JOURNAL NO.5

My faculty advisor at Eugene Lang, Niel Gordon, was also a professor of mine last semester. Niel taught my intro to J.D. Salinger course. His class reminded me of everything I love and hate about literature and it’s criticism. 

The biggest point that I have taken from Niel’s class is that an author’s life isn’t what’s important. What’s important or valuable about an author is his/her’s work. What they have written and published and put out there for the world to read. 

After completing the necessary reading for this blog post, I realized how strongly I agree with Niel’s statement. Reading so much about Hemingway and his letters to his family and wife, Hadley, i can’t help but to become extremely angry. I frankly don’t care about any of that. It honestly shocks me deeply that there are numerous biographies written about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson. It baffles me that so many of Hemingway’s personal letters have been published for all of the world to see. 

Now, I of course don’t know if Hemingway was okay with this and/or decided to publish these letters on his own. If so, everything that I’m writing right now can be considered completely wrong. That being said, I’m going to continue this with all of the knowledge that I do have, which is that someone other than Hemingway found thousands letters he wrote and decided to publish some fraction of them. 

It’s true, though, that in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway seems to have appreciation and respect for Hadley. Based off of what I read in “New Readings of American Expats in Paris”, it’s clear that Hemingway didn’t necessarily treat Hadley that well. From writing letters to her best friend expressing how much he misses her to shacking up with another one of Hadley’s friends and eventually marrying her, I can see that he could have treated her better. 

It’s interesting, though, to compare how Hemingway treated Hadley to the way in which Joyce treated Sylvia Beach. In one of the letters included in “Joyce and Sylvia Beach”, I see Joyce’s affection and appreciation for Sylvia — but it’s a very on the surface appreciation. Almost as if he is only appreciating her and everything she does for him because he feels as though he has to. This point is proven later on in the article when a letter that Sylvia wrote to Joyce is included. This letter was never actually sent to Joyce, but you can see that she isn’t necessarily happy with the way things are going with Joyce and the way that he almost takes advantage of her kindness. 

Hemingway’s portrait of Sylvia in A Moveable Feast, is that of utmost respect and appreciation in my opinion. Sylvia seems as though she is nothing but a sweet and endearing person. And it’s clear that Hemingway doesn’t think any less of her than this. 

Sylvia’s letters don’t seem to dispute this portrayal of her, either. It’s hard to get a sense of if she’s a bad or good person based off her recollection of her time during the war in Paris and when she was forced to go into hiding and remove all the books from Shakespeare and Company. The only sense of her personality that I can gather is that she was extremely passionate about reading and getting others to read more. She wanted to help her dear friends with their writing and personal lives. 

It honestly seems like Hemingway’s depiction of her was nothing but true and accurate. 

All of this, however, brings me back to wondering why so many people are so dedicated to understanding the personal lives and personalities of famous writers. 

The best way that we can learn from a writer is to read his/her work and try our best to understand it. Our understanding of it may be completely different from what they intended or from what someone else’s understanding is — but that’s the point. 

An author writes a fictional piece for a reason, they want people to read it and take it in however they can or will. Spending our time figuring out what type of person they are/were and figuring out how they treated their loved ones doesn’t do anything but change the way we can view their writing, possibly in a negative way. 

I chose to listen to Niel Gordon and disregard information about my favorite writers’ personal lives and purely focus on their writing as  source of knowledge. But that’s just me.