When Ernest Hemingway Came Across Two Snakes In Heat...

What a week. Or should that be, What a two weeks? It’s difficult to keep track of the days when the only way to tell them apart is the calendar.

I’ve been reading Paul Hendrickson’s very excellent Hemingway book, entitled Hemingway’s Boat. I don’t know how to describe this book. It’s certainly not a biography, at least not of Ernest Hemingway himself about whom, Hendrickson notes, there are already too many biographies. If it’s a biography of anyone, it’s a biography of Hemingway’s ill-fated son Giggy, spelled Gigi, and to a lesser degree of Walter Houk, a deckhand on the Pilar, Hemingway’s fishing boat.

I’ll out myself here: I am not a Hemingway fan. Loathe his novels where the much-vaunted spare style clashes with the melodrama of the plots. Find myself singularly unmoved by the plights of rich gigolos with aspirations to the written word dying in the shadows of famous African mountains. My attitude towards Hemingway can be summed up in the famous E.B. White parody, Across the Street and Into the Grill. I do like one of his stories a great deal, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, but that’s only because of the Conradian plot device and the way he channels James Joyce at the end of it: Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada...

The tale of Hemingway’s son Gigi is quite something, though. Gigi was born with what we politically correct people of the 21st century would call a gender aphasia, I don’t know whether this meant that he was gay or whether he simply liked dressing up in women’s clothing and then masturbating in public. What’s interesting is that Hemingway apparently recognized a companion darkness in this son.

Reading this book has given me the idea that if by some miracle the Novel --still unnamed -- whose edits I am most desultorily working my way through now were to be picked up by a publishing house and have some modest success, the ideal franchise wouldn’t be more of the mystery-solving team of John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, but a series of novels about writers to whom magical events occur and their reactions to those events. I suppose one could argue that Dan Simmons already wrote the definitive Hemingway magic book with The Crook Factory. But in my Hemingway magic book, the defining incident would be separating two copulating snakes with a stick -- as Tiresias did in the ancient Greek myth. And look at what happened to Tiresias!