Christine Whitehead | The Blog Also Rises

Hemingway and Fitzgerald: more thoughts

An interesting article on Hem and Fitz

By ANDRIA DIAMOND April 22, 2017

If you’ve ever seen the movie Midnight in Paris then you are familiar with the rose colored glasses romanticists often wear when thinking of the past. In the film, writer Gill Pender (played by Owen Wilson), somehow manages to travel back in time to 1920s Paris and meet many of the greatest minds in literature, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this particular movie, the two historical writers seem to be cordial, Fitzgerald is handsome and sociable while Hemingway is philosophical and intense. Though Midnight in Paris is immensely enjoyable, it may not be wholly accurate in it’s portrayal of the relationship between these two phenomenal writers. History would suggest that their relationship was much more complex.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met in May of 1925, two men with extraordinary talent who were both battling their respective demons. Though they originally were good friends, their interactions later turned less amicable. Hemingway, though impressed with Fitzgerald’s writing, never seemed to respect the writer himself. He was wary of Fitzgerald’s need for validation, his tumultuous relationship with Zelda, and his self-destructive drinking habits. In a letter to Arthur Mizener (Fitzgerald’s biographer) dated April 5, 1950, Hemingway wrote:

“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful; Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead. I think Scott in his strange mixed-up Irish catholic monogamy wrote for Zelda and when he lost all hope in her and she destroyed his confidence in himself he was through.”

Although Hemingway’s feelings toward Fitzgerald are clear, the facts with which he fuels them are decidedly less so.

Hemingway_Vs_Fitzgerald.pngHemingway had a flair for the dramatics, and his accounts of people and experiences could rarely be relied upon as gospel truth. Hemingway denounces Fitzgerald in his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964), and also deals roughly with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ford Maddox Ford. In fact, we’ve recently documented Hemingway’s distaste for Ford Maddox Ford. While history shows it is not uncommon for writers to take issue with other creative minds, Hemingway had a lengthy track record for doing just that. It is speculated by literary devotees and historians alike that Hemingway’s harsh opinion of others was an act of self-preservation, as he seemed to be a man with a big ego and an even bigger chip on his shoulder. He was sensitive to the slightest condescension (which Fitzgerald did not mind providing) and often reacted with a sharp tongue.

While I would love nothing more than to imagine Hemingway and Fitzgerald—these two great minds—strolling through the 1920s as comrades, success rarely comes without sacrifice. Hemingway’s stubbornness and brash masculinity were essential in his work, just as Fitzgerald’s social perspectives and charm were essential in his. The very personalities and behaviors that made for different men are the same that made for great writers, and the world is a better place for it.

Scott and Zelda from Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen

Romance: Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich

Hemingway was a romantic. Sure, he was macho and tough and a man’s man in many ways, but he enjoyed women greatly and always had a close and loving relationship with Marlene Dietrich. One of Hemingway’s love letters to her is going up for auction. It is expected it will garner something in the vicinity of $30 – $40,000.

This particular letter is dated August 12, 1952 – a year after Dietrich had confessed to keeping the author’s photograph by her bedside. They met in 1934 and became quite infatuated with each other but never consummated the attraction because, as Hemingway put it, they were “victims of unsynchronized passion.” He noted that whenever one of them was out of a relationship the other one was in one and the timing never worked out.

Hemingway writes in the letter to Marlene “I always love you and admire you and I have all sorts of mixed up feelings about you.” Later in the letter he declares that while “you are beautiful…I am ugly…please know I love you always and I forget you sometimes as I forget my heart beats. But it beats always.”

Marlene and Hemingway corresponded over several decades. Marlene Dietrich’s daughter wrote a book noting that after Hemingway’s death, her mother wore widow’s weeds for quite a while and she always believed that had he been with her, instead of his then wife, Mary, he wouldn’t have killed himself.

So, if I had $30,000+ just sitting around, I might enter the fray and bid on this letter, but I fear I’m going to have to let it go to some other fervent Hemingway fan.

I’ve read many of Hemingway’s letters. They are fun and he is quite funny and clever in them. His humor rarely comes through in his novels.

I think the line that I’ve quoted above – I forget you sometimes as I forget my heart beats. But it beats always – is so him. It’s very simple and yet it speaks volumes.

Hemingway’s Brain

A new book is coming out by Andrew Farah, called Hemingway’s Brain. Dr.
Farah is Chief of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina Health Care System. Treading on new territory, Dr. Farah highlights these little-known facts.

