From the video description
“The Old Man at the Bridge” was inspired by Hemingway’s travels as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. In fact, the story was originally composed as a news dispatch from the Amposta Bridge over the Ebro River on Easter Sunday in 1938 as the Fascists were set to overrun the region. Hemingway was writing for the North American Newspaper Association but decided to submit this snippet of writing as a short story to a magazine instead of as a journalistic article, which accounts, to a certain extent, for its short length.
6 comments:
I've only tried one novel by Hemingway, and didn't get on with it. But that piece gives me a sense of why he is revered in some quarters.
Sam - I never got on with Hemingway either. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea, but found his spare style too distant and uninvolved, like looking at things through the wrong end of a telescope.
I tried a couple of Hemingways as a boy. Didn't like his stuff and, in particular, decided he was a fraud - his pose of manliness was phoney.
P.S. "as the Fascists were set to overrun the region": Franco's army wasn't "the Fascists". It was a coalition, one part of which - the Falange - was fascist. There were also nationalists, royalists, and old-fashioned Roman Catholic reactionaries. There may even have been some liberals who disapproved of their nasty marxist/socialist/communist government.
But maybe the writer meant "Fascist" in the Guardian sense i.e. anyone he disapproves of.
dearieme - I don't know much about him but I've heard that his manliness pose was phoney. I'm sure he did mean "Fascist" in a lazy, Guardian sense.
It seems that a quote from 'an old man' will engender respect, sympathy etc., but that's not going to be much help if they're wrong when they talk to a younger man.
Scrobs - maybe that's Joe Biden's trick, wander off when you are wrong.
Post a Comment