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Currently, though, I am burdened with the suspicion that the biggest Hemingway devotees are Hemingway scholars, those interested readers of his fiction who also are possessed of a goodly knowledge of his life and times. Is that what great literature is?

I wouldn't think so! There's a lasting debate in literature about what great literature is, and a debate about how to approach it. Some feel that knowing the author's life sullies the work: art for art's sake! It ought to stand alone. Others find the historical perspective more rewarding than the art. Others can't imagine trying to read a work of literature without knowing the context of the author's life and times.

For most of my writing and reading life, I have belonged to the tribe that wants to read the story purveyed by the words on the page, not the words as translated by others through the prism of the writer's biases those others know about. There is a magic—perhaps the magic—for me in seeing a picture emerge from the cryptic symbols men have chosen to convey thoughts, and for believing that I see the same picture the writer means to convey.

Indeed, I would say this magic is the most important beauty of the most abstract of the arts: Storytelling. ¿What other art must rely so heavily on an interested voyeur translating the symbols that convey the pictures in the thoughts of an artist into a picture that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and/or felt? It is a communion with the growth of knowledge through the ages at the behest of the artful use of the language.

It is not that I don't like to know about the writer's life and times and biases, even if it's mostly true that I don't, but I'm guessing that I like to learn of those things only after I feel I have successfully "seen" the picture the experts believe—from study of the artist—was truly drawn. ¡I think my preference for the way I receive communication may come from being asked, sometimes forced, to interpret the abstractness of the Bible based on the pictures the artists drew; these artists claiming they were drawing pictures based on having seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and/or felt God: Talk about the greatest need to suspend one's disbelief!

I don't know a great deal about Hemingway. I like his work because it was revolutionary. He was one of the Modernist writers who transformed literature.

I will take your word for it that Hemingway's work is revolutionary. For most of my writing workshop life, I have been subjected to the idea that his work was a reactionary response to the flowerdy communication of the artists who came before him, an attempt to make his work accessible to folks who don't know all the big, handsome words—and who become lost, groping in the dim light of the long sentences, that artists such as Faulkner were so fond of.

I question what the experts who've tried to sell me on the Hemingway revolution have concluded were his motives. In my study so far of his work—by reading it and seeing how accessible it is to me, an interested reader—I am finding that Hemingway puts the fence of his Iceberg Theory between me and the pictures he draws with his words.

Here is what Hemingway says about accessibility:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. Emphasis mine.

I loudly applaud Hemingway's desire to write accessibly and with dignity. BUT in reading Hemingway, I wonder, "What could he have been thinking? He has left out the dignified parts Faulkner put in that drew pictures of men who moved and smelt and felt and tasted and stared and deciphered..." About which Faulkner said, The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.

¿My bias for Faulkner showing through? Hardly, I beg.

Though I cut my teeth on Faulkner, Hemingway was attempting to change literature in a way I fully support.

That sense that his work has barely begun and isn't quite finished? I think that was purposeful.

If what he was trying to sell was purposeful, that he fails by eliding things that would make his stories truer and more accessible to storylisteners makes his attempt a pig in a poke rather than dignified to me, UNLESS one becomes an expert on Hemingway's life and times and can say with some authority that they know what was meant by what Hemingway left out.

He was coming out of the Victorian era, which wanted to tie a pretty bow around novels -- punish the bad characters, reward the good characters, and end things happily ever after. He's questioning that in his work. Is there a happily ever after? Is their justice? Is there a pretty bow at the end of the story? Or isn't life really a relentless struggle to hold yourself together and be as honorable as you can in a world which dishonors and crushes?

Hemingway's style—so far and except for a few fine successes, and before I set to on his novels—is for me the same as February's style: Short and brutish, and to boot, short of dignity.

He was writing after The Great War shattered illusions. Everything people believed in was scattered all over the floor, including the Victorian vision. Instead of reading Dickens's novels, people are heading to the silver screen to be inspired by images which move and say nothing. I think this contributed to the way literature changed with Hemingway. He's challenging the reader to experience deeply what he leaves unsaid. Here is the stage, here are the players, they said the following, these thoughts crushed the mind, and that is all.

IF the Iceberg Theory was merely an invitation to study his life within the context of the times, then I will have to classify him as one more failed narcissist. If, once I've finished his long stories, his Iceberg Theory reveals to me, an interested and inexpert reader, some ultimate truth about the art of communicating accessible and dignified prose, I will applaud his success with "leaving out" as counter-intuitive genius made manifest.

In the meantime, where do we writers get off saying to interested readers, look at me, study me, look at the mirror I look into, within the context of my times... and learn life.

I'm not sure if that helps?