In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway

So my dad got me a book of a lot of Hemingway's early writing, basically up through The Sun Also Rises. Many of them I've read, including The Sun Also Rises, but also the articles about getting free shaves at the barber college, or interviewing Mussolini. And from what I've heard, The Torrents of Spring was a mess. His mean-spirited attempt to poke at some more established author that pissed him off, that just came off as pitiful. No thanks.

But I hadn't read In Our Time before, which is a collection of a bunch short stories. Some of them very short, less than a page. Just quick bits about someone being prepared for execution, or about a bullfight. The others are longer, for 4 to 15 pages, about a lot of the same things. A man trying to get away from things by returning to a river he hasn't fished in a long time, and the pleasure he takes from it ("Big Two-Hearted River".) Those stories, and several others are about a Nick Adams, growing up alongside his dad, or trying to ride the rails and the perils of that.

The story that was maybe most interesting to me was "My Old Man", written from the viewpoint of a young boy whose father is a jockey, first in Italy, and then in France. The mixture of a boy's idolization of his father, combined with confusion when he does things the boy can't understand. The limited view and understanding a child has of what's going on around them, the blind spots and the information they aren't privy to. 

I don't know if the writing style in that story is on the track to what became his signature style. Certainly not as much as some of the Nick Adams stories. In those you can see him developing that mixture of short specific sentences and the longer, more rambling sentences that are almost stream of consciousness about whatever. It feels like he leans more to the short sentences, brief statements about how he's going to make coffee a certain way. Like his friend Hop insisted. And it has to be Hop's way completely. Too bad Hop's not here. But he won the lotto and went to collect. Never came back like he said. And so on.

'All around people were saying, "Poor Kzar! Poor Kzar!" And I thought, I wish I were a jockey and could have rode him instead of that son of a bitch. And that was funny, thinking of George Gardner as a son of a bitch because I'd always liked him and besides he'd given us the winner, but I guess that's what he is, all right.'

The Ambulance Drivers - James McGrath Morris

Both John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway volunteered to be ambulance drivers during World War I. It was during that time they first met, briefly. If that meeting was unremarkable at the time, the circumstances of course had an outsize impact on both their lives, especially their writing.

Morris tracks both writers' lives, professionally and personally, and their friendship with each other. It isn't a deep dive, having read a lot of books on Hemingway over the last decade, it's obvious Morris is just skimming across the surface in places. But it gives an overall picture of their ups and downs, and how that affects things between them.

Although frankly, most of the effect is on Hemingway, who swings widely between praising Dos Passos and encouraging him to come along to Spain or Key West, and hurling invective at him and running him down anyone and everyone. Which is pretty much how Hemingway did all his friends over the course of his lifetime. Capable of great acts of kindness and cruelty. First envious of Dos Passos' literary success, while Hemingway was still struggling to find his first true success. Then, once he'd far surpassed Dos Passos in popularity and financial success, envious that Dos Passos was the one regarded as the writer of greater literary merit. The critical darling.

Morris spends a lot of time highlighting the two writers' differing philosophies and viewpoints, as expressed through their writing and their actions. That Dos Passos was active politically through the '20s and into the '30s. Joining in protest marches to demand the flimsily accused Sacco and Vanzetti not be executed. Visiting striking coal miners in Kentucky to write about their lives. Then he grew increasingly disenchanted with Communism once he, you know, saw what Stalin was doing with it. Whereas, until the mid-1930s, Hemingway tried to remain out of politics. And frankly, given how To Have and Have Not is one of his weaker efforts, he was better off leaving politics out of his books. Morris notes that Dos Passos wrote about war to try and convince humanity to stop it, while Hemingway wrote about what it was to experience it, to try and process its impact. Differing perspectives.

At times, Morris seems to rush through events, such as the murder of Dos Passos' friend Jose Robles during the Spanish Civil War. Even though that was a major nail in the coffin, one that almost ended contact between the two for over a decade. But, again, there are entire books out there on just that subject, so maybe it's unnecessary. You get a decent feel for the problem, at least, even if Dos Passos almost feels like a bystander in this book at times. Mostly because, as Morris focuses more and more on the disintegration of the friendship, Dos Passos isn't really involved in that. If he's envious of Hemingway's success, he's not letting it drive him to write poison pen articles in magazines, or rail against him in letters. The bitterness is one-sided, but that means the person who isn't retaliating plays a less prominent role.

I can't let the review pass without mentioning a passage late in the book involving William Faulkner, who when asked by a student, describes himself as second only to Thomas Wolfe among contemporary American writers (so humble!). Dos Passos is third, and then Hemingway, who Faulkner says has never used a word that might require a reader to open a dictionary. Because that's the most important thing when you write. But what would I expect from a writer who once had an entire chapter that consisted of the sentence, 'My mother is a fish'?

As I Lay Dying is a shit book, and I'm annoyed I was forced to read it in high school English, is what I'm trying to say here.

'Hemingway, unlike Dos Passos, worried less about war itself than coming to terms with it. War was personal for him, not political.'

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Vol. 4

Volume 3 was not available at a reasonable price last year, so my dad just skipped it and grabbed Volume 4, which runs from 1929 through 1931. During most of this period Hemingway is working on Death in the Afternoon, his non-fiction book about bullfighting, which is one of my favorite things he wrote (and I don't even give a shit about bullfighting). Most of his letters claim he's making good progress until he's in a car wreck in Wyoming that ends with a badly injured right upper arm that takes months to heal to where he can resume writing.

Some of the letters during that stretch are him dictating to his second wife Pauline, and I imagine that was not a lot of fun for her, given how often his letters (regardless of who's writing them) go on bizarre tangents. In general the family seems to be spending much more time in the United States, either Key West or Wyoming, as Ernest is growing increasingly dissatisfied with Europe. Or more specifically, France. He'd already basically sworn off Italy when Mussolini rose to power, and still seems to enjoy traveling to Spain for the bullfights in summer. But there are a lot of letters to people encouraging them to come out west to hunt elk, or travel by boat to the Dry Tortugas and fish with him. The big hunting trip to Africa keeps getting delayed for various reasons, some economic, others health related.

The early part of this volume also involves a lot of letters to his mother about her financial situation, where more of the strain between the two of them shows through. Ernest is clearly expected (or feels he is expected) to support not only Grace Hemingway, but also his various siblings, many of whom he feels aren't showing the industriousness he did when he was their age. There are quite a few comments about how he's sorry he can't provide a larger monthly stipend, but his family does require at least a little money to live on, and that his mother shouldn't have listened to his uncle and bought a house in Florida that isn't doing her any good whatsoever in the midst of a depression. You can also tell he hasn't forgotten comments she made expressing disapproval over his choice of career, or perhaps just his writing style and subject matter.

I know, Ernest Hemingway holding a grudge? Inconceivable.

'To Maxwell Perkins [c. late August 1929]

. . . But am going to write - I think that's Scott's trouble with his novel - among other things of course more complicated - But he thought he had to write a masterpiece to follow The Gatsby - as good as Seldes etc. said he was - and to consciously write such a thing that had to be great just constipated him -

Then too you have to use up your material - you never use Anything you save - I thought I'd used up everything in In Our Time - Should always write as though you were going to die at the end of the book - (This doesn't seem to go with what's before but it's a good idea too!) Never for gods sake use or turn over to the advt. dept. anything I say in a letter -). . .'

