A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning how to relate my trip to Ireland in May to my Hemingway obsession and I just came across an article about a new biography of Maeve Binchy, the great Irish novelist who cultivated the cozy neighborhood story to high art and who passed away recently. She wrote many novels, usually about the west country of Ireland which is where I was. Her writing style, her topics, and her resolutions are/were about as far from Hemingway as you can get but the article was fun and began with a famous Hemingway belief.
Dingle Peninsula
“It was famously laid down by Ernest Hemingway that the first condition for a writer is to have an unhappy childhood. I assumed that Maeve Binchy was the exception to the Hemingway principle, as she always spoke about the idyllic nature of her childhood.”
So, I qualify! My childhood is a story for some other longer post, probably in some other blog that focuses on Dickensian beginnings. I was born in NJ; my parents died 5 months apart when I was seven; the court became involved, and the story goes downhill from there in certain ways but also uphill in other ways.
AngerMy life falls apart when I’m awake!
Hem in some ways had a good childhood in the sense that his family was large; his father took him hunting and fishing; and there were family vacations at a lake in Michigan yearly that formed the basis of many of the short stories. Hem got his love of the outdoors and nature while on the lake in Michigan with many friends and family. However, Hem’s relationship with his mother was always a struggle and his father was a more shadowy figure in Hem’s life, who ultimately killed himself. His mother later sent the gun to Ernest as a gift. Huh? .
So tell me about a great writer who had a great Rockwellian childhood! I’d like to hear about it.
Who knew that David Soul was a Hemingway fan. I am not sure exactly how this will be filmed but I’m always eager to view anything with a Hemingway connection.
I’ll be posting about the Hemingway/Fitzgerald connection in a few weeks. However, this is timely.
I just read the above review in the New York Times. I’m a few weeks behind on my reading but this is the review of a play depicting a last meeting between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It’s fictional and takes place in 1937, about 4 years before Fitzgerald died of a heart attack and Hem was working fairly well around that time. There is a comment that Hemingway is “slyly” trying to undermine Scott’s comeback. I don’t know why so many commentators feel the need to emphasize–unfairly and incorrectly, in my opinion–Hemingway’s bluster and dominance. He was all that but I see little effort to equally point out his generosity and kindness. And while there is no question that he felt literary rivalry with Scott, there is little if any evidence that he tried to undermine him or sabotage his success. While he took a swipe at Scott in A Moveable Feast, let’s recall that Hem never edited or finished it. It was published post-humously and edited first by Mary and a subsequent edition by his grandson. That whole section may have gone out or been amended significantly had Hemingway lived to complete it himself.
Superman
Anyway, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald continue to be a draw and to fascinate the next generation, perhaps equally for their lives and their legend as for their writing.
This documentary is tracking Hem’s early years and the time spent on Walloon Lake in particular. The Lake in some ways, as the documentary believes, served as his muse for many of the early short stories.
As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
Ernest Hemingway
I just returned from Ireland where I finished reading a book called Paris Without End: The True Storyof Hemingway’s First Wife. I loved it.
Irish Coast near Dingle
I’ve read at least five Hemingway biographies as well as the wonderful Bernice Kertin’s book called The Hemingway Women. I nevertheless learned a great deal from this wonderful book by Gioia Diliberto. The insights were fascinating.
As I finished the book, I thought about the irony of Hadley’s pain about being what she called “written out of” The Sun Also Rises. Everybody appeared in some form or another in the book (Duff Twysden as Brett; Pat Guthrie as Mike Campbell; Robert Cohen was Harold Loeb; Bill Gorton was Don Ogden Stewart; and Hem was Jake–maybe) and she was nowhere to be seen. It hurt her, although she made light of it.
Hadley
Hem did dedicate that book to her and her son, still, she was nowhere in evidence. The irony is that the last good writing that Hemingway did was A Moveable Feast, which was, in essence, a love poem in prose to Hadley. While some of the past may have been romanticized, there never was any question in his mind that he did his best writing and was his best self with her and never was that again in his heart. It is said that a page of A Moveable Feast was found in his typewriter at the locale of his suicide.
All over Ireland! Guinness for Strength
Having said all of the above, I thought about whether there was a Hemingway /Ireland connection. There is not a whole lot of Hemingway in Ireland, but he does have a strong connection in his friendship with James Joyce, who, of course, is the quintessential Irish writer and poet. In their Paris days, they engaged in quite a number of drunken sprees, although Hemingway’s drinking at the time was more excessive social drinking than what it became. James Joyce was a small, bespeckled man, and Hemingway was a hulking, large fellow. At more than one bar, Joyce, heavily intoxicated, would start to pick some fight verbally and, when physical threats were made, he’d wave his hand and say, “Handle it Hemingway.” Hemingway was know to have assisted James Joyce back to his Paris flat where James Joyce’s wife would answer the door with great disgust and say, “Well, if it isn’t the two great writers, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.”
