Yes, writing and creating takes time and timing. See below please how a novel became a movie. Best, Christine
Martha Gellhorn (wife 3) and Hemingway.
Alison Owen, Contributor
Producer
When A Labor Of Love Blooms
08/31/2017
Courtesy of The Weinstein Company
Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander star in TULIP FEVER.
The passage of time has become synonymous with something negative. For instance, over time we age – a negative. In this age of technology, we’re impatient for instant gratification. But there cannot be time constraints placed on art.
Take Maxwell Perkins as an example. Perkins, who began his career working for The New York Times, was an editor at Scribner’s and to this day is known for discovering some of the most quintessential classic American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe.
Max Perkins
Before Perkins, editors didn’t normally get so involved in shaping author’s work. He changed the meaning of the job in large part because of his working relationship with Thomas Wolfe. Though ingenious, Wolfe was stubborn. He lacked discipline, overwriting his stories by hundreds of pages, and fought Perkins’s edits at every word.
I first read Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever nearly 17 years ago. It was before the book had been published and I fell absolutely in love. I had already read a review of a factual book about the tulip fever of 1630s Amsterdam and was fascinated by the concept of this mania and how it was the first example of the futures market.
Tulip Fever; Alicia Vikander
I immediately bought the option and fewer than two days after I had sent it out, I had received offers from the industry’s greats. Stephen Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Harvey Weinstein were all interested. I felt like I was dreaming. But then the whirlwind slowed. I was devastated initially because I thought we’d missed our opportunity. Little did I know the zeitgeist would only become more applicable.
The entertainment industry is continually in motion, constantly cranking out the next big project. When people hear how much time has passed between the option of the manuscript and the release, it automatically colors their perspective. The immediate instinct is that something is wrong. If you go into something with your mind made up, the chances of it being changed are incredibly slim.
Earlier this year, we screened the film for a host of best-selling authors including Amor Towles, Anthony Doerr, Dan Jones, Jodi Picoult, Philippa Gregory, M.L. Stedman, Philip Kerr, Sally Bedell Smith, Daniel James Brown, Emma Donoguhe, and Ruth Ware. They praised the thrilling romance narrative, its humor, themes of female empowerment, the talent, the cinematography, the writing.
Catherine and Frederic the remakeMovie of A Farewell to Arms
In large part, this was why we went to authors for support. We knew they wouldn’t judge the movie based on how long it has taken to get to the screen. They don’t view the film with the same harsh eye that film critics do. Time does not connote bad. To them, time has no meaning.
And this Friday, I could not be happier to share it with audiences.
ME: So for those who like period movies, perhaps try Tulip Fever.
The below is from a recent article about Lillian Ross who wrote an iconic interview of Hemingway. I quote just a bit but reprint my blog post on this topic. Thank you as always for your interest in Hemingway. Love, Christine
“Lillian Ross, who recently died at the age of 99, was one of the most remarkable writers of her time. She wrote for The New Yorker for half a dozen decades and redefined magazine journalism while providing fresh, vivid accounts of reality. She was never seen writing a note. The critic Edmund Wilson called her “the girl with the built-in tape-recorder.”
Lillian with an editor
Her clever handling of quotations was not always admired. She first aroused intense criticism with her profile of Ernest Hemingway, published in The New Yorker in 1950. Hemingway loved to talk about himself, especially when drinking, and he particularly liked comparing himself to champion athletes. When Ross interviewed him, he had just turned 50.
Hemingway around 50 years old
Many believed that she had depicted the leading American novelist of the day as a drunken blowhard. Hemingway didn’t think so. He liked the article and years later even provided a jacket blurb for a book by Ross.”
Read my blog post on this from a while ago. So sorry for Ms. Ross’ passing as she was a fine journalist, but Hemingway, from my reading, was not thrilled with the article she wrote. He accepted that it was what it was, the dye was cast, and maintained a friendship with her. My post is below.
The above is a link to the Lillian Ross interview with Hemingway, a sad betrayal of his kindness and friendship to a young writer. My thoughts on this below.
