Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchiner

Poor little Hercaloo broke his tail feathers.  We had to go to the vet and have them removed.  It was not a pleasant experience.  They had to pull them out which is like having your hairs plucked out of your head.  Hercaloo did not suffer in silence.  She kept (we think it's a "she" now) up a constant scream that had my ears ringing until we got back home.

I was afraid she wasn't going to forgive me, but she's just as affectionate as ever, even if she does look like she's been run over by a lawn mower.

Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A.E. Hotchner started out as a young journalist who was assigned to interview Ernest Hemingway. He didn't want to do it. He felt he was much too unimportant a person to be bothering the great writer. Flying down to Cuba where Hemingway was currently living he sent him a note explaining his situation and also that he understood that Hemingway probably didn't have time for him.

What he received was a phone call from "Papa" himself inviting him to a restaurant for dinner and drinks. Thus began a fourteen year friendship between the two men, ending only with Heminway's death. It does not include anything that happened before Hotchner knew him and only includes personal transactions between the two authors.

Hotchner quotes a lot of the conversations verbatim. Hemingway apparently did not talk in complete sentences. This may give an authentic feel to the story but it makes for rather stilted reading. I'd rather he had paraphrased.

Having read Carlos Baker's unflattering biography about Hemingway it was interesting to compare the two. Because Baker in his biography calls Hotchner's biography unrealistic and fawning, I was prepared to read a biography that was biased.

Maybe it was, but I felt that Hotchner was fairly honest about Hemingway's foibles, even if he did leave out or soften some facts that would make Hemingway a less sympathetic character. Mostly it is the story about a man the author obviously has great affection and esteem for. For whatever reason, Hemingway, at least from Hotchner's telling, took a liking to him and did not treat him in the shabby way he treated a lot of people.

Even so, I still don't find Hemingway to be all that nice of a person in Hotchner's biography. Most of it is centered around Hemingway telling Hotchner what sound like tall tales, but even if they're not, they are still rather boorish renditions of what a tough guy he was. ("There I was in WWII, beating up the enemy single handedly...")

The story travels along from Cuba to Spain to Africa, back to Cuba and also the U.S. a few times. Each place Hemingway lived was defined by how he conquered powerful animals . In Spain, he is obsessed with the bullfights. Hemingway never was a bullfighter but he became close friends with bullfighters and seemed to live vicariously through them.

In Cuba he fished Marlin from his boat the Pilar. In Idaho he hunted bears and in Africa he hunted all sorts of big animals. I don't understand the psyche that pushed Hemingway to be such an avid big game hunter. He also enjoyed destroying people, although that does not come into this biography. What drove him to do it? Where did this cruel streak come from? Hotchner does not answer these questions. Baker's biography provides more clues.

Hotchner doesn't answer perhaps because he didn't see it. Or maybe hooking on to Hemingway helped promote his own career. Certainly writing a biography about a famous writer you were personal friends with guaranteed getting known.

Throughout the book Hotchner refers to Hemingway as "Papa". I wonder how the moniker started. It comes across as a little contrived and denotes a kindly, gentleness that was not a part of Hemingway's character.

But perhaps he was a "papa" to some people. Hotchner seemed to view him so and so did others. Who Hemingway showed that side to appears random.

The last part of the biography describes Hemingway's mental deterioration. Other biographies describe Hemingway's mental illness, but Hotchner gives a first hand account, allowing for a more accurate diagnosis. This book was published in the sixties so different names were used but I think that "paranoid schizophrenia" is how it would be described today. Hemingway became convinced that the FBI was out to get him, that they had bugged all his phones, and if any friend disagreed they had been "bought" and crossed over to "their side".

Hemingway was admitted into a mental hospital at different times towards the end of his life and according to Hotchner was released against Hemingway's wife and also Hotchner's advice. In the end Hemingway was able to divert everyone long enough to pull the trigger. Hotchner wrote this biography soon after Hemingway's death.

In conclusion, if you are a Hemingway fan, this is a good biography to include in your library. It is written with the warm affection of someone who knew Hemingway personally and carried on a close relationship with him in his old age, when he had once again invented himself, this time as "Papa Hemingway".



