Michael S. Reynolds (1939–2000)

I like to go into a novel cold so that I form my own impressions of it. This week, I finally read Hemingway’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. But I decided to follow it up with this slim volume that bills itself as a “Students’ Companion” since it had found its way onto my shelves a few years ago. It was an interesting exercise. I found some of my first impressions confirmed; Reynolds cast other things I had noticed into a new light. And he pointed out many things I missed. That’s ok; I don’t expect to read a novel like an English professor would the first time through.
I nearly lost patience with it at the outset, though. Before getting to the novel itself, Reynolds offers three short chapters on the historical context, the importance of the work, and its critical reception that managed to be both superficial and wordy.
The following six chapters examine various aspects of the book, and I found them helpful. The first of them (chapter four in all) discusses the narrator, Jake Barnes. One insight stood out: Jake is, among the friends he has shepherded to Pamplona, like the steer in the ring among the bulls. How did I miss that? Well, in my defense, Hemingway put in a misdirect: Mike (one of those boorish, insufferable drunks) maintains that Cohn was a steer. He wasn’t, of course. How could he have spent a week frolicking in San Sebastian with Mike’s fiancée, Brett, if he had no “horns.”
In chapter five, on structural unity, Reynolds asserts that Hemingway’s inexperience as a novelist made Sun a poorly planned novel (yet in chapter eight, on Signs, Motifs, and Themes, he defends Hemingway from the charge that inconsistent time markers point to a similar lack of control over his material; the effect is to show that time is out of joint). Yet, chapter five shows how Hemingway achieves a satisfying unity through stylistic elements (repetition, for instance) and symbols (water, for one). In addition, the chapter includes a reference to Hemingway’s use of the adjective “nice.” I had noticed its frequent appearance when I read Sun but totally missed the tone of irony in its use that Reynolds demonstrates.
The next chapter, on Geography and History, deals with an aspect of the book I had noticed in my own reading: Hemingway’s detailed and accurate notation of streets, restaurants, and cafes. One could use Sun as a travel guide and find one’s way. In this, as well as with the dispassionate (hard-boiled) dialogues, Hemingway influenced generations of spy and detective novelists.
Chapter seven deals with virtues. Reynolds points out that Jake and his friends have no faith in traditional moral values due to the recent war. His friends are promiscuous, bibulous, and financially irresponsible. Unlike them, Jake is punctual, works for a living, and spends less than he earns. To Reynolds, these are not moral virtues but social. Jake’s responsible yet generous approach to money demonstrates that this is the only value left in a world that no longer holds any others. Jake is clear-eyed about it; he only hopes to get value for his money.
Reynolds returns to this in the next chapter, Signs, Motifs, and Themes. He writes: “If money has become the only operative value for this postwar generation, then it is spiritually sicker than it knows.”
This chapter also deals with an aspect of geography Reynolds hadn’t mentioned in chapter six. Jake and a friend go fishing near where Roland took his stand, in the country of Don Quixote. The allusions suggest that Jake, too, is a doomed, deluded romantic hero. He loves Brett and obeys her summons to come to gather her in Madrid after the departure of Romero, the young bullfighter. But because the war has made him into a steer, she’ll remain his unapproachable Dulcinea. He had even introduced her to Romero, an action that costs him his standing among the aficionados at the Hotel Montoya. He can never go back.
Reynolds has a clear take on Barnes. Jake knows his way around. He looks after his friends, representatives of the lost generation. An incredible quantity of alcohol is consumed in the book, but the one time Jake gets blindingly drunk is in the wake of the climactic event, when he is “gored” by Cohn. Jake pimped for the woman he loved, introducing her to the best of the young generation of bullfighters. Montoya will no longer look him in the eye. He rescues Brett in Madrid, but this clean-up action doesn’t cleanse him. Reynolds doesn’t say so, but his portrayal makes it seem that Jake’s relative sobriety and sense of responsibility—compared to that of his friends—only makes him more acutely aware that he, too, is one of the lost.
I’m glad that I didn’t read this book before reading the novel itself, but I was glad to have it nearby to supplement my own take.… (plus d'informations)

