Hemingway

Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is a giant of modern literature. Among twentieth-century American fiction writers, his work is most often compared to that of his contemporaries William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Combined with his outstanding short stories, Hemingway’s four major novels—The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952)—comprise a contribution to modern fiction that is far more substantial than Fitzgerald’s and that approximates Faulkner’s.
Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years before Hemingway received this recognition, but their respective approaches to fiction are so dissimilar that this belated receipt says little or nothing about Hemingway’s stature relative to that of Faulkner. When set alongside Faulkner’s Mississippi novels, Hemingway’s major works feature simpler structures and narrative voices/personae.
As or more important, Hemingway’s style, with its consistent use of short, concrete, direct prose and of scenes consisting exclusively of dialogue, gives his novels and short stories a distinctive accessibility that is immediately identifiable with the author. Owing to the direct character of both his style and his life-style, there is a tendency to cast Hemingway as a “representative” American writer whose work reflects the bold, forthright and rugged individualism of the American spirit in action.
His own background as a wounded veteran of World War I, as an engaged combatant in the fight against Fascism/Nazism, and as a “he-man” with a passion for outdoor adventures and other manly pursuits reinforce this association.
But this identification of Hemingway as a uniquely American genius is problematic. Although three of his major novels are told by and/or through American men, Hemingway’s protagonists are expatriates, and his fictional settings are in France, Italy, Spain, and later Cuba, rather than America itself.
While Hemingway’s early career benefited from his connections with Fitzgerald and (more so) with American novelist Sherwood Anderson, his aesthetic is actually closer to that shared by the transplanted American poets that he met in Paris during the 1920s; T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, most crucially, Gertrude Stein. In this context, we must realize that Hemingway’s approach to the craft of fiction is direct but never blunt or just plain simple.
Hemingway’s text is the result of a painstaking selection process, each word performing an assigned function in the narrative. These choices of language, in turn, occur through the mind and experience of his novels’ central characters whether they serve explicitly as narrators of their experience or as focal characters from whose perspectives the story unfolds. The main working corollary of Hemingway’s “iceberg principle” is that the full meaning of the text is not limited to moving the plot forward: there is always a web of association and inference, a submerged reason behind the inclusion (or even the omission) of every detail.
We note, too, that although Hemingway’s novels usually follow a straightforward chronological progression as in the three days of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway does make use of summary accounts of the past, of memories related externally as stories, and of flashbacks. These devices lend further depth to his characters and create narrative structures that are not completely straightforward chronicles.
Hemingway is direct. But he is also quite subtle, and subtlety is not a trait that we ascribe to the American way. In the end, Hemingway is an international artist, a man who never relinquished his American identity but who entered new territories too broad and too deep to fit within the domain of any national culture.

William Faulkner’s writing and awards
On writing, Faulkner remarked, “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him”, in an interview with The Paris Review in 1956. Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, stated that, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
Faulkner’s most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished (1938). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories: His first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including “A Rose for Emily,” “Red Leaves”, “That Evening Sun,” and “Dry September.” Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat.
Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist “pulp fiction”-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux as “the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story.” Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published as a young man. Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight’s Gambit.
Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his “minor” novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.

