My Love/Hate Affair with Ernest Hemingway.

Well, hate is a bit strong. More like disappointment. I first read Hemingway as many young folks do in college. Not for assignment. And here was prose that was direct, fresh, sincere, and connected with me. So you want to write you start to imitate. Not a bad thing to do. You learn how sentence rhythms can be created. The Southern writer Reynolds Price (A Long and Happy Life; The Names and Faces of Heroes) was a visiting lecturer and as part of being in the creative writing course we were given a one-on-one with him. I didn't have much to show, just some prose poems, which he pronounced were "lovely."

One began: "The snows came in March and it was unfair because that same morning there had been the smell of spring in the air." Yep, that's pretty Hemingwayesque. But it's not a bad way to begin to find one's own writing voice. I digress.

Hemingway became a caricature of himself. And then his later prose became a caricature of his early prose. His late work Across the River and Into the Trees, deserved the ridicule it received through E.B. White's satire "Across the Street and Into the Grill" in The New Yorker.

You read Across the River today and groan: "I could learn it really well, he thought, and then I'd have that." Oh, Lord, please. And "Keep it clean, he said to himself. And love your girl." Jezz, really?

And yet. And yet. On one of the most emotional evenings of my life I turned to that book for a kind of solace. I had learned my father had died of a heart attack and the next day I would drive to Hutchinson. I reread Across the River and underlined passages. Today, almost 50 years later, I still have that book in my library.

Until the other day, the last Hemingway novel I had read was Islands in the Stream, published posthumously. I thought it pretty awful. Didn't connect at all. So when I read about another novel to be published posthumously I didn't bother, which was quite some time ago: 1986.

Wandering through an estate sale I came across The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway and it caught my eye because I was unfamiliar with that title. Looking through it, I realized it was the posthumous publication, so I bought it.

I'm just one chapter into it, but it was like meeting up again with an old friend. Here was early Hemingway prose: fresh, sincere, and it connected with me. I don't know how the rest of the book will go, but it's been a great joy so far to reconnect with my younger self and Ernest Hemingway in this odd way.

Paragraphs Reynolds Price Found "Lovely"

I came across those paragraphs that were the only things I had to show the Southern writer Reynolds Price when he came to visit our creative writing class at KU in the late 1960s. He called them "lovely." They actually got  published in that odd yearbook done by KU in 1971. I look at them now, 40-some years after they were written, and think: "Hey, this isn't bad stuff. Rhythms are good. Emotions are honest. What more do you want?"

Weather and Her 

By Randy Attwood

(c) 2013 by Randy Attwood

Soft Rains

When the rains were soft in the fall we would stay in bed, just looking at each other's eyes and listening to the sounds of the drops as they hit the roof and the collecting puddles. Then, there would be the battle of who could tickle the other person out of bed so that one of us would have to go and make the coffee and bring two cups back to bed where we would listen to the rain again.

March Snows

The snows came in March and it was unfair because that same morning there had been the smell of spring in the air. But during the night the snows came, and I awoke when I heard the wind. I got up and parted the curtains and looked out at the street lamp and saw the snow blowing as it collected in drifts around the trees and her car in the driveway. A happiness I did not understand filled me when I looked down at the bed where she slept. I slid down under the covers again and she stirred, her lips slightly parted and her yellow hair everywhere. I pulled her close to me and slowly inhaled our warmth—man warm and woman warm together—as the wind continued to howl.

Tightly

During those nights, I would hold her as tightly as I could, my lips pressed into her arm as it tightened around my neck in the darkness. If there was anything else anywhere else, it was unnecessary to look for it. The smell of her hair and my nose against her throat and always through to more, always into never ending, stop at never ending and search for more and through and out and into never ending, stopped just before never ending, only close away from never ending, search again for never ending and quick-found oblivion stretching farther, reaching never ending. No thought. Only long and tight-filled ending.

Storm

Holding hands, we stood under the protection of the roof of the porch and watched the thunder and the lightning bring the night. It also brought the rains from the east: Enraged hard rains that whipped the ground like a savage madman, raging hell against the earth for being secure, not having to roam the restless skies like they, the rains. They beat and beat and pounded upon the ground–the ground that either soaked the rains or ran them off to the rivers; but the earth remained, infuriating the rain that screamed its hate with wind: A jealous shrieking wind that came down crushing into our faces as we braced against each other on the porch.

Wind

The wind blew all that day and it was impossible to be away from it because you could still feel it in your hair when you were inside. The only thing was to hope that it wouldn't last too long. But it stayed through the next two days bringing only heat and exasperation and a feeing of helplessness. It was impossible to concentrate on anything. Even the love-making took on an exasperated feeling, some helpless fight against the wind.

"Why does the wind bother you so?" she asked.

"It's constant sound and feel. It leaves me weak."

"Why weak?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry. Kiss me again and I'll ignore it."

I couldn't ignore it, but it helped to have her weight on top of me, pinning me, and I slept well that way, secure that the wind would not blow me away.

END