The Sun Also Rises: now in the public domain.Also interesting discussion of copyrights. Best to all, stay warm northeast! Best, Christine

You might not have realized, but at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, a fantastic thing happened!

No, it wasn’t just the ending of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 — at the stroke of midnight, a whole wave of Intellectual Property (IP) entered the Public Domain!

“Winnie the Pooh”, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, poetry by Dorothy Parker and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway have now joined Sherlock Holmes, the works of William Shakespeare, Cthulhu, and other classics in the Public Domain.

For libraries and creators, the Public Domain allows us to share information, art and science while making it possible for intellectual property to freely enter the artistic and cultural sphere for further exploration and variation.

At the Tyrrell County Public Library, this allows for our organization to digitize yearbooks and local history, broaden our virtual programming offerings and fulfill digital interlibrary loan requests.

What exactly is the Public Domain?

It is all creative, academic and scientific work with no exclusive intellectual property rights or copyright owned by a single creator, multiple creators or organization. A work enters this status when a property right/copyright expires, has been forfeited, expressly waived or may be inapplicable.

With this in mind, how long does it actually take for something to enter the Public Domain? Currently, copyright expiration lasts the author’s lifetime plus 70 years, or 95 years from the original publication if owned by a company. It can also expire 120 years after the original publication, whichever comes first.

For example the character Mickey Mouse will not enter the Public Domain until Jan. 1, 2024.

How did this complicated system first come about? In the American legal system, copyright and Public Domain found their roots in English law under Queen Anne and the 1710 Parliament. The law she passed intended to give exclusive intellectual property rights to a creator for a total of 28 years (14 years after initial publication and one renewal of another 14 years by the author); after that, it was in the Public Domain.

When the newly established United States of America developed the Constitution, this law was incorporated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

Once the Constitution was adopted, an act was passed in 1790 that outlined the term of expiration which followed the precedent set by the law from Queen Anne (28 years total). Between 1790 and 1910, the law changed only twice. In 1909, it changed to broaden the scope of categories protected to include all works of authorship, and the copyright lasted for 28 years with an additional 28-year renewal (a total of 56 years of protection).

This law did not change again until 1976, when the Disney Corporation and others lobbied Congress to change the law. Under the law at the time, Mickey Mouse would have entered Public Domain in 1984. The new law changed the copyright expiration to 50 years plus the life of the author or 75 years after publication if a corporation owns it.

In 1998, with Mickey Mouse set to expire in 2003, Disney pushed Congress to revise the law to the current restrictions we see today.

The Public Domain is a fantastic resource for creative exploration, education, sharing information and enriching American cultural heritage.

Our Library has already utilized Winnie the Pooh for last week’s virtual Storytime. With so many great characters at your disposal, I encourage you to get out there and write a new story! I can’t wait to read a steampunk science fiction novel where Winnie the Pooh, Sherlock Holmes and the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz team up to fight the Elder Ones from H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories.

Have a wonderful week, and we hope to see you in the library!

Jared Jacavone is the librarian at the Tyrrell County Public Library.

Hemingway and Wine: Around the Globe. Very interesting about Hemingway places, drinks, anecdotes. Best, Christine

Ernest Hemingway Was Everyman’s Wine And Spirits Lover

John Mariani

  • Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn Make a Toast

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”    —A Moveable Feast(1964)

Life’s greatest gifts to Ernest Hemingway were his appetite and being born in a century that allowed him to indulge it. No one travelled more widely or immersed himself so deeply in the culture of a place, picking up the language on the street, so that he could say with certainty, “If a man is making up a story, it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is.”

He knew a tremendous amount about wine, which he called “one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.” He had an amazing capacity without getting drunk, though he often did, and he could write descriptions with great exactitude about drinks like the sugar-less frozen daiquiri at the La Floridita bar in Havana: “The frapped part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over marl bottom. That was almost the exact color.” He held the official record for the largest number of daiquiris (which he liked without sugar) at La Floridita.

 He liked his Martinis made with 15 parts gin and one of dry vermouth, a mix he called a “Montgomery” after the British Field Marshall, who liked to outnumber his enemy by that ratio before attacking. Hemingway preferred Russian vodka, Gordon’s gin, and Bacardi rum, and called deusico, a Turkish coffee he tried in Constantinople, a “tremendously poisonous, stomach rotting drink.”