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2 - Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, Robert Trogdon

By the time covered in volume 2, Hemingway and Hadley have a son, and Hemingway is becoming rapidly disenchanted with working as a newspaperman. Or maybe it was just being a reporter in Canada that did it.

During this stretch, Hemingway gets his collection of shorts stories, In Our Time published, although he spends a lot of letters complaining about how Liveright, his publisher, won't give the thing a proper advertising push, doesn't supply enough copies, etc. He gets the initial draft of the Sun Also Rises written, but actually submits a shorter book, meant to be satirical, called Torrents of Spring. Mostly it sounds like him wanting to talk shit about a bunch of writers he doesn't think much of, but not having read it - or the works of the people he wants to mock - I don't know if that's accurate. His insistence in several letters on how funny it is strikes me as a load of crap, though.

It's more interesting to chart the progression of his relationships with different people. Correspondence with F. Scott Fitzgerald begins, and Hemingway at this stage still speaks pleasantly of Zelda Fitzgerald, or at least doesn't disparage her as convincing Scott to waste his talent. He seems to have a falling out with Gertrude Stein because she won't author a review of In Our Time, and there's far less writing back and forth between he and his sister Marceline. The letters there are don't show any hostility, so maybe it's simply a matter of them each having their own lives, or there being letters in between that weren't kept.

He does rekindle his friendship with Bill Smith, after they hadn't talked for a few years, with Hemingway encouraging his friend to abandon his job as a salesman and come to France to help run one of the literary magazines Hemingway's friends (erratically) publish. Of course, once Smith actually visits, Hemingway writes to a lot of other people that his friend has pretty much been used up or lost his spark, so there's still that trait of his to be both a really good, and extremely shitty, friend. I don't know what exactly it was Smith was or wasn't doing that led to the assessment. Maybe he didn't enjoy drinking and boxing enough.

There's an undercurrent of frustration, about a lot of things. He gripes a lot about the state of Italy, by this point firmly under Mussolini's incompetent rule. About money, about his publishers, about writers and critics he thinks aren't worth a damn, especially if the latter are comparing him to the former (he seems to really despise Sherwood Anderson). The book jacket notes that he starts mentioning Pauline Pfeiffer in the last few letters, when discussing he, Hadley, and Bumby's last winter in Austria. Pauline would end up being Mrs. Hemingway #2, although at this point, he still seems very happy with Hadley and proud of his son, so he isn't vocalizing dissatisfaction with his marriage. Yet.

'But bulls are just like rattle snakes - Gaw - they ain't human and they ain't animals. They got something damn strange about 'em. For 600 years they been bred for viciousness, and speed. They ain't like our bulls. They got the speed of a racehorse, they never move except on the run, and they never back up. Never. They don't do anything to 'em to make 'em sore before they fight. They just let 'em loose in the ring.'

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 1 - Sandra Spanier & Robert W. Trogdon

The book is exactly what the title suggests, a collection of letters Hemingway wrote to various people. Letters to his parents, his sisters, his friends, prospective employers, any letters that could be located. In this case, from 1907 up through 1922. There are three more volumes of this, which my dad seems very intent on purchasing for me.

It can be interesting as a way to track Hemingway's mood on things, the points when he gets fed up with someone. You can track his progress through his relationship with the nurse he met while serving in the Ambulance Corps in Italy. From being head over heels and ready to marry her, to finding out she met someone else while he was back in the States. First he's heartbroken, then he's insisting he really dodged a bullet, and by the final time he refers to her, he's adopted the approach that it was a good learning experience, if nothing else.

There can be a lot of humor in the letters, when he's bullshitting with his friends or his sisters. Or seeing how he chooses to sign his letters. During his stint in Europe during World War I, he seems fond of adding little drawings of different things. Beer steins sometimes, I think there's at least one that's meant to depict the state of his leg after he got a lot of shrapnel in it from a shell. He makes me look like a good artist, which is saying something.

At times only part of the letter was located, or whatever was written or typed is unintelligible. Or Hemingway will use a Latin phrase, but change one of the words, so Spanier and Trogdon are left trying to decipher what he meant by it. That's probably the main point of the book, that at the end of each letter is a series of footnotes explaining things. Sometimes it's simply the context of a person or event that's referred to, or translating something he writes in French. Other times they have to try and guess at what might have been written or said to him in earlier correspondence that he's responding to (since I'm guessing the collection of letters Hemingway received that he kept is fairly spotty).

'To Marcelline Hemingway, [5 May 1915]

You poor bonus caput how in the name of all things just and unjust did you get in the story club. If I couldn't write a better story than you I'd consign myself to purgatory. Congratulations.

Thine eternally,
Ernestum'

Hemingway and Gellhorn - Jerome Tuccille

The book's about Ernest Hemingway and the third woman to make the grievous error of marrying him, Martha Gellhorn. It follows Hemingway around the time he and Pauline moved to Key West, and Gellhorn from much earlier in her life, as she heads out to try and become first a journalist, and then a writer.  She travels a lot, meets various men, most of whom seem to fall madly in love with her, while she can only stand to be around them for brief stretches of time. But when she does want to be around them, she's as passionate about it as they are.

She eventually meets Hemingway on a family trip to Key West, they fall for each other, he starts seeing her on the (not very) sly. They travel to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War together. Eventually they get married. Things go south from there. Martha grows more comfortable as writer, starts to experience success on her own, where she isn't quite so chained to Hemingway's legacy, which irks him. The more he tries to control, the more she pulls away, the more resentful he gets, the more she sees all the parts of his personality she doesn't like so much. Like the constant drinking and partying with his vast array of hangers-on and buddies.

In the broad strokes, there's nothing here I didn't already know. Martha and Ernest were terribly suited for a long-term relationship together, in large part because Martha was not going to spend her life as "Mrs. Hemingway". Ernest is a jealous jerk who destroys every friendship he has. Martha, while a passionate journalist, was not above ignoring facts that went against the cause she favored. But some of the details were new, such as Martha's efforts to get into mainland Europe and cover the Allied invasion in 1944 (despite Ernest getting her fired from Collier's). Or their travels in China.

Tuccille effectively highlights the differences in their perspectives and personalities through their reactions. Such as Martha not doing so well with the hygienic conditions in China, while Hemingway seemed unperturbed - until his booze ran out. Or Martha's tendency, pointed out to her by Hemingway at one point, to think everyone should think and react to everything just as she did. Hemingway, of course, was fully aware other people had different opinions from him. He just didn't particularly care what they were (he didn't say that, that's just my assessment of him).

'Ernest, undoubtedly, was suffering from guilt pangs over his treatment of Pauline. Years earlier he had blamed Pauline for breaking up his marriage to Hadley, and now he was finding reasons to blame Martha for his all-but-doomed second marriage. Someone had to be the scapegoat, as long as it wasn't Ernest.'

Everybody Behaves Badly - Lesley M.M. Blume

Everybody Behaves Badly is about Ernest Hemingway's path to make a name for himself as a writer, and how he turned one of his excursions to Pamplona into the basis for The Sun Also Rises, which was his first novel (depending on whether you count his poor attempt at satire/hatchet job, The Torrents of Spring).

