Hemingway, Orgasms, & Hector from the Trojan War

[mallorys_camera]

Lotsa smutty dreams last night!

They were fun even though dream orgasms are kinda weird, lacking any somatic specificy.

But when I woke up, I had to wonder: Why were you dreaming that??




I suppose because I spent a big chunk of the day in bed reading Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin.

Love and Ruin purports to be a fictional tell-all about the disastrous marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn.

Classic chick lit! Or clit lit, as I dubbed the genre in my youth.

The book isn’t exactly bad.

Obviously, it’s very readable, or I wouldn’t have spent four hours reading it.

I dunno.

I guess I don’t quite understand how a writer can devote 150 pages to describing the Spanish Civil War without once mentioning the word “fascism.”

Also, although the status details are obviously quite different, the authorial voice animating Gelhorn is identical to the authorial voice animating Hadley in McLain’s earlier Hemingway Wife fictional bio (whose name I now forget.)

So, I gotta think I was reading what Paula McLain might have experienced had she gone off to Lorca-land, trailing in Papa’s wake.

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.



War is fascinating for some reason.

And, of course, everybody wants to romanticize the underdog—even if the underdog, as a political entity, is every bit as corrupt as the villainous victor presumptive.

I remember reading the Iliad for the first time when I was 10 or so, and absolutely falling in ❤️LUV❤️ with Hector, an early Zelensky prototype!

Meanwhile, one does feel horrified for the victims of war—I almost wrote “innocent victims of war” there but I caught myself because practically nobody deserves that kind of violence except maybe serial killers.

Could you make some kind of argument that a Head of State who launches a war that results in thousands of civilian deaths is actually a serial killer?

I suppose.



My favorite quote about the Trojan War doesn’t come from the Iliad.

No, it comes from Hamlet:

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

Hamlet has been watching a play within a play and sneers this as an aside to the actual audience… watching Hamlet!

A mirror within a mirror, in other words: Hamlet doesn't quite get the fact that he's a character in a play!

Gotta love it.

Shakespeare does the best rhetorical questions!



The other thing I didn’t like about Love and Ruin is that it features lots of what I like to call “clutch and claw” sex between Hemingway and Gelhorn.

Except that Gelhorn is on record as saying she never had a single orgasm with Hemingway.

Gelhorn wrote this after the marriage exploded in a letter to one of her many correspondents. It’s right there in Gelhorn’s Collected Letters. A well-known bit of literary trivia.

Hemingway apparently was so embittered by his inability to bring Gelhorn to orgasm that in later life, he belittled her savagely. He wrote a poem— To Martha Gellhorn's Vagina—in which he compared said anatomy to the wrinkled neck of an old hot-water bottle.

So, you know. Love and Ruin. Historically inaccurate!



I read Love and Ruin because I’m writing a kind of unsung-consort-to-the-Great-Man fictionalized biography myself, so I’m naturally very interested in other writers’ takes on the subject.

It’s funny.

June's voice in the June novel isn’t anything like my voice in this diary.

June's voice is the voice of barely controlled hysteria.

I didn’t plan it that way. That’s just what came out when I decided to channel June Miller.

The novel would probably be much more commercial if I were using the voice I use in this diary. Lucius once told me I should write everything in my first-person diary voice and then just transpose it into the third person as needed. He thought my first-person diary voice was very appealing. Of course, the June novel is first-person. But not this voice!!

###

Meanwhile, today promises to be busy-busy-busy!

Busy-busy-busy is good!

Comments

[lethe1]

Could you make some kind of argument that a Head of State who launches a war that results in thousands of civilian deaths is actually a serial killer?

A mass murderer?

[mallorys_camera]

Yes. That's more accurate.

[summersgate]

Love all your versions of that scene! Some are very painterly. Might I ask, what did you use?

[mallorys_camera]

I used the phone app Prisma. 😀

[asakiyume]

SAME. I came here to ask how she did it--and I see she answers below.

Really brilliant, P!

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah! I like the effect, too! 😀

[thisnewday]

The Paris Wife. McLain's earlier novel.

I've really gotta buy or build that tall bookcase I'd planned for beside the office door. Lest the perilously-piled books in here collapse and end me.