1. The only variety of mental illness for which Hemingway seemed to
have compassion was shell-shock. Those of you who’ve read For Whom the Bell Tolls know that Robert Jordan – the main character – condemns his own father’s suicide, saying it’s the easy way out for cowards.

2. Hemingway’s depression was noted in his own letters as early as 1903
(he was 4 years old in 1903! so I would love to see the letter) and that he
required a “rest cure.” I’m thinking it’s a letter that Hemingway must have written later in life describing himself at 4? I’m not sure but I will read the book and find out.

3. The original manuscript of The Garden of Eden is 200,000 words and
it was edited down posthumously to 70,000 words by Scribner’s. Hemingway worked on The Garden of Eden for quite a number of years. He’d put it on the back burner and then bring it out. It dealt with what we call today a threesome – two women and a man – and sexual ambiguity and was well ahead of its time. A very interesting book.

(AP Photo) gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald once described Hemingway as having the quality
of a stick that has been hardened in a fire. I’m not quite sure what to
make of that. Did Fitzgerald mean that Hemingway was really tough or that he had been burned and became brittle as a result? Food for thought.

5. In 1936, Hemingway told Archibald MacLeish that he would never kill himself because of what the trauma might do to his sons. While we can all comment on that one and how he was not true to that narrative, I have to say that by the time he did kill himself, he was debilitated after electric
shock treatments and ongoing mental health/depressive issues.

1954: American novelist Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) on safari in Africa. (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

So, we will all have to read the book to get more of the details.

Best,

Christine

HOW DRIVING AMBULANCES IN WW I INSPIRED HEMINGWAY

How driving ambulances during World War I inspired Hemingway
By Michael Riedel March 19, 2017

Several major artists and innovators of the 20th century served as volunteer ambulance drivers during World War I, shaping their experiences on the battlefield into groundbreaking works.

The carnage horrified poet E.E. Cummings, who drove an ambulance in France. He would go on to fracture his verse the way bodies were fractured in the trenches. He poured his anger at the senselessness of war into letters back to the United States — and found himself in a detention camp for subversives. He recounted his imprisonment in his novel “The Enormous Room.”

W. Somerset Maugham, who trained as a doctor, did not flinch from the horror. He picked up body parts and treated gaping wounds with cool detachment, the kind of detachment he would later use to dissect the emotional lives of his characters in novels such as “The Painted Veil.”

At 16, Walt Disney was too young to enlist, so he volunteered for the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was sent to France and had little contact with the wounded. He spent most of his time drawing. “I found out that inside or outside of an ambulance is as good a place as any to draw,” he said.

While training to be a driver, Disney befriended Ray Kroc, another patriot who was too young to enlist and had chosen to be an ambulance driver instead. In the 1950s, Kroc would become one of the country’s best known businessmen when he turned McDonald’s into a fast-food empire.

But the deepest friendship to develop in the ambulance-driver ranks was between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. They shared not only an occupation but a desire to revolutionize American writing — that would last until the ideological battles of the 1930s tore it apart.

Their relationship is detailed in James McGrath Morris’ new book, “The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War.”

“The world was shattered, and Hemingway and Dos Passos explicitly felt they would have to write about life in a different way,” Morris told The Post.

Dos Passos had poor eyesight that made him unfit for combat, so he joined the volunteer ambulance corps. He had to pick his way through corpse-filled trenches at Verdun, writing in his diary, “Horror is so piled on horror there can be no more.”

Hemingway tried to enlist in the army, but he, too, failed vision tests. He joined the Red Cross and was dispatched to an ambulance unit on the Italian front. He met Dos Passos over a dinner of rabbit stew and red wine at a hospital near Schio.

A mortar cut short Hemingway’s service. He spent the rest of the war in a hospital, where he fell in love with a nurse who inspired the character of Catherine Barkley in “A Farewell to Arms.”

Dos Passos had a very different experience. “[He] carried buckets of body parts and suffered a mustard-gas attack. For him war was senseless and crushing and must be opposed,” Morris said.

After the war they both lived in Paris, spending hours in Left Bank cafes discussing art, books and their desire to revolutionize American literature.

The friendship showed signs of fraying, especially when Dos Passos urged Hemingway to join left-wing causes that Hemingway eschewed. But they continued to spend a lot of time together fishing — and drinking — in Cuba and the Florida Keys.

The break came during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, while staunchly anti-fascist, began to sour on the left-wing government of Spain, whose main ally was the Soviet Union. Hemingway supported the government in its battle against General Franco and the fascists.