There’s a famous profile of Hemingway that was published on May 13, 1950 in The New Yorker done by a very young journalist at the time named Lillian Ross. Hemingway had helped her with her first big article about Sidney Franklin, the first Jewish-American bull fighter. Hemingway and Lillian Ross became friends and as Hemingway often did, he enjoyed taking this younger, very smart woman under his wing and addressing her as “daughter” and sharing some of the things that he knew with her.
Lillian’s book after Hem’s deathLillian Ross
Lillian Ross started working at The New Yorker in 1945 and seemed particularly adept at charming her subjects into saying things they might otherwise not say. She asked to do a profile on Hemingway, who needed the publicity like a hole in the head, but he agreed, hoping to help her career. She shadowed him for months and in particular went with him to New York on a three-day tour. Hemingway viewed it all as a lark.
Here’s where my objectivity stops. As I noted in my opening post five years ago, while I try to be objective about Hemingway and his flaws, which were many, I’m on his side. I’m not neutral. Lillian Ross’ article made him look like a self-involved jerk, almost ignorant. He thought she was his friend.
Hem relaxed
In that article are statements by Hemingway such as “Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.” And then there’s this repeated gem apropos of nothing, “How do you like it now, Gentlemen.” Ross always maintained that it was an affectionate portrait of a wonderful writer, but, in essence, it made fun of him and it made him look ludicrous. If that’s how she saw him, then so be it. The press is free and she can write what she’d like to write, but don’t pretend it was an “affectionate” portrayal.
An older Lillian Ross
At the time, Lillian Ross was 24 years old and it was the opportunity of a lifetime to profile Ernest Hemingway, the biggest writer of the day. Years later, The New York Times wrote that “The effect of her severely unadorned portrait was to create an impression of an unpleasant egotist, a celebrity who, to a pathetic extent, had identified himself with his own public image.” As one of Hemingway’s biographers, Jeffrey Meyers, wrote later that she’d repaid his generosity with meanness and malice, and established her reputation at his expense.” Quoting Meyers again, he notes that she never recorded or revealed the serious and sensitive side of his character and chose instead to portray him as a boring braggart. So how do you like it now, Gentlemen?
New book
When Lillian published the profile in book form shortly after Hemingway’s death, she still claimed it was a sympathetic portrait of a great, loveable man. Few readers were fooled. She also claimed he was fine with it. True. He read it before publication; felt the dye was cast so said little; and passed on it, but it was not really “fine” with him. He was hurt.
reading
If you look at the cover, could Lillian have picked a less attractive, less compelling photo? (See below right). In a reissue, there’s a nice photo of Hemingway and Lillian on the front, but I believe the original shows a Hemingway looking out of it and bizarre. If I’m wrong on this, someone out there probably knows, so please correct me.
Lillian Ross has written a new book in which Ross has collected selected pieces, including the Hemingway profile along with newer works spanning her sixty year career as a journalist. It is called “Reporting Always: Writings From The New Yorker.” It was published last week by Scribner’s, which, of course, is Hemingway’s publisher.
I can’t help being wounded for him. He trusted her and thought they were having some fun together and that she would not portray him as a lout. It’s his fault in part, no question for being too casual and not foreseeing damage for not taking the interview seriously. However, his loyalty was betrayed.
Take a read and see what you think. Perhaps you’ll see it differently. I’m happy to stand corrected or confronted.
Real aficionados will find this so easy but casual readers . . . not so much. Answers below!
trivia contest ready
Mary’s book
1) Which Hemingway novel(s) were made into movies (Check all applicable)
The Sun Also Rises YES
Old Man and the Sea YES
For Whom the Bell Tolls YES
A Farewell to Arms YES
2) Number of wives
Three
Four X
Five
Two
Bonus point for first names (Hadley, Pauline, Martha, Mary)
3) What was Hemingway’s nickname for the Nobel Prize for Literature? THE IGNOBLE PRIZE
4) What animals populated his Cuban home? CATS and Dogs and chickens
5) As a writer, was the Hemingway the type to:
get it down right the first time with few revisions or
did he revise extensively YES
6) Famous couples in his books
Jake and ? (BRETT)
Robert Jordan and ? (MARIA)
Frederic and ? (CATHERINE)
the Colonel and ? (RENATA)
7) What was Hemingway’s personal nickname from the time he was 27? PAPA
8) Which book was Hemingway’s memoir and love story to the city of Paris? A MOVEABLE FEAST
9) In what state was Hemingway born? ILLINOIS
10) In what state did Hemingway die? IDAHO
11) Where do Hemingway’s original papers and most of his memorabilia reside? THE KENNEDY LIBRARY
12) To whom did Hemingway say “Never mistake movement for action.” MARLENE DIETRICH
13) Who was Hemingway’s closest Hollywood friend, starred in one of his movies, and who “made it to the barn” (their slang for ‘died’) before Hem, much to Hemingway’s grief. GARY COOPER
14) Who said that Hemingway needs a new woman for each new book? F. SCOTT FITZGERALD and Faulkner said something similar: that Hemingway seemed to feel he had to marry every woman he fell in love with.