(I couldn't remember the title either and so, rather than simply open the loathsome little tablet on my lab, instead conducted a manual search.)

Although it's obvious from the news, and from life's more recent experiences, that there are infinitely worse ways to go.

Oh, and out of sheer desperation for something immediately at/in hand to read, I was looking at the selection at Wegman's supermarket and came across a similar piece of historical fiction, similarly critiqued, The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles.

The criticism was that it relegated the heroic librarians at the American Library in WW II Paris to, I guess, mere sorters and stackers of books.

I hadn't gone back to buy it, read it, see if that was true, but now I'm tempted...

[mallorys_camera]

The Paris Wife, yes! Which I quite liked. 😀

[thisnewday]

Yeah, thinkin' I liked it too, although it's been awhile and my preference has been for memoir, biography, and autobiography as opposed to historical fiction, etc.

Which kind of leads me to ask, given the breadth of your own life's experience, whether you've ever considered taking a shot at some sort of memoir. You know, in your spare time, lol...

[mallorys_camera]

You're actually the third person this week who's said the word "memoir" to me. 😀

No, I don't think I'd write a memoir. I mean—I keep a diary, right? 😀

[thisnewday]

Without knowing the context, in which that word was used by others, I'd offer that my use of it was intended to suggest a direction to look in, not a defined and limiting genre in which to work...

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah. I don't know. I guess I've lived an interesting life. I've dipped into so many different kinds of experiences. And writing a memoir would be easy since all I'd have to do basically is plunder my diary entries!

Not sure exactly why the idea does not appeal. 😀

[lookfar2]

Have you worked out for yourself why you chose this particular literary marriage to imagine? I mean, there are so many to think of, it seems practically diagnostic to wonder why any particular one. I don't know much about Hemingway. Do you think of this as a novel about marriage or about him or about something else altogether? Or don't think about that?

[mallorys_camera]

Fictionalized bios of Great Male Artists' Women is kind of a literary subgenre. 😀 Zelda Fitzgerald is the big prototype here.

I read a lot of Henry Miller in my youth. Henry Miller is awfully politically incorrect these days, but he still has quite the fan base, and I retain considerable affection for the old rascal. And on every Miller website I've looked at, it's always the entries about June that get the most hits! And then, of course, there's the Anaïs Nin tie-in—and Anaïs Nin is politically correct! 😀. A novel with June as its protagonist has the potential to be a commercial success, in other words. There is a built-in readership—provided I can finish the novel and market it well after (as is seeming increasingly likely) I self-publish.

Miller writes June as the ultimate femme fatale-slash-vagina dentata. I'm writing June as a borderline personality.

Love and Ruin is about a very particular marriage—Gelhorn's to Hemingway. I've never been a big Hemingway fan. There are a handful of short stories I admire, but I loathe his novels. Gelhorn, though, is a genuinely interesting woman. A war correspondent. The only correspondent to have been on the beach on D-day. She deserves a novel in which she is more than just another Hemingway marital trophy.

[thisnewday]

I've loved a lot of Hemingway's work, as well as that of his one-time cohort Fitzgerald, read several biographies about them, and came to loathe both of them for, among other things, their relationships with women.

I LMAO when I read that Hemingway was pissed that Gelhorn had made the landing and he hadn't...

[mallorys_camera]

Never been a big fan of Hemingway's prose myself. Not a fan of unadorned prose (can you tell? 😀). I figure someone invented all those adjectives and I want to use them! 😀

I do like a few of Hemingway's short stories. My fave is A Clean, Well-Lighted Place because of its (rare for Hemingway) descent into the figurative: Our Nada who art in Nada...

I am a fan of Fitzgerald's prose. He wrote a few absolutely perfect sentences. His problem was that he didn't know how to bind them together with connective tissue. I have problems with The Great Gatsby, for instance, because the characterizations seem puppet-like and the action static.

Hemingway was altogether a creepy guy, and his relationships with women were awful.

I have more sympathy for Fitzgerald. I think the deal with Fitzgerald is that he was basically a very simple Midwestern guy who got in over his head.