When a friend was killed in the war, Dos Passos suspected (with good reason) that the communists had murdered him. Hemingway told him, “Don’t ask questions,” Morris writes.

In 1964, decades after the Spanish Civil War and three years after his own death, Hemingway exacted revenge on Dos Passos with the posthumous publishing of his memoir, “A Moveable Feast.” He depicted Dos Passos as a parasite who lived off rich friends.

As Morris writes, “War forged their friendship, but in the end another war took it from them.”

Letters published that he didn’t want published

This is an article by Alexander Fiske-Harrison as published in The Spectator.

Do we really need 17 volumes of letters especially when Hemingway specifically requested in his will that his personal letters not be published?

‘In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large had been bamboozled, somehow.’ So wrote Raymond Carver in the New York Times in 1981. My, how times have changed.

In the past 12 months alone this reviewer has seen Hemingway elegantly caricatured in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, strut the West End stage thinly disguised as Jake Barnes in an adaptation of his novel The Sun Also Rises (a production on which I was pleasingly credited as ‘bullfighting consultant’), be traduced with neither art nor foundation in Paula McLain’s novel about his first marriage, The Paris Wife, and fascinatingly explicated in the monograph, Beyond Death in the Afternoon by Allen Josephs (who, unlike McLain, knows well the difference between a banderillero and a picador.)

And I wasn’t even in England for most of the year. Orson Welles had it right when he said in his interview with Michael Parkinson in 1974 that although Hemingway ‘was in total eclipse for the last ten years, the sun is rising again critically for him. He’s been dead long enough.’

However, one wonders how long do you have to be dead for, and how good a writer do you have to be, for 17 volumes of collected letters to be too much of a good thing. The first volume begins when the author was seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Indeed, that it is a good thing at all is in serious doubt: in the introduction to this volume Hemingway himself is quoted, from a letter to his executors three years before his death, quite explicitly:

It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct to you not to publish, or consent to the publication by others, of any such letters.

This is followed by some rather sketchy and self-serving argument by the editors — along with his only surviving son, Patrick — that his correspondence is owed to posterity, to scholarship, and that anyway, if he didn’t want them published, he should have burned them. One wonders, in this age of total information, whether just such an argument won’t be used to publish the credit- card statements of, say, Saul Bellow or John Updike, ‘so we can more accurately know the writer as he actually lived, rather than the mask he wrote for himself’. If the academics are after you, God forbid they find your email password after you’re gone.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, there is no denying that the letters are of interest, although the interest is necessarily patchy, given the inclusion of everything from financial instructions to stockbrokers to artistic advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scholars will undoubtedly find the minutiae fascinating, while literary gossips will focus on familiar names such as Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Gertude Stein.

Gertrude Stein and Bumby in Paris. He wrote to gertrude before the falling out.

My own interest was piqued, admittedly, by Hemingway’s discovery of bullfighting and Spain during these years, his reaction to which was the inspiration for my stint as an amateur torero in 2010. So I was intrigued to see quite how little hispanophilia and tauromania impinged on his everyday life and professional thoughts, given what some would have us believe. That a man of an aesthetically sensitive temperament who survived gruesome wounds, psychological and physical, in the first world war should be drawn to the gore of the corrida de toros is not exactly surprising; but those who try to make it central to Hemingway’s intellectual development will be disappointed by this evidence. As A Moveable Feast made clear, someone like Pound, who impressed so hard on his protégé a combination of minimalism and le mot juste, was far more important to the development of Hemingway’s mid-1920s style of ‘omission’ than his infrequent, though devout, hero-worship of matadores including Juan Belmonte, El Niño de la Palma and Maera.

However developmentally intriguing such speculations may be, one still has to ask oneself why one is reading someone’s letters without their permission in the first place. In Hemingway’s case it could be because he developed a style within his métier as powerful, innovative and influential as, say Marlon Brando’s in acting or, indeed, Belmonte’s in toreo. But this is the very thing that is not in the letters. Apart from a few flashes of distinctly mannered rhythms, the style is warmly unpretentious and frequently playful.

What is most striking is how accurately he assessed his own worth and impact; that if he wrote ‘awfully well’ it would ‘last right on through’. It didn’t just last, but changed literature ever after — although not all would say for the better.

