'I don't know,
Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But
that's gone now. Memory is hunger.'
This hunger for life, for
what it holds, for what it can give you, and for what you can give to it is limitless.
This world is very vast and throughout history there has been constant change
and movement wither it be with revolutions or wars, or movements that all lead
to where the world is today. We learn about such events in times through
readings, through documentations, through the people who were part of this
community in their time. The quote above taken from Hemingway’s A moveable feast – A false spring
describes that this hunger is everywhere that it will never be lost and even in
the darkest side of the moonlight there will still be a glimpse of it in the
little speck of light that remains. Going through Hemingway’s passages based on
the spring in Paris and John Dos Passos time in the Spanish Civil war, will
help describe how their realities were in the time they lived in.
Hemingway and Dos Passos
were close friends, they lived in the same time, and both lived in Spain
together during the Spanish Civil war at some point. Being so close, one can
see that their style of writing have similar tendencies, however there are
rather significant differences between how they objectify their themes. As the
civil war continued the way Dos perceived communism altered gravely as when his
good friend and translator Jose Robles was murdered and covered up in the propaganda
of Stalinists for whom Hemingway was doing work for, greatly damaged their
relationship, and Hemingway later in A Moveable Feast names Dos as a “pilot
fish”. Their relationship fell apart and it is evident within their writings
how they both perceived their times, and how they saw the world, including
Paris. In Hemingway’s passages A false spring and People by the Seine he romantisises
the idea of Paris, he manages to capture the honesty of Paris and place a
pleasantry around it. He doesn’t make it just a perfect place or illustrate it
with shades of pure beauty, but he shows how he accepts the darker sides of Paris
and still finds it to be the center of the world. When he comes to describing
Paris in in the spring he says, “Part of you died each year when the leaves
fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold,
wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring.” This idea of
anticipation of spring, this yearning of a new life, a new time, when all the
darkness is gone and nature begins to bloom again; “I could never be lonely
along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring
coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one
morning.” The way he describes Paris is a reality that is familiar,
particularly since this is the case, is slowly comes and then one morning you
realize we’ve entered a new season, a new chapter in one’s life.
“The only thing that could
spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day
had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very
few that were as good as spring itself.” Hemingway’s style of describing Paris
and the surroundings within spring is very romanticized but plausible, his view
on reality is enhanced within his writings, there is a positivity to his
writing of Paris in the spring, but goes on to describe and narrate almost what
he sees in a fictitious yet documentary like way. “But Paris was a very old
city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor
sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of
someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.” This idea or view of Hemingway is
so beautiful, the use of his words is effortlessly placed together, even though
he’s describing the darker sides of it, there is still holds Paris to a higher
view. There is still this air of fiction like writing, the melody of the tone
of his words enhance the meanings and symbolism he wishes to get through to the
reader. Compared to Dos Passos – he has as well as documentaries style however
his roots are very much political towards the fact rather than beautifying it.
“But Paris in the spring is
pleasant as a song in a musical comedy, if you can get away from the chore of
interviewing politicians and waiting for them in their gloomy antechambers
where the furniture and carpets and the pale faced attendants with not very
clean starched shirts and white ties and unbrushed liveries as if they hadn’t changed
since the days of the sun king”. You can see the use of his irony used in his
style- he has a rather cynical style of writing, it seems rather biased – the
way he sees reality in this fictitious stories are based of the narrator or
main character Andrew- sees things very different, represents himself as an
almost disliked person by many. He has this impersonally logic to his literary
writing/method, there are hints of dry irony, and “a kind of willed and
slightly humorless desire to locate his subjects in neatly defined networks o
history and social change”(Dos Passos). Sartre saw his writing as better than
authors, such as Faulkner or Kafka- “ that he wrote the way fiction should be
written, as “a responsible way, using materials from the world as it is without
being a meme photographer” (Dos Passos). Marian Merrriman described John as
being “a better writer than Hemingway. He was a seasoned writer of the prose of
war”, but said that, as a person he didn’t impress her, he was perhaps ‘wishy-washy’.
