The Girls
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/27/evan-robertson_n_4325295.html?utm_hp_ref=arts
Aside from being thankful for Hemingway, I wish all a great holiday. The above link is really clever: Literary posters with quotes. Hemingway’s is: WRITE DRUNK. EDIT SOBER. (He actually did not write when drunk, or at least not often.)
Happy Holiday season. Christine and friends
Lovely bride
Pony on Aran Island
Reading Hemingway makes me thankful
Sometimes it feels like you can’t move an inch without hitting something very Hemingway related. From the recent book about Hadley (The Parisian Wife) to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s life story (Z) to a show in the Berkshire’s about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their last encounter, and Woody Allen’s delightful Midnight in Paris, it seems that Hemingway remains relevant and his ripples are felt regularly, especially in the arts.
Zelda and Scott
The latest entry to this group is the new Robert Redford film, All is Lost. Called by several critics “Robert Redford’s greatest performance,” he has two words of dialogue in the whole film. While stranded on his boat, which has been disabled in the middle of the Indian Ocean, he has a struggle with a huge marlin, not unlike Hemingway’s Santiago, and ultimately is hoping just to survive. While the modern character moans “God,” it’s followed by the universally understaood, albeit uncouth, word of despair, “f***!”
The Old Man and the Sea
Instead, Hemingway’s dialogue from Santiago is: “I am not religious” he says aloud, alone in his skiff holding the line, hands bleeding, muscles aching, as he battles the great fish. “But I will say ten Our Fathers and Ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish. And I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre if I catch him.”
As I wrote somewhere earlier in this blog, many Hemingway readers are not fans of fishing, bull fighting, war, or hunting. In fact, many of us don’t like those topics at all. However, we are fans of man’s humanity, of man’s and women’s will to live, of surviving despite defeat with head jerked high, and of love that is worth all sacrifice. Those were Hemingway’s themes and topics. It’s what keeps many of us coming back to him.
Catherine and Frederic
In a three-page short story, he can move a reader to tears. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a long short story, we all understood Harry’s life and what had happened and how he had lost himself. Harry, built loosely on Hemingway himself, had always feared death and now that’s he ‘s faced with it, he steps back and almost analyzes it from the outside. He’s frankly too exhausted and weak with fever to fight it and he accepts it as it’s due, as it lurks outside of his tent, a hideous hyena with bad breath, waiting. What he regrets is that he won’t have time to write the other stories that are in his head and the loss of so many of the things that he loved doing, the loss of love, the hurt to those that were loyal to him. Who can’t relate to that on each of our own personal levels?
Kilimanjaro
That’s why Hemingway never gets old and we overlook some of the things that don’t resonate with us because most of it does. A bullfight is a life struggle; hunting can be a battle to survive; and love can be the greatest loss and triumph of your life.
Maria and Robert in For whom the Bell Tolls
Reading Hemingway makes me happy
Happiness
I just read an article about a man who liked to visit literary places and relate them to the writings. This is an article about his visit to upper Michigan and some Hemingway places there. I liked the last line, something to the effect that he’ll always think of Hem in the sand dunes, crystal lake, beautiful colors of that place.
Key West
Africa savannah
There are so many places that Hemingway has touched or that have touched him: Paris, Key West, Cuba, Ketchum, Michigan, Spain, Illinois, Kansas City, Toronto, Italy,
Spanish Civil war
Africa. I’m heading to Paris for the first time in June 2014 and will see as many of his places as I can manage. It all sounds so romantic with cafes, languid river boats, elegant boulevards. I’ll report back and let you know if it’s all that or if I was disappointed. Friends seem to either love Paris or shrug at the fuss. I wish I could take my two quasi-Gallic dogs with me but alas, they must stay home.
Ketchum
Rue Gertrude Stein, Paris
Bouviers des Flandres
Random!
Venice nights
Paris street
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway killed himself on July 1, 1961. It’s sad to think about but I think we can say that he was true to himself to the end. His great companion, A. E. Hotchner, wrote an essay about the death and I attach the link here.