Hemingway’s spare style started early. Read for yourself! Article by Robert k. Elder Love, Christine
Hemingway’s First Short Story Found in Key West
By ROBERT K. ELDER SEPT. 29, 2017
Hemingway’s First Short Story Found in Key West
Photo
Ten-year-old Ernest Hemingway’s notebook containing his untitled, previously unknown work of fiction.CreditSandra Spanier
When Hurricane Irma smashed into Key West, Fla., author Shel Silverstein’s historic home was nearly leveled. But it was another home in his neighborhood that had Brewster Chamberlin, a writer and historian, worried.
His friend Sandra Spanier was also nervous. Not only because she feared for Mr. Chamberlin, who weathered the hurricane at home with his wife, but also because they shared a discovery that few people knew about.
In May, she and Mr. Chamberlin found Ernest Hemingway’s first short story — an untitled, previously unknown work that he wrote at the age of 10 — in the archives of the Bruce family, longtime friends of the Hemingways. now this rare artifact could be blown off the island entirely. “I was really terrified,” said Ms. Spanier, the general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project and an English professor at Penn State University.
On Wednesday, Sept. 27, Mr. Chamberlin returned to the archive in Key West’s Old Town neighborhood. He walked past fallen trees and debris lining the yards, sidewalks and streets. “The collection is in fine shape,” Mr. Chamberlin reported. While the property lost several large trees, “there was no damage whatsoever to the building,” he said.
The notebook was there, unharmed, tucked inside a Ziploc freezer bag, with “Sep. 8, 1909,” written in black marker.
But how this notebook traveled from Hemingway’s hometown in Oak Park, Ill., to storage in ammo boxes in Key West is another story. Hemingway was the best chronicler of his own life, or in modern terms: a hoarder. He kept not only photos and letters, but also receipts, ticket stubs, dental X-rays, school assignments, Spanish bullfighting magazines and other ephemera. By the time Hemingway died in 1961, he left scores of material scattered in places such as Key West, Oak Park, Cuba and his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
Photo
Ernest Hemingway, left, poses with his longtime friend Toby Bruce in 1940. The latest collection was found in the archives of the Bruce family.CreditRegional History Department Ketchum Community Library
The author’s fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, spent years gathering letters, notebooks and Hemingway’s unfinished manuscripts, including the memoir of his Paris years, “A Moveable Feast.” In the winter of 1962, she traveled to Key West to visit Betty and Telly Otto “Toby” Bruce, who retrieved a pile of boxes left in a storeroom behind Sloppy Joe’s Bar, Hemingway’s favorite saloon. Bruce was a longtime confidant who had served as Hemingway’s mechanic, handyman and sometime chauffeur.
Mary took what she deemed important back to New York and gave the rest to the Bruces.
The collection also includes little-seen Hemingway photos, letters, a lock of the author’s hair and 46 prints, a gift from the famous photographer Walker Evans. Only within the last 15 years has it begun to be properly cataloged, due largely to the efforts of Mr. Chamberlin, who wrote “The Hemingway Log,” a timeline of the author’s life and career.
Hemingway’s travelogue through Ireland and Scotland was written as letters to his parents and what seem to be diary entries, so it didn’t seem significant. It was only when Ms. Spanier visited Mr. Chamberlin in May that they realized Hemingway never made this trip, as a child or as an adult. It was then that the full weight of the discovery hit them. “Oh my God, I thought, this is quite something. This is Hemingway’s first attempt at fiction,” Mr. Chamberlin recalled thinking.