As you might guess, most of his acquaintances who were on the trip, and ended up "starring" in the book, weren't all that happy with it. Though Hemingway trashes just about everyone over the course of this time period. Whether a staunch ally or a critic, or a cheerleader for his work when nobody had ever heard of him, he will tear them down in an instant. It's that form of ego where he proceeds as if there's only so much praise in the world, and so every bit that goes to someone else lessens what can someday be lavished upon him. And he can't abide that.

Which isn't anything terribly new; I've read enough other books on him to know about his vicious, petty streak. Though I'd forgotten just how entirely indiscriminate it can be. I think maybe Hadley, his first wife, is the only one he doesn't entirely disparage at some point, and of course, he ultimately cheated on her and then they divorced (though he signed over all royalties from The Sun Also Rises to her, which surprised me).

The book provided some stories and insights I either never knew, or had forgotten. I had always thought Robert Cohn, the fellow who moons hopelessly over Lady Brett, and was just getting out of an unhappy relationship with a party lady who wanted to destroy his writing, was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Apparently Cohn was based on Harold Loeb, who had been a staunch supporter and believer in Hemingway's talent, but committed the grave mistake of coming from money and I guess being Jewish. Also possibly for mooning over Lady Duff Twysden, who Hemingway was also interested in (and who wound up being the inspiration for Lady Brett). Looking back, I was basing too much of my guess that it was Fitzgerald on Hemingway's unflattering description of "Frances", who I figured was meant to be Zelda Fitzgerald.

Silly me, thinking Hemingway could only despise one woman at a time.

As the title says, everybody behaves badly, so there are plenty of amusing anecdotes. Hemingway's seemingly unerring ability to recognize people who could further his goals, and his even more surprising ability to avoid alienating them before they could help him. And of course, lots of people being drunk idiots. I enjoy the parts about him struggling with his writing, trying to sort out his style, figure out what he wanted to write about and really get it going. How he learned from Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, adopted some of their suggestions, but bent them to what he wanted to do. He has some of Stein's repetition, for example, but in his own style.

'There must have been moments during this period, however, when both of the Hemingways began to see themselves through the eyes of their rich new friends. It is difficult to imagine that the veneer of bohemian romanticism never once dissolved and revealed instead a scene of cramped, dreary struggle.'

Bylines: Ernest Hemingway

This is a collection of some of Hemingway's many published articles, dating back to his days working for the Toronto Star Weekly in the early 1920s. It isn't all his articles, just some of the ones the editor (William White) thought were the best, I guess. There are quite from his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, as well as a section for articles written about World War II. Most of the earlier of those are written about a trip he and Martha Gellhorn took to China in 1938 to scope things out (I should try to find any articles Gellhorn wrote about it, since I suspect her perspective would be rather different than his), and the last few are from his time in France traveling with Allied forces during the invasion. And of course, there are a lot of articles about fishing in the Gulf Stream, though fewer than I expected about hunting in Africa.

So it's a mixed bag. Some articles are better written than others, some are just more interesting to me. One of the earliest articles is, "A Free Shave," where he investigates the options available for someone looking for free services, and winds up at the barber college. Turns out the shaves are only free if you let the less-experienced, not ready for prime time students do it. He wound up with a guy who had cut open his finger that morning, but escaped unscathed. Anyway, I enjoyed that one partly because its subject matter was so different from most of the others. I did like some of his reports from Spain, or his writing about the Genoa Conference, but they can feel repetitive if he's hammering the same points.

One other thing I enjoyed is how he works around not being able to include profanity in the articles. One that he wrote for Esquire in the '30s, "On Being Shot Again: A Gulf Stream Letter", he uses phrases like, 'Fornicate the illegitimate,' and 'I'll be of unsavory parentage.' I thought those were clever workarounds, but for some reason I've been delighted by the phrase "expletive deleted" ever since I first saw it (probably in an article in the sports page), so maybe I'm just strange.

'Now when you become known as a Friend of France it usually means that you are dead, the French would not commit themselves that far if you were alive, and that you have either spent much money for France, obtained much money for France, or simply sucked after certain people long enough to get the Legion of Honor. In the last case they call you a Friend of France in much smaller type.'

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

I saved the one I remember liking the best for last. In 11th grade, my 12th grade English teacher approached all of us her who were going to be her students, and told us we had to pick some book to read over the summer, because we'd have to write an essay over it first thing when school started in the fall. I had enjoyed the Old Man and the Sea, so I picked For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It reads differently now, since in high school, I didn't know how the Spanish Civil War ended.  Robert Jordan, Pilar, Anselmo and the rest, fighting for the Republic. Robert in particular hoping this offensive - of which he and the guerrilla bands are a small part - can be the place where they start winning. Except they didn't win. Franco won. So some of them died for nothing, but maybe it at least convinced them to leave those hills, head elsewhere. I'm not sure anywhere else in Spain would be especially safe, but it's mentioned more than once in the story that Pablo's group couldn't stay much longer, that cavalry was going to be scouring those hills more thoroughly soon.

The other historical bit that stuck out to me was Jordan thinking of how he worked with the Communists because they were the only organized bunch on the Republic's side, much better than those Anarchists. It's a little funny, because the Communists were basically taking orders from Moscow, and Moscow didn't give a tinker's damn about Spain in and of itself. It was a way to test their weapons a bit, without actually endangering their own country. Hemingway wouldn't be the only person who didn't recognize that at the time, but it was something I thought of while reading those sections.

What stands out the most now, that I'm betting didn't when I first read it, is the sense of necessity. No one is excited about blowing the bridge, certainly not once they learn they have to wait until after the attack starts, after daylight. The closer they get, the greater the tension, the sense of walls closing in. The fate of Sordo's group, buried under an aerial bombardment, served to highlight what they were up against, how bad it was they can't rely on darkness. But they accept this is what they're doing, and they try their best to do it. Anselmo does not want to kill men, can't understand how Robert equates it to killing animals, but he does it when it's needed, hoping he can make up for it later. Jordan grows to hate the orders more the longer he's around the partisans, but he still has to use their help, and hope that he can come up with a plan that will let them succeed, and survive. Pablo doesn't want any part of any of it, but I guess he can't bear to be alone either, and that means he has to help, because he's their best chance of escaping. Nobody wants to be there, everyone is afraid of dying, and each comes to grips with that their own way.

The past is a big part of that, too. Robert stuck between his grandfather, the great soldier, and his father, who committed suicide, something I don't think Robert understood until the very end. Pilar thinking back on her matador love, and how he would have to constantly conquer his fear of the bulls. Anselmo and his fear that his will would falter when the moment came. Andres relief that he'd miss the battle, because he's tired of having to match everyone else's expectations of his bravery. That was the one I found most interesting (outside of Jordan's father having killed himself, because that's straight out of Hemingway's life), because of how he had been driven to put on a show every year during the bull-baiting. He had to bite the bull's ear every year, because it was expected of him, but it only really works that first time, when he's too young and exhilarated to realize how risky it was. Later, he realizes those things, and it seems foolish, but he has to keep trying it, because people will think less of him, and he can't bring himself to simply say, "No." Better for outside forces to save him from it. I don't know if that's Hemingway reflecting on masculine ideas of bravery in general, or Spanish ideas of it in particular.

I'm glad I reread it. I imagine I didn't appreciate the other characters' backstories as much the first time. Probably regarded them as needless filler getting between me and the climactic battle.

'No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.'