James Joyce
What I do think Hemingway would appreciate about Ireland is the natural beauty, the outdoorsy lifestyle, the fishing, and the rugged coast that has been kept rugged.
Pony on Aran Island
My own experience was that there was little affectation; the food was simple, fresh and terrific; and a conversation was always to be had if you simply began one with someone sitting next to you.
Hem never got over enjoying sitting down with local people and talking, whether it was in China, Key West, Cuba or Ketchum, Idaho. While on a trek to China with Martha, at her instigation, he was in his element immediately talking to people just riding bikes or sitting on the dock, while she found it all too dirty and too rustic.
Martha And Hem
I’m not a beer drinker, so I didn’t lift a Guinness in Hem’s honor, but I did down some wonderful scotch and soda in his memory. While much has been made of Hemingway’s macho image, Gioia Diliberto makes the point that each of his books really was a romantic love story at its heart. Brett and Jake had a love that could never be totally fulfilled; Catherine and Frederic left everything behind to escape into Switzerland in the hope of making their life work; Maria and Robert Jordan made one of the greatest love stories ever told. Consequently, it’s all very fitting that Ireland, the land of romance and high drama, has a Hemingway connection.
Me at the Cliffs of Moher! Freezing in June!Me in an Irish restaurant
The Sun Also Rises as a ballet? Sure why not. For Whom the Bell Tolls would make a hell of an opera, I think. And I’d love to see a remake of The Sun Also Rises. Brett: Blake Lively. Jake Barnes: Jake Gyllenhall. Robert Cohn: Matt Damon. Mike Campbell: Jude Law. On my first read, I was not sure what all the fuss was about. Bunch of aimless drunks. Yes, Hemingway did a good job with the settings but, to me at age 19, the dialogue was a bit too : I am good. I am cold. When I returned to it years later, the light went on in a big way. I got that it was about dreams, loss, death, defeat, and hope. And love. Always love.
What was it thought of then? Below is the NY Times review of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
October 31, 1926
Marital Tragedy
THE SUN ALSO RISES By Ernest Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: “You are all a lost generation.” This is the novel for which a keen appetite was stimulated by Mr. Hemingway’s exciting volume of short stories. “In Our Time.” The clear objectivity and the sustained intensity of the stories , and their concentration upon action in the present moment, seemed to point to a failure to project a novel in terms of the same method, yet a resort to any other method would have let down the reader’s expectations. It is a relief to find that “The Sun Also Rises” maintains the same heightened, intimate tangibility as the shorter narratives and does it in the same kind of weighted, quickening prose.
Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily have become “a spectacle with unexplained horrors,” and disciplined it to a design which gives full value to its Dionysian, all but uncapturable, elements. On the face of it, he has simply gathered, almost at random, a group of American and British expatriates from Paris, conducted them on a fishing expedition, and exhibited them against the background of a wild Spanish fiesta and bull-fight. The characters are concisely indicated. Much of their inherent natures are left to be betrayed by their own speech, by their apparently aimless conversation among themselves. Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford’s records of talk. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks.
The story is told in the first person, as if by one Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent in Paris. This approach notoriously invites digression and clumsiness. The way Mr. Hemingway plays this hard-boiled Jake is comparable to Jake’s own evocations of the technique of the expert matador handling his bull. In fact, the bull-fight within the story bears two relations to the narrative proper. It not only serves to bring the situation to a crisis, but it also suggests the design which Mr. Hemingway is following. He keeps goading Jake, leading him on, involving him in difficulties, averting serious tragedy for him, just as the matador conducts the bull through the elaborate pattern of danger.
The love affair of Jake and the lovely, impulsive Lady Ashley might easily have descended into bathos. It is an erotic attraction which is destined from the start to be frustrated. Mr. Hemingway has such a sure hold on his values that he makes an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative of it. Jake was wounded in the war in a manner that won for him a grandiose speech from the Italian General. Certainly Jake is led to consider his life worse than death. When he and Brett (Lady Ashley) fall in love, and know, with that complete absence of reticences of the war generation, that nothing can be done about it, the thing might well have ended there. Mr. Hemingway shows uncanny skill in prolonging it and delivering it of all its implications.
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of “The Sun Also Rises.” It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.
Hemingway’s records from Cuba have been recorded digitally. The originals are in the Finca Vigia Collection at the JFK Library, Hemingway Collection, in Boston.