Reading William Faulkner’s short stories is an excellent way to approach his major works. Although his novels are better known and more widely read, many of the same characters and ideas found in them are introduced in his stories.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897, but soon thereafter his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, a site he would rename Jefferson in his fiction and would use as the setting for almost all of his novels and short stories.
Faulkner came from an old, proud, and distinguished Mississippi family, which included a governor, a colonel in the Confederate Army, and notable business pioneers. His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the “u” was added to Faulkner’s name by mistake when his first novel was published, and he retained the misspelling), emigrated from Tennessee to Mississippi during the first part of the nineteenth century. Colonel Falkner, who appears as Colonel John Sartoris in Faulkner’s fiction, had a distinguished career as a soldier, both in the Mexican War and the American Civil War. During the Civil War, his fiery temper caused him to be demoted from colonel to lieutenant colonel.
Falkner was heavily involved in events taking place during Reconstruction, the twelve years following the end of the Civil War in 1865, when the Union governed the secessional Confederate states before readmitting them. He killed several men during this time and became a rather notorious figure. With a partner, he oversaw the financing and construction of the first post-Civil War railroad in the South; then, after quarreling with his partner, the relationship dissolved. When this former business associate ran for the state legislature, Falkner ran against him and soundly defeated him.
Once asked how much he based his characterization of the genteel Colonel Sartoris on his great-grandfather, Faulkner responded:
“That’s difficult to say. That comes back to what we spoke of—the three sources the writer draws from—and I myself would have to stop and go page by page to see just how much I drew from family annals that I had listened to from these old undefeated spinster aunts that children of my time grew up with. Probably, well, the similarity of raising of that infantry regiment, that was the same, the—his death was about—was pretty close, pretty close parallel, but the rest of it I would have to go through to—page by page and remember, did I hear this or did I imagine this?”
What does not appear in Faulkner’s fiction is that during all of his great-grandfather’s projects and designs, the colonel took time to write one of the nation’s bestsellers, The White Rose of Memphis, which was published in book form in 1881. He also wrote two other novels, but only The White Rose of Memphis was successful.
Falkner was finally killed by one of his rivals, and his death was never avenged. Today, a statue of him stands in the Oxford, Mississippi, cemetery. Dressed in a Confederate uniform, he looks out over the region for which he fought so desperately and so valiantly. Only William Faulkner, of all the Falkner clan, is as distinguished and, ultimately, became more distinguished than his great-grandfather.
Faulkner’s personal life fits seemingly into the romantic cliché of what a writer’s life is like, and he often contributed deliberately to the various stories circulating about him. For example, in 1919, during the final months of World War I, he was rejected for service in the U.S. Armed Forces because he was too short. Not easily deterred, he went to Canada and was accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force, but World War I ended before he finished his training. Returning to Oxford, he adopted an English accent and walked around his hometown in a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform, which he had purchased, along with some medals to adorn the uniform.
To write about Faulkner’s personal life is to put oneself at risk of not being able to separate the facts from the imaginary life he conceived for himself. Critics generally agree that he did not graduate from high school, and that he dropped out of the University of Mississippi after a couple of years. He moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village at the invitation of an established Mississippi writer, Stark Young, who used his influence to get Faulkner a position as a bookstore clerk, but he returned to Oxford after a few months. He then traveled to New Orleans, where he got a job running a boat that carried bootleg liquor. There, he met the established American writer Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio. Observing the leisurely life Anderson led, Faulkner decided that he wanted to become a writer, and Anderson helped get his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), published—with the promise that he would never have to read it.
Because Soldiers’ Pay was not successful commercially, Faulkner again was forced to find employment. This time, however, he found an ideal job: He shipped out as a deck hand on a freighter bound for Europe, where he spent many weeks loafing about the Mediterranean, especially in France and in Italy. His own imaginative reports of his life abroad have never been corroborated.
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, a high-school sweetheart who had been married previously, and he began a period of serious writing. Over the next few years, three of his greatest novels-The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932)-were published. Despite his numerous publications, however, he still did not earn enough money to support his and Estelle’s lifestyle. In 1933, a daughter, Jill, was born, and by the mid-1930s, Faulkner was deeply troubled with debt: In addition to his own family and servants, he supported his brother Dean’s children after Dean died in a plane crash, in a plane Faulkner had bought for him.
Mounting financial problems forced Faulkner to publish short stories as quickly as he could, and he finally capitulated to the monetary rewards of working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a thousand dollars a week. He hated the work, but he returned to it off and on during the 1930s, working long enough to pay off his significant debts, and then returning to Oxford, where he wrote at least three novels—Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Wild Palms (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), in addition to several short stories.
Despite Faulkner’s having produced some of the finest twentieth-century novels, his early works were never commercial successes; the exception is Sanctuary (1931), at first thought to be a sensational potboiler but later viewed otherwise. He struggled financially until the 1948 publication of Intruder in the Dust. The novel was made into a movie, filmed in Oxford, and Faulkner found himself an important figure in and around the town, the same town that earlier had spurned him, calling him such names as “Count No ‘Count.”
When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, only one of his novels was in print. Almost overnight, he was acclaimed by critics, writers, teachers, and reporters. From being an obscure, backwoods country writer, he was catapulted suddenly to the highest echelons of literary achievement. He took advantage of this newfound acclaim by encouraging young writers not to quit their craft. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he seized the spotlight of worldwide attention “as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.”
In 1957, Faulkner accepted a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. There, in informal class settings, he answered many questions about his novels and his artistic vision. Although he sometimes confused aspects of one novel with another, his answers attest to his characters’ vibrant personalities and expand on his panoramic vision for the Yoknapatawpha saga.
In June 1962, Faulkner was thrown from his horse and injured his back. He suffered intense pain and was admitted to Wright’s Sanitarium, in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 5. The next day—ironically the date of the old Colonel’s birthday—he died, leaving behind him a body of work unsurpassed in twentieth-century literature.
Faulkner uses new techniques to express man’s position in the modern world. The complexity of his narrative structures mirrors the complex lives we lead. Most of his novels and short stories probe into the mores and morals of the South, which he was not hesitant to criticize. In his early fiction, Faulkner views despairingly man’s position in the universe. He briefly voices this same sense of futility and defeat in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” Man is a weak creature incapable of rising above his selfish needs.
In his latter works, however, Faulkner’s tone changes, and he emphasizes humankind’s survival. He believes human beings to be potentially great, affirming that “man shall not only endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Penetrating deeply the psychological motivations for human beings’ actions, Faulkner concludes that hope remains for our salvation from despair
A brief introduction to William Faulkner
1897–1962, American novelist, b. New Albany, Miss., one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. Born into an old Southern family named Falkner, he changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner when he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, in 1924. Faulkner trained in Canada as a cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the Univ. of Mississippi in 1919–20, and lived in Paris briefly in 1925. In 1931 he bought a pre–Civil War mansion, “Rowanoak,” in Oxford, Miss., where he lived, a virtual recluse, for the rest of his life. As a writer Faulkner’s primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep South. Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi with a colorful history and a richly varied population. The county is a microcosm of the South as a whole, and Faulkner’s novels examine the effects of the dissolution of traditional values and authority on all levels of Southern society. One of his primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner’s novels treat the decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories including These 13 (1931), Go Down, Moses (1942), Knight’s Gambit (1949), and Big Woods (1955); and collections of essays and poems.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angle in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare
“Not of an age, but for all time”

