Hemingway lives! : why reading Ernest Hemingway matters today PDF
Preview Hemingway lives! : why reading Ernest Hemingway matters today
H H E M I N GWAY IN THIS CONCISE AND SPARKLING ACCOUNT E of the life and work of America’s most storied writer, M Clancy Sigal presents a persuasive case for the relevance of Ernest Hemingway to readers today. I L I V ES! N Sigal breaks new ground in celebrating Hemingway’s G passionate and unapologetic political partisanship, his W stunningly concise, no-frills writing style, and an W H Y attitude to sex and sexuality much more nuanced than A traditionally assumed. Sigal insists that, simply for the Y pleasure provided by a consummate story teller, R E A D I N G Hemingway is still as much a must-read as ever. L I Though Hemingway Lives! will provide plenty that’s new V for those already familiar with Papa’s oeuvre, including E R N E S T E substantial forays into his political commitments, the women in his life, and the astonishing range of his short S stories, it assumes no prior knowledge of his work. Those ! H E M I N G WAY venturing into Hemingway’s writing for the first time will find in Sigal an inspirational and erudite guide. C L A M AT T E R S CLANCY SIGAL, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award N winner, is the author of Weekend in Dinlock, Going Away (a National Book Award runner-up), Zone of the Interior, C T O D AY The Secret Defector, and A Woman of Uncertain Character. Y He co-wrote the 2002 feature film Frida , as well as In Love and War about a young and wounded Hemingway’s S passionate love affair with his nurse. I C L A N C Y G A L S I G A L OR Books www.orbooks.com Cover image: Hemingway’s passport photo, 1923 HEMINGWAY LIVES! HEMINGWAY LIVES! W H Y R E A D I N G E R N EST H E M I N GWAY M AT T E R S TO DAY C L A N CY S I G A L OR Books New York • London © 2013 Clancy Sigal Published by OR Books, New York and London Visit our website at www.orbooks.com First printing 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-939293-17-6 paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-18-3 e-book All images courtesy of the JFK Presidential Library’s Media Gallery. Cover design by Bathcat Ltd. Cover photograph © National Archives and Records Administration. This book was set in the typeface Garamond. Typeset by Lapiz Digital, Chennai, India. Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom. The U.S. printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered. CONTENTS Introduction vii 1 The Forever Boy 1 2 His Private War 13 3 The Wound, the Bow, and the Minenwerfer M.14 shell 17 4 That Great Body of His 23 5 His #2 Pencil 27 6 The Women in His Life 31 7 It’s Not Only Men Who are Victims of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder—The Sun Also Rises 53 8 The Deserter—A Farewell to Arms 65 9 Marie, Hemingway’s Amazing Whore—To Have and Have Not 73 10 “No Pasaran”—They Will Not Pass—Hemingway’s Spain 81 11 But They Did Pass—World War II 99 12 The Father’s Sons 113 13 Across the River into a Storm of Flak and The Old Man and the Sea 119 14 His Suicidal Summer 129 15 The Hurts, the Air Crashes, and Castro 133 16 Downhill Racer—Flying to the Mountain Top and Death 137 17 The Short Stories 147 18 The Nasty Stuff 179 19 A Snake Named Catherine 185 20 Immortal Papa—After Death—A Moveable Feast and other Works 193 21 Copy Boy! This Just in From Ernie—the Nonfiction Books 201 22 He Never Dies 209 Appendix: A Time Line 213 Acknowledgments 217 INTRODUCTION A recent item in the Billings, Montana, Gazette has a photograph of Sgt. Dan Baker, of Miles City, being deployed for a second time to Afghanistan. His wife and two daughters cling to him sobbing in the airport lobby. “With emotions running at fever pitch all around him, the 39-year old father . . . flipped through the pages of his e-book immersing himself in the words of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a semi-autobiographical novel about the events during the Italian campaigns of World War I almost a century ago.” Sgt. Baker may have only a vague idea of who Ernest Hemingway is. But it’s obvious the words mean something personal to him, as he and the ex-soldier-author have a shared experience, the experience of war: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the vii mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. Sgt. Baker, on his way to an unwinnable war, as Hemingway was nearly a hundred years ago, must have read the opening para- graph of A Farewell to Arms, and it likely touched him through the emotional truth of his own hairy situation. It matters if you stumble across Hemingway by accident or as “required reading.” If Hemingway had known as a young man that his fate would be as a classroom Assigned Great Writer he’d probably have shot himself long before he did in real life. I was lucky. At 15 I stole a copy of A Farewell to Arms from my local public library. A street pal had told me there was a lot of sex in it (he lied). The story read so differently from other books, especially the assigned ones, that at first I felt there must be a mistake with using such simple words in short sentences viii
The list of books you might like
