Friday, August 18, 2017

Hem

Here is a cafe Hemingway hung out in.

The Dearborn biography does a good job of disillusioning someone that perhaps Hemingway was a great man. He lied, he cheated, he was venial. I guess it's good to see people's clay feet.

I'm reading The Sun Also Raises. At first I felt a connection to the beats, who celebrated celebration. They threw a lot of parties, and the Americans in Paris drank a lot. They got "tight". I like the silly slang and nick names he gives in his dialogue. You can feel he could be a good friend (as long as you were not in competition with him). You could feel he was a good friend until he wasn't.

By giving the narrator an inability to perform in standard sexual ways, and because they probably didn't want to go into other practices, Jake is an interesting narrator, who at once wants but can't have, and is also perhaps not fully embroiled.

Being in Paris at that time seems romantic. I sat in a cafe in Paris and the owner was really cruel to his puppy dog. I like the photo above, there's a kid there. It's kind of like a beer garden, or perhaps a bar that is also a restaurant. I love the family getting one's drunk on.

He's about to go fishing, a lovely respite.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Dearborn's Hemingway

OK, so he's a piker, didn't take responsibility for leaving Hadley, his first wife. He took credit for things he did with others that were good and then took no credit for things that looked bad.

He was an ungrateful git. Sherwood Anderson got In Our Time published and to pay him back Hemingway wrote a book making fun of his latest novel. He used it to get out of a contract with a publisher who published his first book.

Then Fitzgerald got him working with Max Perkins and edited The Sun Also Raises. Then he wrote shit about him in A Movable Feast.

A friend called his second wife daughter, and she called him Papa, and that's the origins of that nickname.