Author: Christine Whitehead

The below well-written article by Lyz Lenz captures how Hemingway sneaks up on you.   I too started out not liking the clipped sentences and actually disliked his subject matter. As I became fascinated by him as a persona, I went back to read his works. And there it was. I still hate some of his topics but I realized that at its heart, his stories and novels are really just about life and love, getting it, losing it, coping with both. He doesn’t sugar coat it and leaves it raw, and yet therein is its power. I shortened the article slightly. Well said, Ms. Lenz.

How Ernest Hemingway taught me to love baseball
By Lyz Lenz | Dec 2, 2016
In college, when I began dating the man who would become my husband, he told me that his family loved baseball.

”

To understand us, you have to understand baseball,” Dave once told me over a dinner of burgers at our favorite diner. I shrugged.

The second year we were dating, I started my senior year of college. One of the classes I signed up for was on Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I loved Faulkner, whose wild characters and dense prose often made me laugh out loud. But I cared nothing for Hemingway. I hated his female characters and the cold feel of his short sentences. But I couldn’t take a class on one without the other, so I signed up.

We began that semester with Hemingway’s short stories, starting with the collection “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and then moving onto “In Our Time.” I was surprised at how often sports were on the periphery of his writing — the depressed prize fighter in “The Killers,” the match fixing in “Fifty Grand” and hunting in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

It was something I’d never noticed before, how consumed with physical action his characters were, how sport gave them an identity, whether real or imagined, that could in turn devastate and define who they were.

I told Gary I was reading Hemingway.

“Oh, he’s my favorite author,” he said on one of my visits. I was shocked. I didn’t think he read anything besides books on management and Mickey Mantle biographies. He told me his favorite book was “Old Man and the Sea,” and I rolled my eyes.

“The Three-Day Blow” is everything I hate in a story — boys going into the woods to talk about women and get drunk. But when I read it that fall, I was 21 and in love with a boy who loved baseball. Reading the story again, I saw baseball in a way I’d never seen it before. Upset over a breakup, Nick Adams, a character who became an alter-ego for Hemingway, goes to a cabin with his friend Bill. They get drunk on whiskey and talk about women, but that topic contains mystery and heartbreak. So, they talk baseball. Alternating between love and disillusionment for the sport, their words become metaphors for the other things they can’t bring themselves to say. When Nick declares “…baseball is a game for louts” he might as well be saying “love is a game for louts.”

Baseball  gives the two boys a common language and experience.

When all else failed, baseball was a way to be part of something together — some way to touch and connect with something great, to believe that whatever else fails, here is a thing that mattered, a place where winning was possible, and hope always prevailed.

That same semester, during Thanksgiving break, as I began to write my final paper for the class on baseball, Hemingway and love, Dave asked me to marry him under the stars while we danced as Carole King’s “Far Away” played from the CD player on his Mazda.

Lyz Lenz’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Marie Claire, Pacific Standard, Buzzfeed and the LA Review of Books. She lives in Iowa, but you can find her on Twitter @lyzl

It is the end of an era in Cuba. Although Fidel Castro has not recently been active in governing Cuba, he still was a force and an icon.

Hemingway loved his Cuban home. From his patio at night, he could see the lights of Havana twinkling in the distance. When asked why he didn’t live in America, he said – and I am paraphrasing – “if you can find a place in the States that has this climate, this food, these people, I’ll happily move.” He loved the Cuban people, baseball, the food, the drink, fishing.

Hemingway did have a run in with Batista’s forces shortly before he was forced to leave Cuba. They had invaded his home – why, I don’t recall at the moment – and when his loyal old spaniel, Black Dog, tried to defend, a soldier hit him in the head with the butt of his gun and Black Dog perished. Hemingway never recovered from that loss and it increased the depression that he was already suffering. Black Dog lived for Hemingway. When Hemingway was away, he’d pine and barely eat and sit on the front steps, waiting for master’s return. When Hemingway took a walk in the gardens, as he did most mornings, Black Dog and an ever-loyal Boise, one of his favorite cats, would follow along. When Hemingway would write, Black Dog was at his feet and wouldn’t move until he stopped writing for the day.

As Cuba became a more perilous place to live, Hemingway, who had a nodding acquaintance personally with Castro, felt with a sense of foreboding that his time in Cuba was nearing an end. As protesters roamed the streets with signs saying “Yanqui No”, he, and particularly Mary, his wife, came to realize that their time was limited. It came faster than they expected when on a trip to America, Hemingway was advised that he and Mary could not return. That’s a whole other story for another day.

Whatever your opinion about Castro, he leveraged the status of Little Cuba into a country that was noticed by all. The Bay of Pigs is legendary. The U.S., and particularly John F. Kennedy, suffered a stinging loss that haunted Kennedy greatly. This disaster was later somewhat balanced out by the psychological and real victory in the Cuban missile crisis. As most of you probably recall, Nikita Khrushchev backed down and did not put missiles in Cuba–within launching reach of the U.S. Castro’s death does indeed mark the end of an era.

This is the book trailer for my new book published a month ago by Kindle’s private press. Thank you more than I can say for reading my blog, for loving/enjoying Hemingway, and for just plain still reading. Love and happy holiday season, Christine

The most famous writer of the 20^th century, Ernest Hemingway, had such an eventful life that he created enough myths to keep his story alive well into this century.  There are whole industries based on the Hemingway image:  look alike contests held in Key West; bad Hemingway writing contests; drinks popularized by him; Harry’s Bar and Grill in Venice; the running of the bulls in Pamplona; and that’s just to name a few.  All of the foregoing are efforts to have a connection with what he did and what he was.

He had many unattractive traits along with his more positive ones.  His excesses are well-known and his granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, who was born after his death, has made it her vocation to educate the public about mental illness and the need to avoid the destructive patterns that depression and alcoholism create for everyone around them.  In her book “When Out Came the Sun” was published, she said she considered it a corrective “to the romanticizing of hard drinking and writing and living this macho existence, which I’m sure, if my grandfather could do it again, he would choose a different way.”

I just read an article which delineates some of the above and which reviews a new book on Hemingway by James M. Hutchisson, called Hemingway: A New Life.  He quotes Hemingway’s brother Leicester as saying “he loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was good anymore.”  Hutchisson’s searches for the roots of Hemingway’s discontent.  He believes casual drinking that evolved into lifetime alcoholism and too much success at too young an age contributed.  Hemingway developed a very competitive streak and his high standards created an almost suffocating anxiety in him, says Hutchisson.  When critics savaged “Across the River and Into the Woods”, published in 1950, Hemingway felt it was unjust and it really bothered him deeply, tapping into his insecurities and anxieties. He particularly hated that James Jones’ “From Here To Eternity” was getting raves.

Toward the end of the 1950’s, Hemingway’s health and mental health truly began to fail.  Two plane crashes in 1954 hadn’t helped his health.  Years of drinking and failing to take care of his weight, blood pressure and exercise didn’t help either.  After shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic, his short term memory was shot and writing even a thank you note was impossible.

For those interested in a fresh look, check it out.  It’s published by Pennsylvania State University Press.