While an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, he drank cheap wine, writing, “On a retreat we drink barbera.” Decades later, staying at the Gritti Palace in Venice, he enjoyed Valpolicella and drank it frequently with his friend Giuseppe Cipriani, owner of Harry’s Bar there. He learned about French wines while a correspondent in Paris, enjoying the cafés of Montparnasse like La Rotonde, La Cloiserie des Lilas and Lipp. Aside from good Champagne, his taste ran to cheap, hearty red wines like Cahors, of which said, “If I had all the money in the world I would drink Cahors and water.” Equally so, Chablis was a cheap white wine back then, and he enjoyed that with sandwiches at lunch, but he did not consider Châteauneuf-du-Pape “a luncheon wine.” His favorite rosé was Tavel. He was, however, duly impressed when a waiter in Madrid brought him a bottle of Château Mouton-Rothschild 1906.

 

After Hemingway started making good money from his writing, he stayed at the two hotels that are still among the very finest in Paris—The Ritz and the Crillon. While on assignment in 1944 for Collier’s, Hemingway and a group of G.I.s “liberated” the Ritz on the Place Vendôme, clearing out a pocket of German soldiers and celebrating by ordering 50 Martinis. After the war he frequented the “Little Bar” at The Ritz, since enlarged and re-named “The Hemingway Bar,” where bartender Colin Field still keeps Papa’s memory burning and where they play old 78 RPM records on the phonograph.

Hemingway craved the glamor of The Ritz, which opened just a year before he was born, recalling the unalloyed pleasure he took “always haveing [sic] at least two bottles of Perrier Jouet in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave.” One night at The Ritz he stayed up until dawn drinking Scotch with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

But when Hemingway just wanted to meet friends for drinks, he, like every American since 1919, headed for Harry’s New York Bar at 5 Rue Daunou (printed on the window, for Americans’ benefit, as “SANK ROO DOE NOO”).  Festooned with American college pennants, this birthplace of the Bloody Mary (under the name “Red Snapper”) was where Hemingway once dragged an ex-welterweight and his defecating pet lion into the street for disturbing the customers.

 

Of course, Hemingway was happiest in Madrid, and his spirit is palpable in that great city. Walk up the street from The Palace to the Plaza Santa Ana and you’ll find one of Papa’s favorite surviving tapas bars, Cerveceria Alemana, decked out with photos of famous bullfighters he knew well. Papa would drink with them while gobbling up a platter of Iberian ham, boiled shrimp with mayonnaise and crisp potato salad, sweet squid fried with vinegar, and wash it all down with white mugs of Mahou beer. Cerveceria Alemana remains just like that, scruffy, fast-paced, unforgettable. His favorite Madrid restaurant was the ancient Botin, where he said he once had the wonderful roast suckling pig with “three bottles of Rioja alta.” Botin, too, is as popular and dependable as ever, though now packed with tourists still attracted by Hemingway’s recommendation.

Alcohol was fuel to Hemingway but also his foe; he endured stretches of drunkenness and periods of abstinence. In Cuba and Florida he rose early in the morning, wrote until noon (unless he was out fishing or U-boat hunting on his boat the Pilar) and didn’t start drinking till early evening with dinner. Hardly a page of Hemingway is turned without reference to his characters drinking, but that was an era when drinking was standard behavior among Americans abroad.

He sometimes drank just to drink, but in his prose, no one ever wrote better about the pleasures of good wine and spirits.

Check out my website.

John Mariani is an author and journalist of 40 years standing, and an author of 15 books. He has been called by the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the most influential food-wine critic in the popular press” and is a three-time nominee for the James Beard Journalism Award. For 35 years he was Esquire Magazine’s food & travel correspondent and wine columnist for Bloomberg News for ten. His Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink was hailed as the “American Larousse Gastronomique” His next book, “America Eats Out” won the International Association of Cooking Professionals Award for Best Food Reference Book. His “How Italian Food Conquered the World” won the Gourmand World Cookbooks Award for the USA 2011, and the Italian Cuisine Worldwide Award 2012. He co-authored “Menu Design in America: 1850-1985” and wrote the food sections for the Encyclopedia of New York City. In 1994 the City of New Orleans conferred on him the title of Honorary Citizen and in 2003 he was given the Philadelphia Toque Award “for exceptional achievements in culinary writing and accomplishments.”

