Month: April 2021

 

            I decided it was time to re-read Hemingway. I’ve read all of it but lately have been reading more books about him instead of reading him. I just finished Mary (wife 4) Hemingway’s How It Was for the second time. It had been widely criticized as self-serving and not insightful. For me, it still was very interesting to see Mary’s point of view and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about events that I knew much about but this time from Mary’s perspective. She is a complicated figure and that’s for another post. She put up with a lot of verbal abuse from Hem but also seems to have wanted to be “Hemingway’s Wife,” and for that, she endured. She was loyal, and despite some bad times, stayed.

Within the past six months, I also have read Hemingway’s Cats and Hemingway and Fitzgerald..  I loved the animal book as much as anything I’ve read about Hemingway. It’s not scholarly but it’s human and I am an  animal person so I  melted into the book. I love that Hem loved his animals like family members and he valued their presence in his life.

A month ago,I began reading the short stories again. I read slowly and

found new meaning and layers in this go-round. Favorite: The Snows of Kilimanjaro.  I’m now tackling A Farewell to Arms. I’m listening to it on an audio tape because I find it lets me listen and focus on the words and the sentence structure as opposed to being distracted.

In listening, I am finding that there is so much that I missed or that I’d forgotten.  Despite my affinity for Hemingway, I don’t like war stories as a rule.  However, listening to the dialogue, I became completely engrossed in the maneuvers of Hemingway’s unit/Frederic Henry’s unit and his cohorts with him. I love Rinaldi and the way he calls Frederic “baby.” I loved the love story.

The descriptions are beautiful and immediate and while by modern standards, the romance and the dialogue between Frederic and Catherine are dated, the emotional wallop is still there.

Next up is Across The River and into the Trees, Hemingway’s most maligned novel for which Adrianna Ivancich was his muse.  As he was writing it, Hemingway apparently thought it was going to be one of his best.  The reviews were brutal.  I haven’t read that one in a long time and I want to see if it’s as bad as all that.

So:  Do you have a favorite short story?  A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is probably my favorite but The Snows of Kilimanjaro is the pinnacle for me–very different lengths–those two–but wow, in 3 pages, what he did in A Clean Well-Lighted Place.

This was recently posted on Hemingway Facebook page . I pasted it a few years ago but in light of the PBS special, i thought i’d repost as it is so much fun. If you have not seen it before, enjoy!

It was quite a 3-night extravaganza of Hemingway on PBS. I’m very interested in what you all thought since we are a bit inside the loop in terms of already having an interest and not coming to the subject matter completely without preconceptions and knowledge.

When I first read about Ken Burns and Lynn Novick doing the series, I was hopeful that it would be balanced. Then when I heard some reviews, I became fearful that it was going to be a hatchet job. After watching all three parts myself, I thought it was fair. Because I know so much about Hemingway already, not a lot was new to me and perhaps that took some of the sparkle out of it. However, I felt that while there were some portions in which he showed up badly, that was him at times and it can’t be avoided if a true portrait is being drawn. And based on all of my reading, when he was bad, he was really bad. Even without the booze, some of his letters were just atrocious. Others, however, were warm, loving and very funny. A man who for weeks slept outside his son Patrick’s room when he was ill to be sure he made it through was the same man who was cruel to Gregory as well as to each of his wives. He was complicated.

I thought they did a good job in exploring the impact of numerous severe concussions throughout his life. When you layer that in with extreme alcoholism and add in a significant swath of mental illness in terms of depression which developed a paranoid component, you have a man whose behavior at any moment could be unexplainable and incomprehensible. I do think anyone who didn’t know much about Hemingway would come away with a sense of a complexity and a sense of the highs and lows, and an interest, perhaps, of knowing more and reading more.

