Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”

The Bohemian Poetry of Ernest Hemingway

 

 All 88 of Hemingway’s poems, including juvenilia, are contained in a modern edition edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis and readily available for borrowing online at https://archive.org/details/88poems0000hemi.

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s poetry is likely to be read primarily by those, diminishing in number these last few decades, who sufficiently favor his fiction to seek even relatively insubstantial new light that might illuminate his novels and stories.  The lyric oeuvre is slender, all right.  His editor has eked out eighty-eight short bits by including high school compositions, while he published maybe twenty-five poems during his life, including others in letters.  Apart from the small quantity of work, even a Hemingway enthusiast would be unlikely to make any great claims for these pieces, many of which seem to have been taken lightly by their own author.  Yet they are revealing in a way that tells less about Hemingway as an individual than about the nature of the modern avant-garde, the values and uses of an artistic bohemia, and the development of the concept of “hip.” 

     Reading these poems with a bit of distance from their composition, one conceives not so much a specific persona behind them, but rather a type, the young and rebellious artist.  While, of course, a good many details have dated, the flavor, the tone has much in common with the readings I have attended my entire life from hearing the Beats at Chicago’s Big Table Readings sixty years ago through my Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series lasting twenty-one years in the Hudson Valley.  Poetry on the page tends to differ from that which is meant to be performed, but, even apart from these generic differences, Hemingway’s poems exemplify the attitudes that have come to be associated not with art as a whole, but with an artistic “underground.”

     Though the literary historian more commonly views the expatriate writers of the ‘twenties as individuals, they contributed as well to a collective scene that celebrated the values associated with artistic bohemias: experimentalism in art and radicalism in politics and morals.  Such milieux, while in part traceable far back in time, have been well-defined since the Romantic Age.  While each artist produced individual works with unique characteristics, many also contributed or assented to the formation of a counter-cultural paradigm. 

     Readings by writers who consider themselves adversaries of the established culture take place not at universities but in cafes, bars, and living room salons.  A goal at such gatherings, apart from the delectation of art, is the creation of a community sub-culture.  For the last two hundred years such milieux have been called bohemias. [1]  Radicalism in these settings not only suggests challenges to social, political, religious, and aesthetic orthodoxies both as proposals and as pure style.  The writers’ posture of revolt appeals to the expected readership all though it may be detached from any possibility of actual adoption. 

     An embattled contrarian protest in fact derives its energy and drama from its not being accepted by the majority.  The desire to “épater les bourgeois” [2] can be a motive in itself, with the potential to inspire both Baudelaire’s in-your-face dandyism, Whitman’s casual open-collared workman’s dress, or  punk safety-pin in the ear.  I recall observing at the first live poetry readings I attended that the greatest audience response was regularly generated by transgressive lines, either sexually explicit, politically revolutionary, or aesthetically outré.  Fifty years later, at one of my own Poetry on the Loose events, an artist displayed his naked rear as part of his performance.  The gesture was meant to offend, a direct descendant of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, though in Jarry’s time the opening word was sufficient to cause the play to be banned.

     An ambience similar to such live venues may be constructed from the content of journals as well.  Hemingway published many of his poems in “little magazines” which cultivated the creation of a community of those critical of the majority culture such as Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Der Querschnitt, founded by Alfred Flechtheim and later edited by Hans von Wedderkop.

     The very name of The Little Review highlights its dissent from social norms.  The first issue proclaims the journal’s intention to pursue “that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”  In case any reader should mistake the editor’s intentions, she later included the slogan “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” beneath the title. [3]  She serialized Joyce’s Ulysses, losing a censorship trial over the excerpts. [4]  The poet whose work appeared in The Little Review most often was the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven whose work was often highly sexual as well as seeming to some incoherent.  In its pages frequent contributor Emma Goldman advocated not only anarchism but sexual freedom as well.