Hemingway Estate new Representation

Gersh Signs Ernest Hemingway Estate

ernest hemingway
Gersh

EXCLUSIVE: The Ernest Hemingway estate has inked with Gersh for representation as the agency will look to explore opportunities for the author’s work across film, TV and digital media.

Gersh Partner Joe Veltre tells Deadline, “We are thrilled to be working with the Hemingway Estate. Hemingway is a twentieth century icon, and the most important and influential American author of our time. Considering his tremendous literary work and fascinating personal life, we believe there are great opportunities to create future projects that will both honor his work and entertain new audiences in the years ahead.”

 

Gersh Agency Logo
Gersh

The Ernest Hemingway Estate added, “The heirs and descendants of Ernest Hemingway enthusiastically welcome this relationship. As active and involved stewards of Hemingway’s work, we are excited to help foster the creation of fresh adaptations that can be enjoyed by both new and lifelong fans. We feel that modern film and television mediums are better equipped than ever to bring the spirit of Hemingway’s words to life in ways never imagined before. Papa fought hard to share his version of the truth with the world, and inspired so many to do the same. We are confident that with the help of Gersh, Ernest Hemingway’s works will live on to inspire courage and self-reflection – both on the page and on the silver screen.”

Hemingway’s writing was awarded both the Nobel Prize in Literature and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His canon includes such classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Moveable Feast, all of which continue to sell millions of copies around the globe annually, and many of which have adapted for the stage and screen. Ken Burns recently made the documentary Hemingway capturing the author’s life and iconic status as cultural touchstone.

Born in Oak Park, Ill, Hemingway began his career as a journalist at the age of 17. From there he would serve in the First World War, became a member of the 1920s ex-pats in Paris known as the Lost Generation, and reported from the front lines of the Spanish Civil war and World War II. He was also an avid sportsman, enjoying hunting and fishing, all of which factored into his writing.

 

Interesting Post about a visit to Ketchum, where Hem died.

Ketchum Idaho home where Hem died
Ketchum Idaho home where Hem died

Column: At Ernest Hemingway’s final home, seeking answers

://www.eagletribune.com/opinion/x1912995411/Column-At-Ernest-Hemingways-final-home-seeking-answers

 

 

Ok, It’s not Hemingway but a good discussion below about Hem. I highlighted it in case you are short on time. Best to all for the Holiday season! Christine

BY THE BOOK

The Best Book That Amor Towles Ever Received as a Gift

Credit…Rebecca Clarke

“My wife gave me the first edition of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ to be published in English (in 1886),” says the novelist Amor Towles, whose new book is “The Lincoln Highway.” “That the edition was in translation was just as well, since I don’t read a word of Russian.”

What books are on your night stand?

For the last 16 years, I’ve been reading with three friends. Every month, we meet in a restaurant in New York City to discuss a novel, arriving at 7 and lingering until they close the place. We typically pursue projects. One spring we read Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady,” Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” a project we referred to as “19th-Century Wives Under Pressure.” Often, we’ll read five or six works by a single writer chronologically. We’re about to launch into a survey of the Australian Nobel laureate, Patrick White. So, his “The Tree of Man” is at the top of my pile.

What’s the last great book you read?

Earlier this year, I was asked to write an introduction for the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises.” I enjoyed rereading the book immensely. Hemingway began writing it on his 26th birthday, almost a hundred years ago. At the time, he was still married to the first of his four wives. By trade, he was still a foreign correspondent living in Paris. It was before his trip to Africa to hunt big game. Before his face would adorn the cover of Life magazine — three separate times. Before the compromising effects of fame, wealth and recognition. So, in picking up “The Sun Also Rises” today, we have the opportunity to set aside what we think we know about Hemingway as a man and writer, to set aside what we think we know about his style, to read the book as if it were newly released, and to be amply rewarded for doing so.

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

Great writing can make almost anything interesting. Any subjects, any settings, any themes. But for me, bad writing is an insurmountable obstacle.

