Play and enjoy courtesy of Quincy Perkins, of Key West, Florida! Lovely look at part of the home, the cats and a bit of the cats’ history, and Quincy’s own dark humor and take on it all as a kid growing up with its aura nearby. A glittering Gem. 5 minutes of fascination. Thank you, Quincy and his creative colleagues! Best, Christine
Author: Christine Whitehead
Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Politics that split them up.
My friend Trudy found this interesting Article about the writers of Paris in the ’20s. I edited it to shorten but I think you will enjoy it. Photos added by me.
Best, Christine
Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound’s friendship spanned continents—and ideologies.
Michael Hogue
Ernest Hemingway, fresh off his marriage to Hadley Richardson, his first wife, arrived in Paris in 1921. Paris was a playground for writers and artists, offering respite from the radical politics spreading across Europe. Sherwood Anderson supplied Hemingway with a letter of introduction to Ezra Pound. The two litterateurs met at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and struck up a friendship that would shape the world of letters.
They frolicked the streets of Paris as bohemians, joined by rambunctious and disillusioned painters, aesthetes, druggies, and drinkers. They smoked opium, inhabited salons, and delighted in casual soirées, fine champagnes, expensive caviars, and robust conversations about art, literature, and the avant-garde. Pound was, through 1923, exuberant, having fallen for Olga Rudge, his soon-to-be mistress, a young concert violinist with firm breasts, shapely curves, midnight hair, and long eyebrows and eyelashes. She exuded a kind of mystical sensuality unique among eccentric highbrow musicians; Pound found her irresistible.
Pound was known for his loyalty to friends. Although he had many companions besides Hemingway—among them William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Pablo Picasso, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, William Carlos Williams, Walter Morse Rummel, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, and Malcolm Cowley—Hemingway arguably did more than the others to reciprocate Pound’s favors, at least during the Paris years when he promoted Pound as Pound promoted others.
Pound edited Hemingway’s work, stripping his prose of excessive adjectives. Hemingway remarked that Pound had taught him “to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.”
Pound, however, grew disillusioned with Paris, where his friends were gravitating toward socialism and communism. Paris, he decided, was not good for his waning health. Hemingway himself had been in and out of Paris, settling for a short time in Toronto. In 1923, accompanied by their wives, Pound and Hemingway undertook a walking tour of Italy. The fond memories of this rejuvenating getaway inspired Pound to return to Italy with his wife Dorothy Shakespear in 1924. They relocated, in 1925, to a picturesque hotel in Rapallo, a beautiful sea town in the province of Genoa.
Young Ezra
The move to Italy also effectively terminated Pound’s glory years in Paris, about which Hemingway wrote affectionately:
More than anything else, Italian politics—and the rise of fascism—damaged Hemingway’s regard for Pound, who became a zealous supporter of Mussolini and a reckless trafficker in conspiracy theories.
Hemingway offered Pound some money, sensing that money was needed, but Pound declined it. 
The falling out was no secret, and other writers took sides. William Carlos Williams wrote to Pound in 1938, saying, “It is you, not Hemingway, in this case who is playing directly into the hands of the International Bankers.”
Archibald MacLeish helped to orchestrate Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s, (A mental asylum Pound had been committed to. See below as to how he got there.) drafting a letter to the government on Pound’s behalf that included Hemingway’s signature, along with those of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. A year later Hemingway provided a statement of support for Pound to be used in a court hearing regarding the dismissal of an indictment against Pound.
Hemingway awoke on the morning of July 2, 1961, put a 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun to his head, and, alone in the foyer of his home, blew his brains out. He was 61. Pound’s friends and family didn’t tell him about Hemingway’s death, but a careless nurse did, and Pound reacted hysterically. The older of the two, Pound, at 72, was free from St. Elizabeth’s, where he’d spent 12 solemn years. He had returned to his beloved Italy to finish out his long and full life. In the autumn of 1972, he died peacefully in his sleep in Venice, the day after his birthday, which he’d spent in the company of friends.
Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty.
