• Hemingway and authenticity — hidden in plain sight

    Thursday October 29, 2015 F: (5:35 a.m. Morning, Papa. My friend Dirk suggests I talk to Teddy Roosevelt, which I am hesitant to do because I am not so much in sympathy with him as I was when I was young, but it makes me wonder if you and he have connected. There were so…

  • Hemingway — integrity and ideals, a tension

    Friday, October 30, 2015 F: 5:15 a.m. “Hero worshipping a self you weren’t yet.” Let’s talk some more about that, Papa. EH: It is a way to see the process that many people go through. You, Frank, would probably put it more like “magnetizing yourself toward a particular future,” others might say setting an ideal…

  • Hemingway — two kinds of life

    Saturday, October 31, 2015 F: 3:45 a.m. All right, Papa, here we are again. Yesterday’s short session focused on one thing – the coexistence of integrity and what we might call pretending toward an ideal. Where do we go from here? EH: Remember, we are moving, however slowly, toward one point. F: Yes, I have…

  • Hemingway — on the Famous Author trap

    Sunday, November 1, 2015 F: 5:35 a.m. EST. So, Papa, as you know, I am reading volume three of your collected letters, which goes from 1926 into 1929, just the time we are discussing. It gives a curiously stereoscopic effect. Do you want to continue where we left off, or move in some other direction?…

  • Hemingway on Key West life

    Monday. November 2, 2015 F: 3:15 a.m. Okay, Papa, Famous Author versus One of the Guys. EH: Again – and I’ll say this at the beginning of every session if need be – remember that this is leading toward something. We’re heading for the moment when I met Martha. If you keep that in mind,…

  • Hemingway and Key West

    Tuesday, November 3, 2015 F: 3 a.m. So, Papa, in Key West you established a life that did not involve your being enmeshed in Oak Park – which you had feared when you came home in 1919 – nor becoming enmeshed in Pauline’s family life in Piggott [Arkansas], which I imagine you may have had…

  • Different kinds of facts

    Wednesday, November 4, 2015 F: 3:15 a.m. Is this leading to anything? Or is it just more wasted work? It had better lead to something, there isn’t anything else I’m doing. Papa? I re-read McLendon’s book that was written in 1972. As usual, I hadn’t remembered things quite right. Also, I wasn’t as impressed by…

  • Why Hemingway wrote that way

    Thursday, November 5, 2015 F: 4:25 a.m. Your move, Papa. I’m finding your letters (1926-1929) fascinating, as you know. EH: That project [complete publication of his letters] is an example of the value of scholarship. To do the methodical work involved in locating, collating, editing so much material is a huge creative achievement, even though…

  • Praying for what we don’t want

    Worry has been defined as praying for what we don’t want. Thinking about that, this morning, it struck me that we all – Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, independents, libertarians, grumpy old men, members of the lunatic fringe, and those who can only be called Untitled But Disgusted – are going about this election business the…

  • Hemingway and Hotchner and “objectivity”

    Friday, November 6, 2015 F: 4:30 a.m. So, yesterday my copy of Hemingway in Love, by A.E. Hotchner arrived. Slim book and of course I read it right off. So, Papa, anything you’d care to say about your old friend’s book? It was curious to be reading it going, “no, that’s not quite right,” and…