     Though European and focused centrally on visual art with oblique and satiric references to politics, Der Querschnitt also insisted on its radical loyalties, publicizing innovative artists such as Klee, Chagall, and Max Ernst whose “Dada est mort, vive dada!” appeared in January of 1921.  The editors included coverage of boxing tournaments as well as of the most significant developments in art.  Its tone is suggested by the claim in its subscription promotion in 1923 that the journal had correspondents in “the great centers of Europe and America and among Negroes and Eskimos.”  It published as poetry Salvation Army songs and the “the war cry of the famous All Blacks', the Maori hakka, of New Zealand’s Rugby team” in the same issue with a song about Jesse James from Harry Archer’s musical revue. [5]

     Hemingway’s poetic contributions to these journals were in many ways discontinuous from his fiction, but most exhibit the characteristics of bohemian art: transgressive material: sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic, suggesting a general bent toward the Dionysiac in preference to the Apollonian in spite of a certain cynicism, and an insider hipness implying a coterie with privileged insight.  While the poem’s editor Nicholas Gerogiannis says that “the poems reveal Hemingway himself rather than a fictional counterpart” [6], their persona is in fact less the author as an individual than a projection of the generic bohemian artist.  The significance of the poetry’s outlaw pose is evident in the title of the earliest collection of his poetry, The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway. [7]

     The same emphasis is sounded when Hemingway refers to his poems in Querschnitt as “dirty,” writing to John Dos Passos “the ‘Schnitt also publishing a book of my dirty poems . . . Have you got any dirty poems you want me to sign? Jeeze I wish you were here to write a few good prurient poems for me because that is now my only source of income.” [8]  His off-hand attitude distinguishes these poems from the center of his serious literary work.  After this claim that the poems are merely a source of income and asking Dos Passos to contribute, he jocularly implies that his wife Hadley was the author of some of them. 

     In spite of this off-handed attitude, Hemingway thought enough of many of his poems to retain them, revise them, and to publish a good many during his life.  Still, they have found few admirers (though Wallace Stevens was one), particularly in contrast to his enormous popular success and substantial critical reputation toward the end of his life.  Many are occasional and seem very casual, tossed off while doing his more significant work.  Others are written for those in his personal circle, including allusions meaningless to the general public.  A good share are satirical or otherwise humorous, even whimsical.  Perhaps the most pervasive attitude they project is a devil-may-care, insouciant bohemianism, reflecting transgressive attitudes in a cheeky rebellion more willing to sound flippant than grave. 

     The simplest device to indicate transgressive counter-cultural attitudes is the use of vulgar language.  Taboos which have since diminished were through Hemingway’s life strict enough that his use of obscene, scatological, and racist language was still shocking.  Now that politicians and celebrities routinely use formerly tabooed expressions, it is difficult to realize the offense originally caused by words such as “cunts,” (“Sequel”).  He managed to include “shit,” “fuck,” and cocksuckers,” all in a single poem, “The Defense of Luxembourg.”  Whereas other writers pushing the boundaries of censorship were quite serious about their themes – D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even, I would include, Henry Miller, Hemingway seems to indulge in what looks like juvenile play.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” everything is “the shit” and his style is half Gertrude Stein and half restroom graffiti: “Home is where the art is, home is where the fart is,/ let us fart and artless fart in  the home.”  In “The Road to Avallon” he makes, perhaps, a bit more sense.

 

Dogs must shit as well as men
            I like dogs better
           Say: Amen

 

     He likewise engages in ethnic jibes, referring, for instance, to “wops” in “d’Annunzio,”  “nigger” in “The Road to Avallon,” and making thoughtless remarks about Jews in “[The rail ends do not meet . . .].”  Worse, he ridicules Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts in “To a Tragic Poetess” and Scott Fitzgerald’s chronic depression in “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritime).”  (He spoke of his own depression in “Black-Ass Poem After Talking to Pamela Churchill” with greater gravitas, a somber tone, and old-fashioned prosody.)   

     He repeatedly implies a free attitude toward sexual relations, joking about gonorrhea in “Oklahoma,” and declaring “FOR THE HARLOT HAS A HARDLOT.”  When he announces an intention to aim at monogamy since he is “in love,” he sounds still ecstatic.

 

I’m off’n wild wimmen

An Cognac

An Sinnin’

For I’m in loOOOOOOOve.