Ketchum Idaho home where Hem died
Hotchner met Hemingway while doing a story for Cosmopolitan, which was about the future of everything: art, music, theater, and literature. They asked a young journalist to go down to Cuba and interview Hemingway. I won’t repeat what I’ve written before about their meeting.
Suffice to say for this post that Hotchner remained to the end a trusted confidant, hell-raiser when necessary, collaborator on projects, and loyal friend. As he notes in his article, he dramatized many of Hemingway’s stories and novels for TV and the movies, and they traveled through Europe together often.
Mary’s book about Papa
Hotchner, in his article, notes that Hemingway called him in May of 1960 from Cuba. Hem had been asked by Life magazine to cut a 92,000 word article down to 40,000. A month later, Hem had only cut out about 534 words. He asked Hotchner to come to Cuba to help him. He did go and got the job done, but Hotchner noted that Hem was “bone tired and very beat up.” He assumed that after a period of rest, Hem would be back to his hale old self.
Much has been written about Hemingway’s paranoia and the last year of his life. He felt that the feds, the FBI, the IRS or all were following him and out to get him. During dinner with Hem and Mary (Hemingway’s fourth wife), Hem indicated halfway through the meal that they had to leave because two FBI agents at the bar were watching him. At the time Hemingway was working on A Moveable Feast, having difficultly, although most of the Paris sketches were all set and down on paper. He often spoke of suicide. His father had killed himself.
AE Hotchner’s book about Hemingway
During the last eight months of Hemingway’s life, he received eleven electric shock treatments at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. During a short release, he attempted suicide twice with a gun; on a flight to the Mayo Clinic, he tried to jump from the plane. When it stopped in Casper, Wyoming, for repairs, he tried to walk into the moving propeller.
When Hotchner visited him in June, he’d been given a new series of shock treatments and insisted that his room was bugged. When Hochner asked him, “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself,” he replied, “What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? And do any of the other things he promised himself on the good days?” Hotchner noted that he’d written a beautiful book about Paris and Hem replied, “The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.”
Hem writing
When Hotch suggested he could relax or retire, Hem noted, “How does a writer retire? Everywhere he goes he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?”
The irony is that decades later in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of his activities in Cuba. Agents filed reports and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital and it’s likely that the phone outside of his room was tapped after all.
Hotch ends the article noting that he believes Hemingway truly sensed the surveillance and that it contributed to his anguish and his suicide.
The above borrows heavily from the article by A. E. Hotchner, so I urge you to read it directly. Hotchner also wrote the wonderful book “Papa Hemingway” and “Hemingway and His World.” I love his writing and his view of Hem as a true friend, not just as “Hemingway.” There’s not a better source, in my opinion, for getting a real flavor of what it was like to be part of Hemingway’s posse and inner circle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
My next post will be about Hemingway’s birthday, which is a must happier topic to write about.
RIP, Hem.
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2013/10/17/hemingways-hamburger-helper
This looks positively intriguing. I love hamburgers so I’ll try it and let you know. If you try it, let me know!
The perfect Hamburger
Hello all: For anyone interested, my novel which features a Hemingway loving heroine will be free as an ebook from Amazon this Friday Oct. 25 to Tuesday Oct. 29. Hope you like it!
Windy in Dingle
A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning how to relate my trip to Ireland in May to my Hemingway obsession and I just came across an article about a new biography of Maeve Binchy, the great Irish novelist who cultivated the cozy neighborhood story to high art and who passed away recently. She wrote many novels, usually about the west country of Ireland which is where I was. Her writing style, her topics, and her resolutions are/were about as far from Hemingway as you can get but the article was fun and began with a famous Hemingway belief.
Dingle Peninsula
“It was famously laid down by Ernest Hemingway that the first condition for a writer is to have an unhappy childhood. I assumed that Maeve Binchy was the exception to the Hemingway principle, as she always spoke about the idyllic nature of her childhood.”