ME here: I may have over-edited re: how Ezra ended up in a psych facility. Ezra Pound was closely aligned with the Fascists in Italy. He was later imprisoned in Pisa by the liberating American forces in 1945 on charges of treason. In Pisa, he purportedly was placed in a small 6 x 6 cell and had a mental breakdown. He was ultimately sent to St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C. for 12 years. Friends including Hemingway sent money and petitions for his release which finally happened. While most acknowledged that he was a bit “crazy,” most felt he was far from any sort of danger to anyone including to his country. Once released he returned to Italy and died in Venice eleven years after Hemingway’s death. Christine
The Styles of the Novelists
I just read an article by Kevin Knudson, which appeared on April 30 in Forbes Magazine. It was a book review of Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, by Ben Blatt. Noting that famous novelists write in their own particular style: Hemingway and the short sentences, Henry James and the longer ones, Virginia Woolf in the free-flowing stream of consciousness, Mr. Blatt, who’s a scientist, wanted to determine if you could figure out who the author was just by examining the pattern of his or her words.
The first chapter tackles the rule that all of us writers learned early, i.e. to use adverbs sparingly. Blatt took it to the scientific level. He took a corpus of novels written by a broad spectrum of famous writers and counts the “LY” adverbs. Here’s what you’ve got:
Author Books looked at Adverbs per 10,000 words
Hemingway 10 80
Mark Twain 13 81
Amy Tan 6 83
Steinbeck 19 93
Vonnegut 14 101
Updike 26 102
Rushdie 9 101
King 51 105
Dickens 20 108
Virginia Woolf 9 116
Blatt goes on to determine if each author is uniformly efficient or does it vary from book to book. Bringing it home to this blog, the question is: Hemingway the most efficient or just the most efficient on average. It turns out that William Faulkner wrote three books with a lower adverb rate (As I Lay Dying, The Sound And The Fury, The Unvanquished), than Hemingway’s lowest count, To Have and Have Not.
Blatt also looks at the number of exclamation points per 100,000 words. Elmore Leonard once said, “You are allowed no more than 2 or 3 per 100,000 words.” He actually used 49 per 100,000, but that still made him “one of the stingiest.” Tom Wolfe used 929 per 100,000. But the “winner” is James Joyce’s 1105 per 100,000. Most clichés? James Patterson the highest; Jane Austin the lowest. In addition, Blatt looks at what words an author uses more often than the average. He set out the following requirements to judge this issue:
- The word must be used in at least half of the author’s books.
- It must be used at a rate of at least once per 100,000 words.
- It must be obscure in the sense that it is not commonly used.
- It is not a proper noun.
Based on those criteria, Ray Bradbury’s favorite words are: icebox, dammit, exhaled. Nabokov’s favorite word was, in fact, mauve.
So, some scientists have really buckled down and used their training to illuminate, and to have a bit of fun! Interesting data that’s not quite trivia.
Love,
Christine
How to Tell if You are in a Hemingway Novel
This is part of a series that Mallory Ortberg has done (how to tell if you are in a Bronte novel, etc.) I read it in THE TOAST. I found it hilarious. If you don’t, you probably don’t read enough Hemingway. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Best, Christine
1. Everyone you know respects you. This disgusts you.
2. The door is white and the day is hot. This pleases you.
3. A Jewish man believes you are his friend. This disgusts you.
4. You are a man. A man! A man is a man like a tree is a tree.
5. A Greek man is shouting incomprehensibly at you. This is why you are drunk.
6. You have lost something in a war. This is why you are drunk.
7. A woman is looking at you. She is wearing her hat in a manner you find unbearably independent and mannish. You despise her.
8. You are standing on top of a mountain. The mountain admires you for climbing it. You do not care what the mountain thinks of you, and you light a cigar. The cigar admires you for smoking it. You sneer casually at the sun. Somewhere there is a white door.
9. You are shooting a large animal but thinking about a woman. You cannot shoot her. This infuriates you.
10. You met a homosexual once in Paris. It took you two years snowshoeing across the backcountry in Michigan to recover.
11. You have said goodbye to a young girl with a white face on a black train. You are ready to die.
12. Waiter bring me another rum
13. You hate every single one of your friends. You have no friends. You are alone at sea. How you hate the sea, but how you respect the fish inside of it. How you hate the kelp. How indifferent you are to the coral.
14. Your stomach hurts; that is how you know you are alive.
15. You are standing in a river and something is coming to kill you. You will welcome it with open arms and a booming laugh when it comes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
