Brainpickings:

Burguete, Navera.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the / Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Even stuff like this is such a pleasure to read.

Hat tip to the Dish.

Yale Beinecke Library collection.

Postcard dated July 13, 1924, from Ernest Hemingway in Spain to Gertrude Stein in Paris.

* Novilladas are bullfights during which 3-4 year old bulls are used. The bullfighters are amateur bullfighters.

This Day in Literature remembers that Ernest Hemingway placed the barrels of that London Best-Grade 12 gauge Boss against his forehead 52 years ago today, counts up the suicides in the Hemingway family, and quotes granddaughter Lorian Hemingway:

I had visited my grandfather’s grave in Ketchum the summer I had caught the marlin, arriving at the small hillside cemetery on a scalding July day, a half-finished fifth of vodka in one hand, a filter-tip cigar in the other. I’d made my way to the simple marble slab marked by a white cross, and stood swaying over the marker for a long time, expecting epiphany, resolution, a crashing, blinding flash of insight…. I wanted to say something of value to the old man, perhaps that I had met a dare he had set forth by example, but nothing came. The neck of the bottle grew hot in my hand. I tipped it to my mouth, taking a long swig, then poured the rest, a stream of booze, clear as Caribbean waters, at the head of the marker. “Here,” I said, “have this,” and walked away.

The young, pre-WWI Ernest with his first model Colt Woodsman in a shoulder holster and a large catch of tiny trout.

Ah! A pre-season look forward to impending trout season written by Ernest Hemingway for the Toronto Star in 1920.

Not a great piece of writing, and no expression of dry fly purism either. But in one short passage of two sentences, there is a glimpse forward to the masterful Big Two-Hearted River. And we are reminded of the old days, when steel fly rods were the hot new cutting-edge of fishing technology, and the fly fisherman fished a couple of wet flies on a dropper.

[A] vision of a certain stream… obsesses him.

It is clear and wide with a pebbly bottom and the water is the color of champagne. It makes a bend and narrows a bit and the water rushes like a millrace. Sticking up in the middle of the stream is a big boulder and the water makes a swirl at its base. …

A snipe lights on the boulder and looks inquiringly at the fly fisherman and then flies jerkily up the stream. But the fly fisherman does not see him for he is engaged in the most important thing in the world. Deciding on his cast for the first day on the stream.

Finally he bends on two flies. One on the end of the leader and one about three feet up. I’d tell you what flies they were, but every fly fisherman in Toronto would dispute the choice. With me though they are going to be a Royal Coachman and a McGinty.

The fairy rod waves back and forth and then shoots out and the flies drop at the head of the swirl by the big boulder. There is a twelve-inch flash of flame out of water, the flyfisher strikes with a wrist like a steel trap, the rod bends, and the first trout of the season is hooked.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Everyone knows that the code-hero career of Ernest Hemingway ended with the great man putting a shotgun to his own forehead, after years of infidelity to a series of wives, disgraceful episodes of bullying, and embarrassing displays of drunkenness and vanity. By the time Hemingway pulled the trigger on his 12-gauge Boss, it was all gone for him: the powerful athletic physique and once superlative health, the unsurpassed ability to produce clear and elegant English prose, even the penetrating insight and cool lucidity underlying his impeccably stoical point of view.

He had essentially prophesied his own end in his great 1938 short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro:

He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. …What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil.

Paul Hendrickson takes Hemingway’s 38-foot Wheeler cabin cruiser, the Pilar, built for him in 1934, as the center and symbol of the final 27-year, 3-month trajectory of the author’s literary career and life, and chronicles Hemingway’s whole sad end game, the struggle of the human being to live up to his own masterfully-designed and brilliantly-marketed personal myth, his failure, crack-up, and decline. Yet, Hendrickson sympathizes and finds in Hemingway’s process of personal self-destruction still ever so much to pity and admire. As he puts it in the title of his prologue: “Amid So Much Ruin, Still the Beauty.”

