Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner

When people ask if I like Faulkner or Hemingay, like they’re Maryann and Ginger, it irks me. My answer is yes, and it’s not like, it’s love. And why are you neglecting Steinbeck? I reject the idea that a reader can only read one style and like it. Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner are my holy trinity, my neapolitan ice cream. At the risk of stating the obvious, Hemingway is vanilla, Steinbeck is strawberry, and Faulkner is chocolate. I love them all.

Hemingway as vanilla is the easiest to understand and the easiest to misconstrue: it’s elegant—not boring, not lacking. Hemingway’s prose confronts you on the page, yanks you into the story instead of telling it to you. You stand in tbe room and observe, just like he does. All artifice and ornament is gone; there’s nothing left but the honesty of the moment and the people who inhabit it. Hemingway isn’t going to explain it to you or spoon feed you. Either your literary palate relishes this, distinguishing between his vanilla bean, French vanilla, and soft-serve cones of story. I’m specifically thinking of one novel and two short stories here: Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and The Sun Also Rises, intentionally out of the order of my list. Hemingway brings you to the story (fine, throws you into it like a sack of potatoes), then lets you observe and draw your own conclusions, and that, my friends, is stone cold respect for the reader, which is something I see a great lack of in a great many pieces here. The reader doesn’t owe us anything, not even attention and time, so they deserve respect, not over-explaining and front-loaded narrative. There’s a reason we call Hemingway Big Papa. If you don’t like vanilla, that’s fine, but you can’t have a hot fudge sundae without it.

Don’t forget that all three of these men were awarded the big one, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Steinbeck won “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception” (Nobelprize.org). The Nobel committee loved him for the same reasons I do, but I also love his natural physical landscape description—his skill in that arena is reminiscent of Irving in what it conveys. I’ve been reading The Wayward Bus since 1989, coming back to it again and again, learning something new about my perceptions with each read. I just read The Moon is Down for the first time this year, and East of Eden is everything I want in a novel. Once, I taught it in an English 102 class, back in the twentieth century, and my class loved it. If you're teaching literature to adolescents, choose stories that they'll enjoy, and make sure it has some whores in it. Unsavory characters exist in life, so I fully expect to meet some in every fictional world I enter. Steinbeck doesn't disappoint; Steinbeck doesn't clean up his characters. Teinbeck gives them to us whole, warts and all. I love him for it. What makes Steinbeck strawberry, aside from his connection to agriculture and nature itself? For me, it's that layer of tartness belied by sweetness. I find balance with Steinbeck--he's not as spare as Hemingway, nor as verbose as Faulkner. He's the happy medium.

Ah, Faulkner. What I wouldn't give to sip bourbon on the porch at Rowan Oak. The opening scene of The Sound and The Fury is pure literary platinum, and Sanctuary is the home of some of my favorite quotes, like "You're not being tried by common sense, you're being tried by a jury," and "Put the son of a bitch in a coffin. Let's have two funerals." Faulkner’s language is too dense for some, his humor too dark for most, but to me, a man who told the University of Mississippi, upon being accused of throwing away the mail, drinking bourbon, playing cards, and playing golf during business hours (othe post office, of which he was postmaster), replied:

“As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.

This, sir, is my resignation.”

This is just the surface of what I love about my neapolitan ice cream, my banana split of American literature. These will always me my main men of fiction.