And this is not restricted to literature: in July this year, while participating in my 19th ‘running of the bulls’ in Pamplona, I was tripped and trampled by a rampaging herd of drunken tourists, 5,000 of whom were crowded into the half-mile that comprise the world’s most famous encierro. After I was dragged to safety before a group of bulls could add their weight to the melée, I discovered that my saviour was none other than John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson. As we later shared a drink, I half-jokingly remarked: ‘You know it’s you Hemingways’ fault that all of us idiots are here in the first place.’ There are more than a few novelists — Norman Mailer and Elmore Leonard spring immediately to mind — who could say the same thing.

Hemingway and the Russians

With all of the talk about politicians and Russian connections, there has also been in the news recently much discussion of Hemingway’s Russian connections. It’s interesting to me since this information has been around, open, and in all biographies, yet seems to be presented as a new finding. I’m an amateur student of Hemingway and this is what I’ve known:

From 1942 through the end of the war, Hemingway conducted a furtive group, which he in Hemingway self-mocking fashion, called the Crook Factory. It was established with the permission American diplomat Robert Joyce. In essence, Hemingway and buddies observed local happenings that might be tied to German subversion, submarines, surveillance. It was observed by Spruill Braiden, also a diplomat, that Hemingway had a knack for “charismatic convincing, an astonishing ability to recruit to the cause local folks you might understatedly call mixed company, i.e. bartenders, wharf rats, down-at-heel pelota players and former bullfighters, Basque priests, assorted exiled counts and dukes, several Spanish loyalists.”His wife at the time, Martha Gellhorn, wanted him to be more importantly and directly reporting on the war. She saw the “Crook Factory” as an opportunity for Hemingway to go out on his boat and get drunk with his pals. However, this is not exactly news.
Happier days, Hem and Martha

Hemingway was left-leaning. In the Spanish Civil War, he wrote and contributed financially to the opposition to Franco, which just happened to be the leftists and Russians, who were fighting against Franco.
Hem and Martha

Prior to 1935, Hemingway was not particularly politically active or vocal. He was moved to the left when in the aftermath of a hurricane in Florida (he was still in Key West in 1935), he saw World War I vets living nearby and doing construction under Roosevelt’s New Deal. Very bad conditions became worse when the hurricane hit. He observed that “heroes were dead and left half-naked to float in the Atlantic.” He felt the government should be doing more for its people.
on the Pilar

For some reason, the recent writings have put some sinister cast on Hemingway’s activism. In terms of the times, the Russians were our allies in World War II, and there was nothing sinister about it, although Hemingway did get on the FBI watch list as a result. He was not a fan of Fidel Castro, although he did hope for the best and tried to keep a low profile so that he could remain in Cuba unmolested. Ultimately, that turned out to be impossible.

In August 1944, Hemingway was in Paris during the liberation and his ego made him unpopular at times with some. He did join the tank line heading toward Paris in Rambouillet and was present at the liberation of Paris. Although he went to France as a war correspondent for Colliers, he didn’t have to put himself in any danger but he did. There have been criticisms that he took too much control at times, and/or that he had a disproportionate amount of liquor available to him. Andy Rooney, who was also in France covering the allied efforts as a foreign correspondent for Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, disliked him. He called him a “jerk.” Hemingway was like that. Either his bigger than life presentations inspired you and was fun or it turned you off and you were wary.

Still, I’m not quite sure why Hemingway is now portrayed as some sort of collaborator in a bad way. At that time, you were for or against the Nazis, and he was against them. So please read about it and decide for yourself.

SIX THOUSAND LETTERS, FOUR WIVES, AND ONE AMERICAN AUTHOR

This is an amazing feat! Read on!

Dr. Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar, is heading the Hemingway letters project. She and her international team have spent the past few years pouring over letters from Hemingway and then cataloguing them and getting them ready for publication. They are currently working to publish every—yes, you read that correctly—letter written by Ernest Hemingway. The collection will span 17 volumes. The letters include those written to his family, to other authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to the women in his life with whom he was romantically involved or with whom he was simply friends. At Penn State alone there are 13 members on staff helping with this massive task. The team currently has 6,000 letters from all over the world. People still continue to send letters from their own private collections to be published. They are being published in chronological order.

This is very interesting to me. The decision to publish every letter rather than to edit and pick and choose the ones that may seem more significant historically or academically than others, is at the request and insistence of Hemingway’s surviving son, Patrick. Patrick insisted that it was either all or nothing—all letters get published or none get published.

The scholarly investigation has been painstaking and awe-inspiring. Dr. Spanier noted that, for example, finding out whether or not Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was with him in Pamplona for the Fiesta Day San Fermin in 1929 was an important part of the annotating process. It is the intent to clarify every detail that can be extracted from these letters.