Green Hills of Africa - Ernest Hemingway

I'm starting to think I enjoy Hemingway's non-fiction more than his novels. The real people he knows are frequently less irritating than the ones he makes up. Green Hills of Africa is his recollection of a particular hunting trip to Africa. The primary external conflict is Hemingway struggling to land a bull kudu before the rainy season arrives and they have to pack it in. The internal conflict is the strain the repeated failures and complications cause in him. There's another hunter along with them, a fellow named Karl, who consistently gets the best example of whatever species they're hunting, but never seems satisfied with it, or with his shooting. Then add Hemingway's struggles with jealousy, and that makes Karl that much less pleased with his trophies, because he can tell his friend isn't happy.

In the end, the two aren't really very different. They each have some animal they're trying very hard to get, and as time runs out, they each get more frustrated with those around them. Karl's a little different in that he doesn't like to have people watch him shoot, whereas Hemingway doesn't mind if people are watching, so long as they don't spoil his shot. Karl seems to feel other people rush his shot, while Hemingway is rarely rushed by anyone other than himself. Maybe a little too eager to show off.

One thing about Hemingway's writing that impresses me is how interested he can get me in things I ordinarily don't care about. I don't care much for bullfighting, but Death in the Afternoon was a fascinating read. The scene with the marlin was probably the best part of Islands in the Stream. Jake and Bill's fishing trip in the mountains was certainly my favorite part of The Sun Also Rises. The way he wrote it, I could feel how perfectly relaxing and pleasant it was to be out in nature, just relaxing with a friend, fishing, enjoying some good food and drink. He pulls that off again here. That quiet tension as they pursue a rhino or a buffalo into high grass, the awe and excitement when they finally see it. I don't hunt, but I do enjoy target shooting, and I know that moment before the shot, when you're trying hard to remain calm and concentrate, just shoot the way you know you can.

One of the other things, beyond conveying the mood and emotion of a moment, is how well he describes places, so I can picture it well. Maybe I'm not seeing the huge salt lick as it was, or as he saw it, but there's a clear picture of sorts in my mind. You may have noticed, I don't spend a lot of time on setting in my stories. I think about it, but it always feels so irrelevant compared to describing the action or trying to come up with some decent dialogue that I only make a sort of half-assed attempt at it, if that. Plus, I always worry those stories get too long as it is. I suppose I ought to spend more time thinking it all through ahead of time, so I had a clearer picture in my head I could try and describe to you.

To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

I don't believe I'd read this one before. I've seen the movie, an enjoyable sort of Casablanca ripoff, but the book isn't like that. The movie was more about a guy setting aside his cynicism, and letting the honorable man inside out, whether he really wanted to or not. The book is about what hard times will drive a man to do.

It still prominently features Harry Morgan, and for the start of the book, he does own a charter fishing boat that he sometimes lets his rummy pal Eddy crew on. But when he turns to smuggling people, it's Chinese laborers, not resistance members. And, figuring a double cross, he kills the man he made the deal with, and dumps the laborers off back on Cuba, rather than delivering them to their destination. Things go downhill from there. The economic situation isn't getting any better, so he starts running liquor, then he agrees to ferry some bank robbers to Cuba. He feels he has no choice. He's almost broke, he has a family to support, and he sees this as his best option.

There's some other threads about a writer who didn't realize he was losing his wife, and some reflection on how the wealthy are generally indifferent to the suffering of the less fortunate, and if they bother to think of them at all, they don't understand them. It feels tacked on near the end, and only serves to dilute the book.

One thing that kept jarring me was the sheer number of times he used the word "nigger". He's used it in the other books, but not so frequently that it disrupts the flow of the book for me. So that didn't help, and then you throw in all the stuff about the wealthy right at the end, and that throws things off some more. The idea of all these people sleeping soundly in their yachts, worrying about their comparatively small problems, oblivious to the guy who's nearly dead because he felt he had to throw in with thieves, it isn't a bad one. He needed to do a better job threading it in earlier in the book, so it didn't just appear, poof!, at the last moment.

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

The thing that stood out to me with A Farewell to Arms was the progression Henry went through. Over the course of the book, I saw him as going from being a young man to an old one.

When the book starts, he's just a kid, nothing is serious, nothing is well thought out. He tells Catherine he loves her when he doesn't, because it makes her more likely to make out with him. After his injury, he seems to fall in love with her, or maybe he's just looking for someone stable to hold onto. But he does seem to love her, wants to be her husband, is willing (I wouldn't say "eager") to be a father. By the end, he's alone, left to bury a wife and child. In someways, he's old, having outlived his loved ones. Maybe Count Greffi is the same, though he doesn't give the appearance of one weighed down by the loss of those dear to him. Still, to have reached 94 years of age, he must have lost someone.

There's also the shift in Henry's attitude to the war. There was his discussion with his drivers just prior to his injury. They all think it would be better for Italy to stop fighting, no more dying or killing. He disagrees; defeat would be worse than continuing the war. He envisions the Austrians charging into Italy, attacking homes, trying to force the Italians to fight for them. His drivers counter that how can you make people fight for you? They'll just run once the battle starts, then you can either waste bullets on them, or on whoever you wanted them to fight (who is presumably taking advantage of the chaos). And as for their homes, let each man defend his own. For them, nationalism isn't anything worth thinking about. They don't see their lives as changing much whether it's Italians or Austrians who run the country*.

After his wound and return to the front, Henry seems to have come around. He's "gentle" about the war, as the priest describes it. There isn't any real fire to fight or win, just get it over with so he can go back to Catherine. Maybe the difference is less that he nearly died, and more that he has someone he could lose because of the fighting. Although then I have to wonder if the injury, that brush with mortality, was what intensified his feelings for her. Then the disaster of the retreat, the military police executing people, essentially, for not looking Italian enough, or officers for begin separated from their men. It's the point where the whole thing becomes not about defending the lives of the citizens - because if it was, they'd be establishing trenches to halt the advance - and more about salvaging military pride by scapegoating. And what the hell point is there to being part of that? So he's gone. He volunteered to help the Italians, wasn't drafted, by his own admission things ran smoothly without him, so no reason not to check out. I think he entered it on a lark, out of some ideal that no longer holds true in the face of what he experienced.

This isn't connected to the rest of this, but I was a little stunned to read the doctor advising Catherine to drink beer because it would keep the baby small. Well, the idea of encouraging an expectant mother to drink in general was strange. I realize they probably didn't know about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome back then, but it's still startling. As for Catherine herself, I have a hard time pegging her. She tried to keep Henry at arms length initially, probably because she recognized he wasn't serious about her, but also because she was concerned herself about becoming attached to him, because of the first fiance she lost. Once she falls for him, though, she seems determined to be whatever she thought he wanted her to be. Is it because she didn't marry her first fiance before he died, so she's afraid she caused his death somehow? So she molds herself to what she believes Henry wants, because somehow that'll keep him alive? She's very mercurial, but I can't tell whether that's just Hemingway's attitude towards women, or just a reflection of him. A lot of his characters are like that, shifting quickly between happiness and anger, or brooding, which sounds similar to the author himself.

