his death less than a month later, and Hemingway got fucked up so many times over the years that he really was in chronic agony by the end.
12. Both were, quite literally, dads.
If you were to ask me who the finest American author of the 20th century was, someone who wrote and also died in that century, I might say Philip K. Dick. If you were to ask me who the finest American author of the 20th century was in the context of how they conversed with the changing times and attitudes of their era, I might say Robert Heinlein. If, though, you were to ask me who the finest American author of the 20th century was in terms of aesthetic achievement, I would say, "Well jeez, I'm not sure about that. I'm torn between Faulkner and Hemingway. I find it hard, in this retrospective fashion, to separate them. Wish we could put them in a boxing ring and have them duke it out."
Regardless, I wanted to take this year's Father's Day as an opportunity to ramble a bit about two guys who helped me along during my formative years as an enthusiastic reader.
Happy Father's Day to them, and happy Father's Day to your dad (and mine) as well.
I dunno, sounds plausible. Good job!
I note in passing the vogue for using "interrogate" as a synonym for "examine." As if the subject were a) a criminal or political prisoner and b) able to answer for itself.
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I think "interrogate," especially in Faulkner's case, is pretty apt. Been re-reading The Sound and the Fury, and the guy really tears into these notions of pre-Civil War southern nobility. It's a novel about an old-money white southern family that basically collapses under its own weight because it can't adapt to what was then the "New South," a more democratized society where black Americans had at least a little more autonomy than in the slavery days.
Hemingway has his moments too. These men were deconstructing masculine norms about as often as they were paying them lip service, which is partly what makes them interesting to me.
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Okay, that's a fair defense of the usage. Nice work!
And I just now stumbled across this: Paris as Hemingway would have seen it.