Kristin Quesenberry, an editorial and researcher associate, has a favorite letter. “There’s a hilarious letter that showed up in the second volume. He just lists off dozens and dozens of things he hates. There was a research worksheet for every single word in the list and this rant was 100 words or so.”

Dr. Spanier estimated that not a month goes by in which she does not hear from someone who has a copy of a letter. The volume the team is working on right now will follow Hemingway from 1929 through 1931. During those years, he lived in Key West and was married to Pauline. That’s about when A Farewell to Arms came out. This is the fourth volume so the task is about a quarter of the way done if 17 volumes are anticipated.

Wedding to Hadley. And he did write to his mother, despite not liking her much.

Another unique aspect of the project that Dr. Spanier noted is the public’s continued interest in Hemingway. The letters have even been featured in an article in Vanity Fair. A Cambridge University press recently advised Dr. Spanier that they picked up the first volume as one of their top holiday gift picks for the season.

Emily Knell of The Daily Collegian, wrote an article from which I’m quoting much of the above from. She noted that, “Public interest could be due to the letters’ ability to by-pass the macho myth surrounding Hemingway and focus more on his life and his work. However, it could also be due to the fact that Hemingway led a life full of love—enough for four wives, adventures, and friendships with people like Gertrude Stein.”

This is me speaking: I don’t know if I’ll get through all 17 volumes, but what a delight and what a treasure-trove of amazing information directly from Hemingway. I think you’ll get to see the blustering side; the sensitive side; empathic side; the funny side; and at times, perhaps, the ugly side. What a treat!

Hem in Rapallo or The Cat in the Rain

Plaque at Hotel Riviera, Rapallo — The Cat in the Rain writing place

Please forgive this reprint from 2012. I re-read it and felt it was worthy of a second look. I added some new media. Thank you all! Best, Christine

I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back I can feel… I want to have a kitty… I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles.

The Cat In The Rain, Ernest Hemingway

I never take vacations. Seriously, never. (I do now! Didn’t then. C) But last Spring, I decided, when nursing my lame broken clavicle from a fall off my horse, that I needed to see Italy soon, before something else broke and I wasn’t able to stroll up all those hills to all those hill towns.

I’ve avoided Tuscany for years because I found it repetitive to hear everyone talking about Tuscany, like they’d single-handedly discovered the place. But I succumbed when I saw a photo of the skyline of San Gimignano. It was romantic and lovely. I booked the trip

So I was strolling in Rapallo, after the Tuscan portion of the trip, and what do I see but a sign, about one third obscured by shrubbery proclaiming that this was the hotel in which Hemingway wrote The Cat in the Rain. I hadn’t gone looking for it—although I should have—but there it was. When I read the note displayed proudly in front of the hotel, I envisioned Hem and Hadley seeing that view, just as I was seeing it.

The days I was there were all gorgeous, sunny and warm with sparkling deep blue water. The day Hem wrote about was dank, gloomy, and stormy

I then had to run out to reread The Cat in the Rain, a short story I’d always liked.

You can read this story literally: a lonely wife seeking attention from her dullard husband and asking to retrieve and keep the cat stuck outside under the park bench, seeking sanctuary from the buckets of rain. Or you can go further. Analyses range from the sexual (Husband dry and desiccated; wife wanting the dripping kitty cat: need I say more?) to the psychological (wife who feels abandoned; husband/psuedo father figure who is withholding; cat as child figure) to the political (the Americans are unhappy while the Italians appreciate the nature outside and the sacrifices made during the war; the Italian concierge listens to the whining nameless American wife while her American husband just reads blindly. By the end of the story, wifey is known only as the American girl–no longer even the American wife. She’s been demoted further.)

I think the wife deserves a name–perhaps Kate. (And, by the way, do we know if the big tortoise cat brought to Kate by the kind Italian chambermaid is the cat under the bench getting drenched or a substitute cat?)

I didn’t expect to discuss The Cat in the Rain in this post but since seeing the plaque in Rapallo, I was drawn to it. So what do you think? Do you love that story; hate it; is it clear to you what it’s about? I’m pretty literal and read it as the lonely, a bit childish wife, trying to get attention from her distracted husband and wanting something to nurture. I just read another analysis by a guy who thinks the wife is just a brat, end of analysis. But heck, that’s the fun of the short story. A lot is packed into a small package. Kind of like my beagle. (My beagle, Vilulah, has since passed away but I still have two large dogs ready to fill in for her. She was the best.)

