Short cut to knowing basic facts of Hemingway's life and work.

The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you, too, but there will be no special hurry.

Yousuf Karsh, Ernest Hemingway, 1957, gelatin silver photograph

I just got this book, while it is still warm of our handshake with WhiteDwarfStar.

Hemingway, hm! It's said he was a true guy to be reckoned with. But I really don't know that much of him. I heard he got quite frustrated in his elder days and that they did lobotomy on him, after that he lost his knack for words and myth making, so he said they'd robbed him of everything dear to him, took a shotgun off the wall and shot himself. When his close friend was informed of that he said, good, and after some days shot himself as well. I hope I get a chance to read Baker's biography Hemingway someday, - it's said to be the best. But as a warming prelude to it, this Hemingway for Beginners will do just fine. Oh and some novel by Hemingway himself and I am all set to ...

I knew that this book would come handy. Together with the main article on Wikipedia it brought me Hemingway-the-man closer and brighter, so I could enjoy Hemingway-the-writer later on - when I read For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea (I linked to my book blog posts, in Slovene) - more. I also read A Farewell to Arms some years back, so I wasn't on completely unknown territory.

I usually don't read these biographies, for it's said that writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard, which I agree with. With men like Hemingway, however, this is different. People like him - Henry Miller and Slovene author Vitomil Zupan also comes to my mind - namely didn't write literature but life, theirs of course. They had something to tell.

Their lives were lived to the fullest. Isn't it then normal that they had grown dark sides along the way? It was heavy boozing and womanizing - I counted eight major romances - for Hemingway that destroyed him in the end, but at the same time it drove him on. For dark as it may be, alcohol and illegitimate sex were complementary to his creative writing. This passionate self-destructiveness soon brought on him. He was falling in deeper and deeper depressions. Doctors tried to cure him with electroshocks (ECT), and they did save his soul, in a way, for they also erased his memory, his greatest capital. Without his memory, without the ability to mold his experiences into words - what he cherished above all else, even above alcohol and women -, he felt lonely and ruined, so he took his shotgun off the wall and shot himself in the head. One of his last words, "that they'd put him out of the business", were remembered very brightly by scientists and doctors. There are no such methods as electroshock and lobotomy in practice anymore today. (Which doesn't imply that everything is OK in practical psychiatry.)

Anyway, what to think of this man who said, at the age of 62, that "if he can't exist on his own terms, then his existence is impossible?" Had he grown up at all? Yes and no, could be correctly stated. It is undisputed, however, that Hemingway didn't won the Nobel Prize for no reason, and that his life - so also his books - were full of myths. I would like to know that, I am into myths.

P.S. To the page just before the back cover I attached a (Slovene) article "Sto trideset bradatih / A Hundred and Thirty Bearded Ones" from my local newspaper which describes the annual event on Florida, of selecting a man that resembles Ernest Hemingway the most. Must he also be a heavy drinker, you ask? I guess not, I guess the similarity - as the titles of the article implies - should be merely physical. There is a photograph above the text, and I must say that the winner looks remarkably like Hemingway.

RELEASE NOTES:

Among other natural beauties, Slovenia is a country of mountains. The highest part is called the Julian Alps with Triglav (2864 m) its highest peak. One can see it in the image below as the first pretty high peak from the left; well, the second, the first just besides is Small Triglav. Debela peč (2014 m) is not that high, but it's Julian's east most peak over 2 km. The below image shows some hikers on the top. There lies a metallic box that contains a hiking journal. In it I squeezed the book, together with a - mm mm, ch ch - chocolate, and enclosed both into a BookCrossing bag.



I love to hike there. As I liked reading the words both by Hemingway and about his life.