Jonathan Franzen aboard Hemingway’s boat

This Guardian piece by Jonathan Franzen seems to annoy everybody who reads it.  Most of what Franzen writes that isn’t fiction tends to do that.  That’s because his usual theme is “I am an unhappy, difficult to please character, who finds what other people do for fun a sign that human beings are contemptible creatures it’s best to avoid as much as possible.” This one is more of the same with a few cheap shots at his ex-wife thrown in as he explains how it was better for both of them that he went on to be rich and famous without her.

Fiction writers rarely come off well when they write about themselves.  Twain got away with it because he treated himself as a comic character.  But generally whenever they make themselves their subject whatever they write turns into advertisements for theirselves.  Norman Mailer was only the loudest and most egregious and honest offender.  One way or another they all manage to tell readers, “In real life I am a colossal bore and a world-class jerk and that’s what makes me such a great writer.”

Ernest Hemingway was particularly enthusiastic about tackling this theme and very persuasive when he did it.  The difference between him and Franzen is that Hemingway usually wrote about what excited him---hunting, fishing, Africa, Cuba, the fun he had being famous, writing---and Franzen writes about what bores him, annoys him, depresses him, or distracts him when he’s trying to concentrate on the important business of being Jonathan Franzen.

He treats readers as if they’ve shown up on his doorstep uninvited to ask him impertinent questions he feels obligated to answer in exhausting detail.  Hemingway wrote as if he was having the time of his life and had just sat down next to you at a bar to tell you all about it, certain you’ll be happy to hear what fun he’s been having because it’s the kind of fun you wish you were having yourself.  Oh, and he’s buying.

The truly annoying thing about Hemingway when he started gassing on about this was that, as far as a lot of academic and intellectual types were concerned, he was right.  It was the kind of fun they wished they were having and they felt bad about themselves because they weren’t out having it.  Reading him go on and on about this good fish, that good light, this fine boat, that fine bull made their tweed suits itch.  They felt the stuffiness of their offices, the flabbiness of their middles, the weakness of their characters, the oppressiveness of their marriages, and, most galling of all, the absolute, irredeemable, and unforgiveable mediocrity of their own writing.

He was still having this effect on the academic and intellectual types I looked to for insight and advice when I was setting out to be a writer and they passed along their resentments and self-loathing in the form of lofty and sneering dismissals of his writing that, never subtly, made a point of how his mother made him wear dresses until he was five.

Also, it was important to note that, yeah, he was famous in his day, but fame spoiled him and ultimately led to him killing himself because it killed his ability to write. Served him right for being such a show-off.

I might’ve learned a few good and fine things about how to be a writer from Hemingway if I hadn’t been so busy learning how not to be a famous writer like Hemingway, a lesson that was a tad premature.

Of course, the other difference between Hemingway and Franzen is the the big one.

Hemingway was a great writer.

Franzen is a middler.

He’s an unoriginal thinker who writes the prose of equivalent of Academy-approved painting after the Impressionists have shown up.  He’s a prominent feature of the contemporary American literary landscape, but he looms over it more impressively than he ought to because the New York Times Book Review draws the map and they’ve centered it around him while being careful not to place him too close to women writers who are in fact his chief rivals and they’ve left genre writers off the map entirely.

So reading about how Franzen freed himself up to write Freedom by ditching his unappreciative wife doesn’t offer quite the same thrill as reading about how Hemingway came to write Big Two-Hearted River.

This is shaping up to be Hemingway Week in Mannionville.  Tonight or tomorrow I’ll be posting my review of William Kennedy’s new novel Chango’s Beads and Two-tone Shoes which features Hemingway as an important character.  Tomorrow night Hemingway & Gelhorn premieres on HBO.  And I’ve been reading Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson, a fine book, a good book that will be the subject of at least one post (on depression) leading up to a review.

The book is stirring up all kinds of feelings in me. Some of those feelings are uncomfortably close to the ones I accused those academic and intellectual types of harboring when they read Hemingway boasting about all the fun and drama and adventure in his life.

One thing, it’s made me glad of.  I don’t have a friend like Scott Fitzgerald in his decline.

I go back and forth on whether or not I’d like having a friend like Hemingway himself.

He really could be a world-class jerk.

Oddly, although Hendrickson is terrific when writing about Hemingway’s short stories, he’s not making me want to go back and re-read those stories.

He’s just making me want to keep reading Hemingway’s Boat.

But the book has definitely made me want two things.

I want a boat like the Pilar and I want Ava Gardner swimming naked in my swimming pool.

Actually, since I’d have to get a swimming pool before Ava could swim naked in it, I guess it’s making me want three things.

Photo courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Comments

[Janelle]

To be honest, I would have been leery of Scott and Zelda in their prime--there was an awful lot of psycho stuff going on there. I wouldn't have wanted Hemingway as a friend in his prime or otherwise: remember him mocking friends of his in " The Sun Also Rises"? Fitzgerald's alleged sexual inadequacy in "A Movable Feast"? The spectre of that world class jerk would have sent me running for the hills. I love Hemingway's short fiction and "The Sun Also Rises" plus many parts of his other novels. But when he attempts to write women...sorry, I fall off the bandwagon.