Because it’s an interesting issue of the times, Hemingway’s writings that deal with some fluidity of gender is an interesting issue to explore. I think that those who’ve read a lot of Hemingway and about Hemingway realize that the macho bluster he created, promoted and perpetuated was not all of him – not by a mile. I also have always resented people who write that Hemingway was cruel to Fitzgerald and to Harold Loeb in A Moveable Feast. He was and it was not pleasant to see. However, he also didn’t publish it. It was published posthumously and he didn’t edit it. For all we know, that might have been changed greatly, so I read A Moveable Feast – a book I love – nevertheless realizing he did not have the last say on how it came out or how it was edited.

Many of you know much more about Hemingway than I do and I began this blog in order to be educated by others. Please let me know your thoughts on the special.

Warmest wishes and please keep reading and caring about his writing and him.

Christine

P.S. June 1, 2021, my novel–Hemingway’s Daugther will be published. Please look for it if you have an interest. Thank you! C

NEWS FROM WILD RIVER PRESS

A Perfect Tonic for the Literate (and Pandemic-Weary) Traveler

Traveling The World With Hemingway

Curtis L. DeBerg, PhD

This lavish over-size 10 x 12 book in beautiful landscape format brings to life the more than one dozen exciting places the great 20th-century novelist Ernest Hemingway called home—for short periods or for years.

When Hemingway’s prose burst on the scene it was considered highly original for its spare, compact yet evocative style. His writing influenced generations of novelists and journalists; his books are still avidly read around the world.

Hemingway won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among his enduring legacies in print are  A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1951), the posthumously published memoir of his young years in Paris, A Moveable Feast (1964), and The Nick Adams Stories (1972), thematic short stories from various early collections.

In Traveling The World With Hemingway, hundreds of spectacular new digital images capture the odyssey of the adventurous author’s remarkable life. Starting at his birthplace home in Oak Park, Illinois, you’ll follow his footsteps north to his boyhood summer home near Lake Superior in northern Michigan. Then away to the Italian front during World War I and falling in love in Milan; the cafes of Paris and the bullfight rings of Pamplona; marlin fishing off Key West and hunting in Sun Valley, surviving back-to-back plane crashes in Africa and chasing Nazi subs out of Havana. Ernest Hemingway made all these places and more as vivid and indelible as his fictional characters.

Juxtaposed against page after page of lush landscapes and cityscapes are historic sepia portraits of the author, friends and family in all these far-flung locations. Each chapter opens with a colorful quote from Hemingway about the place you are about to visit as you turn these gorgeous pages.

This is a visual treasure book filled with the romance and inspiration of a great writer’s favorite places—the perfect tonic for the literate (and pandemic-weary) traveler.

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Traveling The World With Hemingway will be released in June 2021 by Wild River Press, winner of multiple Benjamin Franklin Gold Medals for excellence in independent publishing since 2005.

ISBN 9781735541501

Hardcover 10 x 12 landscape format

All-color 240 pages printed on luxurious matte stock

Illustrated with hundreds of contemporary color with historical archival photos

Retail price: $75 for hardcover standard edition with color jacket

Direct from the publisher exclusively: $300 author’s signed and numbered limited edition of 100 copies only, bound in gold-stamped black leather with matching collector’s slipcase

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Curtis L. DeBerg became intrigued with Ernest Hemingway when he first traveled to Key West in 2005, to visit a cousin who owned a vacation home near Geiger Key. After 40 years as university professor in California, Dr. DeBerg retired in 2020 to devote his time to researching Hemingway and traveling the world in his footsteps—an ambitious journey no one had ever before attempted on this epic scale. He is a member of The Hemingway Society, a group connecting scholars and historians who love and promote the works of Ernest Hemingway. It has 600 members worldwide, and is one of the largest single-author organizations in existence. He is also a group administrator of the active Facebook group “Ernest Hemingway,” which currently has 28,000 members.

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For interviews with the author or reprint permission, contact Thomas R. Pero, Publisher, at tom@wildriverpress.com or phone 425-486-3638