P.S. See the link below. I just found this sacrilegious but hilarious take on Hem’s whole life. beware obscenities. If you can’t deal with that, please skip. it is laden with them. But still so funny. Really, it’s not to be missed if you love Hemingway.

http://historicalscandals.wordpress.com/tag/adriana-ivancich/

New Book: During War, Hemingway Was Good at Being Hemingway

David Hendricks published a review of a new book by Terry Mort, Hemingway At War. He found much to admire. I’ll quote directly from the review:

“The two key words in Terry Mort’s new book—“Hemingway” and “War”—carry equal weight. Although Hemingway is the hook for most readers, Mort’s book has long stretches about World War II that have little to do with the Nobel Prize winning novelist who was also a correspondent in Europe for Colliers Magazine. That’s not a bad thing. Mort’s buildup to the D-Day invasion at Normandy and the allied forces liberating Paris and their deadly struggle to cross into Germany is fascinating.

“The Hemingway narrative in the book starts with his romance and marriage to another war correspondence, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife. Hemingway himself engaged in the war while living in Cuba as World War II began, patrolling the Cuban shores to hunt down German U-boats. This period was fictionalized in Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. Gellhorn left Hemingway in Cuba to report news in Europe, a move he ultimately followed in 1944 in time for D-Day. Mort alternates between the war and Hemingway’s exploits as a war correspondent.

“He also follows the novelist as Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn dissolves and he romances Mary Welsh, yet another foreign correspondent who became his fourth wife.

Martha and Hem shortly after their marriage

“Mort does not idealize Hemingway and the main point of the book’s first half is to demonstrate that Hemingway was a poor war correspondent, at least in comparison with others such as Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite.

“He did show bravery in certain episodes and suffered several head injuries. Hemingway actually landed with allied troops on D-Day at Omaha Beach, certainly a courageous act.

“Hemingway At War, demonstrates a trend that seems to have no end—that as meritorious as some of Hemingway’s novels are, it is his vigorous life and outsized personality, more than his books, that provide continuous grist for interesting history books.”

So, I would say that Mr. Hendricks enjoyed the book and feels that it added to the Hemingway legend and full involvement in the second war.

Kirkus felt it was too short on facts. So take a look and you decide.

Hemingway At War: Hemingway’s Adventures as a World War II Correspondent, by Terry Mort.

Write Drunk, Edit Sober

This was a famous saying from Hemingway but science is now backing it up. While it’s a cool saying, in reality, it was pretty rare that Hemingway wrote drunk. While writing, he tended to follow a very rigid schedule of getting up early, working until the early afternoon and then stopping. He also liked to stop writing only when he knew what was happening next in his story or novel, so he could start with a jolt the following day. When once it was suggested that he wrote drunk, his response was “Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he has had his first one. Besides, who in the hell would mix more than one martini at a time?”

An Australian blog, The Expert Editor, recently wrote about the science behind writing drunk and editing sober. Using a variety of studies, the author concluded that at a fairly low threshold of alcohol, the brain actually is stimulated in creative ways the sober brain might not be. “The part Hemingway got wrong however is that at the point of legit drunkenness, the quality of one’s writing goes south pronto. The author of For Whom the Bell Tolls may have built up an elephantine tolerance for alcohol to the point where he could drink a fifth of whiskey and still crank out prose that would be studied decades later.”

Perhaps drinking after writing.. This particular photo is while on a safari.

But again, while there is no question that Hemingway did become an alcoholic, he was not writing his masterpieces drunk. he took writing way too seriously for that. He might drink later in the day, but not while he was creating.

The science seems to suggest that because alcohol suppresses certain responses and makes you less focused because it decreases your working memory, you start to care less about what is happening around you and enables you to “think outside the box.” Creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between preexisting ideas. Apparently, the idea is to be tipsy but not drunk, at which point your focus becomes too diminished to hit that creative synapse.

The article goes on to note that it would be imprudent to edit while drunk. Try editing while having coffee. Coffee has the opposite function of alcohol because caffeine provides more working memory so that as we focus on a task we can make those changes. Coffee also helps you to ignore distractions while editing your own work.

Hemingway used to edit as he went along but then he would put it aside and look at it afresh. For those of you who are writers, you are likely familiar with rereading your own writing so many times that you just have no perspective anymore and your eyes are hopping over edits that should be made. Sticking your manuscript in a drawer for a while is not a bad idea. Things you never saw before all of a sudden jump out at you. What you thought was clever now seems contrived and your witty dialogue feels forced.

So, there you have it. Hemingway backed up by science, ye of little faith.