Help Yourself to Mental Health

Beth Blum has a good essay in Aeon about the literary influence of the self-help manual:literary self-help

She draws our attention to the many ways that Ernesto Hemingway internalised his uncle Alfred’s How to make Good &c (It’s a long title that leaves nothing out). He adopted the cult of manliness and being a wise old bird who called himself Papa in his thirties.

Arnold Bennett is another writer that she mentions who wrote three such books none of which I’ve read. That's the mess I am. His literary work I recommend especially An Old Wives Tale and the Clayhanger trilogy. Now neglected of course yet his depiction of the female psychology and predicament in early 20th.C. is sensitive and unusual.

David Foster Wallace whom I haven’t read to any extent was a great reader of the form. His ego was a vast property in need of maintenance. Maria Bustillos had a comprehensive squint at some of the annotated volumes among his papers in Texas U.
Wallace self-help

God Bless and keep you Mother Machree you can hum while you read.

The greatest of them all and I’m reading it now is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson the multi-million copy bestseller down beside the Penguin lest you wander off a lone ‘un in the wrong direction. Mind you there’s irony in the title with its echos of the 7 Rules books of some years ago. The advice is stern and bracing and perfectly fine and uncontroversial moving from Stand up straight with your shoulders back interspersed with Jungian Archetypal encounters to vignettes from his extensive clinical practice. How has he come to be so hated by feminist scolds, ‘so what you’re saying’ types whom he encounters in tv. Interviews? My understanding of this is imperfect but I feel that his patience is severely exasperating to them as he repeats ‘no that’s not what I said’.

But you’ve probably read it already. I haven’t seen it being offered second hand yet so there must be millions of annotated copies out there.

Last Post from Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford : Sylvia Tietjens on being cut

One of my more popular posts is on the passage in A Moveable Feast in which Hemingway traduces Ford Madox Ford:
Hem and Fordie
Ford had committed the unpardonable sin of helping Hemingway by publishing him in the influential Transatlantic Review which he, Ford, edited. At that time his stories were rejected elsewhere.

The section in ‘Feast’ is a disquisition on cutting. Whom might a gentleman cut? A gentleman will always cut a cad etc.

When one analyses Ford’s work it is clear that Hem is being wound up like a long case clock. cf. post supra: In the Last Post(from the tetralogy Parade’s End) the fear of Sylvia Tietjens is that she will be cut by her estranged husband Christopher.

That she had hitherto never dared. From a social point of view it would have been outrageous, but she was prepared to chance that. She was sure enough of her place in Society, and if people will excuse a man’s leaving his wife, they will excuse the wife’s making at least one or two demonstrations that are a bit thick. But she had simply not dared to meet Christopher: he might cut her.
Perhaps he would not. He was a gentleman and gentlemen do not actually cut women with whom they have slept. . . . But he might. . . . She might go down there, and in a dim, low room be making some sort of stipulation — God knew what, the first that came into her head — to Valentine. You can always make up some sort of reason for approaching the woman who has supplanted you. But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy — oh, adorable — face of stone.
That was what you would not dare to face. That would be death. She could imagine him going out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Leaving the whole establishment indifferently to her,
— closing only himself in invisible bonds — denied to her by the angel with the flaming sword! . . . That was what he would do. And that before the other woman. He had come once very near it, and she had hardly recovered from it.

Last Post available on Adelaide:
Last Post

Ole Anderson and Young Hemingway

Hemingway had a fictive go at killing off Sherwood Anderson in his short story The Killers when he sent the vaudville deadly duo Al and Max to rub out; the scriptive erasure is appropriate, a fighter called Ole Anderson. Ole Sherwood had slighted Young Hem unforgivably by helping him in various ways. In a story, a not very good story, Anderson in The Fight from the collection Death in the Woods mocks the Hemingway circularity and plain prose. Hurt feelings don’t generally make for great literature. The word ‘shabby’ barnacle encrusted with judgement seems right for the younger man’s behaviour.

I’ve been reading Winesburg, Ohio recently and re-evaluating the respective positions of the two men in the American canon. The Hemingway paradox is that he is now the more mannered and literary writer of the two and Anderson with his larger grasp of human nature and even with the cracker barrel effects, is an undated perennial. He colours in more of the picture and though the line isn’t delicate it has vigour and risk. Hemingway asks you to fill it in for yourself.
- Yeah, you fill it in.
- I don’t know if I can.
- Sure you can, you can fill it in O.K.
- I’m glad you think so.
The older man slipped off the stool, suddenly. The younger did not try to catch him. He’d seen this sort of thing before and he just hoped it wouldn’t happen to him. It was a thing that you did not wish to see and it was not very satisfactory.

More on Ernest Hemingway and Fort Madox Ford

Previously on the Hem Fordie row: This means war

It becomes clearer as if it were ever that obscure that Hemingway is having his leg pulled by Ford. First of all he knew Belloc well and could pretend that a stranger was him for cutting purposes. In the Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford, Vol.Five, Memories and Impressions he relates how he often dined with him, knew him well and took material from him for The English Review

This ‘cutting’ business was a characteristic joke of his, playing the Tory toff. He is talking about the founding of The Transatlantic Review and tells how at the time that he had met his brother in Paris by chance he had not seen him since 1916.

Then one day, crossing the Boulevard St.Michel up near the Luxembourg Gardens, I met my brother. I had not seen him for a great number of years. The last time had been in 1916 when I had passed his rather bulky form, in uniform, in New Oxford Street. He had been wounded and I failed to recognise him, khaki making everyone look alike. My companion on that day said I exclaimed - it was during the period when my memory was still very weak: ((due to concussion from being blown up))
‘Good God: that was my brother Oliver, I have cut my brother Oliver.... One should not cut one’s brother!......... It isn’t done.

I do not remember to have uttered those words but I can still hear the ringing laughter that saluted whatever I did say.

In the Hemingway Library
Hemingway Library
there are several books of Ford’s including reminiscences. Whether they contain the material that is in the selection made by Michael Killigrew for Bodley Head I do not know but if they do there is much there to offend E.H. His tauromachy, his shadow boxing, his attempt to hijack the contents of the magazine when Ford was away are all related with a sort of affable slighting tone.

On most Thursdays Mr. Hemingway shadow boxed at Mr.Bird’s press, at the files of unsold reviews and at my nose; shot tree-leopards that twined through the rails of the editorial gallery and told magnificent tales of the boundless prairies of his birth. I actually preferred his stories of his Italian campaign. They were less familiar.........Mr. Hemingway had, I think, been a cowboy before he became a tauromachic expert