Ernest Hemingway

[Longshanks]

How do know if some one or thing is directly influenced by a single individual if they don’t actually say it. The might be influenced by the people who influenced Hemingway.

[WordMan]

@Longshanks

How do know if some one or thing is directly influenced by a single individual if they don’t actually say it. The might be influenced by the people who influenced Hemingway.

Sigh.

I am not doing your homework for you. If you can’t grok the fact that when Hemingway got famous, his hard-boiled style became one of “languages of the day,” - and yeah, some folks may cite Sherwood Anderson or other proto-hard-boiled practitioners, but it was Hemingway who became the Poster Boy - I can’t help you.

Same with The Ramones - yeah, you can argue for the Velvets, the Dead Boys, Handsome Dick Manitoba and countless Punk and proto-Punk bands, but if you don’t see that The Ramones have become the “shorthand reference” for what Punk is*, I can’t help you there, either.

*note: I am not happy about this; Punk is so much broader and vibrant that a single, reductionist reference is hard to accept. But to deny it is silly. For that matter, to not recognize that Johnny Ramone’s all-downstrokes guitar style is more influential that 99.9% of other guitarists, you aren’t paying attention. Past Chuck Berry, Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend, you’d be hard-pressed to find a player who has influenced modern guitar more. That would be worthy thread topic - George Harrison touched so many people, The Edge, Andy Summers, Cobain, etc. - but Johnny Ramone would be a central player in the conversation.

OP - sorry for the hijack; just couldn’t let that reference go. Happy to be done here with Punk in a Hard-Boiled Thread…

[shiftless]

I’ve never been able to get through any of Hemingway’s novels but I did run across a collection of his short pieces, written for magazines I believe. They were excellent snapshots of the times in Europe - post war Germany for example. One article described bull fighting in Spain in beautiful detail. Made me apprecate bull fighting as an art form.

[bup]

I beat the brat.

I beat the brat. I had a baseball bat, and I beat the brat with the baseball bat. I beat the brat with a baseball bat because the bat felt good in my hands. I had hit many balls with it, and I learned to love the bat, and I liked the feeling now of beating on the brat with it. The brat was beaten and bloody. I had beat him and now we were drinking. We drank bad whiskey. He admired the bat and I told him about it, how I had had it for many years, how good it felt to hit a ball, and how true the bat was. He hefted the bat, eyed it along the length and agreed it was a very true bat. We drank more and got drunk, and I beat on him some more with the bat, and we became very good friends.

[WordMan]

@bup

I beat the brat.

I beat the brat. I had a baseball bat, and I beat the brat with the baseball bat. I beat the brat with a baseball bat because the bat felt good in my hands. I had hit many balls with it, and I learned to love the bat, and I liked the feeling now of beating on the brat with it. The brat was beaten and bloody. I had beat him and now we were drinking. We drank bad whiskey. He admired the bat and I told him about it, how I had had it for many years, how good it felt to hit a ball, and how true the bat was. He hefted the bat, eyed it along the length and agreed it was a very true bat. We drank more and got drunk, and I beat on him some more with the bat, and we became very good friends.

Yeah. Look, I’m sorry I was an enabler of this. Can we be done? I’ll start another thread just to provide a channel…

[WordMan]

@WordMan

Yeah. Look, I’m sorry I was an enabler of this. Can we be done? I’ll start another thread just to provide a channel…

Started here: Ramones haters - Really? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

Have at it.

[Fact_of_the_Matter]

The legend goes, Ernest Hemingway once won a bet by writing a six word short story that was so good, it could make people cry.

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

It is unlikely that he actually wrote it but it would fitting if he had.

[NAF1138]

He may not have written that one, but he did write a piece he called "A Very Short Story, that is only about a page long…in fact it’s short enough that I’ll just paste it in here:

@Hemingway-A Very Short Story

ne hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.

Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after, he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

It’s easy enough to find on the internet that I am guessing it’s ok to copy-paste this here, if not the link to where I found it is here, or just google search “Hemingway “A Very Short Story”- Compete Text” and get a bunch of other hits.

Anyway, while not his best work by a long shot, it gives a pretty good representation of what his style is all about. You say as much as you can with as few words as possible and still make an impact on the audience. This had been copied so much by other authors that it really doesn’t have the impact it used to have, but at the time it was revolutionary.

Having read through the thread again I take back my suggestion to start with The Old Man and the Sea and say start with a couple of the accessible short stories first, Then do the other books.

[Saintly_Loser]

@bup

I beat the brat.

I beat the brat. I had a baseball bat, and I beat the brat with the baseball bat. I beat the brat with a baseball bat because the bat felt good in my hands. I had hit many balls with it, and I learned to love the bat, and I liked the feeling now of beating on the brat with it. The brat was beaten and bloody. I had beat him and now we were drinking. We drank bad whiskey. He admired the bat and I told him about it, how I had had it for many years, how good it felt to hit a ball, and how true the bat was. He hefted the bat, eyed it along the length and agreed it was a very true bat. We drank more and got drunk, and I beat on him some more with the bat, and we became very good friends.

You are a genius.

[Crafter_Man]

Thanks for all the replies.

I just ordered the paperback of The Old Man and The Sea. (I haven’t yet graduated to the Kindle. Am still old school.) I’ll let you know what I think of it.