In one section of the notebook, young Hemingway tells the story of a dead man who returns once a year to rebuild Ross Castle in Ireland, and host a nighttime feast. “When daylight comes the castle falls in ruins and O’Donahue returns to his grave,” wrote Hemingway in a spidery scrawl.
Although Hemingway’s penmanship wouldn’t improve much, his writing would. The story foreshadows the writer to be, not only in terms of Hemingway’s economy of language and use of landscape, but also in his mixing of reportage with fiction. This is a technique Hemingway would employ throughout his career to inject realism into his stories, to ground them with gravity of facts and experience.
Photo
There are no grade marks on the piece, so it’s unknown whether this was a draft of an English assignment, or if Hemingway was writing for his own amusement.
As for Dink Bruce, he couldn’t be more surprised by the whole thing, although time and the recent hurricane have made him rethink the future of the archive.
“A tornado can take them out, but they are as safe as they can be right now,” said Mr. Bruce, who splits his time between Key West and Livingston, Mont.
He’s considering selling the archive, so it can find a new home inside or outside of Florida.
“It deserves to be in some place where it can be studied,” he said.
Robert K. Elder is the co-author of “Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park” and six other books.
Abbe Driver wrote a post recently about why having a “boring” routine is a key to creativity. It was printed in www.refinery29.uk, if you wish to view the original. Interesting! Best, Christine
Had his routines.
People who don’t write usually think that fiction writers get inspiration and then begin to scribble when that inspiration hits. While there can be patches of that lightening striking, most of the time it’s being disciplined enough to sit down and write, discard what doesn’t work, and keep what does. Before I started writing, I thought that you sat by a sunny window and ideas floated in for the seizing, but that’s not how it works for most of us.
inspiration
Novelist Haruki Murakami gets up at 4:00 a.m. each day and writes for five hours. He then runs a few miles and swims a few miles and spends his evening listening to music or reading. His bedtime is set at 9:00 p.m. He told The Paris Review that repetition becomes the important thing. “It’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Those who read this blog regularly know that Hemingway awoke early when he was writing (at about 6:00 a.m.) and would write until the early afternoon. He’d then take a swim or relax and that was it for the day. He didn’t like to stop until he knew what was going to come next. However, he kept that schedule when he was writing and didn’t vary much from it. He usually cut down on his drinking while working on a novel.
Kurt Vonnegut made sure he did his pushups and sit-ups each day. Maya Angelou writes from a specially decorated hotel room she keeps solely for that purpose.
vonnegut
While this isn’t a very deep conclusion, it nevertheless seems to be true: by keeping routines, your creativity can funnel into the work as opposed to scattering into thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner or do next. It’s a little like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs wearing only black uniforms. None of their creativity has /had to go into wardrobe selections for the day.
steve jobs
As Ms. Driver noted in her article, we don’t like to think about this boring routine resulting in some masterpieces or at least in some decent novels. “There is nothing sexy about sitting at your laptop and putting in cold, hard time; far more alluring is the wild-haired genius who doesn’t have to try. But that is deeply flawed logic and a dangerous belief to hold… Routines might work, but they don’t jive with our cultural obsession with the talented prodigy.”
Another observation was that having a routine guarantees you some down time. “Whether you’re doing yoga, listening to jazz or relaxing in the bath, making time for activities which aren’t too cognitively taxing allows your brain to shift gears.”
Gustave Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
I’m writing this article based on an article by Karen Heller, dated June 23, that she published in The Washington Post. I’m quoting significantly from her but please read her original in The Post.
The American Writers Museum just opened in Chicago. It is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, 77, an Irishman who had the idea for this museum about eight years ago. It’s “a very visual place, a social environment where people interact.” There is a reading room for children and another for adults, play tables with catchy graphics that purport to go inside the mind of the writer and the use of music and film to make some points. Scents highlight the work of M.F.K. Fisher (strawberry jam) and James Beard (onions). On display are a pair of vintage Royal typewriters that invite visitors to type and create a story.