William Shakespeare – Born 23rd April 1564 – Died 23rd April 1616

Born at Stratford Upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire, it is likely he was educated at Stratford Grammar School.

He probably began writing plays around 1592 and of the 38 plays that comprise the Shakespeare Canon, 36 were published in the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare wrote for nearly 20 years and at his height he probably completed as many as two or even three plays a year. Shakespeare probably retired from writing plays in 1613.

He died in 1616 at the age of 53 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity. His gravestone which is thought to be the last thing he wrote bears the inscription –
Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here!
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
As copyright laws did not exist at this time, playwrights often borrowed plots and dialogues from other sources. It is thought that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were taken from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. There was no hesitation on the part of some playwrights including Shakespeare to take events, characters or lines from previous works. Partly to overcome this it wasn’t uncommon for plays not to be published until after the performances had finished. The versions sold were called quartos. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were first published in this way. The texts often differ from those of the First Folio; the variations may represent performance practise.

Shakespeare’s reputation grew steadily after his death. His plays are regularly performed all over the world in many different languages. His work is considered integral to the development of German literature and culture. In the U.K. we have the Royal Shakespeare Company dedicated to his work, and Shakespeare forms part of the national curriculum. Other playwrights have also used the plays as a basis for writing their own material. Because Shakespeare’s works are so widely known audiences are able to recognise politial allusions, coded into productions, and enjoy parodies and plays which are spin-offs from the originals such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 pictured above

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

In 1609 a collection of Shakespeare’s private sonnets was published, probably without his permission. They have led to speculations about his life, as they are addressed to at least one man and one woman.
The sonnets show a relationship with a younger man, probably of higher rank than Shakespeare, urge the young man to marry and breed, but become increasingly warm and affectionate.

The sonnets to the young woman show a passionate physical relationship, but one which Shakespeare also regrets:
‘The better angel is a man right fair
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill…’
(Sonnet 144).
The young man seems to have become involved with the woman, causing Shakespeare great pain.

There has been much speculation about their identities; the most likely candidates for the young man being the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. A. L. Rouse proposed Emilia Lanier, of a family of Italian Jews, mistress of Lord Hunston, patron of Shakespeare’s company to 1596 as the Dark Lady.

Shakespeare regularly visited his wife and family in Stratford, and may also have been involved with the wife of a tavern owner in Oxford, on the route from London. Her playwright son, Sir William Davenant, claimed Shakespeare as his father.

The Language of Shakespeare

To enjoy Shakespeare it is a good idea to not only read the play but to see it acted or to listen to it on an audio tape. The Shakespeare collection includes copies of most films of Shakespeare’s plays on videos, DVDs and sound recordings. Shakespeare used words not only to explain the plot but to create images and help us to understand the feelings of his characters.

For example a lot of the imagery used in Macbeth is concerned with blood –
“It will have blood, they say.
Blood will have blood.” III. iv. 122

Many of his words have now become part of our everyday speech.
“leapfrog”
“barefaced”
“lonely”

Probably everyone could quote from at least one of Shakespeares Works.

” There’s a method in my madness ” Hamlet, II. ii. 207-8

“Well the world’s your oyster now.” The Merry Wives of Windsor, II. ii. 4-5

Some words that he used have a different meaning today such as

“defend” meant to forbid
“fig” meant to insult
“sad” meant serious

Shakespeare usually wrote in blank verse so the lines do not have to rhyme. Those that do, tend to mark the end of the scene as there were no curtains on the stage. He used a lot of metaphors and similies. Some of the earlier plays are particularly lyrical; Romeo and Juliet includes whole sonnets in the text. The language and blank verse of his later plays became increasingly fluid, with his increased mastery of dramatic possibilities. Shakespeare was famed, in his own time, for his lyrical and passionate poems, particularly the Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.

