61. Transcendence: Fictions by Hemingway and Oyler, reviewed by Master Raro
I’ve been reading novels during the pandemic, and Pippa has been introducing me to the writings of Parker Tyler, whose mythopoeic approach to narrative and visual arts (especially films) I’m finding to be useful. Dear Louise, my boss, gave me the new Library of America volume of Hemingway’s early work, The Sun Also Rises and other Writings 1918-1926 (LOA, 2020). And Pippa insisted that I read a new novel, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (Catapult, 2021). So here are my reports, and I am sure you will notice the influence of Tyler, especially since I also deal with the 1957 Hollywood film adaptation of Sun for comparison’s sake.
The Hemingway classic was published in 1926 and is seen as his major contribution to modernism in twentieth-century fiction because, among other things, it documents the lifestyle of what Gertrude Stein called the “Lost Generation” following World War One. The setting is France and Spain during the 1920s, with major scenes in Paris and Pamplona. Hemingway is able to display throughout his fiction a knowledge of alcoholic connoisseurship, fly-fishing, and bullfights -- clearly activities that either obsessed him or allowed him to relax between bouts of writing. This novel’s main male character is named Jake Barnes, a Paris-based expat journalist and a veteran of the War. In fact, he is one of its walking wounded since he sustained an injury in the conflict that left him impotent. Jake has sportif friends who accompany him on his bar crawls: Robert Cohn, another American writer who happens to be a former boxer; and Bill Gorton, an American tourist dedicated to following big-time boxing matches and to fishing trips with Jake.
But the character who interested me the most was Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful upper-class British divorcee-in-waiting, who claims to be miserable as she drinks herself senseless at the spectacle of men throwing themselves at her. Hemingway is brilliant at capturing the speech of these characters, especially Brett’s argot, which repeatedly consists of “What rot!” and “What are you drinking?” There is a great deal of repetition of action and language throughout the novel. This could come across as precious (Hemingway had been coached by Gertrude Stein to use repetition generously), but mostly it describes a scene of languor and mild anomie, partly inspired by the erotic charge Brett brings to her every entrance. Robert falls immediately in love with her, and she takes him out of town for what sounds like therapeutic sessions in her bed, perhaps meant ultimately to warn him off. Jake watches Brett in a state of permanent frustration because he knows she loves him but cannot commit to a physically disabled amour. Brett has a new suitor in tow named Mike, a short-tempered, usually impoverished alcoholic who takes heated exception to Robert’s obsessive interest in Brett. And in Pamplona, where the whole sloshed crew ends up for the running of the bulls, the fiesta, and the bullfights, Brett adds to her list of conquests the new matador sensation, Pedro Montoya. Jake observes Brett’s triumphs and reports them first-person in a just-the-facts-mam style. Hemingway allows the reader to form her or his own judgment. Brett refers to herself as a “bitch”, but I don’t think a reader in 2021 is going to use such a heavy hand.
In fact, I was on the side of Brett throughout. Her British husband treated her badly, and now she’s up for a good time. Or two. Or three. How to get through each new day? Brett is no more generous with her favors than many independent women in our own century. She likes the young guys, but she knows she can always come back to Jake for money, fidelity, and a shoulder to cry on. (She could cry on my shoulder any time.) I suspect the novel may have allowed her character to be distrusted morally by many readers in the 1920s, but Hemingway’s “objective” reportorial style allows other responses. Here is a well-off young woman searching for herself amid a crowd of expats and tourists with money to spend and lots of time to amuse themselves. I suspect Hemingway wanted to show such people as they were: young people struggling, as young people will, to drift stylishly toward something like happiness.
As Pippa points out, Hemingway has set up his novel so that it discusses “loss of generation” (read: a writer’s creative blockage) as a self-critique of artistic manhood. Brett is not only a modern version of the fabulous hetaerae of Mediterranean culture (archetypal courtesans, often fallen on bad times) but even a kind of classical goddess figure, the type of maternal divinity found in ancient cultures who is often attended by a priesthood of self-castrated devotees. I am referring to the old religious cults, such as the Cybele-Attis and Aphrodite-Adonis religions. Brett would thus be a kind of sacred muse who would point Jake toward artistic transcendence, and he is not only a lover but he who worships her through his very disability. Isn’t it a mortal fate always to fail before the godhead? For all the worshipper’s pain at unmanning himself for his idol, Brett does ultimately grant Jake a vision that is the novel The Sun Also Rises. Brett is the mythic genetrix of the book, as Parker Tyler would doubtless see it. And that’s how I see it, too.
