Deal with him, Hemingway!

I’m very late coming to it, but I’ve stumbled into a wonderful rabbit-hole of a website: Open Culture.

I was intrigued by this post of audio clips of Gertrude Stein reading work inspired by Matisse, Picasso and TS Eliot.
Listening to her I couldn’t help but wonder: Would Gertrude Stein be published now? How many blank stares, total, did she receive in her lifetime? How difficult it must have been to be Gertrude Stein.
The audio clips motivated me to dig out my copy of Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice – her Malcolmian biography and investigation of how two odd looking elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis and lived openly in Vichy France. Two Lives is now back on top of my To-Be-Read-Again stack. But Stein’s books … wait on the shelf for another day. The closest I’ve come to understanding her writing, or understanding what she was trying to convey, was this fascinating and clear-headed NYTBR review by Lynne Tillman, Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein. But for me, her life remains infinitely more interesting than her writing.

Me looking at Gertrude.

Back to the Open Culture rabbit hole and now going downmarket: The post on Gertrude led to this photo of a shirtless Mark Twain. It’s real. And now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it.

Clicking as quickly as possible away from the Mark Twain photo led to a fabulous video clip of James Joyce in Paris that describes one of the greatest writers of the 20th century as a “small, thin, un-athletic man with very bad eyes.” It also notes that Joyce and Hemingway did a certain amount of drinking together, and in the course of their drinking, if Joyce ran into any sort of belligerence, he would jump behind his “powerful friend,” shouting “Deal with him Hemingway, deal with him!” So. What was true 100 years ago is still true today: Some writers you want to know, some writers you don’t. (Thanks Open Culture!)