I was saddened to learn, as I went to write this review, that Michael Reynolds died in 2000. Initially, the concept of the book made me wonder whether Reynolds' work is merely a retelling of the master's work: whether Reynolds had much talent at all and simply used another's carefully-crafted public image as a topic for elevating one's own status. Moreover, my first thoughts were that chronologically-ordered books tend to be a hard slog to read. Australian war historian Lex McAulay came to mind as he writes very well-referenced, precisely-detailed and scholarly work which can be incredibly difficult to read other than for research purposes and I couldn't help seeing the similarities in style from a "readability" perspective. Nonetheless, Reynolds successfully melds chronology, at-times lengthy quotations, details and historical context with his own blend of character depictions and descriptions, without ever appearing to over-step the mark and over-dramatise history in what is an essentially good, scholarly and entertaining read. Reynolds' ability to capture the history of a character who was synonymous with the spirit of so many of the more romantic elements of the twentieth century is remarkable. I was reading Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" and a number of his famous short stories while also reading Reynolds' work, an approach which I intend to continue as I read and study more of Hemingway's legacy while reading Reynolds' "The Paris Years". Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice how the chronologically-ordered chapters move from year to year until the last few chapters where the years are suddenly jammed together as if the author became frustrated with the approach and forsook the planned structure in order to finish the book using less words than originally intended. On learning of Reynolds' death, and reflecting on Hemingway's witnessing the beginnings of his own legacy, however, i cannot help but think that Reynolds' work stands on its own two feet and is worthy of much praise as a historical piece. While not in the same vein as Hemingway's oft more glamorous career, I can not help but think that Reynolds' lifetime effort to record for posterity the lifetime of another was, in its own way, a life worth living. With that in mind, I suspect the true greatness of Reynolds' work is in the entire series on Hemingway, and not just this one volume.… (plus d'informations)

Michael Reynolds' "Hemingway: The Homecoming", originally issued in 1992 as "Hemingway: The American Homecoming", is the 3rd book of a 5 Volume Biography of Ernest Hemingway. I came across a downloadable audiobook edition of this on Amazon.com & Audible Inc. which was released by them on June 27, 2013 but which has since (as of early July 2013) been discontinued for sale. The removal from sale may be due to some marketing faults in the book's presentation and presumably it will reappear once those have been adjusted. The cover of the initial audiobook edition mistakenly used the cover of the print edition of the combined Volume 4 "The 1930s" and Volume 5 "The Final Years" and the text description read a bit too much* like a description of Volume 2 "The Paris Years." The audiobook is narrated by actor Allen O'Reilly. One further technical issue with the audiobook is that either the original reading or the post-production edit is at a fast speed which isn't always at a comfortable listening rate. The first edition release that I heard was 8 hours and 19 minutes, so it will be interesting if a future reissue will have slowed that down.

The Hemingway period covered in the book is the latter half of the 1920's which is the end of the Paris years and the divorce with first wife Hadley Richardson and the marriage and beginning of the Key West years with second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. "The Homecoming" of the title refers to the return to the USA and the establishment of a new base in Key West, Florida. Hemingway's books that were written and published during this time were "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "Men Without Women" (1927) and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929). Also the writing of the unfinished and abandoned 1927 novel "Jimmy Breen" is discussed.

This book (as does all of Reynolds' Hemingway) tells the story of Hemingway's life in a narrative novel style which concentrates primarily on a 3rd person description of the life events without a lot of sidetracking or interpretation. Excerpts from the stories and novels are inserted into the text especially where they are a development or extension of the true life events they were based on. Those who have read the primary single volume biographies by Carlos Baker, Kenneth Lynn and Jeffrey Meyer will likely not find anything new here but the novel style of storytelling does make it more approachable than the more standard biography style. We can only hope that this audiobook edition will see a reissue with errors repaired and that further volumes of the series will be made available. Due to the faults of this first issue (esp. the speed of the reading) I have to give this a 3 out of 5.

* "The 1920s in Paris are the pivotal years in Hemingway's apprenticeship as a writer, whether sitting in cafés or at the feet of Gertrude Stein. These are the heady times of the Nick Adams short stories, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the writing of The Sun Also Rises. These are also the years of Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, the birth of his first son, and his discovery of the bullfights at Pamplona."… (plus d'informations)