I'm always surprised that Feldman wrote such beautiful and coherent music given the fog of confusion his brain seems habitually to have been in, to judge from incoherent ramblings like that, of which as you'll know there are very many.

No, it isn't all nonsense of course, but I would respectfully submit that he hasn't said anything useful about Hemingway in that paragraph, though he has managed to bring in a gratuitous reference to Günter Grass whose work has nothing to do with Hemingway but who was supposedly a friend of Feldman - and so it usually goes on...

I completely agree with Swan_Knight.
I can not say it better my self.

He was so popular. All people on subway and other transports were reading him.
It was difficult to get his books. I think  he was only published in one magazine.
I only remember that my mother read it.

When we lived in the USA I tried to read his books again. I don't know why I am not interested.
Am I wrong?

I read his biography and was sad.

Like following your own instructions, for instance:

Maybe he should learn to take out "you see" and "maybe", you see?

Of course, I never ramble... ahem. 

I confess I have no idea what Feldman is really trying to say, but Hemmingway did type. There is apparently a big demand these days for the exact style of vintage typewriter he used (this is a central point in Joe Haldeman's The Hemmingway Hoax).

It is now many years since I enjoyed Hemingway's terse prose in his collection of short stories and I'm not to keen to revisit Carlos Baker's lengthy biography again, although at the time it did encourage me to continue with the major novels.   Most of his work failed badly when adapted for the cinema as the visual language could not match the distinction of his prose.   The one exception was the first version of "The Killers" (1946) which is a masterpiece in film noir.

This afternoon, I took a copy of 'Ernest Hemingway' (1978) by Anthony Burgess, off my shelves; a neat 130pp vignette in the Thames & Hudson Literary Lives series.     "He had to turn himself into a Homeric myth, which meant posing and lying, treating life as fiction,...it is difficult to sort-out the self-made legend from a reality less glamorous, though still glamorous enough... Hemingway the legend is treated sceptically by Professor Baker, but the portrait of Hemingway the man that emerges does not diminish the writer, hunter, warrior, bullfight aficionado."

I was certainly content to discount his fibs and tantrums when, as a young man,  I read about his changing scene: from a happy childhood to the grim reality of the First World War; from the Paris of the twenties to the Spanish Civil War;  the experiences of an African safari to the sadness of his last years in Cuba.     I saw a self-portrait in the character of the dying Harry, from a gangrened leg, lying on a plane, looking up at 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', fully aware that he had followed the wrong gods and wasted his talent.   A white hunter told Hemingway that the frozen corpse of a leopard had been found in the heights of the mountain.   The story of the 'clean' death of the overreaching predator and the dirty death through gangrene are then used as powerful symbols.   The beast dies nobly seeking the summit and the gangrene represents the corruption and mortification of a talent misused , prostituted, permitted to atrophy.  Harry finally faces his destiny having at last 'burnt the fat off his soul'.

Anthony Burgess's assessment is both penetrating and generous and my reminiscences today are more happily aligned in this direction.

I found Hemingway's description of army life not erotic at all, so I don't think he was gay. But I'm not an expert on this.

I find the following clip far more revealing, entertaining and "interesting":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nisMqIKkOs

By the way, I wonder if Member Grew has read the following book:



It was published in France not so long ago and caused quite a stir. The invasion of German Körperkultur was a liberating force (well, sexually speaking) in 1940s France. Remember Sartre's description of the German troops marching into Paris in The Roads to Freedom? I see that through different eyes now.



Eyes, yes...

One of Hemingway's most striking and personal works, surely.

And the Italian translation, according to Philip Hensher, is sublime.