Writers’ room
There are 11,000 square feet of galleries. The museum cost almost $10 million to get off the ground, an amount that includes substantial funding from the Washington D.C. co-founders and friends. The founders chose not to use the donations to create a dazzling building. Rather, they are hoping that the museum grows in phases with a permanent building later, or perhaps not.
Featured writers
The founder is an Irishman who was reared in Yeates country. Mr. O’Hagan emigrated to the U.S. in 1968. “Growing up in Ireland, I loved the American writers—Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway—that made me love America.” Co-founder Lawyer Werner Hein, 74, grew up in Germany after the War and noted that America caught his imagination through the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Hemingway. Hein and O’Hagan met in Washington D.C. where they are members of a writing club. They noted that there is no place in America that specifically honors the nation’s authors. The third co-founder is business executive Jay Hammer, 62, and also a book club colleague.
Mr. O’Hagan
All three grappled with where to put this museum. Chicago has a fine tradition of writers and is in the center to the country. It’s the original home of Hemingway. The Director of Operations, Christopher Burrow, noted that “books can be kind of stale. We’re trying to bring them back to life.”
The Writers Hall honors 100 “significant” writers of fiction and non-fiction. They’ve tried to include diversity, women, and varied styles. Honors have been bestowed on Tupac Shakur, Julie Child, Richard Pryor and Herman Melville among the many others. So, Chicago is now home to a “dream born of Mr. O’Hagan’s Irish ardor for the American language and the written word.” The next project: Turning the restrooms into additional gallery space while still keeping them functioning as bathrooms.
So if in Chicago, check it out. It looks very intriguing to me.
Vintage typewriters
Ms. Keller is a national General Features writer for Style. You can follow her on Twitter @kheller.
Hemingway owned a house in Ketchum, Idaho at the time of his death. He killed himself there and he was buried in Ketchum. He lived simply in that home with few adornments.
The ownership of the house after his death was gifted by his wife, Mary, to the Nature Conservancy. It was a modest two story 2,500 square foot house which he loved. The Nature Conservancy just transferred the house as a gift to the Community Library, a privately funded public library. The library has indicated that an apartment in the house will be renovated for a residency program for visiting writers, scholars and artists. The house still has many of Hemingway’s personal possessions and some will be put on display at the Sun Valley Museum of History.
Interior
Hemingway owned the house from April 1959 until his death, July 1961, at the age of 61. The house was given by Mary Hemingway to the Nature Conservancy with the restriction that it was precluded from operating as a public museum. The Nature Conservancy used the house as a field office before outgrowing it. The property is 13.9 acres and while the property is worth millions, the house is “small and outdated compared with the mega mansions common in the area.”
Grave
The Carr Foundation supplied the money to make the purchase of the Hemingway house by the Community Library possible. It appears that philanthropist Gregory Carr, who was born in Idaho and owns a home in the Ketchum area, made the donation. Jenny Emery Davidson, who is the executive director of the library, noted that “people are interested in Hemingway but the people who have stepped up so far are people who care about Idaho.” She also said the house is a perfect fit for the library, which has a regional history division, and is keen to promote the area’s literary icon. The house will not be open to the public like Hemingway’s other homes in Key West and Havana, but there will be some access. (At this time people cannot enter the house in Havana but can view it from the outside. It’s being restored and it is unclear if there will be access to the interior in time.)
Hem and Mary
Davidson noted that “we plan to treat it as a home. Sometimes people invite small groups of people to their home.”
So time moves on but Ketchum, Idaho maintains its love and respect for the Hemingway property.
Guest Post by Augustine Himmel: Very thought provoking. Augustine details his personal journey through Hemingway study. I added a few photos.
working
Best, Christine
Praying for Hemingway
Augustine Himmel
July 01, 2017
In graduate school, a friend and I, both Hemingway aficionados, would try to stump each other by quoting lines from the famous writer’s fiction. I had a bit of an advantage because I was a few years older than my rival and had already taught Hemingway to high school students. And so, familiar with even obscure works like “A Man of the World,” which adolescents enjoyed, I never lost one of our good-natured contests. Yet despite my devotion to the Nobel Laureate, I never thought two decades later I’d be praying for his soul.
