Ernest Hemingway working at his book For Whom the Bell Tolls at Sun Valley, Idaho in December 1939

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21st 1899, to Grace Hall-Hemingway, a musician, and Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician.

In his  early years, he developed a taste for outdoor adventure in the family’s summer home on Walloon Lake in Michigan, which would come to influence his writing.

On leaving high school in 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter, and he later took their style guide to heart for his fiction writing: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

Early in 1918, he volunteered to help the war effort in Europe, signing on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. Those familiar with Hemingway’s work will know that an experience in Italy was described later in a non-fiction book, Death in the Afternoon.

His gallantry in assisting Italian soldiers won him the Italian Silver Medal for Bravery, but a bad injury resulting from mortar fire took him off the battlefield. Whilst recuperating, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, but she left him for an Italian officer. This experience affected his relationships thereon after, and he abandoned wives before they could abandon him.

After returning from Europe, he became staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly in 1919. In September 1921 he married his first wife, Hadley Richardson,  and two months later, the couple moved to Paris with Hemingway working for the Toronto Star as their foreign correspondent. It was this period that inspired the fictional account of their lives in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Hemingway’s first book, an anthology of short stories and poems called, to-the-point true to Hemingway fashion, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923. It was quickly followed by In Our Time, another collection of vignettes and stories.

He also worked on The Transatlantic Review with Ford Madox Ford, which featured some of his short stories. Around this time, he began to earn the praise of critics, who credited him for reinvigorating the short story genre.

Hemingway began work on his first novel on his birthday, 21st of July, 1925. In October 1926, The Sun Also Rises was published.

There followed a glittering career as a writer, including such major works as A Farewell To Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and many of his novels, short stories and non-fiction works have been made into major films. The Old Man and the Sea, which was published in 1951 after Across the River and Into the Trees garnered bad reviews, won him a Pulitzer Prize the following year. In 1954 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

During his life, Hemingway travelled extensively, covering the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. During the Second World War, he covered the hostilities for Collier’s Magazine, and was present at the Normandy Landings, and at the liberation of Paris in August 1945. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in WWII by the United States Military, having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions”.

But not everything in Hemingway’s life was positive. His father committed suicide in the winter of 1928, just minutes before a letter had arrived from Ernest telling him to not worry about money troubles. He commented, “I’ll probably go the same way.” During his life, he was beset by injuries from accidents and war coverage. Apart from the injury sustained in Italy in 1918, he was concussed in London in a car accident; another car accident in 1945 smashed his knee and caused a deep forehead wound; in 1944 in Africa, he nearly died after being involved in two successive plane crashes; and in 1955 on a fishing expedition in Africa, a bush fire caused him second degree burns. In Venice in 1955 his fourth wife, Mary, reported his injuries consisted of two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder and a broken skull.

When he was in Paris, he became friends with Irish writer James Joyce, and spent many evenings in heavy drinking sessions. His obsession with drink stayed with him. The uncle of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, bought the couple a house in Key West. It is said the location, opposite the lighthouse, made it easy for Hemingway to find it on his way home from drinking sessions at a local bar, Sloppy Joe’s.

He suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and diabetes. His drinking increased partly to mask the pain from his injuries. He began to sink into depression as, one after another, his great literary friends began to die.

In his final years, his mental state deteriorated, and he became confused, disorganised and irritable. His brother and his sister, as well as his father, all committed suicide. On July 2nd, 1961, Hemingway unlocked the basement storeroom in his house in Idaho, removed his favourite Boss shotgun, pushed two shells into it, put the end of the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His complicated history as war hero, writer, womanizer and alcoholic, polarized is reception. To some he was an inscrutable enigma, to others a hero, and to others still a villain.

Regardless of one’s opinion on his character, he is sparse writing irrefutably changed the world of literature.  Hemingway referred to his style as the Iceberg Theory: the facts float above the water, the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the short novel The Old Man and The Sea, where the simple tale of an old fisherman parallels on many levels with religious texts.

This week we’ll be discussing “The Old Man at the Bridge”.

Abe Kobo was born Abe Kimifusa in Tokyo in 1924. (Kobo is the Chinese reading of his given name.) His father was a doctor and taught medicine at a local college. As a small boy, his family moved to Mukden, Manchuria, home of the Manchurian Incident of 1931 in which the Japanese military staged an assault on Japanese railway tracks, and blamed the Chinese as a pretext for invasion. From 1931 to 1945, the Japanese ruled Manchuria as its puppet state under a brutal regime which terrorized local Russian and Chinese populations. From this distant and grim view of his native Japan, Abe grew critical of modern culture.

He returned to Japan in 1941, and enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943 to pursue medicine. However, his passion for writing, and indifference to medicine prevented a career as a doctor. He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree under the condition that he would never practice, an arrangement which allowed him to save face.

He was first published as a poet in 1947, and then as a novelist in 1948 for The Road Sign at the End of the Street. Though the first novel established his reputation in literary and avant-garde circles, he did not receive widespread, international acclaim until his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes.