Few great writers have ever received such an extraordinary tribute. Hemingway’s Boat represents the product of massive and intensely focused research. Hendrickson can lovingly describe the details of the room where Hemingway used to stay in the Ambus Mundos Hotel, as well as tell you exactly which models of Vom Hofe and Hardy salt water reels he fished. Hendrickson even throws in some rather significant and ground-breaking criticism, arguing quite persuasively that it was Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa (1935), who really invented the non-fiction novel, not Capote or Mailer thirty years later). Hemingway’s Boat is, in the final analysis, a passionate and deeply personal eulogy to a great man delivered in finely crafted prose that is worthy of its own subject.

—————————————-

It has been a very long time since anyone has produced a fishing memoir as good as Luke Jennings’ Blood Knots.

Jennings, who I found is, oddly enough, dance critic for the Observer, describes the (exotic to Americans) bildungsroman of an ordinary British angler, who starts off –like the rest of us– with cheap tackle and humble access to low quality, near-home angling opportunities before gradually progressing to more exciting waters and nobler quarry.

In Jennings’ case, we get some astonishingly exciting accounts of how much sporting excitement can be found in pike and carp, barbel, tench and rudd. Luke Jennings can make the encounter with a canal-bred pike lurking off a London tow-path read like Jim Corbett stalking a man-eater in the Himalayan foothills.

But Blood Knots is not only a fishing book. It is an account of the coming of age and moral education, in today’s modern world, of a surprisingly exotic survival: the recusant Catholic gentleman. Jennings’ family, as he puts it, was of “bookish gentry, each beggaring itself to pay for the education of the next… born of windy vicarages and dusty cantonments.”

His first powerful influence was his father, a Hussar officer awarded the Military Cross for pressing home an armored attack at Ijsselstein in September of 1944, despite two tanks being shot out from under him. The second, as the saying goes, “brewed up,” and Jennings’ father only lived because he was thrown out of the tank by the explosion. He was badly burned. The scars on his face remained highly visible, and Mrs. Jennings had to dress his burned fingers every day for the fifty years of their marriage.

Jennings attended the (Benedictine) Ampleforth College, and provides this testimony to its unmodern ethos.

Father Paul Neville, the former headmaster of Ampleforth, was once talking to a fellow principal who informed him expansively that his own establishment’s purpose was ‘to prepare boys for life.’ ‘Ah,’ said Father Paul quietly. ‘Ours is to prepare them for death.'”

At Ampleforth, Jennings met his second major influence, a recent Ampleforth graduate named Robert Nairac, then serving as junior master.

It was important to know whom you were dealing with and so, on the first night of the autumn term, three of us cooked up a excuse to knock on the new master’s door. We trooped in to be greeted by a tough-looking figure with unkempt black hair and a cheerful grin. He was lying on his bed in his shirtsleeves, smoking. Around him, on the sheets, lay the constituent parts of a twelve-bore shotgun and a pair of cleaning rods. On top of the chest of drawers was a falconer’s leather gauntlet, the fingers dark with dried blood, and a battered fishing-bag in which I could see a jumble of wire traces and pike lures. With the small sash-window closed, the air was heavy with gun oil and Balkan tobacco.

Nairac proved a superb sporting mentor immersing Jennings in “the rituals of the field sports” and “the near mystical sense of place and history that, on occasion, can accompany them.”

The same Robert Nairac, a few years later, became part of history. After Oxford, he joined the Grenadier Guards, and worked undercover against the Provisional IRA terrorists in Ireland. In May of 1977, while visiting a pub to gather intelligence, he was abducted, brutally tortured, and finally murdered by the IRA. His body was never found.

Blood Knots is the best kind of fishing memoir, the kind of book that demonstrates the necessary role of active participation in the processes of Nature in fulfilling essential needs in the cultivated human being’s spiritual life.

Hemingway’s 1923 passport photo

A nice little essay, in Stale of all places, by Nathan Heller on Hemingway, discussing why greater respect is generally accorded Hemingway’s earlier work, his short stories in particular being preferred to certain later works featuring a recognizable note of self parody.

Those who knew Hemingway well, especially in these early years, reported that his braggadocio was something of a cover: Far from being the swaggering, insouciant rake of lore, he was emotionally fragile, stirred into panics by women’s rejections, prone to insomnia, workaholic and perfectionist (in Paris, he’d spend all day writing and sometimes come home with a single sentence), and given to weird and compulsive record-keeping projects, like tallying exact word counts or tracking his wife’s menstrual rhythms. He was what we would now call a neurotic, and the struggle to make sense of a life suddenly coming apart gave his work the urgency and contours earlier efforts had lacked. Hemingway was at that point in the habit of composing “sketches” that doubled as diary entries, and in the course of writing up an odd and flirtatious trip to Pamplona with friends and enemies, he realized he had more than a few pages of material to work with. The result was The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway’s first real novel and, he later said, the most successful book of his career.