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For a video tour of Hemingway's house "Finca La Vigia" in Cuba, click on the link below:
http://www.hemingwaycuba.com/finca-la-vigia.html 

Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway and The Guns of Navarone by Alistair Maclean

Two books I left off of my end of the year book post was The Guns of Navarone and Green Hills of Africa.  The former I read while my son drove us to Florida.  The latter I read each night in the silence of my bedroom after a day filled with family and beach.

The reason I want to review them together is because of the reasons why I liked the books.

The books are very different and probably why some writers are good fun and others achieve the level of greatness.

The Guns of Navarone is built around a storyline.  For those of you who haven't seen the classic movie, the story takes place during WWII.  Captain Keith Mallory, a New Zealander, is commissioned to infiltrate the German occupation of the Greek island Navarone and destroy the mighty German guns that have prevented the Allies from invading this point and retaking Greece from German occupation.  There is no way to arrive there except by the entrance that the Germans stand sentinel with their guns.  The rest of the island's edge is sheer stone cliff.

Captain Mallory, who speaks both Greek and German like a native, also happens to be a world class mountain climber and fully capable of scaling the mountainous walls on the side of the island the Germans would not be guarding. 

He and his team, a mix of British and American soldiers and one apparently indestructible Greek native, embark on this adventure.  It is naturally full of suspense and action.  Therein lies the fun of reading the story which is basically built on a sequence of seemingly impossible obstacles that are flung in the way of the team.  Just when they overcome one horrible threat, another one rises to take its place.  There's no down time.  Kind of like a video game.

Maclean develops his characters well.  This is before existentialism took over books, where life and death are all the same and the characters aren't anyone the reader can develop an attachment to.  The main characters in Navarone are sympathetically drawn and the reader roots for them, mourning any losses that happen along the way.  Even the Germans are presented as human, rather than android monsters. (Which are a lot of fun destroy in video games!)  

The book was written a decade after the war which allowed contemporary readers to enjoy the story because they knew that an evil empire had already been defeated. The story reflects the optimism and sentiment that good triumphs over evil.  Many popular stories now written seem to have thrown out any kind of moral compass, leaving a type of  purposelessness infused in the pages.  One doesn't leave a modern story with a positive resolution but rather with a "whatever, nothing matters anyway" state of mind.  Of course I can only speak for myself.

Why do I compare Maclean's book with Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa? Perhaps because I read one after the other I couldn't help making a comparison.  While The Guns of Navarone is a story built entirely around a series of events that arrive at a climax then resolution, Green Hills of Africa has no story-line whatever.  It's simply about Hemingway and his wife on safari.  He describes the animals he wants to kill, his frustrations when he fails, his elation when he succeeds.

He writes down the conversations he has with his wife, the African guides and a few other men who accompany them on the hunt.

Aside from his blood lust for killing magnificent animals which disturbed me, his writing is what makes him the superior writer over Maclean and most twentieth century writers.  

Anyone who can keep me going through a book where nothing happens is a brilliant writer in my opinion.

So what makes his writing so great (and I acknowledge that many people who read Hemingway don't share my views)?

Each sentence, each carefully chosen word, can only be compared to how an artist must choose specific hues to create a painting. How he describes the background scenery implants in my imagination a rich backdrop through which I vicariously enjoy the African plains. Every word is like a well-placed step, like that of a ballet dancer, that drives the sentences, the paragraphs and ultimately the entire novel forward.

The writing seems so simple. Almost as if written for a child, or by a child.  Or someone who speaks English as a second language.

Yet there is heavy drama implied with each conversation that takes place.  Every sentence is pregnant with meaning. 

Green Hills was written in 1936, six years after he left his first wife for the woman in the novel and four years before he divorced this second wife.  Knowing that added to the subtle drama that hung over and under the story.

Green Hills of Africa is not a work of fiction.  In the foreword Hemingway writes:

Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary...The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.



It is hard to describe why I enjoy reading Hemingway. How does one justify an aesthetic response?  

  Nevertheless, I hope in this brief post I successfully explained why I enjoy Maclean's novels but why I love Hemingway's.