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/memories-of-maeve-29469292.html
So, I qualify! My childhood is a story for some other longer post, probably in some other blog that focuses on Dickensian beginnings. I was born in NJ; my parents died 5 months apart when I was seven; the court became involved, and the story goes downhill from there in certain ways but also uphill in other ways.
Anger
My life falls apart when I’m awake!
Hem in some ways had a good childhood in the sense that his family was large; his father took him hunting and fishing; and there were family vacations at a lake in Michigan yearly that formed the basis of many of the short stories. Hem got his love of the outdoors and nature while on the lake in Michigan with many friends and family. However, Hem’s relationship with his mother was always a struggle and his father was a more shadowy figure in Hem’s life, who ultimately killed himself. His mother later sent the gun to Ernest as a gift. Huh? .
So tell me about a great writer who had a great Rockwellian childhood! I’d like to hear about it.
Love crazy
Intelligent and happy?
Who knew that David Soul was a Hemingway fan. I am not sure exactly how this will be filmed but I’m always eager to view anything with a Hemingway connection.
Hem in Tweed
Zelda in ballet slippers
Rue Gertrude Stein, Paris
I just finished a book about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald called “Z.” It was interesting. Zelda’shatred for Hemingway came across loud and clear. I know that it’s historically true. However, there’s a claim that Hemingway came on to her, which didn’t strike me as true based on all that I’ve read and Hem’s feelings toward/against her. And there’s another portion in which she wonders if her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway were closet homosexuals who had an attraction to each other. I don’t know that much about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but there’s not anything in the volumes that I’ve read about Hemingway and his past that would even slightly suggest that. I’ve read all of the hypotheses that Hemingway went ultra-macho to compensate for homosexual feelings. I don’t see that but everyone can have an opinion. Those comments aside, I found that I had sympathy for Zelda’s plight and her frustration in her life with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Zelda and Scott
I also couldn’t help comparing Fitzgerald, of course, to Hemingway. When Hemingway met Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald was the star, having come off of a great success with The Beautiful and Damned. His short stories were successfully being sold and some were going to Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald was generous with his time and advice to Hemingway and they remained really close friends for a long time before something of quiet falling out occurred, probably due to normal as opposed to cut-throat literary rivalry and partly due to Hemingway’s disgust with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking and Zelda. Whatever else you can say about Hemingway and his later serious problems with the bottle, for most of his career, he was very disciplined when it came to writing. He often stopped drinking for some significant periods of time while writing and he didn’t drink during the day while he was getting his words down on paper. Fitzgerald began to drink daily from morning on and for many years, didn’t even try to write.
Martini anyone?
Hem in Midnight in Paris
I also gathered from “Z” that the ragefulness between Zelda and Fitzgerald went on for years and they both treated each other badly. It was a sort of recreational warfare. That behavior certainly didn’t occur between Hemingway and Hadley. I think there was some bitterness in his fighting with Pauline (second wife) in the end, but not the low blows Zelda and Scott hurled. Hemingway generally felt guilty at the end of a relationship and didn’t rant and rave at his soon to be ex-wife.
The Sun Also Rises
His relationship with Martha (third wife) was an exception because it did become volatile. Certainly there was anger and insults with Mary (fourth wife) and they might have divorced had Hem lived longer. With the exception of Martha, Hem’s other three wives never tried to compete with him and perhaps that was what he was looking for in a woman. He tended to prefer stable, smart, but non-challenging women. Further, he was married four times, whereas Fitzgerald and Zelda were only married once, although affairs did occur in the marriage.
Hemingway and Gellhorn
Married to a writer
Anger
I liked the book and I felt for Zelda, which I didn’t expect. It was interesting to read another perspective on the jazz age, and the whole lost generation crowd in Paris, including the Murphys, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Picasso.
You might try it. It’s an easy read and Hemingway features prominently.
I don’t get it.
Paris 1927
.
I’d love to read her stories.
Hem writing