It’s also a strikingly linear novel. Few time cuts or flashbacks appear, and its narration has the effect of plodding forward, never looking more than a few feet ahead. Yet the book seems viscerally vivid and alive, as in its description of bull-running:

There were so many people running ahead of the bulls that the mass thickened and slowed up going through the gate into the ring, and as the bulls passed, galloping together, heavy, muddy-sided, horns swinging, one shot ahead, caught a man in the running crowd in the back and lifted him in the air. … You could tell by the degree of intensity in the shout how bad a thing it was that was happening.

Every sentence here is shaped by a sequence of perception: We see the people running, then become aware of a slowing, then see the bulls pass, then see one strike a man, then see him go in the air. And on. It’s only in the final, beautifully colloquial sentence that a causal interpretation and a moral judgment—in short, a narrative frame—finally appears.

What Hemingway captured, in other words, was the familiar, personal, very un-Jamesian experience of processing the world directly in time. His work of this period connects with our animal habits of consciousness. And the struggle it brings to the foreground is the struggle to make sense of—to find a line of narrative through—this disordered experience. Hemingway’s insight was to understand that this struggle was not just a literary one. It’s a fundamental part of how people themselves perceive and try to make sense of the world.

Read the whole thing.

The best new book I’ve read this year was Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.

Ernest Hemingway was not only the generally recognized greatest American writer of fiction of his time, Hemingway seemed to have deliberately crafted his life to parallel and underline his art, emphasizing and exemplifying the same themes of manliness and confronting the same life and death questions. Hemingway became thusly, not only the great novelist, but a code hero, the equivalent of Achilleus or Beowulf as well as Nick Adams, in his own right.

When the great man, at 7 AM one July morning fifty years ago, crept out of bed, found the key to the closet where his wife Mary had locked away his firearms, took out his Boss best-grade double-barreled 12 gauge, inserted two rounds of high brass number 6s, braced the gun butt on the floor of his house’s foyer, placed his forehead against the barrels, and reached down and fired both barrels, Hemingway’s vast audience of readers and admirers experienced an international catharsis as the epic suddenly concluded and the curtain came down the tragedy.

Paul Hendrickson takes Hemingway’s 38-foot Wheeler cabin cruiser, the Pilar, built for him in 1934, as the metonymic focus and symbol of the final 27-year 3-month trajectory of the author’s literary career and life.

Few great writers have received such a tribute, featuring massive and intensely focused research (Hendrickson can lovingly describe the details of the room where Hemingway used to stay in the Ambus Mundos Hotel as well as tell you which models of Vom Hofe and Hardy reels he fished); ground-breaking criticism (Hendrickson argues very persuasively that it was Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa (1935), who invented the non-fiction novel, not Capote or Mailer thirty years later); or anything like this sympathetic and deeply personal tribute in finely crafted prose worthy of its own subject.

In the final analysis, Hendrickson is writing to explain and to defend Hemingway’s crack-up, all the famous outrageous incidents of egotism, bullying, and vainglory, all the drink and all the damnation. His prologue’s title, “Amid So Much Ruin, Still the Beauty,” could have been the title of the whole book.

Hendrickson writes:

I have come to believe deeply that Ernest Hemingway, however unpost-modern it may sound, was on a lifelong quest for sainthood, and not just literary sainthood, and that at nearly every turn, he defeated himself. How? “By betrayals of himself, and what he believed in,” as the dying writer, with the gangrene going up his leg, says so bitterly in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” one of Hemingway’s greatest short stories. Why the self-defeating betrayal of high humanistic aspirations? The seductions of celebrity and the sin of pridefulness and the curses of megalomania and the wastings of booze and, not least, the onslaughts of bipolarism must amount to a large part of the answer. Hemingway once said in a letter to his closest friend in the last two decades of his life, General Buck Lanham, whom he had come to know on the battlefield as a correspondent in World War II: “I have always had the illusion it was more important, or as important, to be a good man as to be a great writer. May turn out to be neither. But would like to be both.”