I found the Darryl F. Zanuck film of the novel streaming on the Internet, and I must say the paint-by-numbers Henry King adaptation (from a screenplay by Peter Viertel) bears out my interpretation. In a dream flashback of his surgical operation for war wounds, Tyrone Power (as Jake) looks up and sees Brett (Ava Gardner) administering anesthetic in a nurse’s uniform. In the following dream-memory, a military surgeon informs Jake that he is going to be permanently disabled sexually. Thus, via the movie’s visual logic, Brett officiates at the sacrifice of Jake’s manhood. Before her divine beauty and glamor, the writer offers up his creative powers. A novelist or filmmaker could exorcize his own personal fears through such mythopoeic allusions.
Veteran director Henry King (Tol’able David, The Gunfighter, The Snows of Kilamanjaro) was 71 years old when he made Sun, and it shows. He was good friends with both Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn, who plays the alcoholic Mike. The script tidies up some of the lifestyle excesses of the men but otherwise imitates accurately the repetitious carousals that Hemingway takes pains to vary in his prose. And then, about ninety minutes into the film, there is an outdoor bistro scene in Pamplona where Errol Flynn as Mike explodes in fury at Brett’s assignation with the young matador, and King’s movie suddenly comes to life. Flynn is riveting as an intelligent drunk. It is instructive what a good actor can do to a basically lifeless film. I also liked the fact that the movie lets you see Juliette Greco as the young poule Georgette whom Jake picks up and then drops when Ava Gardner invades a lively bal musette. Greco doesn’t get to sing here, but she is striking. (She died recently, and I devoured her obit.)
The starry cast of the film seems almost deliberately aged. Tyrone Power is about forty-five and looks ravaged. Ava Gardner is also no longer a fresh beauty but retains some of her charms. The novel’s “lost generation” has become a portrait of middle-aged Hollywood decadence, especially since the men are required to act like frat boys on a permanent spree. For anyone who has read the novel, this creates a science fiction time-travel aspect to the adaptation, which was undoubtedly not so apparent to audiences in 1957: it is as though the film’s male failures are the mature avatars of the younger men we read about in the novel, serving out the life sentences that Hemingway’s characters dimly anticipate on the page. Talk about layering! The exception for me is Gardner’s Lady Brett because no reader-viewer today is going to hold her freedom to love when and with whom she wishes against her. A goddess who regularly claims to be “miserable” can use such a plaint to attract as well as to rout her worshippers. Who wouldn’t want to offer incense to such an idol? I wonder if the venerable Henry King was aware of this double-vision effect he was creating with his older cast? He had lived long enough to anticipate such transcendent temporal layers in movie art. I think true wisdom may, indeed, involve multiple viewpoints held in simultaneity.
Another surreal sci-fi aspect of the film is the casting of Robert Evans as Romero, the young matador. Yes, the kid stayed in the picture, despite Gardner’s and Hemingway’s objections. And you must admire her for the one scene in the film where Gardner must flirt outrageously with Evans. As my boss would say, “What an actress!” Here is the man who would become the rescuer of Paramount Studios with hits like The Godfather, Chinatown, and Love Story. In other words, here is the future studio head and producer who helped create the legend that the 1970s was a renaissance of American filmmaking. (If only!) I’ve always seen the movies of that period as basically elaborate pastiche. Several “classics” of the time are really triumphs of casting, since their screenplays involved tried-and-true character types as old as the hills, and there were some very fine actors (and casting agents) available to fill the many stereotyped roles. Evans was not much of an actor, as he himself knew, and his ability to back popular films was a run of good luck more than a sign of advanced taste. Since his skills as a matador had to be faked in Sun (there is a trained double used in long shots), his very presence adds to the temporal weirdness of the movie. If he were alive today, I think Parker Tyler would definitely be alert to such multiple cinematic refractions.