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Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

When I was a college sophomore in the early 1980s, I had the good fortune of being admitted to a fiction writing seminar with a visiting modernist named Walter Abish. As part of the class, he gave us a list of about a hundred novels that he admired. The list included an array of inventive writers and stylists, most of whom I had never heard of, including Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Evan S. Connell, Julio Cortázar, Jean Genet, Elizabeth Hardwick, Knut Hamsun, Milan Kundera, Grace Paley and Alain Robbe-Grillet. With the list fraying in my pocket, I began tracking down these novels whenever I was in a used bookstore. For the next few years, as soon as school would let out, I would retreat alone to my family’s summer house, where I would sit on the porch and read one book a day. It was pure bliss. It also had a lasting influence on me as an artist.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Harry Mathews’s “Cigarettes.” The only American-born member of the experimental confederacy Oulipo, Mathews often wrote about shattering conventions, and thus his work can be somewhat uneven. But in “Cigarettes” he gives us a sly, inventive and entertaining novel which is a racy investigation of midcentury New York society.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

I admire a lot of my contemporaries as writers. But Ann Patchett is someone I admire not simply as a writer, but as an advocate for independent bookstores and new voices, as half of a grand marriage, as a graceful thinker, a sly humorist, a generous spirit. I could go on.

Did Hemingway like any of the movies made from his Books? Well maybe one.

‘The Killers’: The only adaptation that Ernest Hemingway loved
(Credit: Alamy)

‘The Killers’: The only adaptation that Ernest Hemingway loved

‘THE KILLERS’ – ROBERT SIODMAK

4

A masterful example of the quintessential film noirThe Killers has gone down in history as one of the best works from the immensely popular genre. Based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, this was the film that landed Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner unprecedented fame and success. However, the greatest achievement of The Killers is that it has firmly retained its cinematic magic even after all these years.

Right from the very beginning, The Killers keeps the audience on its toes and confronts them with quasi-surreal imagery. Presented like the contents of a bizarre dream, two professional assassins casually walk into a small-town diner in order to capture and kill a man known as the Swede (Lancaster). Within minutes, the atmospheric silence ignites into a cloud of chaos. A hostage situation arises out of nowhere and is defused just as quickly. The protagonist is brutally gunned down in the first ten minutes. Everything falls apart.

This initial spiral into beautiful absurdism plays a vital role in the momentum of the film’s subsequent discursive pathways. We follow an insurance investigator (played by Edmond O’Brien) who enters a dangerous world of crime and intrigue while trying his best to pick up the fragmented pieces of the narrative. Unlike many other suspense thrillers whose success hinges on the excitement of the final destination, The Killers is all about the journey and what a journey it is indeed!

Throughout his life, Hemingway was a very vocal critic of the Hollywood factory and often criticised films that were based on his works. However, The Killers is a significant exception to Hemingway’s general disdain for the machinations of the film industry. He famously wrote: “It is a good picture and the only good picture ever made of a story of mine.”

The screenplay, although credited to Anthony Veiller, was also co-written by the likes of John Huston and Richard Brooks. A major reason behind the efficiency of The Killers is the slick screenplay which manages to capture the poetry of Hemingway’s art.

Structured through the flashbacks and recollections of various characters, we are given fleeting visions of the past life of our dead protagonist. Director Robert Siodmak arranges these accounts in the form of poignant puzzle pieces which come together to form a mesmerising gestalt instead of a mere summation. Ranging from ex-lovers to prison inmates, The Killers functions like a fictional documentary that attempts to reconstruct the impenetrable mythology of a film noir mystery.

There are philosophical reflections sprinkled in there as well, most evident in the figure of the Swede’s cellmate in prison who spends his time studying constellations which invoke the memory of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

The Killers has a little bit of everything – precursors to heist films, tributes to the choreography of silent cinema as well as the ethereal presence of Ava Gardner as the delightfully self-centred femme fatale. It has moments of humour and it has just as tragic sequences which have the power to move audiences.

More importantly, The Killers stays true to the spirit of Hemingway while also fashioning its own identity. Siodmak would reach greater artistic heights with later projects like Criss Cross (1949) but it’s The Killers that will forever be remembered as the “Citizen Kane of film noir.”

A Scene from THE KILLERS

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Hemingway’s Best Novels in someone’s opinion. This includes the Big Three, and does not include A Moveable Feast which was not a novel–or was it?