I wonder about the Count character. He reminds me a bit of the baron from The Sun Also Rises. The much older character, one who survived his own battles, and is wealthy enough and confident enough in himself to live as he pleases. The baron enjoyed meeting new people, drinking, being with women, but none of it seemed too important to him. I'm not certain if that makes him in reality, what Barnes, Brett and the others were trying to be. They play at being affluent, living the high life for the sheer enjoyment of it, but really, their personal lives are disasters, they live beyond their means. So is the baron the real deal, or is he a cautionary tale? Does he have nothing else in his life, and so he tries to fill the emptiness the same as them? Or is he really just living as he pleases, with no worries? There's a line between the two, but I'm not certain which side he falls on.

As for the Count, his pleasures are considerably simpler - billiards figures prominently - but he seems largely content. I don't know if he's a sign of where Henry might end up in several decades. The fact that the Count now finds himself slipping into Italian naturally, rather than German or English seems significant in light of Henry being an American with no strong ties to his family back home. he met an Englishwoman in Italy, fled to Switzerland with her, and lost her there. During their time there, he didn't do any work that I could discern, he just passed the time with Catherine. But Henry is religious, and the Count is not, is actually disappointed he didn't become devout as he aged. Maybe because death doesn't bother him, is that why he he thought he'd become religious, he'd fear approaching death? I notice Henry prayed more after his injury, and especially after Catherine was pregnant and the delivery grew closer. When things beyond your control grow near, you turn to something beyond yourself is the point. The Count either doesn't have any such concerns, or he abandoned them, and so it doesn't work for him.

'This was a strange and mysterious war zone but I supposed it was quite well run and grim compared to other wars with the Austrians. The Austrian army was created to give Napoleon victories; any Napoleon. I wished we had a Napoleon, but instead we had Il Generale Cadorna, fat and prosperous, and Vittorio Emmanuele, the tiny man with the long thing neck and the goat beard.'

* This reminds me of those Mussolini biographies that noted that, contrary to his claims, Mussolini's policies did very little to affect the lives of the average Italian citizen, especially in rural areas. Their culture and lives didn't change much to reflect his Fascist ideals.

Islands in the Stream - Ernest Hemingway

Yeah, I'm still chugging along on the Hemingway kick. Probably another month at this rate, unless I take a break. Islands in the Stream is another one of those works his fourth wife arranged to have published some time after his passing. She says in a foreword that it's basically the original manuscript, minus some cuts she made that she felt certain he would have made as well. They could have afforded to make some more cuts. There are some sections where the conversations run on far too long over the same territory. That's a problem I've had with some of the other books, but it was worse here, when it was bad. Still, if they're going to publish it after his death, probably better to leave it as much his book as possible, since one can't be sure what precisely he'd choose to take out, given the chance.

I do wonder how Mary Hemingway felt, reading over these stories, seeing how wistful he was for his first wife? I suppose if you're someone's fourth spouse, you kind of accept that they'll have fond memories of the earlier spouses. Islands in the Stream is ostensibly fiction, but Hemingway is the base for Thomas Hudson. Hudson's a painter, rather than a writer, but he lives on the same islands, had one son who grew up in Paris with his first wife, two sons from the second wife, patrolled for U-boats off the Cuban coast during World War 2. So it's a more fanciful account of his life than A Moveable Feast, but it's also a significantly darker tale than that remembrance.

Hudson is a man far enough along in life to recognize his past mistakes, but to have set himself the task of not dwelling on them. The people important to him are drifting away, and he tries to accept that, use the loneliness to be productive, but he can't quite pull it off. He needs people, but being around them opens wounds and throws him off. He's trying to come to grips with the passage of time, with loss, maybe with the sense he's wasted his talents (or his life), but I'm not certain he pulled it off in time. Not that it matters, the opportunity to put any realizations he might have had into practice doesn't present itself.

As I said, it's a dark book. All three of his sons die across the course of the book, along with an ex-wife. Not sure what that represented for him. That basic fear parents have of losing their children, either in the final sense, or just in the way children and parents grow apart sometimes. Maybe regrets, the feeling he's let them down somehow, pushed them too hard, not been there enough. The whole sequence of Davey trying to bring up that marlin - one of the best sequences in the book - had an air of that after. Hudson feeling he ought to have stepped in, not let the boy exert so much effort only to fall short, as though it damaged the kid somehow. Maybe he feels he put too much of his desires into the boys, made them feel they had to connect with him through the things he liked, rather than him learning about the things they cared about. All the conversations the boys have with him are about things related to him: fishing, Paris, books, writers, painting, horses. I don't have any real picture of things the boys like to do that aren't connected to him some how.

'There are probably politer ways and more endearing ways of leaving a girl than simply, with no unpleasantness and never having been in any row, excusing yourself to go to the men's room at 21 and never coming back. But, as Roger said, he did settle the check downstairs and he loved to think of his last glimpse of her, sitting alone at the corner table in that decor that suited her so and that she loved so well.'

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

You don't need me to recap the plot do you? Fine, The Sun Also Rises about a bunch of people living in 1924 Paris doing their damndest to find some kind of meaning to life. Either that or they're trying desperately to avoid recognizing the lack of meaning in their lives.

I'm pretty sure I read this during that original Hemingway phase a decade ago, but I'm less sure now than I was before this week. I definitely didn't remember there being so much Antisemitism among the characters. It didn't reflect well on them that it wasn't enough to dislike Cohn because he was a bore, or because he wouldn't stop mooning over Brett, his heritage had to be brought into it as well.

Maybe it's that I've changed since then, but I don't recall being incredibly annoyed with most of the characters, especially during the fiesta. The fact, Jake, Brett, and the rest do very little other than drink and behave like asses to each other was off-putting. While I don't drink myself, I have no particular problem with people who (basically everyone I know besides myself drinks to varying degrees), except for when they become belligerent, or if they start repeating the same phrase or sentiment. That in mind, it wasn't surprising I found myself wanting Mike Campbell to be trampled by a bull at some point, since he alternated between the two behaviors. Even when sober, his attitude was irritating. That he was bothered that someone who loaned him money in Cannes - and presumably had not been repaid - who be irate to see him living it up in San Sebastian didn't help. I'm not sure whether that's his privilege showing, or a simple lack of self-awareness.

He's almost - almost - pitiable, in that he can't seem to stop spending beyond his means. The scene near the end in the bar with he, Jake, and Bill , where they start betting to see who pays, and before you know it, he's out of money again. He seems embarrassed about it, but he doesn't seem to have any self-control, and he sort of accepts that. It's happened before, it'll happen again. They're all like that, to varying degrees, caught in these cycles, doing the same stuff over and over again. I don't think they even expect a different result, they simply can't or won't change course. Either they can't decide what they want, they know what they want but can't have it, or won't let themselves have. Brett and Jake might do well together, regardless of his war injury, but he seems to think it makes him unworthy of her, and Brett doesn't seem to think too highly of herself, either, such as her concerns she'd ruin the young bullfighter, Romero.

That whole bit was one of the scenes I found the most interesting. Jake and Montoya discuss whether Montoya should mention the wealthy Americans who want Romero to attend a party with them. Montoya asked Jake because he feels Jake has a true passion for proper bullfighting as Montoya does, and they both recognize Romero could be great. Thus, they both agree he shouldn't pass the invitation along, that those sorts of people will ruin Romero. Of course, alter that same evening, Romero ends up drinking and dining with Jake and his compatriots, becoming smitten with Brett, Jake tacitly encouraging it, out of some idea of chivalry. If he can't make Brett happy (because impotence removes all possibility of that, naturally), he'll help her pursue any man who temporarily catches her fancy, even though he ought to know by now it won't end happily for anyone. The shift in Montoya's attitude towards Jake after that, it's silly in a way, but I understand it. Ultimately, Romero's life is his own, to live as he wants. Montoya, a random hotel owner and bullfight aficionado, is irrelevant. But Montoya's a fan, and I know that fannish desire to see someone great realize their potential, and how ugly it could be to see someone he thought felt as he did turn out to be just another leech.