My devotion influenced my first published story, “The Man Who Thought He Was Hemingway,” and the summer after graduate school another friend and I made a pilgrimage to northern Michigan, retracing the steps young Ernest would have taken when vacationing with his family. We went to Walloon Lake in Petoskey, to Horton Bay where he loved to fish, and then on to the Upper Peninsula, to Seney and the nearby Fox, a.k.a. “Big Two-Hearted” River. After visiting Hemingway shrines during the day we would spend our evenings in the local taverns, and then around 2:30 a.m., back in the tent while my poor friend tried to sleep, I would turn on a flashlight and read Hemingway stories aloud as if they were Compline.
Michigan with Gregory
I was not Catholic then and had never heard of Compline; I did not know the Scripture verses prayed at night were selected by the church to encourage peace in the soul. Yet in my own fumbling way I sought this peace through what I was reading. And to some extent, I succeeded. For it is impossible to encounter the best of Hemingway’s stories, “Indian Camp” or “Now I Lay Me,” “The Undefeated” or “In Another Country,” without being soothed by their transcendence. Fiction is not divinely inspired, but Ralph Ellison thought so much of “In Another Country” he could recite its opening paragraph verbatim.
Pauline giving haircut
A few years after that pilgrimage I converted to Catholicism, and as I tried to move closer to God I found myself moving away from Hemingway. For a long time, before, during and after graduate school, I did not have any faith—in spite of having been blessed with a solid Lutheran upbringing. In retrospect I partially blamed the man who, in The Sun Also Rises, taught me “a bottle of wine was good company.” I knew my atheism had been a response to my mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, which struck her at 55 and turned her into an old woman overnight. I had watched her exhaustingly take care of her own mother, afflicted with the same disease, and the irony of my mother’s suffering, commencing just a year after my grandmother’s death, could not be reconciled with a loving God.
Still, hadn’t Hemingway also played a role? In addition to the lousy example he set as a hard-drinking womanizer, hadn’t he, in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” penned the nihilistic and blasphemous lines of the old waiter? They are as sharp and clear as anything he ever wrote:
It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nadaus ournada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
As a writer, I understood a character’s words and actions cannot be ascribed to their author. The old waiter is a fictional invention. He is not Hemingway any more than the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is Flannery O’Connor—even if the Misfit’s lament, “I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment,” might well have been echoed by O’Connor or my mother and grandmother. More importantly, the old waiter’s insomnia could be viewed as resulting from his nihilism, and a reader could interpret the tale as a condemnation of that philosophy. Nonetheless, those lines from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” haunted me. I felt guilty for having taught that story to impressionable students.
Swimming with Pauline
So I avoided Hemingway like the other fishermen avoid Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Now, however, roughly a decade later, I realize I did so out of ignorance. I had bought into the myth of Hemingway propagated by our culture and, indeed, many of his biographers, rather than the truth revealed in his life and work. Far from being a nihilist, he had an interest in Catholicism even before his 1927 marriage to Pauline, and though he practiced the faith imperfectly, to say the least—four wives, several affairs—it always remained important to him and permeates much of his fiction. Santiago, after all, means St. James, and in 1954 Hemingway formally presented his Nobel Prize Medal to Our Lady of Charity, the Patroness of Cuba.
Yet I do not pray for Hemingway because he was Catholic, but rather because through his writing he has been a friend of mine, and in 1961, two years before I was born, he put the twin barrels of a shotgun against his forehead and committed suicide. He had received electro-shock treatments to combat depression, and these, combined with the serious concussions he had previously suffered, left him unable to think clearly, much less pursue the craft for which he won the Nobel. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that psychological factors like this can mitigate one’s culpability. Furthermore, it says: “We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (No. 2283).
Pauline and HEm
In short, there is hope for Ernest Hemingway, for all suicides, and this hope is rooted in God’s timelessness as well as his mercy. Our prayers are effective because everything stands before God in an ever-present now. God has always known that I would offer prayers in 2017 for that terrible moment in 1961. He can, therefore, assign the grace of those prayers to Hemingway in that moment, in the final millisecond of life after the trigger was pulled. My petitions before God, even 56 years after Hemingway’s death, can foster a disposition of the writer’s soul that will lead to salvation.