The Best Hemingway Novels

Photo Credit: The Estate of Yousuf Karsh

In her new biography, Influencing Hemingway: The People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work, Nancy W. Sindelar introduces the reader to the individuals who played significant roles in Hemingway’s development as both a man and as an artist. Sindelar ranks the fiction works of Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway created memorable characters in his short stories and novels by drawing on real people—parents, friends, and fellow writers, among others. He also drew on real places and events to create settings and engaging plots. Whether revisiting the Italian front in A Farewell to Arms, recounting a Pamplona bull run in The Sun Also Rises, or depicting a Cuban fishing village in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway relied on his personal experiences, friendships and observations for the content of his work.

Since Hemingway’s works reflect interests and adventures at different stages of his life, creating a ranking for his fiction is difficult. However, the following ranks his most broadly acclaimed works and comments on their contribution to the Hemingway legacy.

1. The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway’s first novel is at the top of my list because it reflects his reliance on his traditional Midwestern values as he encountered new experiences and values in post-World War I Europe. Using friends and acquaintances that populated the cafes along Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris, he reveals his concern about the valueless life of these Lost Generation characters and begins his personal and literary search for meaning in what appears to be a godless world. In the midst of their heavy drinking and meaningless revelry during a fiesta in Spain, Pedro Romero, the matador, becomes a hero. He conducts himself with honor and courage, and it is here we see the beginnings of what will become the Hemingway Code.

The book also tops my list because it reveals Hemingway’s courageous attempt to write in a new and different way by portraying the bad and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Though The Sun Also Rises was well received by the critics, it was not well received by Hemingway’s acquaintances who saw themselves portrayed as self-indulgent, alcoholic and sexually promiscuous in his unflattering, but honest, characterizations. Nor was it well received by his mother, who said he had produced “one of the filthiest books of the year.”

2. A Farewell to Arms – Hemingway’s second novel is a high on my list because it is the fictional account of events that changed and informed his world view. When Hemingway left the security of the Midwest and went to Italy looking for adventure as an ambulance driver in World War I, he got more than he had bargained for. The idealistic Midwesterner joined the war to end all wars, ready to display honor and courage, but was blown up in a trench. Then he fell in love, contemplated marriage and was rejected by the woman he loved. His confrontation with death, his subsequent wound, and his first experience with love all became catalysts for developing a code of behavior for facing life’s challenges.

A Farewell to Arms was the fictional result of Hemingway’s experiences in Italy and initiates what would become one of the most dominant themes in his novels, the confrontation of death. Though Catherine Barkley’s character seems dated to contemporary female readers, the book still demonstrates that Hemingway used what he learned in Italy to show that war brings out the best and worst in men and women.

3. The Old Man and the Sea – After the unsuccessful reception to Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning novel to defend his reputation as a writer. Based on his experiences in Cuba, he created a character of an old fisherman. Alone in a skiff, the old man catches a great marlin, only to have it destroyed by sharks. The old man, who had been a champion arm-wrestler and a successful fisherman, was, like Hemingway, trying for a comeback.

The old man embraces the code for living that Hemingway first developed based on his experiences in World War I—the experiences in which a man confronts an unconquerable element. In fighting the sharks, the old man exhibits courage and grace under pressure, believing “a man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”

The reviews and success of the book were nothing less than phenomenal. Appropriately, Hemingway was aboard his boat and out on the Gulf Stream when he heard via the ship’s radio that the book had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

4. To Have and Have Not – Hemingway’s growing awareness of financial and social strata are reflected in To Have and Have Not. The characters are based on people the now famous author met in Key West—the working class he encountered on the docks and at Sloppy Joe’s, the rich who moored their boats in Key West harbor, and the illegal Chinese immigrants who were being smuggled from Cuba to Key West to promote tourism in newly formed Chinatowns.

In this Depression-era novel Hemingway comes close to arguing for social and political changes needed to help the working man. However, Hemingway does not see the New Deal remedies as the solution. As a result, the fate of the novel’s main character, Harry Morgan, outlines the limits of personal freedom, self-reliance and the absence of grace under pressure, and the closest Hemingway comes to a solution is for Harry to say, “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no f—— chance.”

5. The Nick Adams Stories – This collection of short stories is a favorite because it provides insight into the life of the young Hemingway. As a child Ernest would accompany his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, as he provided pro bono medical services and attended to injured Indians, women in child-birth, and individuals in a variety of life-threatening situations in the Indian camps of northern Michigan. The memory of one of these trips appears in “Indian Camp.” Young Nick is with his father on a medical mission to deliver a baby. A Native American woman’s been in labor for two days, and Nick observes his father perform a Caesarian with a jackknife sterilized in a basin of boiled water.