 

     The ethnocentrism implied by his use of racial epithets does not extend to conventional patriotism.  In the poems concerning war, a deep cynicism prevails.  In “To Good Guys Dead” he says, “they sucked us in.”  His “Riparto d’Assalto” is almost reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, apart from its more casual structure and image of “a “warm and soft and sleepy whore.”

 

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride --

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

 

A similar attitude is evident in “Champs d’Honneur” which notes “Soldiers never do die well” and proceeds then to specifics.

 

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch

     All the world roars red and black,

Soldiers smother in a ditch;

     Choking through the whole attack. 

 

Never nationalistic, his poems about war insist on drunkenness and death as in “To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering,” and “[Some day when you are picked up . . .]”. 

     The seriousness of what might seem political poems in part do not survive the general tone.  One poem, “[In a Magazine . . .]”, which describes police brutality, mingles that theme with belligerence toward the “Hun,” though the persona notes that he prefers his adversaries “unarmed.”   A poem dedicated “To Will Davies” (poet and “Super-tramp” William Henry Davies) seems to address an unequal justice system, capital punishment, and racism, but concludes with a distracting throwaway jocular reference to performer Bert Williams.  His observations on America often go no deeper than playful fancy, as when he says “They read the Saturday Evening Post./ And believe in Santa Claus.” and “they wear B. V. D.’s all the year round” in “I Like Americans by a foreigner.”

     Hemingway also defines his counter-cultural pose with irreligious remarks.  In “Chapter Heading” he says he “has danced to devils’ tunes” before “shivering home to pray,” thus serving “one master in the night,/ Another in the day.”  The church is for him an occasion for a joke.  In “[God is away for the summer . . .]” he whimsically comments that the minister’s summer vacation has caused to absence of the divine, and his “Neothomist Poem” includes a line-break pause worthy of a stand-up comedian: “The Lord is my shelter, I shall not/ want him for long.”  He later glossed the bit by saying it described “the temporary embracing of the church by literary gents.” [10]

     While making a show of spurning conventional proprieties in language, religion, patriotism, sexuality, and even, on occasion, human sympathy, he adopted avant-garde rhetoric, closely imitating Gertrude Stein whose work was ridiculed by many, though the criticism only increased her celebrity.  In a comment on his description of the Lausanne Peace Conference published as “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?” in The Little Review, he called Stein’s style “invaluable for analysing anything” yet referred to his own poem as “a joke.” [11]  In spite of this claim to levity, how own mature prose style uses repetitions and simple language doubtless linked to her influence.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” he imitates Stein, though sounding careless and flippant while she often seemed measured and quite serious.

 

Home is where the art is,

home is where the fart is,

let us fart and artless fart in the home.

 

Stein’s importance is all the more impressive since Hemingway’s sexism led him to discount other “poetesses” in “The Lady Poets With Footnotes” which dismisses the leading female poets of the day. 

    It may be that Stein’s position as doyenne of the avant-garde attracted Hemingway at least as much as her specific model.  His poems include a number of friendly references to Ezra Pound though his fiction owes nothing whatever to the older poet.  In “The Soul of Spain . . .” published in Querschnitt he claims that “We have done a monument to Ezra,” in “The Age Demanded” he tropes on “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and in “Kipling” and “[I think that I have never trod . . .]” he includes Provençal envois as a gesture toward Pound. 

     As the role of Pound suggests, what Hemingway valued was in part the coterie character of the literary set with its “hip” insider references.  He considered the smallness of the small magazines that published his work as evidence of their integrity, and he defended those in which he appeared against their rivals.  When Pound was trying to convince Robert McAlmon of the Dial to publish Eliot’s “The Wasteland” he also submitted Hemingway’s “Killed Piave – July 8 – 1918,” the rejection of which generated made Hemingway an enemy of the journal.

     The bohemian attitude led him in any event to discount critics in general, particularly what he perceived as establishment critics whom he attacked not with an aesthetic defense, but by impugning their virility.  Thus, Edmund Wilson’s 1930 introduction to In Our Time elicited his observation in “[Little Mr. Wilson . . .]” that in Wilson’s “pedantic” novel I Thought of Daisy “no one liked to screw,” and a general complaint about “All the ball-less critics/ all their cuntless wives.”  Contrasting the vigorous creative type with the effete intellectual, he insists in “Poem” that his life experience has given him something “that cannot be taken from us by an article/ or abolished by a critical agreement of professors.”  

