Author Event: Hidden Hemingway with Mark Cirino

Wednesday night I splashed my way through a summer storm to attend another terrific author event at the library. This time it was a presentation by Hemingway scholar and English professor Mark Cirino. 

He is one of three authors who have put together Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Hemingway Archives at Oak Park.  The book includes some 300 images of letters, photos, notebooks, school assignments, receipts, and even a slightly gross dental x-ray. By all accounts, Ernest Hemingway, a Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize-winning author, was a pack rat. 

Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago and where Hemingway was born and grew up, is home to The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park where the archives containing these items are held. Oddly enough, although Hemingway lived and wrote about places all over the world - France, Spain, Cuba, Italy, Switzerland - he never wrote about his hometown, Mr. Cirino said.

Hemingway had a weird childhood. His mother dressed him as a girl. She held back his older sister and sent them off to begin school together and introduced them as twins. After living an out-sized masculine life full of bullfights, wars, women, drinking, and big game hunting, in his final years Hemingway ended up in the Mayo Clinic paranoid and depressed and subject to electroshock treatments. He committed suicide in 1961 just days before his 62nd birthday.

He didn't get a happy ending.

Author Mark Cirino

Mr. Cirino was a delightful presenter. He showed photos of the young and very handsome Hemingway, letters, and the aforesaid dental x-ray. But mostly he was interested in Hemingway the writer. He contends that Hemingway created a new language about war - reporting objective facts rather than the false romance of  'sacred, glorious, and sacrifice'. His writing offers the touchstone of omission and restraint, describing action and scenes but leaving the emotions they create up to the reader.

After his presentation, Mr. Cirino fielded questions from the crowd. There were many inquiries as to Hemingway's psychological and sexual characteristics which Mr. Cirino declined in the kindest way to speculate on. "I am a literature professor, not a psychiatrist."

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Ernest Miller Hemingway. Two books worth attention might be Everyone Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley M.M. Blume and Writing With Hemingway: A Writer's Exercise Book by Cathy MacHold.

My favorite Hemingway book is and will remain A Movable Feast. 

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,

then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you,

for Paris is a movable feast."

************


This is my 900th post to Belle, Book, and Candle. I didn't think when I started that I would have so many words in me about books and bookish things! Thanks to all of you who have joined me here. I feel the warmth of your friendship. ---Belle

A Moveable Feast - Chapitre Deux

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Scapegoat by Daniel Pennac was a disappointment. I gave up after just a couple of chapters. I had no idea what was going on and didn't feel compelled to sort anything out.

I wanted to comment on the final chapters of A Moveable Feast. The stories about F. Scott Fitzgerald are très triste. Hemingway paints him as being rather a hypochondriac and in the early stages of his alcoholism. His wife Zelda loved to party and was jealous of Scotty's work so she pulled him along with her. He would resist for a bit and get some writing done, but then fall under the spell of the drink and was unable to work until he would resist again and then fall again.

But Hemingway loved him and they were good friends.

The final pages of the book are heartbreaking: Hemingway and Hadley and why that marriage ended and how. He is writing of their relationship from some distance of time and place and has great insight into its end. I felt as if he were heartbroken still.

I wondered often as I read these vignettes and stories if they would have been just as interesting if the characters were not so well known. I had to answer, mais oui. Hemingway's writing is what gives them their power, not the names.

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other."

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

La Closerie des Lilas
Hemingway loved to write here and called it "one of the best cafés in Paris."

It is so easy to fall into Ernest Hemingway's Paris. Although the pieces in A Moveable Feast were written about the Paris of the 1920s, the pictures he creates of the streets, the cafés, the people, the food, the shops, are still as fresh and complete as ever.  Nothing escapes his notice: waiters, trees, goatherds, race tracks, train stations, bookstalls, weather.

Hemingway wrote these sketches of Paris long after he and Hadley lived there. Long after the suitcase full of his stories was stolen from the platform at the Gare de Lyon; long after he and Gertrude Stein had conversations about homosexuality, art and writing; long after he spent time among the shelves of books at Shakespeare & Company with Sylvia Beach; and, long after The Lost Generation - Une Génération Perdue - had aged into another generation.

No matter what I may think of Hemingway's personal life - his attitudes and actions - and I have had a somewhat love/hate relationship with them - I have to admit he is one heck of a writer. It has been quite a while since I read these snapshots of Paris and the prose is so bristling and evocative of the city that I had to put the book aside and make myself an espresso - un petit café, if you will.

A selection of first lines:

Then there was the bad weather. - A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel

When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. - Miss Stein Instructs

In those days there was no money to buy books. - Shakespeare and Company

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. - A False Spring

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. - Hunger Was Good Discipline

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. - Birth of a New School