The Morgan Library & Museum examines author Ernest Hemingway
One of the privileges of living in a great city is having a choice of museums. For many, jobs and family responsibilities prevent visits from being anything other than a weekend or vacation treat.
But I would argue that regular trips to MoMA or The Frick ought to be part of a balanced psychological diet. In the same way that people work out, run or do yoga, contemplating a Winslow Homer painting in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum could well be justified on mental-health grounds.
It’s never going to happen—probably not even in Denmark—but employers ought to encourage their workers to visit cultural institutions on company time.
I know that sounds air-headed. But if the goal is to have people think creatively and come up with fresh ideas, to tiptoe outside the box, I suspect there’s no more expedient and efficient way than to throw them into a milieu where they’re surrounded by genius.
And more than genius, the historical record of individuals, over centuries, who pursued their passions. Some even managed to make a living at it.
Among them was Ernest Hemingway, the subject of a show at the Morgan Library & Museum that runs through Jan. 31.
ENLARGEI was tempted to visit for all the excuses listed above—but also for arguably professional reasons.
Overwriting is a personal and occupational hazard. But if anybody overcame it, Ernest Hemingway did. He pared his prose down to its essence, displaying a heroic sense of self-discipline in the process.
It probably doesn’t say much for my seriousness as a person, but this may be the first show I’ve ever attended where I read the entire wall text, which I understand is referred to in the museum trade as “didactics.”
The show starts with Hemingway’s precocious youthful efforts. (One is a short story about a couple of Canadian trappers published in “The Tabula,” his Oak Park, Ill., high-school literary magazine.)
There’s also the senior page from his high-school yearbook, a vehicle that sometimes sheds early light on later greatness. Hemingway’s entry includes a quote, attributed to his friend Susan Kesler: “None are to be found more clever than Ernie.”
As a writer, one is relieved to discover that literary giants also often didn’t get it right in their first draft. Dickens is a good example of one whose manuscripts look like a battlefield. But few appear more assiduous than Hemingway in polishing his sentences—for example, in the show’s notebooks, where he wrote the first draft of “The Sun Also Rises.”
It also helps that his writing is generally legible, that he pounded out much of his work on a typewriter and then revised in pencil, and that he can grab the reader’s attention, as few can, with a simple declarative sentence.
A show centered around manuscripts might sound like a yawn. But it whets the imagination at every turn through the force and charisma of Hemingway’s personality, and of those with whom he crossed paths.
Gertrude Stein, for example. The show includes an invitation she sent the writer and his wife Hadley to tea. “Begin over again and concentrate,” she instructed after reading his early work.
Or an envious July 7, 1926, letter from fellow writer John Dos Passos—both served in Italy during World War I with the American Red Cross Ambulance Service—sitting in Brooklyn while Hemingway (affectionately addressed as “Hemingstein”) was spending July in Pamplona.
The most remarkable missive of all may be a 1926 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald after reading “The Sun Also Rises.” He suggested Hemingway chuck the first two chapters, characterizing the novel’s opening as “careless and ineffectual.”
“About this time,” the author of “The Great Gatsby” went on, “I can hear you say, ‘Jesus this guy thinks I’m lousy, & he can stick it up his ass for all I give a Gd Dm for his ‘critisism’ [sic]. But remember this is a new departure for you, and I think your stuff is great. You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe—and the last.”
To Hemingway’s credit, he took Fitzgerald’s advice.