Ernest Loves Agnes: and the early romance continues

The newly announced name is a tribute to the romance — real and imagined — of young Ernest Hemingway and nurse Agnes von Kurowsky that grew during the author’s stay as a soldier in an American Red Cross hospital in Milan during World War I. “It’s about falling in love with Italy as much as anything,” Lajuenesse said. “It’s a sweet… bittersweet story.”

Hemingway’s first big romance and the basis of the love story in A Farewell to Arms is immortalized in a new Seattle restaurant. the Romance lives.

1918 Nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway, Milan, Italy. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

What’s Percolating in the Hemingway World?

I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds and google alerts that keep me posted on all things Hemingway. So here are a few random developments.

1) Mariel Hemingway is producing a movie of Hemingway’s last book, A Moveable Feast, finished after his death and published initially in 1964. (Hemingway died in 1961).

2) Andy Garcia is wrapping up his movie about Hemingway and his boat captain, Gregorio Fuentes.

3) Coming out in the Fall is a possible Oscar contender called GENIUS, about

Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins (played by Colin Firth) and Tom Wolfe (played by Michael Fassbinder). Dominic West plays Hemingway. All Brits playing Americans.

4) The Cuban government is working on how much access to permit to the Finca Vigia. Right now, the public can peer through windows but cannot go in.

5)Thomasville is having a Hemingway Outdoor furniture collection.

6) A man named Robert Wheeler spent a winter four years ago in Paris, retracing Hemingway’s time there in the early 1920s. He took a camera. And now he’s publishing a book, due out April 7. I can’t wait to see it.

Furniture from the Thomasville Hemingway collection

7) Before announcing the winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, Beacon Press director Helene Atwan, administrator of the prize, made note of a major gift from the Hemingway family. The cash prize attached to the award was doubled this year to $20,000. Patrick, Hemingway’s remaining son, was on hand to assist in distributing the awards which took place at the JFK Library, home of he Hemingway Collection.

El Papa Doble

“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”

And this is a surprise?? Fun reading.

Hemingway and Paris, on the trail

Ernest Hemingway’s Paris springs to life via cafes, brasseries, more

Have fun reading about one writer/fan and his visit to Paris tracing Hemingway’s steps. When I went last year, I did a lot of that but this fellow did it better and more systematically. It always makes me sad to read Hemingway’s words that Paris never was the same again but as he also noted, it changes as we change.

Hemingway and Formula 1

Ernest Hemingway once said that there only existed three sports: mountaineering, bull fighting and motorsport. The rest, he said, were just games.

Without the fear of death, the sport to Hemingway was not such a challenge. Read more as well as about the decline of Formula 1.

Mary Welsh Hemingway, Hemingway’s Widow

Minn. native Mary Hemingway, wife of Ernest, memorialized in Bemidji

Mary was Hemingway’s fourth wife and his widow. She took a fair amount of abuse. I was never certain if she truly loved him that much or if she loved being Mrs. Ernest Hemingway that much. She survived his infatuation with Adriana Ivancich, his bad behavior and heavy drinking that was the precursor to that bad behavior and she helped as ill health hit both of them, but particularly Hemingway.

Hemingway seemed to like all sorts of women but the kind that he married was level headed and smart. He never left Pauline for Jane Kendall Mason, beautiful though she was, as she was emotionally unstable. Hadley, Pauline, Martha, and Mary were all stable, intelligent women. All but Hadley were journalists in their own right. All but Martha were very deferential to Hemingway and perhaps that’s why he always said that was the one marriage he regretted.

Anyway, Mary is being honored in her hometown in MN. All of the other three wives strangely were from St. Louis.

Mary's book about Papa — Mary’s book about Papa

Geniuses at Work: Hem and Fitzgerald funny letters

In the early 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald sent Ernest Hemingway the first draft of the novel that would go on to become his magnum opus, ‘The Great Gatsby.’ What followed was one of the most incredible correspondences in the history of American literature. If you’ve never seen these letters before, you’ve got to check them out right now! They offer some remarkable insight into one of the greatest novels of all time.

You may be baffled, as you read letter one, by Hemingway’s arrogance. READ ON. Really fun and funny by two writers at the top of their powers and who at least at that point, genuinely liked and admired the other’s skills and persona.

Possible New Filming Location in Cuba

Hemingway's livingroom — Vigia Finca, Cuba. Hemingway’s Living Room, 60 feet long.

One Stateside filmmaker who recently took advantage of Cuba’s retro look is Bob Yari, who spent a month shooting his Ernest Hemingway biopic “Papa” entirely on location in and near Havana in March and April of 2014.

The old man and the sea — written in Cuba about Cuba

Now that Cuba has opened a bit, more opportunities for on location filming is possible. The new biopic about Hem’s declining years was just filmed and it sounds like the producer was able to use the actual Cuban locations. However, more of this should be possible in the future.

Hemingway helps with Writer’s Block

Hemingway brings to life the pleasures of a warm and friendly café, in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.

Where he wrote in the 1920's in Paris — Where he wrote in the 1920’s in Paris

A Hemingway Takeoff: Guest Blogger Will Tincher

A fellow Hemingway fan, Will TIncher, has written a work of about 66,000 words exploring a fictional setting that follows Hemingway as an old man on a road trip with his aspiring baseball player neighbor, just before the actual death of Hemingway. He reconstructed possible conversations from all of Hemingway’s works and tried to show the sum of the man at the end of an incredible life. The text also offers a parallel narrative of the young ball player’s future experiences in the Vietnam War. Take a look!

Will TIncher’s Excerpt