That whole thing reminded me of the end of A Moveable Feast, when Hemingway described his foolishly associating with wealthy people at that lodge in the mountains as he was nearing completion of The Sun Also Rises. I wonder if he incorporated that experience into this novel, or if that was simply a coincidence. Along those same lines, the first chapter gave me a clue as to why Hemingway didn't want to Fitzgerald to see the book for as long as possible. I feel like Cohn was strongly based on Fitzgerald, and Frances seems to be Zelda, with her attempts to undercut Cohn's writing, her heavy drinking precipitating his drinking as he has to attend parties to watch over her. Or maybe Hemingway simply didn't want Fitzgerald making a bunch of suggestions on how to change the book so it would sell better. I imagine Hemingway wouldn't have taken the advice, but I think he also would have struggled to tactfully ignore the suggestions.

I can't really decide about Brett. Part of me thinks she pursues men who in some way relate or connect her to Jake. Cohn, a writer, Romero, a bullfighter (Jake isn't a bullfighter, but he loves bullfighting), Campbell, someone who lost something in the way. On the other hand, maybe she legitimately likes them for a while, then either grows disenchanted with them, or starts to hate herself. Do people look askance at her for her behavior, or does she believe they do? At a certain point, I think the flings and other failed romances create a loop for her where the inability up to that point to find a lasting, happy relationship, makes her think none of her relationships will go well, because there's something wrong with her. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, or she breaks it off.

One character I would have liked to see a little more on was Bill. There's a part of me that thinks he's the only one of the five not struggling with someone. I could be wrong, the constant travel could be his symptom, that he's physically trying to find something, but he seems more comfortable in his skin than the others. Or he hides it better.

'"I'm sorry, I've got a nasty tongue. I never mean it when I say nasty things."

"I know it," Cohn said. "You're really about the best friend I have, Jake."

God help you, I thought.'

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

Yes, I'm back from the boonies, which means I can resume the Hemingway reading I was doing in July.

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's recollections of his time living in Paris in the years before The Sun Also Rises was published. There's quite a bit about his times hanging out with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, his life with his first wife, Hadley, and their son, Bumby. I suppose the book is written in roughly chronological order, but it reads more like a series of loosely connected anecdotes, which is fine. Most of them are fairly short, and so the book zips along, though it dragged during the stuff about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. But I've never cared about the Fitzgeralds (The Great Gatsby was not one of the books I was forced to read in high school that I enjoyed), so maybe that's why.

There are a lot of small things he mentions, those little details that help the story come alive, or just interest me. For example, French book dealers hated dealing with English books, because they could never tell whether a particular book was worth anything, because they considered the binding to be uniformly terrible. Hemingway and Hadley going to the track occasionally, though for Hemingway it started becoming all too regular. His doubts he could ever write a full novel, because he was having so much trouble even writing one paragraph in the way he really wanted, and his doubts about the wisdom in leaving journalism to focus on prose. Heck, even the fact he hated his first name was interesting, though now that I think of it, how many people are truly happy with their first name? You didn't get to choose it, unless you had it legally changed, but you had to live with the other name for a time. Being Hemingway, he deliberately called someone he knew (and didn't like) with the same name in Paris "Ernest", because it was a private way of expressing scorn.

I was very curious about his discussion of Dostoyevsky with his friend Evan Shipman. He likes Dostoyevsky's characters, but they both thought he was a terrible writer, who somehow wrote wonderful you still didn't want to read more than once. Crime and Punishment was one of the two books I had to read in high school I did enjoy (The Old Man and the Sea being the other, which is probably not a surprise to you), but it's been a long time and I haven't read any of Dostoyevsky's other work, so I couldn't really say. I remember being impressed with his characters, but I don't recall being put off by the writing style.

The book's written with an air of wistful nostalgia, perhaps not surprising since it was written over thirty years after the fact, with a lifetime worth of decisions and mistakes between them. There's a sense Hemingway misses being the struggling young writer living in a crappy apartment with Hadley and Bumby, and the cat, F. Puss. The book ends shortly after he describes making a fool of himself for a bunch of rich people at a place up in the mountains, and around the time he started having an affair. My guess is that's when he thinks things started going downhill, and opted to stop before he had to detail it.

This regret and longing colors everything, and combined with Hemingway's own tendency to self-aggrandize and tear others down, I frequently wondered how much I could take at face value, especially where it involved people he was not entirely kindly disposed to, like Stein or the Fitzgeralds (mostly Zelda, though I think Scott's method of writing a little as well, see the excerpt below). Hemingway would hardly be the first to revise history to make himself seem more prescient or wise, just like Stein would hardly be the first author to look more kindly upon writers who gave her work positive reviews (which Hemingway mentions not so much as a fault of hers, more just a fact of life for talking with her).

Anyway, it's an excellent quick read, if you have any interest in him, or some of the life in Paris shortly after World War 1.

'I was trying to get him to write stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did.

"You've written a fine novel now," I told him. "And you mustn't write slop."

"The novel isn't selling," he said. "I must write stories and they have to be stories that sell."

"Write the best story you can and write it as straight as you can."'

True At First Light - Ernest Hemingway

I think it's a good time to take a break from Hemingway. True At First Light was a well-written book, but I struggled to get through it at times. It details part of a stint Hemingway and Mary, his last wife, spent in Kenya in a safari camp. At the start of it a local hunter who is a longtime friend of Hemingway's, departs, leaving the writer as the local game warden to an extent. Meaning that if there's troublesome wildlife - elephants destroying homes, lions eating livestock - it's his responsibility to deal with it. Mary's determined to kill a particular lion before Christmas, and in the early chapters, there's the threat of an insurgency by the local farmers against the European farmers, who presumably were granted more power and influence. And Hemingway is also courting a young local girl from a nearby village, even considering making her a second wife, with the apparent full knowledge and consent of Mary.

Then again, this is at least partly fictional, though which parts are true and which aren't, I couldn't tell you (a quick online search suggests the whole subplot with Debba isn't real). It seems unlikely Mary would be OK with his fooling around with Debba, but Mary does frequently ask for reassurance that he loves her best, that he's not leaving her for Debba, and Hemingway doesn't spend much time with both of them simultaneously. He may simply be oblivious (or unconcerned) with her doubts and fears. Everything is from his perspective, we don't get either of the ladies' opinions beyond what they tell him (and of that, only what he saw fit to include in the narrative).

