The Legend and the ManErnest Hemingway is probably at least as well known for who he was as for what he wrote. He's not the only writer you can say that about, but he's certainly one of the most pronounced examples of that species known as Literanius Leonicus.
A. E. Hotchner, a frequent travelling companion during Hemingway's latter days, brings you inside the lion's den in this engaging, subjective memoir.
At its root, Papa Hemingway forms a kind of final testament on the writer's calling, as lived and observed by one of the most famous exemplars of that calling in our time. Hemingway talks a lot about writing as an art and craft, and the importance of sticking with it even when one feels empty or distraught.
"How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you're a writer?" he asks in recalling his old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway regarded as too sensitive that way. "You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously."
That Hemingway suffered for his art is the other key theme that emerges from Papa Hemingway. He suffered by living the way he chose to live, losing both his mother's affection and his inheritance because he refused to pursue music as she wanted. He suffered in seeking out the stuff of life in all its awful fury, going to war and being wounded in action. He suffered through various failed marriages and rejected manuscripts as he stuck to his vision however frustrated. Finally, when he had arrived at a place of satisfaction, he began to lose his writing abilities, and with them, the will to live.
By the time Hotchner arrived on the scene, Hemingway's career as a first-rank author was largely concluded. It was 1948, and Hotchner was writing for Cosmopolitan, then as now a Hearst publication but at the time focused on the kind of fiction that stretched beyond women's orgasms. He was given an assignment of tracking down Hemingway in Havana, Cuba to ask if the great man would write a piece about the future of literature. Hotchner tried to nerve himself to pay a call on Hemingway, then settled with sending a note and expecting nothing in return.
Then the phone rang. "This Hotchner?" asked the voice on the other end. "Dr. Hemingway here. Got your note. Can't let you abort your mission or you'll lose face with the Hearst organization, which is about like getting bounced from a leper colony. You want to have a drink around five?"
James Boswell was introduced to Samuel Johnson in a book store. In a similarly apropos way, Hotchner first set eyes on Hemingway in a bar. Daiquiris were the business of that day, specifically one dubbed Papa Doble by then famously associated with Hemingway. The Papa Doble was a big drink, and Hemingway was proud of the way he could put them away, something he talked about that day along with Lena Horne, Ted Williams, swordfish recipes, and cock fighting.
This inaugural conversation sets the tone for the rest of the book, riveting yet rambling. It helps if you like Hemingway's writing going in. Not only is the inspiration behind his novels and short stories often discussed, Papa Hemingway is also written in that terse, unsentimental style commonly associated with the author of such works as "A Very Short Story" and "The End Of Something."
"It rained so hard the first day of the feria that the bullfights had to be called off," is how Hotchner starts one section about a trip he took with Hemingway to Madrid, Spain in 1954. "As a substitute we had drinks and tapas in the Palace Bar, the nerve center of Madrid social intrigue, where every woman looks like a successful spy."
Hotchner also elicits some strong views about the cultural epoch from which Hemingway emerged, such as when he asks about "the Lost Generation."
"That was Gertrude Stein's pronouncement, not mine," Hemingway responds. "Look, Gertrude was a complainer. So she labeled that generation with her complaint. But it was bullshit. There was no movement, no tight band of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for Mommy to lead them out of the dada wilderness. What there was, was a lot of people around the same age who had been through the war and now were writing or composing or whatever, and other people who had not been through the war and either wished they had been or wished they were writing and boasted about not being in the war. Nobody I knew at that time thought of himself as wearing the silks of the Lost Generation, or had even heard the label."
Hotchner pulled close to Hemingway professionally as well as personally. He worked on a series of teleplays based on Hemingway short stories, for which he helped Hemingway get money for the rights. He also worked to help bring to light one of Hemingway's final novels, a work called Across The River And Into The Trees which actually had its genesis in the piece Hotchner tried to get Hemingway to write for Cosmopolitan.
Across The River And Into The Trees, the manuscript for which Hotchner brought back with him to the States and nearly lost, was the only novel Hemingway ever wrote that reached the top of the U. S. bestseller's list. But it also took a critical drubbing. E. B. White wrote a parody called "Across The Street And Into The Grill." Hemingway took his shots in turn ("The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal") but clearly he was hurt by it all. Fortunately, he wasn't out of bullets yet, as his next novel, and the last to be published in his lifetime, was The Old Man And The Sea, which earned him both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize.
The sense one gets as one gets deeper into Papa Hemingway was the combination of age, literary stature, and copious drinking made the title character less and less fun to be around. In the last third of the book, Hemingway is a shell of his old self, carrying scars both physical and mental, miserably following doctor's orders about his drinking while nursing vague, paranoid thoughts about those around him. Most horribly of all, he discovers himself unable to write.
"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is," Hemingway tells Hotchner near the end. "Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do – and what you do makes you what you are – is to back up into the grave."
Papa Hemingway was the first book about Hemingway to directly discuss his suicide, and controversy has followed it since. Did Hotchner use correspondence to re-create non-existent conversations? Did he invent disputes where they did not exist, or conversely, soft-soap Hemingway's bad side? Did he minimize Hemingway's affairs or his persecution complex?
