I can trace my passion for Hemingway to a
sweltering July afternoon in Key West in the 1970s. My husband and I
were there with a couple of friends who were eloping. We were the sole
witnesses to the wedding, conducted in the office of the justice of the
peace, who, upon learning the purpose of our visit, walked over to a
hook on the back of his door, removed the necktie hanging there and put
it on over his golf shirt. After the ceremony we had lunch at a fish
shack, and as I was already too sunburned to think about the beach, we
headed for the Hemingway House.
I don’t recall seeing any other visitors. In the living room the high
French doors were open to the veranda, and a cat was napping on the
sofa. In the kitchen another cat had draped itself across the top of the
stove. The guide invited us to take a cat home if we wanted to—they
were special six-toed “Hemingway cats,” he said, but it didn’t seem
practical. (We know now, thanks to the recollections of the author’s son
Patrick Hemingway, who grew up in that house in the 1930s, that despite
the present-day hype, the family did not have cats on the property, but
kept peacocks instead.) We talked through the rooms, up the center
staircase, around the house on the outside balcony, and across a catwalk
to the room on the second floor of the coach house, where Hemingway
retreated to write.
As a fellow midwesterner (a native of Des Moines, Iowa, a few hundred
miles due west of Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois), I felt
the lure of the exotic: the turquoise waters of the Gulf, faded old wood
houses with gingerbread trim, turtle soup and conch chowder, the sign
saying “Southernmost Point of the United States—90 miles to Cuba.” My
interest in Hemingway was piqued, and I began reading everything he had
written.
If I had to identify one thing that most strongly attracted me to
Hemingway—and attracts me still—it probably would be his art of evoking a
sense of place. Henry James—not one of Hemingway’s favorite
writers—advised those who aspired to write fiction, “Try to be one of
the people on whom nothing is lost.” As a writer who started out as a
journalist, Hemingway had a sharp eye and keen ear. His letters capture
his own immediate impressions and excitement of discovery as his world
widened out from the American heartland.
In May 1923, encouraged by Gertrude Stein,
Hemingway traveled to Spain to witness his first bullfights. He was
immediately enthralled. Just weeks after returning home to Paris in
mid-June, he headed back to Spain with his wife, Hadley. On July 18th,
1923, he wrote to his ambulance corps comrade Bill Horne, “Have just got
back from the best week I ever had since the Section—the big Feria at
Pamplona—five days of bullfighting dancing all day and all
night—wonderful music—drums, reed pipes, fifes—Faces of Velasquez’s
drinkers, Goya and Greco faces, all the men in blue shirts and red
handkerchiefs—circling, lifting floating dance. We the only foreigners
at the damn fair.” He described the morning running of the bulls through
the streets, from the corrals on the edge of town into the bullring,
“with all of the young bucks of Pamplona running ahead of them!” Of the
bullfight itself he wrote, “It’s a great tragedy—and the most beautiful
thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than
anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the
war with nothing going to happen to you.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-vulnerable-private-writings-of-ernest-hemingway/
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