Hem’s bedroom
Dorothy Day understood this and prayed frequently for suicides, and we should do the same. These are souls on the margins, spiritual outcasts in need of our compassion. We should have Masses said for them, pray the Rosary and Divine Mercy Chaplet for them and offer up our trials so they may attain the beatific vision. And whether we are tied to them by kinship, friendship, admiration for their brilliant writing, or just the metaphysical bond of our shared humanity, we must trust in the boundless love of God whom we know “desires all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4).
More: Spirituality / Books
Augustine Himmel
Augustine Himmel’s stories have been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal, South Carolina Review, Long Story, Arizona Mandala and other publications. He is currently shopping around his literary novel, If I Needed You.
Those of you who follow this blog may recall my post about the simplification of some of the classics for children. As I mentioned, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, among others was put into “simple” language.
This week, a federal judge ruled that the publisher of these popular kids’ versions are infringing on the copyrights of the famous novelists. The idea was to make literary classics accessible to children as young as six. However, the estates of four literary lions (Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Kerouac’s On the Road, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Arthur Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) joined Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House in a suit after the publisher of the kiddy books refused earlier demands to stop publishing.
The ruling was clear that this was an infringement on the copyright holders’ rights to exercise control of the publication of their works. KinderGuide Books, the division of Moppet Books that published the child versions of the classic, plans to appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff.
Breakfast at Tiffanys
KinderGuide however is continuing to move forward in publishing children’s editions of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, Homer’s The Odyssey, as well as biographies of Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey. The publisher had originally planned to do child versions of 50 classic novels, but given the legal challenges it’s facing, it has already dropped plans to publish illustrated versions of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye was published (sort of) by KinderGuides’ co-founder Frederik Colting in 2009 when Colting published an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye in the United Kingdom entitled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. In 2011, just before his death, J.D. Salinger obtained a court order blocking the book from ever being published in the U.S.
So for the moment, the simplification, or as some have called it, the “dumbing down” of these classics has been halted.
BELOW MY DECEMBER 2016 POST ABOUT THIS
Four classics so far have been made child friendly by KinderGuides: On The Road, by Jack Kerouac; Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote; Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The stories have been dramatically abbreviated and have large, colorful illustrations. Among the next four classics to be published by KinderGuides are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. Bear in mind, these are being read to 6 to 12-year olds. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, blessedly omits the drugs, prostitutes and wild parties.
Jack KerouacSpencer Tracy as Santiago
Forbes just published an article by Frank Miniter entitled “A Startling Example of How the Politically Correct Currents Pull Strongly Toward Mediocrity.” It starts out asking if Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, actually can be watered down for young readers, noting that the great dumbing down of the American mind isn’t just underway, but has become a parody of itself.
The Old Man and the Sea
The KinderGuides’ version of The Old Man and the Sea begins with, “Santiago is an old fisherman who lives in a small village by the sea, on an island called Cuba. Every day he takes his boat far out into the ocean to catch fish. But after 84 days of trolling, he hasn’t caught any fish at all. He is sad.”
Frank Miniter’s article notes further that The Old Man and the Sea is a concise novella as it is, exploring man’s struggle, not just with a fish, but with his mortality. The prose in the original is hardly difficult. The real Hemingway begins, “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the gulfstream and he had gone eighty-four days now without a fish.” If the word ‘skiff’ is a new and challenging word, there is always the dictionary. At the Forbes article goes on to note, the theme of a man’s struggling, knowing his body is failing him and that inevitably he will be a tragic figure, but that nevertheless he must face his mortality with grace, regardless, is lost in the KinderGuides’ version.
Miniter writes, “Instead of raising children’s knowledge and understanding of these things, this is another example of watering down the education of our youth. Should great paintings also be simplified into cartoon characters? How about plays and music?”
Ernest Hemingway, the legendary author and tortured Nobel laureate, is known for works like “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Old Man and The Sea.”
His image was that of a bold adventurer and world traveler. He was an avid big game hunter, often posing next to his prey in pictures.
There’s another — and perhaps more relatable — side to the legendary author, though. It’s one of an awkward teenage suitor trying desperately to impress a girl who captured his high school heart.