Debba's even more of a puzzle to me. Does she really love him, or is this a matter of convenience? She lives with the Widow, her aunt near as I can tell, who doesn't seem to have much (other than potential suitors), and Hemingway doesn't think much of Debba's father, so I wonder if she's trying to help her family. Hemingway certainly favors them with gifts, food, and such. If so, I don't think he picks up on it, but there's a sequence where she grows distant, and I wasn't sure what to make of that. Mary was away, and he'd invited Debba and the Widow to stay at the camp for dinner, and for the night. The implication being he and Debba were going to have sex, but I was pretty Keiti cut that off. But there's a later mention of Miss Mary's cot being broken, and I'm left wondering if Debba did that out of jealousy, or if she and Hemingway did that from fooling around. Which would be pretty sleazy to my eyes, but hardly out of character for him. Like, I said, that relationship appears to have been fictional, a metaphor for Hemingway's concerns about his writing skill fading with age (which reminds me of his idea that mediocre writers live forever, and thus have the largest library from Across the River and Into the Trees).

One thing I've noticed in his fiction over these last few weeks is how the main characters all shift abruptly between cruelty and reconciliation. Things will be going smoothly, then someone makes a snippy remark, or an outright cruel one, there's some more hostility, but by the end of the page, they're apologizing and asking that all be forgotten and let's just have a good time. I wouldn't say this an unheard of characteristic in people - I am frequently hostile or impatient with people initially, only to regret it shortly after - but it's pervasive in Hemingway's characters. Some of the things I've read about Hemingway suggest he was much like that - writing letters that insulted friends in one paragraph, only to apologize at the bottom of the page - so it makes a certain amount of sense that some characters would speak that way. I wonder if a lot of his conversations devolved into that because his attitude brought out a similar one in the people he talked with.

Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway

Garden of Eden is supposed to be an uncompleted Hemingway novel. Which makes me wonder how much more he might have added or subtracted to it before he would have declared it completed.

What we have is a story of a recently married couple, Catherine and David. David's a writer, Catherine seems to come from a family of wealth, and has provided funding for David's works, which sell modestly (I assume a print run of 5,000 or so would be modest). The story follows them across several months as they travel from France to Spain and back, and things deteriorate. Catherine is, well, it's hard for me to say. It seems pretty clear she has some sort of mental disorder, maybe she's manic-depressive, but it could also be an identity issue. She likes to be a boy sometimes, gets her hair cut short, like she envisions a boy would have it, and tries to tan herself as dark as she can get. She meets a young woman, Marita, while out one day, and before you know it, she's encouraged her to come stay at the hotel/resort Catherine and David are staying at. Initially Catherine plays it off as her just wanting to experiment, but then she's encouraging David and Marita to sleep together as well. Then she starts to regret that, and tends to act in a more hostile fashion towards David.

Through all this, David has his misgivings, but tends to go along with Catherine's wishes. Part of it is a honest desire to make her happy, but part of it seems like a desire to avoid conflict, and that part only grows stronger as he starts avoiding Catherine and throwing himself deeper into writing stories about his childhood in Africa with his big-game hunting father. he starts out trying to avoid Marita, but ends up spending more time with her than Catherine. Marita seems to be what David thought Catherine was, and I'm left wondering if that's why Catherine encouraged her. She recognized that the person she wants to be isn't the person David liked, and so she finds a replacement for herself. She tries to be happy about it, because she loves David still, but part of her is angry or resentful that he can't love who she wants to be.

I really wish this was written from Catherine's perspective, frankly, because I am fascinated by what's going on inside her head. Like I said, I think she must have some sort of mental difficulty, but then there are times I feel more like she's a spoiled wealthy girl used to getting her way. So every time David indulges her, get his hair cut and died identically to hers, fools around with Marita, it just encourages Catherine to push further. Other times I think she's straining against what's expected of her. At one stage she asks if he likes her as a girl, and when he says yes, she responds it's good someone does, because it's a goddamned bore. So maybe she just hates being limited. If she feel she's a boy, then her frustration and anger would be understandable, and it isn't always going to manifest itself when or how I might expect.

David is almost passive in all this. Catherine and Marita make all the real decisions between themselves, David just goes along with it, while secretly resenting the situation. I figure it has something to do with the story he's writing about the time he regretted helping his father track down an elephant, but I'm not sure how. The story is the point where David learned the difference between the idealized version of how we see things and the truth. Sure, your dad being a ivory hunter sounds cool, but then you get a good look at the elephant he's going to kill, and suddenly it's a different perspective. So he found a beautiful, kind, curious woman willing to subsidize his writing. And look at that, she's encouraging him to sleep with another woman! It's a dream come true! But the reality is messier, when real emotions are tied up in it. The honeymoon's over.

I really would have like to have read a finished version. As it is, Garden of Eden is intriguing, but the writing lacks a certain something. The descriptions aren't quite as vivid as in his other works, and the ending sputters out. Things wrap up a little too neatly, given the personalities involved, and it feels like there were other things he was getting ready to expand on, but didn't get there.

'I can because I'm lion color and they can go dark. But I want every part of me dark and it's getting that way and you'll be darker than an Indian and that takes us further away from other people. You can see why that's important.'

Death In the Afternoon - Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's book on bullfighting. If you have any interest in bullfighting, or in Hemingway's writing when he's genuinely invested in the topic, it's a great book. If neither of those categories applies to you, give it a pass.

I don't have any real interest in bullfighting myself. I'd enjoy it more if bulls which defeated the matador were allowed to live. The matador has an entire team with him, the bull is on its own. If the bull can triumph in spite of the odds, put it out to stud. Hemingway explains they were spared originally, though it was so they could be reused. The good news - from the bull's perspective - this works to its advantage*. Many matadors were dying, so Pope Pius the Fifth threatened excommunication to any princes that sponsored bullfighting, and barred those participating from Christian burials. The compromise was that bulls were not used more than once. Which somehow translated into killing them at the end, no matter what.

As usual, the Vatican ruins everything.

Anyway, despite having no interest in watching bullfighting, I was curious about it, and Death in the Afternoon comes through better than I could have expected. Hemingway covers everything, from the different stages of the fight itself, to the different types of passes, to the differences in bulls depending on breeds, the best places to sit depending on what experience you're after, where are the places to go at a given time of year for bullfights, the way bulls are chosen, the wheelin-dealin' that goes on when picadors choose their horses, and how a matador gets his specific bulls for a match. He discusses the role of the press in a matador's commercial success, how we deify the past, even if we hated it when it was happening, the conflict between the fans' desire for a show and the matador's desire to not die, which results in very different ideas of what the ideal bull is. He discusses the ways in which the techniques have changed, so that what is considered a "good" bullfight changes over time, and a matador can grow to be considered old-fashioned and unpopular before he knows it.

Given the scope of the book, the level of detail he reaches, is remarkable for less than 280 pages, and that's with a few pages at the end of each chapter typically devoted to other things. Odd little stories that have nothing to do with bullfighting. Critiques of critiques of his writing**. A brief discussion of the few times he's tried getting in the ring. When pressed whether he actually did that (by an old woman he conjured as a piece to address certain things), he claims there were hundreds of witnesses, though many have sadly died from damage to their diaphragm from excessive laughing (Hemingway wasn't nimble enough, though he was smart enough to recognize it and avoid being gored). Obviously I haven't read any other books on bullfighting to compare it with, but I feel as though I learned a lot from this, as he does it best to explain things clearly, trying to focus on one subject at a time and cover all he thinks he needs to before moving on.

