Ford on Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway: passport photo from 1923

I came across an extract taken from the New York Evening Post Literary Review from 3rd January 1925 that I found interesting. It appears in the excellent collection, edited by Max Saunders, of War Prose by Ford Madox Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, pp 219-221).

It contains some of Ford's thoughts on Hemingway and his sparse writing style:

Mr Hemingway [...] writes like an angel; like an archangel: but his talk - his matter - is that of a bayonet instructor.

Ford also provides an example of Hemingway's prose that is worth re-producing (I thought it might be from Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises however, it wasn't published until 1926/7. Perhaps it is from one of his short stories - if anyone knows where it's from I'd be pleased to know):

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out and he lay in the sand and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he could not get the sword in. He could hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull-ring....

First things first: how long is that second sentence without containing any punctuation! And where are the adjectives! In relation to the above, Ford writes:

That is very marvelous writing. If the American Father and Mother will just for a moment withhold their protests against the blood on the sand, they will realise that they now possess an incomparable picture and that that picture has been presented with almost fewer words than is believable.

It's not difficult to reach the conclusion that, in 1925, Ford was a great admirer of Hemingway's approach to writing. I wonder if the feeling was reciprocal....

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2008) is an incredibly tense film about the current war in Iraq that is filled with intense moments of action.

By turning her attention to one facet of the war - following the (mis)fortunes of a specialist bomb disposal unit in the U.S. Army - director Kathryn Bigelow is able to keep the plot focused but, at the same time, is able to explore some of the larger themes associated with modern warfare. Although on the periphery, these themes are what lingered in my mind after the film had ended.

Of particular interest were: how defective military hardware can be responsible for the loss of lives; the difficulty of dealing with feelings of guilt and culpability when a comrade is killed in action; and the alienation a soldier feels when attempting to re-integrate into life at home after a tour of duty has ended.

The first point is pertinent at this time due to the media attention in this country (Britain) upon the substandard equipment being supplied to our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is alarming to see that this issue affects the American military as well.

At the same time, and of interest on an academic level, is the parallels that can be drawn between the events portrayed in Bigelow's film and those captured by writers who fought in the Great War.

For example, in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy, Parade's End, Christopher Tietjens blames himself for the death of one of the soldiers under his command, O Nine Morgan. If Tietjens had granted the man home leave then death may have been avoided. Later, Tietjens experiences hallucinations about the dead soldier's eyes.

And in Siegfried Sassoon's poem, 'Repression of War Experience', we are told that the soldier who is the subject of the poem is 'quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; / You'd never think there was a bloody war on!' The tone of these lines makes it clear that even on leave, the war weighs heavily on the combatant's mind.