Reflections of Hemingway
Morning Briefing - Sunday, March 14, 2021
The Front Page
By Ken Tingley
Sunday, March 14, 2021
My parents were literate, but not literary.
They filled my bookshelves and encouraged me to read without ever really telling me what to read. Their bookshelves were sparse and I don’t recall either of them ever reading a book.
When we moved to new town when I was 10 and I discovered the town library, I was left to my own devices, checking out books about World War II and baseball that I rarely finished.
I joined a monthly book club and received novels in the mail, but I rarely finished those either.
I was looking or something to touch me, to move me without luck.
As an adolescent in junior high, I discovered the memoir of a former New York Yankees pitcher named Jim Bouton. It was pretty controversial at the time. On vacation at the beach in North Carolina, I remember spending most of the day devouring the book on the cool of the porch. My father returned from the beach one day to berate me for wasting my time reading instead of swimming.
In high school, I discovered “Catcher in the Rye” and “Catch 22.”
I was the only one of my friends to sign up for the “American Novel” class as a junior in high school. On the first day of class, the teacher went around the room and asked us our favorite author.
One by one, the students listed Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Melville.
When she got to me, I said “Bouton” and the others snickered.
Mrs. Fisher opened up a new world to me that year. We read Gatsby and talked about the symbolism and later a guy named Hemingway.
When I got to the end of “A Farewell to Arms” I found myself in tears.
This was story telling and the beginning of a lifetime relationship with, not only Hemingway, but reading.
In college, we were assigned Hemingway’s short stories. When my son became a serious reader, when he graduated beyond Harry Potter, I offered up “The Short, Happy Life of Francis McComber” and he was hooked, too.
Hemingway’s life was as good as any of his novels. He started out as a newspaper guy, became a foreign correspondent, an ambulance driver in World War and caught a ride on a landing craft on its way to Omaha Beach.
He was larger than life.
A couple years ago, I visited Key West for the first time and toured Hemingway’s house. My son and I both stood outside his writing studio, peering at the desk and typewriter as if we expected some new prose to appear.
Before we left, we went back up the stairs to look at the writing studio again.
If you ever wanted to be a writer, if you ever wrote anything, Hemingway was often the starting point.
When we returned to Key West the next year, we went back to the Hemingway house again. We peered into the writing studio again.
I’ve spent my life writing and Hemingway was part of the inspiration, the starting point for figuring out to do it as well as possible.
Beginning on April 5, Ken Burns’ latest documentary will begin airing on PBS - “Hemingway.”
This past week, I sat in on an online chat with Burns, his co-director Lynn Novick and a couple of academics who talked about the documentary and the Hemingway legacy.
He related a story about Hemingway’s fourth wife, who he treated terribly. After she finished reading “Old Man and the Sea,” she turned to him and said, “I forgive you for everything.”
That’s how good Hemingway was as a writer.
At the end of the hour, Burns admitted that he keeps a book of Hemingway’s short stories by the foot of his bed.
“At the end of the long day, you can’t beat spending 20 minutes reading one of his stories,” he said.
In the commentary, actor Jeff Daniels is the voice used for Hemingway. He said this at one of the online events:
“There’s such a brevity and simplicity (to Hemingway’s work) that it just boils down to him telling you the truth. And there’s no adornment. Since doing the reading for Ken and Lynn I’ve ceased using adjectives and adverbs.”
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New biography
After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Lady Bird Johnson began keeping a taped diary. Some of it she kept secret until well after her death.
Her book “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight” comes out next week and reveals there were several times that President Johnson wanted to resign the presidency and return to the Texas.
It shows the tremendous burdens that come with the presidency.
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