Regardless of all that, Papa Hemingway in its blatantly subjectively way offers a unique window on the man it is about, not too different from Boswell's Life Of Johnson that way. Even if you are not a Hemingway fan, finding yourself at the center of the maelstrom always surrounding the man makes for invigorating reading. Hotchner is a clear advocate for Hemingway's greatness, but he seems reasonable enough about it not to make his company unbearable. The end result is a book that basically consists of two guys talking for 300 pages that makes you sad it doesn't continue on for 300 more.
At its root, Papa Hemingway forms a kind of final testament on the writer's calling, as lived and observed by one of the most famous exemplars of that calling in our time. Hemingway talks a lot about writing as an art and craft, and the importance of sticking with it even when one feels empty or distraught.
"How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you're a writer?" he asks in recalling his old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway regarded as too sensitive that way. "You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously."
That Hemingway suffered for his art is the other key theme that emerges from Papa Hemingway. He suffered by living the way he chose to live, losing both his mother's affection and his inheritance because he refused to pursue music as she wanted. He suffered in seeking out the stuff of life in all its awful fury, going to war and being wounded in action. He suffered through various failed marriages and rejected manuscripts as he stuck to his vision however frustrated. Finally, when he had arrived at a place of satisfaction, he began to lose his writing abilities, and with them, the will to live.
By the time Hotchner arrived on the scene, Hemingway's career as a first-rank author was largely concluded. It was 1948, and Hotchner was writing for Cosmopolitan, then as now a Hearst publication but at the time focused on the kind of fiction that stretched beyond women's orgasms. He was given an assignment of tracking down Hemingway in Havana, Cuba to ask if the great man would write a piece about the future of literature. Hotchner tried to nerve himself to pay a call on Hemingway, then settled with sending a note and expecting nothing in return.
Then the phone rang. "This Hotchner?" asked the voice on the other end. "Dr. Hemingway here. Got your note. Can't let you abort your mission or you'll lose face with the Hearst organization, which is about like getting bounced from a leper colony. You want to have a drink around five?"
James Boswell was introduced to Samuel Johnson in a book store. In a similarly apropos way, Hotchner first set eyes on Hemingway in a bar. Daiquiris were the business of that day, specifically one dubbed Papa Doble by then famously associated with Hemingway. The Papa Doble was a big drink, and Hemingway was proud of the way he could put them away, something he talked about that day along with Lena Horne, Ted Williams, swordfish recipes, and cock fighting.
This inaugural conversation sets the tone for the rest of the book, riveting yet rambling. It helps if you like Hemingway's writing going in. Not only is the inspiration behind his novels and short stories often discussed, Papa Hemingway is also written in that terse, unsentimental style commonly associated with the author of such works as "A Very Short Story" and "The End Of Something."
"It rained so hard the first day of the feria that the bullfights had to be called off," is how Hotchner starts one section about a trip he took with Hemingway to Madrid, Spain in 1954. "As a substitute we had drinks and tapas in the Palace Bar, the nerve center of Madrid social intrigue, where every woman looks like a successful spy."
Hotchner also elicits some strong views about the cultural epoch from which Hemingway emerged, such as when he asks about "the Lost Generation."
"That was Gertrude Stein's pronouncement, not mine," Hemingway responds. "Look, Gertrude was a complainer. So she labeled that generation with her complaint. But it was bullshit. There was no movement, no tight band of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for Mommy to lead them out of the dada wilderness. What there was, was a lot of people around the same age who had been through the war and now were writing or composing or whatever, and other people who had not been through the war and either wished they had been or wished they were writing and boasted about not being in the war. Nobody I knew at that time thought of himself as wearing the silks of the Lost Generation, or had even heard the label."
Hotchner pulled close to Hemingway professionally as well as personally. He worked on a series of teleplays based on Hemingway short stories, for which he helped Hemingway get money for the rights. He also worked to help bring to light one of Hemingway's final novels, a work called Across The River And Into The Trees which actually had its genesis in the piece Hotchner tried to get Hemingway to write for Cosmopolitan.
 |
| A. E. Hotchner and Ernest Hemingway after shooting some ducks near Hemingway's U. S. home in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1958. Three years later, Hemingway would shoot himself there. [Image from theguardian.com.] |
The sense one gets as one gets deeper into Papa Hemingway was the combination of age, literary stature, and copious drinking made the title character less and less fun to be around. In the last third of the book, Hemingway is a shell of his old self, carrying scars both physical and mental, miserably following doctor's orders about his drinking while nursing vague, paranoid thoughts about those around him. Most horribly of all, he discovers himself unable to write.
"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is," Hemingway tells Hotchner near the end. "Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do – and what you do makes you what you are – is to back up into the grave."
Papa Hemingway was the first book about Hemingway to directly discuss his suicide, and controversy has followed it since. Did Hotchner use correspondence to re-create non-existent conversations? Did he invent disputes where they did not exist, or conversely, soft-soap Hemingway's bad side? Did he minimize Hemingway's affairs or his persecution complex?
Regardless of all that, Papa Hemingway in its blatantly subjectively way offers a unique window on the man it is about, not too different from Boswell's Life Of Johnson that way. Even if you are not a Hemingway fan, finding yourself at the center of the maelstrom always surrounding the man makes for invigorating reading. Hotchner is a clear advocate for Hemingway's greatness, but he seems reasonable enough about it not to make his company unbearable. The end result is a book that basically consists of two guys talking for 300 pages that makes you sad it doesn't continue on for 300 more.
No comments:
Post a Comment