 

We’ll write books.

They will not read them

but their children may

if they have children

 

In “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]’’ he wrote, “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”

     Hemingway’s attitude in these poems is not only anti-academic, it is flippant.  The irreverence and willful immaturity of many of his lines justify the use of the term “smart-alecky.”  Consider, for instance, this excerpt from “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]”: “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”  Or this from “[And everything the author knows . . . ].”

 

And everything the author knows

He shows and shows and shows and shows

his underclothes

are more important than the sum.

 

Or, in “Part Two of The Soul of Spain . . .”, “The wind blows and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.”  

     His “Valentine” with the line “stick them up your asses, lads” was published in the final number of The Little Review for which Margaret Anderson, in a gambit to overtop avant-gardism itself, had specifically asked for manuscripts which were not literature.  Yet some of his poems are far less bohemian.  Those addressed to his wife Mary, for instance, sound almost sincere: “First Poem to Mary in London,“ “Poem to Mary (Second Poem),” “Poem to Miss Mary, and “Travel Poem.”  Several if the war poems such as Captives” are similarly straightforward as is his lighter bit “To Crazy Christian” about his cat.  Some poems -- “Flat Roofs” and “Bird of Night” -- come to mind) are unironic Imagism.  “On Weddynge Gyftes” is a piece of journalistic entertainment.

     Nonetheless, the bent of his 88 Poems is predominately bohemian.  The poems are significant in establishing an adversarial relation to the received ideas of his day by mocking patriotism, religion, sexual morality, and the traditional standards for art.  He practiced rigorous rewriting for his fiction; he said he had rewritten the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times [12] and pronounced that “the only writing is rewriting” [13] most often approached his poetry in a casual fashion, because that off-handedness was a central part of his poems’ significance.  He found in bohemia a subculture that would support his artistic ambitions and he established his credibility within it by rebelling against social norms of every sort.  The themes that dominated his major fiction are largely suppressed, though both combat and bullfighting are themes of the poetry.  The primary meaning, though, was to present his bona fides for membership in the artistic bohemia of his age, reinforcing the gap between writers and the general public and fostering an attitude of hipness, implying the superiority of their subcultural view.     

      

 

    

1.  Popularized by Henri Murger's stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845), the term is first used in English in chapter 65 of Thackery’s Vanity Fair which appeared in Punch in July 1848. 

 

2.  Often attributed to Baudelaire, the term and very similar expressions were used by a number of writers including in 1854 by Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny in Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique (p. 85), in 1855 by Privat d’Anglemont (in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois”) in Paris Anecdote (1855) p. 282), and in 1860 by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le père la ruine, p. 186.

3.  The line first appears in October of 1917. 

 

4.  Ten years later, Random House invited another prosecution by importing the book.  Though the case had to be pursued to the Supreme Court, it was decided in the most significant censorship litigation for a generation to be publishable, Judge Woolsey drily commenting “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

 

5.  Volume V, no. 4.

 

6.  Introduction, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, xi.

 

7.  Published in 1929 Paris by The Library of Living Poetry.  It is undoubtedly the implication of naughtiness in the title that caused this collection to be pirated in the fifties and again in the seventies.

 

8.  Letter of 22 April, 1925 in Selected Letters ed. Carlos Baker (p. 158).

 

9.  In Nicholas Gerogiannis’ edition of Hemingway’s complete poems, 88 Poems, those which are untitled are identified by the opening words followed by an ellipsis and enclosed in brackets.

 

10.  Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, note 50, p. 234.

 

11.  See 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, 141.  This poem was nonetheless admired by Louis Zukovsky who included it in his “Program: Objectivist 1931” manifesto as a model worthy of imitation. 

 

12.  George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” quoted William A. Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 74, No. 2 (Spring, 1966).

 

13. “Art of Fiction No. 21,” the Paris Review, issue 18, 1958.