The new novel Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler is narrated by a young woman who uses social media to solve all of the problems in her life. Alas. She works for an information platform on the internet and regards herself as a sort of digital journalist, confecting stories from other sites around the cyberworld. So indebted is she to private messaging and dating services, she has in effect become part of the electronic system wherein our iPhones and Macs now help us make small and large decisions in the moment-to-moment economy of our lives. We never learn the woman’s name in Oyler’s novel, but we watch as she attempts to get rid of her current boyfriend, Felix, and then tries to replace him with a trip to Berlin and many, many auditions there of potential new partners arranged through dating services on the web. All of the Berlin candidates are sacrificed before the narrator’s merciless standards and caustic wit. And Oyler makes her heroine very witty and devilishly funny about her disappointments and quandaries in life and her dependence on various internet skills in pursuit of practical solutions. (She is also thoroughly aware that Big Questions are not thereby being addressed.) I would not want to have this person in my life necessarily; but reading her story has added new dimensions to my knowledge of human potential, especially the possible lack of final satisfaction to be found in cyber-awareness.
The narrator of Fake Accounts is like a contemporary version of Hemingway’s Lady Brett, whose claims of unhappiness can be doubted from the extent to which people will go to rescue her from those forms of distraction with which she orders her life. Lovers may trick Oyler’s narrator royally, but they render their reciprocal tributes to her self-therapy with what can only be called a type of reverence. The narrator is ultimately a kind of cyberculture goddess for our age. Morally obtuse, perhaps, but isn’t that what you want in a goddess?
The voice that Oyler has created for her protagonist resembles a stand-up comedienne on speed. I am not sure I will ever visit contemporary Berlin after what the narrator accomplishes in describing its newly gentrified neighborhoods. What a mash-up! Here she is on her addiction to the digital universe: “I’d gotten use to using people I had met, or met only a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotion I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it.” Thank you, Berliners. A description of what one of her dating candidates (a movie fan named “Bergman”, as in Ingmar) calls “Relationship Anarchy” sets a new standard for non-commitment between the polyamorous – the achievement of no meaning whatsoever in human relations. (Thereby avoiding all the expectations and disappointments that lovers can impose upon one another.) Berlin must be in even worse shape than we thought. “Bergman” fails his audition, but the reader comes to realize by the end of the novel that social media are complicit in rendering many, if not most, contracted partnerships highly volatile and usually tentative. That way, life in the moment has its existential dramas. Perhaps especially in Berlin. With the Internet as her guide, our narrator faces what Max Weber called “the challenge of everyday life”. (I am a Berliner!) Oyler is unsparing in her portrait of the narrator’s cyber-addiction. The novel’s use of Internet jargon is virtuoso and very funny.
Our heroine becomes the voice of her generation’s quest for some – any -- agency in achieving personal happiness, however difficult such a project must always be. In this way, she really is a kind of sister to Lady Brett. Of course, that earlier generation lost out in not having access to electronic forms of social media, but at least they had bars, restaurants, holidays, and sports to facilitate what we now call “relationships”. Like Jake in The Sun Also Rises, the new fiction’s young Felix undergoes a type of sacrifice in the temple of his beloved’s worship. Men are always serving as high priests in the female principle’s cult, aren’t they? Oyler’s Accounts may deal with the electronically fake, but her satirical aim is true. What is intended as a critique can result in something more. Reason enough for some non-electronic degree of self-analysis.
I can speak with some authority since I am now Louise Ebersdorf’s all-purpose handyman in her high metropolitan Tower. In a sense, she is my aged goddess. And my new solo -- Oestrus -- is an interpretation of erotic desire by a homonormative dancemaker, Sandy, who allows a heteronormative dancer – me -- to evoke the individual sacrifices regularly exacted by universal Eros. The resultant dance is seen partially through a choreographic lens which Sandy has interposed between me and the viewer. Our collaboration aims to ensure that we are inclusive through a resultant layering of information. Anything omitted in the performative disclosure is hopefully compensated for by Sandy’s creative insight. As in the aesthetics of Parker Tyler, the final vision is compound w ith points of view.
Perhaps another type of transcendence.
M.R.
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