From Farce through to Tragedy

Since Shakespeare’s death, his plays have almost continually been performed, and examined by those trying to understand their timeless appeal. The appeal of his plays lies in the strength of his characterisation. Shakespearean characters are neither all good nor all bad, and face dilemas such as jealousy or love in ways which audiences can relate to.

Shakespeare’s plays had their roots in Roman drama, which he probably studied at school, along with classical texts such as the poems of Ovid. He may also have been influenced by the great Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who was killed shortly after Shakespeare came to London. His early reputation was made by the plays based on fairly recent English history; the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, now known as the Wars of the Roses, and on light comedies which would have appealed to his aristocratic patrons. The tragic love story Romeo and Juliet was also written for this audience, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have been commissioned for a wedding.

In the Roman plays such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus Shakespeare used a classical setting to comment on political issues. Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V consider the responsibilities and burdens of the ruler. Around 1601 it is speculated that some personal tragedy deepened Shakespeare’s appreciation of the human condition, and the great tragedies followed; Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Timon of Athens represents an extraordinarily misogynstic view, but was written at the same time as the great love story Antony and Cleopatra. Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, later plays, commonly known as Romances, have themes of reconciliation and re-discovery of lost wives and daughters, while The Tempest, is often seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art.

Shakespeare was also influenced by the change in fashion which followed the accession of King James I. James’s interest in witchcraft and Scottish background led to Macbeth; the masques and dance in Cymbeline and The Tempest were also a response to the demands of the Court audience.

Shakespeare drew on a number of different sources for his writing. The primary source for the History plays and Macbeth was Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. The source for the Roman plays was North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. The text for the famous description of Cleopatra’s first meeting with Antony is drawn almost exactly from Plutarch:
Enobarbus:
‘…The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick…’

Shakespeare Lives On!
Birmingham has one of the world’s best collections of works by and about Shakespeare
including the remarkable Forrest Collection, the scrapbook collection acquired by
H. R. Forrest of Manchester in 1890, which includes The Tempest and Hamlet.

Birmingham Shakespeare Library was founded in 1864 by members of the local Shakespeare Club during celebrations to mark the quarter centenary of Shakespeare’s birth.

The aim, as stated by George Dawson, the President of the Club, was to build a collection containing as far as practicable

every edition and every translation of Shakespeare, all the commentators, good, bad and indifferent, in short, every book connected with the life and works of our great poet. I would add portraits and all the pictures etc. illustrative of his work

Almost a century and a half later, the Library contains copies of almost all the English language editions and criticism of the works of Shakespeare, background material on his life and times and on the theatre. There are also editions and criticism in 93 other languages. There is an extensive archive of production material including videos, DVDs and sound recordings, photographs, programmes, playbills, posters, printed music, reviews and scrapbooks of illustrations.
Hamlet is without question the most famous play in the English language. Probably written in 1601 or 1602, the tragedy is a milestone in Shakespeare’s dramatic development; the playwright achieved artistic maturity in this work through his brilliant depiction of the hero’s struggle with two opposing forces: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father’s murder.

Shakespeare’s focus on this conflict was a revolutionary departure from contemporary revenge tragedies, which tended to graphically dramatize violent acts on stage, in that it emphasized the hero’s dilemma rather than the depiction of bloody deeds. The dramatist’s genius is also evident in his transformation of the play’s literary sources–especially the contemporaneous Ur-Hamlet–into an exceptional tragedy. The Ur-Hamlet, or “original Hamlet,” is a lost play that scholars believe was written mere decades before Shakespeare’s Hamlet, providing much of the dramatic context for the later tragedy. Numerous sixteenth-century records attest to the existence of the Ur-Hamlet, with some references linking its composition to Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy. Other principal sources available to Shakespeare were Saxo Grammaticus’s Historiae Danicae (circa 1200), which features a popular legend with a plot similar to Hamlet, and Francois de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, Extraicts des Oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel (7 Vols.; 1559-80), which provides an expanded account of the story recorded in the Historiae Danicae. From these sources Shakespeare created Hamlet, a supremely rich and complex literary work that continues to delight both readers and audiences with its myriad meanings and interpretations.

In the words of Ernest Johnson, “the dilemma of Hamlet the Prince and Man” is “to disentangle himself from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in evil passion, and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice.?From that dilemma of wrong feelings and right actions, he ultimately emerges, solving the problem by attaining a proper state of mind.” Hamlet endures as the object of universal identification because his central moral dilemma transcends the Elizabethan period, making him a man for all ages. In his difficult struggle to somehow act within a corrupt world and yet maintain his moral integrity, Hamlet ultimately reflects the fate of all human beings.