Her name was Frances Elizabeth Coates. She sang opera and went to the same Oak Park, Illinois high school Hemingway attended. He played cello at the time and was enamored by Coates and her love of art.
Coates’ granddaughter, Betsy Fermano, lives in Marblehead, Mass. She kept Hemingway’s letters to her grandmother since Coates’ death in 1988. She seals the letters in a quart-sized plastic bag and was keeping them in a trunk. She only recently started dropping them off in a vault at a nearby bank when she learned they could be of value. They’re slightly yellowed but in surprisingly good condition for papers that are essentially a century old.
Betsy Fermano opens a plastic bag containing letters from Ernest Hemingway to her grandmother Frances Elizabeth Coates. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
“I remember my grandmother telling me about these letters, and she was very embarrassed to talk about her relationship with Ernest Hemingway — or Ernie as she always called him,” says the retired fundraising and development executive. “Because they were really close friends … and I guess Ernie wasn’t with, so I’ve heard, a lot of women, and he was really close to my grandmother, to Frances, and they spent a lot of time together.”
Elder (A Hemingway Scholar) says the preservation of Hemingway’s letters is remarkable.
“Letters from that era — from 1918, 1919 — outside the family are extremely rare,” he explained. “It’s just his voice. He is just sort of free and flirtatious with her because he’s not writing to family.”
A portion of a letter written by Ernest Hemingway to Frances Coates in 1918. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
In the letters, a young Hemingway writes from Milan, Italy during World War I. We asked Fermano to read one of the letters Hemingway wrote from his hospital bed there in 1918 as he recovers from injuries suffered while volunteering as a wartime ambulance driver. He wrote:
“Dear Frances, you see, I can’t break the old habit of writing you whenever I get a million miles away from Oak Park. Milan is so hot that the proverbial hinges of hell would be like the beads of ice on the outside of a glass of Clicquot Club by comparison. However, it has a cathedral and a dead man, Leonardi Da Vinci and some very good-looking girls, and the best beer in the Allied countries.”
Elder said Hemingway seems to be “trying to make [Frances] jealous. He’s trying to say, ‘look at all these beautiful women around me,’ and then he’s bragging about trying beer, which would’ve been sort of the ultimate sign of rebellion, because he grew up in Oak Park, which was a town sort of founded on the temperance movement and was a dry town.”
Was Coates Hemingway’s First True Love?
Photograph of a young Ernest Hemingway and Frances Elizabeth Coates on a canoe trip. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
“Given some of the evidence here, I think Frances Coates cared for him, but he was squarely what we call in the ‘Friend Zone,’ so if it was his first love, it was very one-sided,” explains Elder.
It was, it appears, unrequited love, then. In fact, in a letter that Francis Coates wrote to a Hemingway biographer, she described her once close friend as awkward and sensitive.
Coates went on to marry a classmate named John Grace, a future railroad executive. But Elder says apparently Hemingway, who pined over Coates as teenager, never forgot Coates — and maybe never got over her because, in fact, her name appears as a character in some of his now classic novels.
“Hemingway was good at holding grudges, and this is not really a grudge, but she is certainly someone he never forgot,” Elder says.
Hemingway apparently references Frances as a character when he’s talking about her husband, in which he writes in his novel, “To Have and Have Not”:
“He’s probably a little too good for Frances, but it will be years before Frances realizes this. Perhaps she will never realize it with luck. [This type of man] is rarely also tapped for bed. But with a lovely girl like Frances, intention counts as much as performance.”
Woo! Elder says “whether or not that was directed at [Coates], Frances definitely saw herself in that — she wrote about it, calling it a wry scene.”
Coates didn’t forget Hemingway either.
She kept his high school portrait in a gold frame in her drawer, and all of the pictures he sent her in a small envelope. Some of those are now in Marblehead as well.
So, did Francis Coates ever regret letting go of the young writer she called Ernie who later became a larger-than-life author — but who also went on to four marriages and three divorces?
Well, a little scribble on the back of an envelope may help answer that question.
“Oh, this is what she says on this envelope, ‘Ernie’s pictures. And 25 years later, ooh! Am I glad I married John!’ ” Fermano reads, laughing.