[El Jefe]

"He’s an unoriginal thinker who writes the prose of equivalent of Academy-approved painting after the Impressionists have shown up." This, in very large letters of fire. Because within his own world it's the most damning comment. (I'll leave aside his being a colossal, self-involved asshat on a scale that makes Paul Theroux look like St. Francis in his prime.) It's why I frankly don't read "literary" fiction and haven't since much after college, which is twenty years at least now. People will be reading Leonard and Pratchett and the like a hundred years from now, just as we read those "unforgiveable hacks" Dickens and Twain. And even the circle of people who say they've read Franzen shrinks towards vanishing, like the forgotten stalwarts of NYT reviews from 1912.

Janelle,

Re: Scott and Zelda, yep. Smile in an unoffending way and keep stepping backwards till you find the door. Like Mark Ruffalo said of a certain Norse deity, minds like a bag full of cats, and not just Zelda's although definitely hers as well. And Hemingway did take way too much pleasure in recounting it all. But -- and I'm sure this is a guy thing -- he was fun to listen to when holding court, so long as you didn't step in too close.

Lance,

For casting, it's good that they got Clive Owen because at least he has charisma and the right complexion. But the only marquee star I would really buy as Hemingway involves getting Brad Pitt to put on thirty pounds and then play the feckless characters of his youth grown bitingly older.

[Steven Hart]

Franzen is like a James Gould Cozzens in search of his Dwight Macdonald.

[Sherri]

Nothing I've read about Franzen has ever convinced me that reading Franzen would be worth my time, not even to see why he gets so much attention.

[Linkmeister]

If you promise to bring Ava along you could use this pool now that it's got a nice new deck surrounding it.

[Morzer]

I have to say that I keep trying to read Franzen (and David Foster Wallace) and I find Franzen astoundingly dull, with a tin ear for dialogue, whereas Foster Wallace takes self-pleasing turgidity to levels undreamed since Tolstoy decided to incorporate vast chunks of third-rate philosophizing into War and Peace. I am relieved to find that persons of taste and discernment (that's you, Mr Mannion!) share these views.

[minstrel hussain boy]

working with and around superbly talented artists like i do, i have more than a few memories and a better than passing acquaintence with the extreme levels of asshole-itude they can bring.

one, in particular stands out. he's a talented composer, he's written songs that can still move me after more than a thousand playings. as a singer, he's not brilliant, but damned if he's not effective.

bring down the curtain, turn off the kleig lights, move the audience out of the seats they fill and dude's a human liability. when his chemical mix is right, he can be charming and fun for a while. too little and he's morose, listless and requires careful attention lest he do damage to property and people around him. too much and he's a vicious, unpredictable stoned asshole. no matter his condition, he needs minding.

over and over with this guy, (who shall remain nameless on account of i gots to work) i have found myself at the ragged edge of walking away, or doing me some violence first, then walking away.

somewhere in his immense self-absorbtion must lurk a shred of awareness of others. usually moments before i am ready to blow everything to hell and walk, he will, out of the blue, do some act of beauty, or perform something so exquisite that i force myself to stay at least for another set.

artists are different from the rest of us. they just are. the sons of bitches.

[Belvoir]

"(Franzen) treats readers as if they’ve shown up on his doorstep uninvited to ask him impertinent questions he feels obligated to answer in exhausting detail. "

Thank you, yes. And the question I asked as I scrolled through that interminable Guardian piece was, "who asked?". You nailed the petty haughtiness, the weird resentment that emanates from every sorry bit on or by Franzen I've ever read. I think he's a ghastly bore, a bookchat log-rolling careerist, and a middling novelist at best. You invoked Hemingways generosity of spirit, to you- I think the best writers have that, some sort of humanism at the core, some love and enthusiasm for something that comes through, compels them to write no matter their own histories, darkness. Franzen's the opposite, he seems a black hole of narcissism, where it always leads back to himself, while he protesting how he hates to talk of himself. His gripings remind me of art school pretentiousness, a perpetual MFA student whose self-chosen role is Being A Serious Writer. Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh, considering what talent he has; he's made a little go a very long way. Bra. Vo.

[jillian6475]

I have to admit that I haven't read The Corrections or Freedom -- tried to read The Corrections and it left me cold. But I've always wondered what happened to Franzen between his earlier works and The Corrections. I remember reading Twenty-Seventh City years ago and feeling trapped in the story for days afterward (didn't help that I grew up in St. Louis, where it was set). Not a good feeling given the plot, but still, it was striking how much it had affected me. Similar reaction to Strong Motion. How often do we hear of those books, though? The university library I work in doesn't have either one, only goes as far back as How to Be Alone and The Corrections, which came out the same year.

I should say, though, that I don't wonder enough to want to read anything autobiographical by him.

[Paul Gottlieb]

O sad, jealous Lance Manion.

[sfmike]

Lance Mannion is neither sad nor jealous. Envious, perhaps, but not really.

The only thing I've read by Franzen was that long piece in "The New Yorker" about taking David Foster Wallace's ashes to some remote island, and how the whole trip was a pain in the ass, and by the end of it I knew I never needed to read anything else by him again. So get that bile out, L.M. Your usual style is so generally upbeat it's nice to see the dark side peek out now and then.

And Hemingway was a creep who shit on his early friends and mentors in Paris in "A Moveable Feast." Fitzgerald may have been a totally alcoholic, sad mess, but his writing just gets better with each passing year, which is not something I'd say about Hemingway.

[J. Dvorak]

Sad? Jealous? No. I don't like Jonathan Franzen's stuff much either.