For more information on Abe, I turned to Rachel Stewart who earned an M.A. in English Criticism and Theory from the University of Exeter. Her thesis titled The Nature of Worlding in Contemporary Japanese Literature will be published in the journal Literature Compass. (Full disclosure: Rachel Stewart is my lovely, delightful, sharply intelligent sister-in-law.)

Anais: On next week’s podcast we’re reading “The Magic Chalk” by Abe Kobo. I know you’ve studied much of his work, and Japanese fiction in general. What can you tell me about Abe as a writer, philosopher, and artist?

Rachel: How fantastic that you are delving into Abe Kobo. He is one of Japan’s better known authors, but his work still deserves a wider readership. He is essentially an absurdist who is often sold to the West as Japan’s Kafka, and that is on many levels true in the sense that he ridicules modernity, but I think he is less humorous than Kafka. From a literary history perspective that so often aims to categorise writers by nationality, he is an interesting case because he was brought up in Manchuria and that has led critics to claim he was better able to criticise modern Japanese culture.

Kobo was very much influenced by Western authors who were beginning to be translated and published in literary magazines at the time, perhaps most significantly Sartre. Kobo was largely concerned with the evolution of humans, which was no doubt influenced by his war experience. I think it’s important to remember when reading Kobo that the Western reader at the time would have had a typically exoticised view of Japan, which is to say cherry blossoms and geishas. His writing certainty helped to raise the status of Japanese literature.  His focus on figures who are marked by the notion of flight, markedly the nomad, deserter, Jew, and gypsy, brings attention to the individual within the state; the concept of which was a contentious topic at the time in Japan, and in many ways remains so.

For a complete contrast I would recommend a ‘High Literature’ author like Kawabata Yasunari or Yukio Mishima, both of whom were very right-wing in contrast to Kobo.

Anais: Could you talk a little more about the difference between Abe and the high literature, right-wing authors like Kawabata and Mishima? What are the main differences?

Rachel: Authors like Mishima and Kawabata were very much concerned with how Japan was perceived by the wider world. Yukio actually committed the most traditional suicide harikiri (seppuku) over the state of Japan’s political future amongst other things. They wrote about huge topics like death and impossibility – Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties is a brilliant example – while Kobo was more concerned with the state of human nature in the postwar years. History plays an important role here as the upbringing of each author varies considerably as does the political atmosphere that they each grew up in. Put simply, Kobo commented on human evolution (or devolution) and society, whilst others are known to have fought against the changes that postwar politics brought to traditional Japanese culture.

Anais: How did ‘high literature’ authors like Mishima and Kawabata receive Abe?

Rachel: As far as I know, Kobo was well received in Japan, even by the very established authors we’re talking about alongside him. The interesting thing about Kobo is that for those who love him he is Japanese, but for those who don’t he is not Japanese, because of his upbringing in Manchuria.

Anais: What exactly is the distinction between ‘high literature’ and ‘low literature’?

Rachel: They’re Japanese terms used in elite Japanese circles, and only really discussed by big name scholars. It’s really a huge area that has a great deal to do with early postwar politics and literary history.  It’s especially difficult to talk about from a Western view point, because it is too closely tied to questions of evolving cultural identity, you see. These days the distinction has become fairly subjective, and it’s a topic that is quite difficult to be politically correct about. Generally, low literature means writing that is not quintessentially Japanese, for example, works that include English words and references to Western pop culture. Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana are classed as low, while a modern high writer might be someone like Murakami Ryu.

Anais: You said that in some ways the comparison to Kafka is accurate. In which ways is it not?

Rachel: I think there is a more tangible element to Kobo than there is to Kafka. Kafka is more allegorical, while Kobo is at times more of a magical realist. Amazingly they both succeed in having their characters turn into inanimate objects or animals in a way that comments on social issues. The biggest difference for me is that Kobo is more concerned with the individual in modern society (bearing in mind that individualism can be a contested topic in a very group-centered culture like Japan), while Kafka is more concerned with ridiculing society as a whole.

***

Abe also had a passion for film and theater, writing screenplays and plays for the stage as well. He collaborated with Japanese director Teshigahara Hiroshi on the film adaptations of his novels The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Ruined Map. They also collaborated on The Pitfall, which is a film adaption of a TV series. The screenplay was also written by Abe.

Abe founded a theater company in the 1970’s and put on productions in Tokyo, Washington and New York in collaboration with his wife, Machi, who survived him along with their daughter, Neri, after his sudden heart failure in 1993. He was 68 (Click here for fascinating NY Time obituary).

All Japanese names in this article are listed in the Japanese convention of surname before given name.

Jocelyn Johnson (photo taken from author’s website)

Jocelyn Johnson has been writing since childhood, and her passion for writing accompanied her through global travel from Tokyo to Cusco, Rajasthan, Rio, and many places in between. Writing remained a constant throughout the evolution of her life as she went on to marry, become a mother, and a teacher. As her life changed, so did her writing.  Literary Roadhouse reached out to Ms. Johnson to ask about how her work has developed over the years, and what her first novel, written as a teenager, was about.

Literary Roadhouse: When did you start writing and why?