Similarly, the reader gains insight into the relationship of Hemingway’s parents in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and understands Hemingway’s feelings of separation from his family and life in Oak Park after returning from World War I in “A Soldier’s Home.”

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Based on his experiences as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, this novel contains the classic Hemingway elements—a main character demonstrating grace under pressure and a plot that combines the interest and conflicts associated with love and war. As with his other works, Hemingway uses his friendships and personal experiences. Robert Jordan is modeled after Robert Merriman, an American professor who left his research on collective farming in Russia to become a commander in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was killed during the final assault on Belchite. Maria is based on a young nurse of the same name who was gang raped by Nationalist soldiers early in the war. The novel’s three days of conflict takes place near the El Tajo gorge that cuts through the Andalusian town of Rondo, where a political massacre like the one led by Pablo occurred early in the Spanish Civil War.

Though some readers find the details of the battles tedious, it is one of Hemingway’s most popular novels. The book was published in October, 1940. By April, 1941 almost 500,000 copies had been sold, and in January, 1942, the movie rights were purchased by Paramount for $100,000.

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Photo courtesy of the Estate of Yousuf Karsh

 

Hemingway’s Perfect Hamburger Recipe. I did try it. It’s good.

 

Hemingway’s Hamburger Helper

The Old Man and the Seasonings

Ernest Hemingway wrote lean prose but liked his burgers fatty and flavorful."Where's the beef?"

The famous author had great appetites. Food and friendships were a moveable feast for him, from Oak Park to Paris to Key West and many points in-between. On the eve of the new season of Check, Please!, I’m passing along a hamburger recipe that local kitchens ought to relish.

When Ernest Hemingway was a well-established and wealthy author, he gave specific instructions to the cooks at his Havana home on the proper way to prepare Papa’s patties.

A shopping trip in and around his hometown last week got me most of the way there. Minus one ingredient, it was still one hell of a burger.

But first: thanks and credit to Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, author and food blogger for The Paris Review. A Hemingway fan, she came across his notes to his Cuban housekeepers. The recipe had been published before in a cooking encyclopedia after his death, but I was unaware until I saw Ms. Tan’s blog post last month. I probably owe her a burger and an order of F. Scott Fitzgerald french fries.Most of the ingredients for Hemingway's hamburger

The ingredients:

1 lb. ground chuck (fattier than I’d prefer, but more in line with what was available then)
2 minced garlic cloves
2 chopped green onions
2 tablespoons of capers
1 egg beaten
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1/3 cup of dry red wine
1 teaspoon sage

[And then it gets a little more rarified]

1 teaspoon, India Relish (a mix of pickled veggies unavailable at Caputo’s, Whole Foods or Penzey’s Spices — so I skipped it)
1/2 teaspoon Beau Monde Seasoning (basically onion, celery and salt with a touch of pepper and sweetness)
1/2 teaspoon Mei Yen Powder (a discontinued blend, but an online guide suggested part salt, part sugar and a dash of soy.)

Mix the ingredients and let them marinate for 20 minutes. Shape four burgers and fry them on a hot burner — Hemingway liked his burgers fried, not broiled. Cook for four or five minutes per side, until crispy on the edges and pink and juicy in the middle.

The Bun Also RisesIt took a long time to gather and prepare the ingredients, and it took about 75 seconds to devour the burger. I had to eat a second one to savor what I’d missed during the first inhalation.

It was delicious — even though my carnivorous son took one bite and labeled it: “weird.” And my vegetarian daughter never stepped into the dining room. And my wife said, “It’s good, but I don’t see how it’s worth the trouble.”

"Go ahead. Make my burger."Trust me, it’s worth the effort at least once. I ate it on a toasted bun with lettuce and tomato. I wanted a taste before deciding which condiments to add. It needed nothing. I took one bite, then another, then it was gone. The ground beef was infused with flavor and moisture. A-1 sauce, ketchup or mustard would have been sacrilegious. In all Ernest-ness, it was the best burger I’ve ever made

 

 

The Hemingway App: So how did Hem do when put to the test?

Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test. The article is a bit long itself but interesting. There is such a thing as too terse.

