Hemingway and Gellhorn

I don't know what it would be like to have watched "Hemingway and Gellhorn" last night without a deep background in Hemingway studies.  I just can't imagine what I would have heard and seen.  Almost everything I have ever watched about Hemingway or his work other than academic material has given me pause.  They are chock-full of errors.  The first two that struck me while watching the HBO movie last night were that Hemingway did not have a deep, masculine voice and that Martha Gellhorn was no raving beauty. Hearing for the first time recordings of Hemingway reading so many years ago was a profound shock.  His was a high, tinny, midwestern voice that didn't match the authority of his writing.  And no matter how biographers tried to stretch the truth about Gellhorn, her looks were obvious.  Last night, I couldn't take my eyes off Nicole Kidman.  I never can.

I almost didn't watch the movie after reading Maureen Ryan's vicious review in The Huffington Post.  "It's not just crap," she writes, "it's expensive, painfully 'artistic' crap. . . ."  "Pseudo-intellectual," she says.

Another reviewer (I can't remember which one, but I think it might have been a critic from the New York Times) belittled the use of stock footage and the insertion of actors into it as well as to the switching from black and white to sepia to color.  The review was equally as ripping.

Fuck 'em.  I enjoyed it.  More than enjoyed it, really.  All the things they complained about seemed good enough to me.  I'm not saying the thing was high art.  Those two critics may even have been right.  I don't know.  But for the most part, the film's makers had facts right.  The writers and director had done their homework.  I've read so much of the biographies that it was fun just watching it dramatized  and paraded about in a faux-documentary way.  And while Hemingway's voice wasn't right, I think they caught the essence of his personality.  I say that as someone who never met him but as someone who has drunk on different occasions with two of his sons, his brother, and a niece, and who has chatted with many people who knew him at various stages in his life on different continents.  That makes me no expert, I realize, but I am someone who has brought to light things about Hemingway's life that were important but overlooked.  And, through a series of events, I've even been through the contents of the wallet he had on him when he died.

Of all the people I met who knew him, though, my favorite was a woman I met in Key West who spent time with Hemingway in the period covered by last night's biopic.  She was a correspondent covering WWII when Hemingway was there.  They stayed in the same hotel.  The drank at the same bar.  And everything she told me about him rang true.

I was attending a writer's conference when I met her.  There was a reception at one of the island's grand houses, a wooden, two story mansion with wrap around verandas up and down.  I was walking to the bar that had been set up on the lower one when I heard a strong, clear voice address me.

"Young man, get me a drink."

God she was beautiful.  She was razor thin and straight with a clear, beautiful face and severely white hair drawn back perfectly into a small bun.  How old would she have been?  It is hard to imagine.

"What do you want," I smiled.

"Vodka.  I want vodka."

When I returned to where she sat, she thanked me.

"They won't let me drink any more," she said.  "I've crashed my car too many times."

I sat with her the rest of the evening and listened.  She was the most fascinating person I have ever met. She had lived her life as adventure.  She didn't say that.  It was simply obvious.  She was not a woman who had ever done anything mundane, I could tell.  She told me stories of dancing barefoot on tables in Spain as a young woman drinking wine from a bota while young men sang songs and played guitars.  I could see her as she spoke, as she must have been then.  I felt what those young men surely felt at the time.

To the point, however.  She told me of sitting in the bar with Hemingway when the bombs would hit.  Everyone, she said, would dive to the floor, hands covering heads, crawling under tables for cover.  But not Hem.  He would just sit at the bar and continue drinking while deriding those who had taken to their bellies.

"He was like that," she said.  "He was belligerent and a bully, and he knew everyone you needed to know.  He could be arrogant, and he could be sweet by turns.  You could never tell when he was telling the truth and when he was bullshitting."

If nothing else, they got that right last night, and it was fun for me to watch.

And did I mention Nicole Kidman?  Jesus Christ.  I'm overly foolish about her, though.  I can't look at her without thinking of a girl I used to love in all the wrong ways too much, the one who is now in New York.  The faces are just too similar.

And so, having matched Hem drink for drink for two and a half hours last night, I wrote a drunken email.  Yup.  I did.  To my credit, I didn't attach any music.  Still. . . I don't want to go back and read what I wrote.  I think I remember it.  It was brief enough.  Shit.


I am enchanted, by the way, with today's posted picture.  I think it is just crazy beautiful.


And now, after a very long weekend, it is back to the factory and its tedious tortures.  I will serve the goose-stepping fascist for another day, but I'll be dreaming of something else.