She couldn’t always make out everything he was saying, was clear- “for whatever
reasons, he wanted out of there, out of Hemingway’s room, out of bomb shaken
Madrid.”
This shows how both writers
are rather different, Dos imposes his views on the reader through his character
as Andrew, he explains things in rather biased light, even though Hemingway
writes from his point of view as well, there isn’t a forceful way about it. He
has this flow through his words that bring the reader on a journey and shows
them the reality through this fictisious glass; unlike Passos who rather shows
direct the political sides of life, and a very much harsher reality. They both
demonstrate their love for Paris, in the Three Soldiers, Andrew tried to do
everything possible to get to Paris, for this idea of freedom and liberty and
art is what can be found in Paris. It is how he represents Paris, a place of
wonder, a place of free spirit, where the music and the arts come together
amongst some of the worlds most creative and interesting people. Hemingway also
illustrates his love for Paris by the love for his wife Hadley, who represents those
times that were hard but full of life and hunger for life. However even though
they both write about the wonderment and life found in Paris, they both
approach reality in different ways.
Andrew straight away from
the beginning shows his interest in people and an interest in the arts as well
as his desire to live in Paris. Andrews went on talking, almost to
himself. "What a wonderful life that would be to live up here in a small
room that would overlook the great rosy grey expanse of the city, to have some
absurd work like that to live on, and to spend all your spare time working and
going to concerts.... A quiet mellow existence.... Think of my life beside it.
Slaving in that iron, metallic, brazen New York to write ineptitudes about
music in the Sunday paper. God! And this."(Dos Passos) This shows him as a
boy who wants to discover a new world, a world he’s only imagined to live. The
life he lives seems to enclose him, seems to suffocate him, this shown by when
he has the urge to rip his shirt open "Oh, I'd like to make the buttons
fly all over the cafe, smashing the liqueur glasses, snapping in the faces of
all those dandified French officers who look so proud of themselves that they
survived long enough to be victorious." He wishes he wasn’t there, shows
how Andrew who is narrating the view of John Dos Passos, despises the way the
war is going, shows how he is changing in terms of his views on the war. He has
a repetition of the ‘violet eyes’ of these two artists that he met, this idea
of violet eyes has a metaphor for perhaps the eyes, the way they see life
through creative and spiritual window. Represents the way they see things vs.
the way Andrew sees life, and perhaps the way he wishes he could see life. This
spiritual view, this view of freedom, is apparent throughout the whole story of
the Three Soldiers, “He wandered aimlessly for a while about the silent village
hoping to find a cafe where he could sit for a few minutes to take a last look
at himself before plunging again into the groveling promiscuity of the army.”
There is definitely a negative connotation to the way he sees the army, and
shows how an American perceives this from an anti communist point of view.
Through various characters and the plot line of the story, the readers can see
how it was to be in the army for a young man who had no yearning to be a part
of it, and how he held a desire to go to Paris to study music, to go to the
American school of Paris, and live a life of freedom. At the end of the story
he allowed to go through struggles and hardship, sweat and embarrassment he
succeeds and get to go to Paris "Tomorrow I'm going to Paris," cried
Andrews boisterously. "It's the end of soldiering for me." There
youthfulness to the way Andrew is perceived, Dos has stubbornly in a way
written through a story of a young man and his journey to Paris, how reality
was at that time and the dreams that lived within him.
Both writers in
the end encapsulate what their time was like, however the degree of irony in
both alters, along with the enhancement of the good is more apparent in
Hemingway’s rather than Dos’s, they both show and equal amount of love for
Paris, however perhaps Hemingway’s sweetens the way he sees life, or hides the
negatives through positives words. Unlike Dos who seems to perhaps darken what
reality was truly, this cynical, dry irony is very much apparent. Either way,
both authors have achieved in selling their views of Paris whether the actual
reality was the way they illustrated, in their own versions, one will never
truly know.
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