A New Classic Resembles No Classic Which Came Before

Or so says Hemingway who was very much inspired by--but doesn't much resemble--Mark Twain.

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A New Classic Resembles No Classic Which Came Before

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s praise of Huckleberry Finn came in 1935, well into America’s fascination with Moby Dick, which found is popularity in the 1920s and famously inspired author’s like Faulkner. Finn was published in 1884. Moby Dick was published in 1851.

What I’m saying is, these were fighting words.

The passage is in Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway’s autobiographical account of his 1933 trip to Africa. In it, he’s been away on a fruitless hunt and returns to join the others in a conversation that turns to Hemingway talking about other American writers.

He begins with those who came earlier:

There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making… [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, [and John Greenleaf] Whittier.

He doesn’t mention Melville at all, unless he’s throwing him in with the “and Company” which ends his list but not mine. His issue with these men is that they wrote too much like what came before, and not just anything that came before, they sound like the classics of a previous generation. Hemingway’s conceit is that a new classic steals from lesser books—not the greats.

[They] did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that... But it cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic.

Which might put to shame my efforts to show you how Hemingway wrote so that you can employ those same techniques.

He also takes issue with their inability or unwillingness to capture the speech of the people:

[A]ll these men were gentlemen, or wished to be… They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.

After Hemingway talks about writers who were ruined by an overstated praise of their early works, he’s asked about the good writers.

The good writers are Henry James [who was born in America and moved to England], Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.

Mind you, Hemingway isn’t alone in this praise. Faulkner called Twain the father of American literature. He just didn’t try to write like him, and if we take him at his word, neither did Hemingway—except for objective narration, clarity of syntax, and use of colloquial language and dialect.

NOTICE

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

EXPLANATORY

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Scene: The Mississippi Valley Time: Forty to fifty years ago

CHAPTER I.

YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Likewise, Hemingway eventually praised Melville, Faulkner’s great inspiration. In 1949, Hemingway wrote to his publisher saying that Melville was one of the few writers he was still trying to beat. A year later, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, the last major work he would publish in his lifetime.

Through Hemingway and Faulkner, the tension between Mark Twain and Herman Melville defined American literary styles in the twentieth century, culminating and synthesized in the work of Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s work is the violence of Twain without the humor to excuse it—and without the cheating, as Hemingway would say.

…Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where … Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had.

At the end of the book, Jim is stolen away by the citizens of the town that Tom Sawyer has been anonymously terrorizing, and they mean to lynch him. This is what Hemingway calls the real end of the story.

Is mine a reductionist view of the history of American, twentieth-century, literary style? Of course. As illustrative as the Melville / Twain tension may be, it’s not a complete picture without, for example, a consideration of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work was the headwater of the genre explosion. However, I’m not interested in the division between literary and genre. The experimentation of form and style that was modernism has a place in genre fiction, too. Over time, that experimentation has transformed through the eras of postmodernism and metamodernism, and our current historical moment is so transformative (whether for good or evil) that I cannot help but believe literature will respond with a transformation of its own.

As authors in this era, it behooves us to consider the path ahead, both our own and the art as a whole, and in so doing, I believe we can look to previous generations for guidance. Georg Hegel saw history as a repeated pattern: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The stylistic differences between Melville and Twain are thesis and antithesis, and McCarthy is the synthesis. We can see in our own time, conflicting forms that are either coming together in synthesis or which are ripe for combinatory explorations.

To find these more recent pairs with differences in styles, I think we need to set aside the framing of American fiction. The world is smaller now, and the possibilities for the authors who’ve defined the last few decades include Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami, Margret Atwood and David Foster Wallace, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Donna Tartt.

Consider:

The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody’d hear you, and you couldn't expect anybody to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and way overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

and…

When he woke it was daylight and the rain had stopped and he was looking up into the face of a man with long hair who was completely covered in mud. The man was saying something to him.

What? said the kid.

I said are you quits?

Quits?

Quits. Cause if you want some more of me you sure as hell goin to get it.

He looked at the sky. Very high, very small, a buzzard. He looked at the man.

Is my neck broke? he said.

The man looked out over the lot and spat and looked at the boy again.

Can you not get up?

I dont know. I ain't tried.

I never meant to break your neck. No.

I meant to kill ye.

They ain't nobody done it yet. He clawed at the mud and pushed himself up. The man was sitting on the planks with his boots alongside him. They ain't nothin wrong with you, he said.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

In 2011, Murakami said to The New York Times, “Most near-future fictions are boring. It’s always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy. I like what Cormac McCarthy wrote, ‘The Road’ — it’s very well written. . . . But still it’s boring. It’s dark, and the people are eating people.”

He contrasted this against his most recent book at the time, 1Q84, which he said was near-past fiction. “If it’s near past, it’s not boring.”

If those were fighting words, McCarthy didn’t fight. Most likely because McCarthy was too old and too accomplished and too McCarthy to be bothered but also because Murakami listed McCarthy, along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Dag Solstad, as one of his favorite “currently active” authors. Murakami isn’t Hemingway. Those weren’t fighting words.

If Hemingway was insecure, he had cause to be. Most writers do. A paper I read from 1968, seven years after Hemingway’s suicide, said something to the affect of… “Hemingway will be remembered as a writer, if he is remembered at all.”

The fighting words continue, even after death.

In the case of Melville, resurrection only comes when you’re dead. With Twain… well, many critics consider Hemingway’s praise overblown, but in doing so, they also misunderstand his point. He didn’t actually say there was nothing good before; he said there was nothing so fully American.

We might disagree, pointing to Poe, Washington Irving, “and Company,” but it’s a less baffling statement in context. Irving was one of the first writers to receive significant recognition and is considered the first to make his living purely off his fiction. Poe became our early master of the macabre and pioneered a number of genres, but (taking up Hemingway’s argument) Twain did something stylistically new, something that distinguished itself from its Europeans roots and (perhaps) birthed the American literature that followed.

Are we then challenged with doing the same, hoping to create something new with that hope founded in its distinction from the classics which came before? It’s easy to lock Hemingway’s ideas into the limits of his time. Postmodernism and metamodernism hadn’t yet begun, both of which elevate pastiche as an art form, but (again) the full context of his quote frees us.

He presents the very contemporary idea of taking from and paying homage to popular and beloved works that academia would never welcome into their canon. Having said that, if he were alive to defend himself, he’d likely disagree and focus on the great writer’s power to draw from lesser writers—but he’s not here to defend himself. We don’t have to listen to the insecure elitism of a man who will be remembered as one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, if he’s remembered at all.

We are free to find accidental, metamodern wisdom in the modernist past.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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