In 2018 I wrote a blog called “Thank God for Novels” about rereading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and loving it: “. . . that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism, suicide, and death.”
Yesterday, in 2021, I quit rereading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms about a third of the way through. The only reason I was rereading this book, which as I recall I didn’t like in the first place, is because I recently watched the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary and got really angry at one of the talking heads in the film, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and essayist. In the film Llosa talks about how much he loved A Farewell to Arms—Hemingway’s “best novel”—and how much he hated For Whom the Bell Tolls—sentimental crap. I knew the real reason he didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it still made me furious that he got to spew his prejudice out on camera. Llosa, who was once a “liberal” but became a “neoliberal,” didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls because he didn’t like its politics, not because of its love scenes.
So I decided to reread A Farewell to Arms to prove my case. It started out all right, with a beautiful description of the Italian/Austrian border town where the American protagonist is stationed as an ambulance driver in World War I for the Italian Army (based on Hemingway’s own experience). It quickly descended into Hemingwayesque: “I went down to the mess to eat. Then I went outside to see what was happening with the cars. The mechanics were working on them to get ready for the next attack.” These are my words, not Hemingway’s, but they could be his. Next the protagonist meets Catherine, the English nurse who turns the novel into a love story. Their conversation consists of nothing beyond themselves: getting to know each other (if you can call it that: there’s no background information about where they’re from, what they’ve done, except for her former boyfriend, who died in the war); falling in love (within a couple of days); getting pregnant; deserting from the army (Catherine does have a great line about that: “Darling (she always calls him “Darling”), please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian Army.”); dying in childbirth. Is this the precursor of autofiction?
I’d already set the book aside for a few days without a definitive decision about whether to continue. Then last night I was talking with John Nichols on the phone, whom I’d already talked with about the Hemingway documentary and Vargas Llosa, and told him I was reading A Farwell to Arms but was thinking of giving it up. He told me the only two pages he’d read were the first and last and then quoted from each: the dust on the tree trunks and leaves from the marching troops, on page one, and on the last page, “It was like saying goodby to a statue.” He gave me his blessing to quit.
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Sunday, June 6, 2021
John Wesley Harding
There was a post on Facebook the other day asking people to name the album that they listen to in its entirety, never skipping a track. What immediately popped into my head, but that I didn’t get around to posting (way too many Facebook group games) was Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. I’m sure there are plenty of other albums that I listen to—or used to listen to, including other Dylan albums—in their entirety, but that’s what came to mind.
Then, a few days later, I was going through Mark’s notebooks as part of my project to set aside a repository of his things for Jakob and Max and found a short entry talking about the first time he heard John Wesley Harding.
“He’d recently recovered from the motorcycle accident that almost killed him and hadn’t recorded anything for over a year after the incredible string of masterpieces: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; and Blonde on Blonde. There was an incredible amount of expectation after the long silence and the near death experience. A friend was living in a beautiful 19th century carriage house behind a stately mansion in downtown Buffalo. It was late November and chilly. The six of us huddled around the fireplace, which was the only light flickering on the dark wood paneled walls. We passed around a couple of potent joints and drank a bottle of wine. The album was a complete surprise coming after that succession of electrified dark nights of the soul. It was acoustic, folksy, countrified, mystical, and completely enigmatic. “Don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” “And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you.” “Nothing is revealed.””
I Googled the release date of the album: December of 1967, so maybe he got the month wrong. This was a year before I graduated from high school. Mark, two years older, was already married and attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he grew up. Those years of hearing new releases from Dylan and all the 60s and 70s artists who defined our youth were themselves magical (especially when accompanied by drugs and alcohol). In a previous blog post called “Play That Rock Guitar” from 2014 I told of my “first” listens: “I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not Dylan.”
Music was such a big part of our lives, and still is, although I’m in shock that I know so little about what is currently being produced. We inculcated the kids with our music and I get exposed to some of theirs—from Jakob, Leon Bridges and Black Pumas, from Max, Chris Stapleton—but my ignorance and lack of curiosity is astounding. That same blog post was essentially a rant about how once the years of rock and roll and R & B segued into pop, I gave up.
I found another entry in Mark’s journals about music that this time pertained to me. He said the fact that I worked as a fire lookout and brought the Mary Wells Sings My Girl album into the relationship sealed the deal for him. All the rest of it, from rock and roll and R & B and jazz and reggae kept us going for 36 years.
Then, a few days later, I was going through Mark’s notebooks as part of my project to set aside a repository of his things for Jakob and Max and found a short entry talking about the first time he heard John Wesley Harding.
“He’d recently recovered from the motorcycle accident that almost killed him and hadn’t recorded anything for over a year after the incredible string of masterpieces: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; and Blonde on Blonde. There was an incredible amount of expectation after the long silence and the near death experience. A friend was living in a beautiful 19th century carriage house behind a stately mansion in downtown Buffalo. It was late November and chilly. The six of us huddled around the fireplace, which was the only light flickering on the dark wood paneled walls. We passed around a couple of potent joints and drank a bottle of wine. The album was a complete surprise coming after that succession of electrified dark nights of the soul. It was acoustic, folksy, countrified, mystical, and completely enigmatic. “Don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” “And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you.” “Nothing is revealed.””
I Googled the release date of the album: December of 1967, so maybe he got the month wrong. This was a year before I graduated from high school. Mark, two years older, was already married and attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he grew up. Those years of hearing new releases from Dylan and all the 60s and 70s artists who defined our youth were themselves magical (especially when accompanied by drugs and alcohol). In a previous blog post called “Play That Rock Guitar” from 2014 I told of my “first” listens: “I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not Dylan.”
Music was such a big part of our lives, and still is, although I’m in shock that I know so little about what is currently being produced. We inculcated the kids with our music and I get exposed to some of theirs—from Jakob, Leon Bridges and Black Pumas, from Max, Chris Stapleton—but my ignorance and lack of curiosity is astounding. That same blog post was essentially a rant about how once the years of rock and roll and R & B segued into pop, I gave up.
I found another entry in Mark’s journals about music that this time pertained to me. He said the fact that I worked as a fire lookout and brought the Mary Wells Sings My Girl album into the relationship sealed the deal for him. All the rest of it, from rock and roll and R & B and jazz and reggae kept us going for 36 years.
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