I think the most important thing I learned from the book with regards to bullfighting was what he explained at the start of Chapter 2. Bullfighting is not a sport, in the sense that basketball or tennis are, where you have people competing to see who triumphs. Bullfighting is more like theater, because the bull's fate is largely preordained. It will fight well, use its strength, speed, and ferocity for all it's worth, but in the end it will die. It's like going to watch Hamlet. You know everyone will die, so it's a matter of how well the carry it off. The bullfight is the same. How well does the matador perform, how well does he bring out the bull's courage, highlight the danger he is placing himself in. Thinking about it that way doesn't make me a fan of bullfighting, but it helps me understand it better.

'He was a fine-looking boy who studied the violin until he was fourteen, studied bullfighting until he was seventeen, and fought bulls until he was twenty. They really worshiped him in Valencia and he was killed before they ever had time to turn on him.'

* The bulls are smarter than we might expect (depending on how smart you think bulls are), and they learn quickly enough the tricks of the cape. It's a matter of whether they can figure it out before they grow too tired to take advantage.

** He has a great line here I'd seen in one of his biographies about his writing: 'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader, the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.' I think Death in the Afternoon, though not prose is almost an exercise in this. He can't put down everything he knows, the book would be massive, and he'd never finish, since as he admits, he's always learning new things. So the goal is to describe enough the reader can understand what he's discussing and make some of the other connections on their own.

Across the River and Into the Trees - Ernest Hemingway

I went through a Hemingway phase near the end of high school and into my undergraduate years. Big surprise the guy who wrote about bull-fighting, shooting, and dying would appeal to the teenage boy. The phase ended some time ago, and I hadn't read any of his work since then, but the books were still on my shelves, several unread. No time like the present.

Across the River and Into the Trees details an American colonel's acceptance of his mortality. It isn't set in a war, he's in his fifties, and I think that's roughly when the story takes place (it's post WW2, for certain). His fighting is behind him, but his heart can't go any further, and he knows it. So he travels to Venice, a town he loved in the First World War, to visit friends, to see the young woman he loves, and to go on a duck hunt. He tries to enjoy himself, but specters loom over it all. Not just his impending death, but the past. The battles he's fought, the men he's lost, the commanding officers whose stupidity he's resented, he can't move past it, despite his best efforts. By the end, I believe he'd made peace with it, but those last few days were rocky ones.

One thing I remember liking about Hemingway's writing was this sense that he got to the point. He didn't waste time blathering on about irrelevant details, and so his books didn't seem to drag. Looking back, I think it was actually that the things he talked about were more interesting to me than what Faulkner or Fitzgerald's topics of choice. If you're interested in something, you can read about it forever.

His dialogue is more stilted than I remember. Maybe because this is later in his career, or not one of his stronger works. Also possibly because they're speaking English, but that isn't Renata's first language, so she's a bit awkward. I think the repetition, the frequent description of the Colonel as being "rough" or "bad" in his speech, the imploring him to say he loves her, it's all part of something. I guess the book was described by some affair he had shortly before he read the book, and I imagine there's much of that in this. I'm not sure whether Renata is meant to be uncertain if the Colonel is genuine in his feelings, if she believes that if he loved her enough he'd find a way not to die, or if she simply enjoys having him wrapped around her finger. She isn't written as possessing any sort of malevolence, but the Colonel is the only one we have to describe her, and he's smitten. He tends to describe her as an effortless beauty, someone who simply has something that draws the eye, but who can say? Ah hell, I should not doubt her, she is a perfectly pleasant and compassionate sort, whatever doubts I have that the Colonel isn't giving her enough credit.

Even with the repetition, the book speeds along. There's something about his writing style, not only his ability to describe things well and succinctly, but something in it that carries its own forward momentum. He's fond of run on sentences, with a lot of commas in there breaking them up, and somehow that makes it like rolling a ball down a hill, as my eyes feel like they're gaining momentum, hurtling down the page. It's pretty impressive, even in one of his lesser works.

Even though I haven't read any of Hemingway's work in years, I've read three or four books about him in that span, and I found myself incorporating what I'd learned from those into my view. Even without looking online to see he'd carried on an affair shortly before this was written, it wasn't hard to see Hemingway in the Colonel. Just into his fifties, beat-up, scarred, simultaneously critical of his physical appearance, but strangely proud of it, because of what it signified about his experiences. Trying to recapture a feeling of youth with a much younger woman. Frequently rude or coarse with his remarks, but almost instantly regretful of them, but internally and externally, leading to vows to be nicer, which are always broken before too long, leading to more internal rebukes. The Colonel's journalist ex-wife almost has to be Hemingway's 3rd wife, Martha Gellhorn, and the Colonel's scorn for General Montgomery is likely Hemingway's as well.

I don't know who - if anyone - the pockmarked and pitted writer the Colonel becomes mildly obsessed with might represent, but I found the Colonel's assessment that mediocre writers are the ones who live forever, and that's why they have the most material, intriguing. Hemingway wasn't one to downplay his own skill as a writer, but I wonder if he wasn't losing a little faith at this point, wondering if he'd lost it, and was doomed to become a middling writer for the remainder of his days.

Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway - Alfredo Jose Estrada

Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway is largely a book about Cuba in the time before Batista rose to power. It's framed as a young man trying to uncover whether the story about his grandfather, Javier, knocking down Hemingway is true or not. Hemingway is not present throughout the book, as the story carries over at least a year or more of unrest prior to Machado stepping down, and "Papa" wasn't in Havana the entire time.

Estrada's method is a little unusual, because he doesn't go the well-worn route of presenting it like some investigative drama. There are no chapters of the author trying to track down leads, then chapters set in the past describing what he learned. Estrada opts to shift into the past merely by having the author picture how his grandfather would have looked, and goes from there. Which is fine, it probably helps the reader stay more engaged in the story if it's presented as though we're there, rather than as though we're hearing about it second hand decades later. Still, it leaves me a little confused, since the chapters in the present are written from the author's perspective, but those set in the 1930s are an omniscient, third-person perspective, as the focus shifts amongst several characters, what they're thinking and feeling. It leaves me wondering if this should be regarded as a "true" retelling (allowing for the fact the book itself is a novel, in the context of the world it inhabits, is it true), or just the author's conjecture and best reconstruction?

However, the book is sufficiently engrossing that these questions only came to the forefront once I stopped reading for the evening.

I was particularly interested in the glimpses of Cuba we get, since it's not a country whose history I'm terribly familiar with. This will seem foolish, but I was surprised by the frequent mentions of a Chinese population. Laundrys, restaurants, general "chinamen" in the markets or pulling wagons of goods. I never pictured Cuba as a popular destination for Chinese immigrants, and perhaps it was limited to Havana, but it was still intriguing. I thought Estrada, by having characters receive focus who were in a variety of professions, was able to nicely chart the rising tension in the country as unrest grew louder. How banks struggle when shops start closing down, or newspapers can't find people to buy ad space and have to worry about being shut down by the government if they don't tread carefully. That air of unease, where anyone in uniform is given a wide berth, not merely out of fear of them, but also fear for them and anyone nearby.

I should have read this before Hemingway's Boat, since having read a dedicated biography of the man makes the version here seem a bit caricatured. It's true Hemingway was prone to fishing, drinking, committing adultery, was likely to be gripped by sudden dark moods that might vanish equally suddenly. Still, I feel Estrada sort of files him down to just those things. It's a bit like how people use Tesla in fiction when they want death rays. It'd be worse if Hemingway was the subject here, but he's more a means to an end, a way to draw ignorant chaps such as myself into the subjects Estrada is more interested in, and in that regard, it worked very well.