[email protected] (Edward Dolan) wrote in message news:<
[email protected]>...
>
> Peter, I don't mean to be too hard on Hemingway. I read most everything he ever wrote when I
> was young and I enjoyed reading him very much. I think as I grew older I began to focus more on
> his life style and I didn't like what I saw there. But I am always able to separate the art
> from the artist.
>
> Hemingway was a very good writer for his style. He was a former newspaperman and he wrote like how
> a journalist would write, which was all to the good. I do not like writing that is too "arty".
>
> I visited his house that he had in Key West many years ago and it was very interesting to say the
> least. There were dozens of cats all over the place. That was fine with me as I like cats too. But
> I could see that he was always striving for a certain ambiance to his life, and it always struck
> me as being a bit phony. After all, he was just a kid from Michigan.
From the very get-go, people had similar opinions to ours; they liked him very mush or didn't see
what all the fuss was about. I don't single-mindedly defend him, but he has to be one of the most
mis-understood people ever. He was pretty much of a stinker to all of his wives and many of his
friends. But throughout much of his life he was about as a non-phony as you could he. He simply
didn't care what people thought of him, so he didn't do things so as to ellicit a public response.
He *did* care what people thought of his writing, at least to the extent that they took the time to
understand it. All five of the biographers make the point that, in spite of the amount of noteriety
he achieved, he was a very private individual whose greatest pleasure was reading. BTW, one of the
surviving Hemingway cousins says there were no cats in the Key West house when he lived there.
>
> His last years were very sad. He came to the Mayo Clinic here in Rochester, Minnesota to be
> treated for his paranoia, and they completely dropped the ball on him. He ended up living in
> Ketchum (near Sun Valley), Idaho. He never liked the Midwest from what I could gather once he left
> it as a young man. He thought southern Minnesota (where the Mayo Clinic is located) was a horrible
> place. There is a very nice memorial to him outside of Ketchum which can really bring a tear to
> the eye for anyone who has ever read Ernest Hemingway.
Don't get me started
When he died one of his matador friends, before he began a bullfight, asked
for a moment of silence. 200,000 were still for a few minutes in the arena. The owner of the Botin
cafe in Madrid set a place for one for the next week - for Don Ernesto. The Cubans declared a
natioanl day of morning and people were seen to be crying in the streets when the news got out. A
fan wrote years later that he heard the news while living in Paris. He decided to visit one of the
cafes made famous by Hemingway and have a drink. Then he went to another then another, then he
noticed that he was seeing the same people at each place. Dozens of people had decided that the best
way to commemorate his death, his life, really, was to go to Le Dome to Les Deux Magots to Le Select
to Lipps to Harry's Bar, etc. and have a drink.
>
> > > I think Hemingway ran ambulances in Italy in WWI, which was also a bit crazy in my opinion.
> > > But like I said, I think he was basically an adventurer. He could also write of course, but he
> > > is vastly overrated in that department too.
> > >
> >
> > Yes, ambulances, along with Walt Disney and a bunch of other people you wouldn't believe. His
> > wounding at this time probably affected his work and to a certain extent the rest of his life.
> > Apart from his work, he helped to establish a particularly American school of literature, a
> > school which said it was alright to hunt and fish as well as write. None of the criticsspeak of
> > over or under-rated, nor do they speak of good or bad. They speak of his influence on other
> > writers. People still refer to Hemingway when they discuss who influenced them in their work.
> > This, and his particular style, are what he won the Nobel for.
>
> Writers like Hemingway will have their ups and downs in the English classrooms of academe. But he
> surely was a great influence, and mostly for the good. However, what has really happened in the
> past generation or two is that no one reads novels anymore. It is becoming a dead and lost art. I
> myself haven't read a novel in over 40 years. Gore Vidal says the novel is as dead as a door nail.
> I think he might be right about this. Novels of course are mainly read by the young who can
> identify with the protagonists, but do young people read novels anymore?
>
I read one a week and the NYTimes fiction best seller list seems to be filled with them. Try "Easter
Day, 1941."
Thanks, again Pjk