I also believe there was so much more fear inside Hemingway than he ever let on, that it was almost always present, by day and more so by night, and that his living with it for so long was ennobling. The thought of self-destruction trailed Hemingway for nearly his entire life, like the tiny wakes a child’s hand will make when it is trailed behind a rowboat in calm water—say, up in Michigan.

Many years ago, Norman Mailer wrote a sentence about Hemingway that has always struck me as profound: “It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” The great twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, a contemporary of Hemingway’s, who admired him early and had contempt for him late, wrote in his journals of the 1960s: “He had a high sense of honor, which he was always violating; he evidently had a permanent bad conscience.”

I repeat: best book of 2011, and best Hemingway biography/appreciation out there.

Hemingway’s Pilar

50 years ago today, July 2, 1961, America’s generally-acknowledged greatest writer, Ernest Hemingway slipped away from his wife’s supervision in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, made his way to his gun closet, removed (according to traditional accounts) a highly-cherished 12 gauge Boss best London grade shotgun, and proceeded to self-administer orally two 1 and 1/4 oz., 3 and 3/4 dram, loads of high brass number 6s, permanently curing the increasing assortment of health and mental problems which afflicted him and made him miserably unhappy.

Although only 62 years old, Hemingway had been wounded in war, suffered an extraordinary variety of contusions and broken bones (most recently in two successive African plane crashes), and had maintained a heavy drinking habit for decades. Most dispiritingly, he had begun to find his powers of concentration and acuity waning, and it had become impossible for Hemingway to write. He had become increasingly querulous and suspicious, and had developed an intense fear of persecution by the federal government and the FBI. His family and friends scoffed at his ravings on the subject, but FBI files later did reveal that J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping Hemingway under surveillance.

Ernest Hemingway’s father, a doctor, also killed himself. Inevitably, Hemingway addressed the subject of suicide in his writing, as NPR aptly recalls:

Today, let’s remember the Hemingway who was 23 years old and indestructible, struggling in Paris to be a writer. He wrote a short story — not even 1,500 words — called “Indian Camp,” in which a boy named Nick Adams accompanies his father, who is a doctor, to an Indian camp in the Michigan woods one night, where his father delivers a baby and discovers that the baby’s father has slit his throat. It’s the first time Nick has seen a baby born, or a man die, and in a boat on their way back home across a lake, Nick asks:

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”

“I don’t know Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it is pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.” …

They were seated in the boat. The sun was coming up over the hills. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

(* punchline to a proposed “Why does a Republican cross the street” joke. The famous Ernest Hemingway version of the “Why Does the Chicken” joke, you see, ends with: “To die… alone… in the rain.”)

Peggy Noonan thinks the two parties these days are like two very different houses:

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

Personally, I think the cops will soon be arriving in large numbers to suppress the donnybrook going on in that nice new house, and to take a significant portion of the tenants away in paddy wagons.

We Republicans?

The base is tired. Republicans feel their own kind of unease at Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Talk about wanting to stand athwart history yelling stop. They’re not in a mood to give money. Remember the phrase “broken glass Republicans?” The number of Republicans so offended, so wounded, actually, as citizens, by the Clinton years, that they’d crawl across broken glass to elect George Bush? They existed in 2004, too. Now a lot of them wouldn’t crawl across a plush weave carpet to vote for a Republican.

Not if he’s John McCain, we wouldn’t.

But Peggy has one crumb of good news about McCain. He likes Hemingway. A lot.

Who has he read besides Hemingway? (And he’s read him—he loves him to an almost scary degree.)

Maybe he’s not all bad, after all.

The New York Times asked some contemporary authors to suggest well-known books which could stand abridgement. The mostly unreadable Joyce Carol Oates responded:

I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There’s much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.

As Ernest Hemingway said about Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot respectively: If I believed that sprinkling Ms. Oates ground into a fine powder onto the grave of Ernest Hemingway would cause Mr. Hemingway to arise from the grave, looking irritated, and resume writing, I would depart for Princeton immediately with a meat grinder.

I would shoot my own mother if she went in coveys and had a good strong flight.

-Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Robert M. Coates, 5 November, 1932, in Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame, Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.) 2006.