Jocelyn Johnson: Since forever, I’ve been writing and drawing stories.  I remember, in the 6th grade, devouring S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. When I learned that she’d completed that work as a teenager, I spent a year drafting my own first novel on my IBM personal computer, back when each piece of printer paper was edged in perforated strips.

LR: What and who do you like to read?

JJ: I’m drawn to short stories and novels that surprise me and place me among outsiders. A few books I’ve loved in the last decade: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by  Charles Yu,  We the Animals by  Justin Torres, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell,  and  We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo.  I recently reread the gorgeous, grotesque Beloved by Toni Morrison, and was, once again, appalled and riveted.

LR: You’ve been writing for such a long time. How would you say your writing has developed over the years?

JJ: I’ve developed an expectation to work harder, and on more complex problems. I’m willing to re-imagine characters, scenes, whole strands in order to figure them out. Also I try to be  a little braver and more emotionally honest in my fiction these days.

LR: What can you tell me about the first novel you wrote as a child? What did that explore? What were the characters like?

JJ: The novel I wrote as a teenager is about Shadow, a lovesick, mohawked boy from San Francisco who travels east to find his girlfriend after she is sent away for attempting suicide— light, right?  At the time, I was interested in disaffected youth; I was disaffected youth.  

When I decided to write a novel as an adult, I found an old draft of Shadow, and drew on the bones of that original story. Nearly all of the particulars changed when I re-imagined my protagonist as sixteen-year-old Aisha Bell, a young photographer girl of color who falls hard for another girl. The short story “The Hasselblad” was born from this transition in the novel.

Ms. Johnson’s essays and fiction have appeared in Life with Objects, Storyglossia, Salome Magazine, Literary Mama and elsewhere. Her work has placed first in the University of Virginia’s Museum’s Writer’s Eye Contest, been anthologized in Jane’s Stories “Bridges and Borders”, and received honorable mention in the E.M. Koeppel fiction award. Her short story “The Hasselblad” placed first in the Richard Bausch Short Story Contest at Our Stories (Spring 2012). Her first novel (written as an adult), Our Savage Hearts, is represented by New Leaf Literary and is currently on submission.

Jocelyn Johnson lives in Virginia with her husband, son, and two dogs. She blogs about parenthood, art, the world we live in, and the intersections between these things, at her website www.jocelynjohnson.com.

Tomek Sętowski

I’m not one of these readers who has been fascinated by magical realism for two decades. I first heard the term last year, in reference to Haruki Murakami. I’d only read Norwegian Wood and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, so I brushed the term off. It was only when I started to research his other novels that the term kept reappearing in reference to both Murakami and some of the most popular Latin American writers. It was hard to find a single definition, but eventually I brushed it off as little more than, a way non-western, non-white’s see the world. To put it crassly, “the Magical Negro’s hip literary Latin cousin.” This negative misperception was only intensified when I heard a podcaster wonder aloud, “why are we reading Murakami, we are supposed to be reading literary fiction not ethnic fiction.” It wasn’t an auspicious beginning to my relationship to the word or the literary community as a whole.

Then I began work on a novel that was blurring the line between the normal reality and the reality of someone whose ancestral religion was invading that reality. My novel was in the current world with current beliefs. There was nothing in it that felt like fantasy. Hearing your ancestors talking to you wasn’t something made up to me. It was an intrinsic part of my familial DNA. It was real, yet… it wasn’t. Anyone not familiar with African traditional religions could look at the story and wonder if it was fantasy. It wasn’t though… I was trying to show how I see the world, not create a new one. So I went digging and found a branch of Magical realism used for African literature called Animist realism. The hole kept getting bigger, and yet I still bristled over the word as a book written from a Christian point of view wouldn’t be considered Magical realism. “What is this thing,” I thought. After falling into a deep internet hole, I almost have a definition.

The term Magical realism was first used in reference to art in the 1925 by the German art critic Franz Rohs. It was used for works that looked at reality in such a hyper real way that it was almost surreal. Rather than the magic of the subconscious, this was art that attempted to express the magic inherent in our world.

Isabelle Allende

The term moved quickly from being applied to the visual arts to literature influencing Latin writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garia Marques and Isabelle Allende. These writers are where I’ve heard the term most frequently used as Latin American literature is currently enjoying international popularity, but the matter of fact portrayal of magical events lends itself easily to many cultures.

As I researched the definition of Magical realism, I discovered that many of my favorite and most spiritually challenging films were in fact classified as magical realism. I can’t forget sitting in a theater at 17 years old watching Like Water For Chocolate, or the way my skin tingled after watching Amelie. My way of seeing the world was permanently changed because for once, I recognized the way I saw the world through another artist’s eyes.

So what is Magical realism? I’m sure there are doctoral theses written on the subject. For me, it is any art that shows reality in such wonderful focus that it retains the magic of reality. It is a book or movie or film version of waking up and seeing the world before you are so awake as to remember what is real and not real. Ask me what magical realism is 50 times and I’ll give you 50 answers. I’m still deciding, but I’m also enjoying the journey to figuring it out.