Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Do the inner battles of a famous American author have to do with our own biggest questions?  Are these questions about how we see our relation to the whole world?  Read “Our Selves & Ernest Hemingway,” the great new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by editor Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the magnificent 1972 lecture Hail, Relation; or, A Study in Poetry, by Eli Siegel. In this section, he speaks about a matter that is intense and constant in everyone’s personal life: the relation between one aspect of ourselves and another. That relation going on within each of us can take the form of: What do we want from ourselves? Why do we disappoint ourselves? Is there something in us stopping us from being how we truly want to be? Can we ourselves interfere with what we are?

And this final section, though brief, is definitive about an important American writer: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). It has in it the comprehension of something critics noticed but could not explain: why Hemingway’s work became much less good in his later years. And Mr. Siegel gives, too, the large reason for Hemingway’s anguish and self-dislike.

The Two Big Aspects of Self

All art, Aesthetic Realism explains, is justice from a person to the outside world: imaginative, fervent, graceful, keen justice. Further, the desire to be just to reality is the deepest desire in every person—all intelligence and kindness come from it. Aesthetic Realism explains too that the thing in us which interferes with ourselves and weakens us is contempt: our going after an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Ernest Hemingway was a contemporary of Eli Siegel, who was three years younger. Hemingway needed to learn about the fight between the artistic drive in him—to be fair to the world, to care for it—and his desire to have contempt. He needed desperately to learn about this. And he could have, from Mr. Siegel.

In 2012 Simon and Schuster published a new edition of Hemingway’s 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms. That edition includes alternate versions of certain passages, versions Hemingway wrote and then rejected. As a prelude to Mr. Siegel’s speaking of him, I am going to quote the famous last sentences of the novel, and also one of the endings Hemingway put aside.

The narrator and main character of A Farewell to Arms is Lt. Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver in World War I. By the end of the novel, he and Catherine Barkley, whom he loves, are in Switzerland; and she dies in a hospital room. Here is a passage Hemingway wrote to conclude the novel, but which he chose—very wisely—not to use…   >> Read more