By Ian Crouch

Hemingway Takes the Hemingway Test

Charles McGrath wroteabout a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries—all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there. Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.”

The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, (The app) an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice.

Hemingway launched in September, and gained wide notice this week after it was shared on Hacker News. The app is free, and the brothers are working, in their off hours, on a desktop version, as well as an extension for Web browsers.

Hemingway uses a formula to judge the “reading level” of a particular selection of writing, which the Longs said is “a measure of how complex the sentence structure is and how big the words you’re using are.” It scored my first paragraph as Grade 14. The app suggests that anything under Grade 10 is a sign of “bold, clear writing.”

Bold and clear, that’s the popular image of the Hemingway persona—the kind of man, as Lillian Ross observed in her Profile of him for The New Yorker, who could walk into an Abercrombie & Fitch store, and, being approached by a sales clerk, say, simply, “Want to see coat.” And Hemingway’s notes to himself from Cuba show a parallel artistic imperative: the search for blunt, descriptive, concise prose.

So would Hemingway have approved of Hemingway? Or, another question: Would he pass the tests he helped inspire? What about the visually potent opening paragraph from his short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”?

It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

Bad news. Hemingway rates merely “O.K.” (Grade 15). That “very” in the first sentence might have been cut. (It may have a point there: Doesn’t the fact that everyone had left but one man suggest just how late it was?) The second sentence is “hard to read” and the third is “very hard to read.” Maybe it’s the shifting perspective? No adverbs, though. Yet, as Hemingway’s paragraphs go, that is perhaps a bit twisty. What about the famously spare early story “The End of Something”? It performs significantly better:

Marjorie sat on the blanket with her back to the fire and waited for Nick. He came over and sat down beside her on the blanket. In back of them was the close second-growth timber of the point and in front was the bay with the mouth of Hortons Creek. It was not quite dark. The fire-light went as far as the water. They could both see the two steel rods at an angle over the dark water. The fire glinted on the reels.

This passage, so Hemingway (the app) tells us, would be readily comprehensible to a fourth grader. The app likes dialogue, too, scoring the next bit of the story similarly:https://d99d5cd7ed237b7db28d60d547f15f10.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.htmlADVERTISEMENThttps://d99d5cd7ed237b7db28d60d547f15f10.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“I don’t feel like eating,” said Nick.
“Come on and eat, Nick.”
“All right.”
They ate without talking, and watched the two rods and the fire-light in the water.

“The End of Something” is a sharp pocketknife of a story, capturing in its seeming slimness all the depth and disorientation of young man’s stunted attempts at love and friendship—and the places where those two often overlap. Its force comes from the declarative power of its words combined with the implied frustration and muteness of its silences. It is also a prime example of a kind of writing prized by people from E. B. White to Gordon Lish, Elmore Leonard, and numberless creative-writing teachers: show don’t tell, always keep the verbs active and propulsive, never use a two-dollar word when a ten-center might suffice, leave adverbs to the nervous and the self-obsessed. There are, of course, other ways to write, even for a mass audience. Leonard’s own rules for writing (“No 10: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”) end with him noting that he enjoys many of the writers who break them.VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERHow to Draw a Creepy Clown

The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things.

But do we want to write like Hemingway? Or, better, did Hemingway really write like Hemingway? He was able to see the humor in the public’s sense of his work; Lillian Ross caught him, at times, playacting a kind of Indian-speak version of his characters’ reticence: “He read book all way up on plane.” “He like book, I think.” His contained style, and the expectations that it engendered in the reader, made his departures from it all the more powerful. Take this description of Romero, the bullfighter, in “The Sun Also Rises”:

Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time.

This breaks several of the Hemingway rules. The passive voice loses points, as do the two adverbs at the end. But “quietly” and “calmly,” are, of course, essential to the point. Bullfighters, masterly or not, avoid the horns most of the time. Only the artists like Romero manage it quietly and calmly. And that word, “quietly,” which is not quite literal, is a little surprise. Regarding the passive voice, it injects emotional uncertainty into the scene. “All that was faked turned bad,” scans like a melody, and in its passivity and slightly odd tense, feels like an elegy. It is not exactly clear. But it’s bold.

Photograph: Torre Johnson/Magnumhttps://d99d5cd7ed237b7db28d60d547f15f10.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.