Papa

Adios Hemingway, Leonardo Padura Fuentes (a novel)

Ernest Hemingway, Mary V. Dearborn

He was a man's man.

The kind of man about whom Richard Slotkin wrote in Regeneration Through Violence; the man who "won the West;" the man with a house full of animal heads, a case full of guns, a rotting liver and a gigantic libido.

A dinosaur.  Like God, our culture--dishonest, feckless, preening, consumerist, shallow--has killed off men like Hemingway. Outside of the military, the version of masculinity Hemingway represented has passed into oblivion.  He was a bully and a drunk and an artist. He did not suffer fools; he didn't bow down to the gods of money and power. He was, like him or not, his own man.
 

In his various biographical guises, Hemingway comes off as brutal and bloodthirsty, buffoonish, drunken, insecure, and, near the end of his life, paranoid.  After reading Mary Dearborn's  biography it is difficult to disagree with this evaluation But he was also courageous, generous, loyal, and committed to his art.

I am rereading a handful of the novels and trying to recapture some of the excitement they engendered in me when I was a young man. To be honest, I'm ambivalent about all of them except for The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and The Sea. The simple cadences of his style--a style learned during Hemingway's brief stint at the Kansas City Star--feels more like reportage than literature. In the opening of To Have and Have Not, for instance, I can't make out the look of the bar (it's the Floridita in Havana) or the disposition of the characters during the gunfight that initiates the story.  The scene is flattened, more like a series of still photos than a narrative describing propulsive action. I understand what Hemingway was aiming for, a laconic detachment implying an unwillingness to judge events, but I can no longer live comfortably without judgments, without a sense of the weightiness of things.This feeling is unshakable during even the best sections of The Sun Also Rises, a book that might have been written by Camus or Gide or Beckett. 

In this post I want to approach Hemingway in terms of a philosophical problem rather than from the point of view of literary merit. The wonderful Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuenctes invites us, in his tiny gem of a novel Adios Hemingway, to rethink Hemingway's life and art, and I have tried to do so.

Please bear with this brief sidebar:

David Hume argued that there can be no such thing as a "self." In our internal life we note a riot of impressions, ideas, memories, sensations, fears, desires, opinions, and so forth. We flit from one thing to another. While we are performing even the most intimate and intensive actions--making love or writing poems--our minds still move to other things: the cool feeling of the air moving through the window, the dog that never ceases barking, the slight pain our knee, the bottle of wine that we will enjoy with dinner.  Everyone before Hume simply assumed that the mind was a theater and that the panoply of acts that crossed the stage was objectively observed by the Soul, made note of and rounded up in some fashion in order to create the Self.  Kant took Hume's point and ran with it--in the first critique he developed the notion of Transcendental Idealism, of an objective, self-observant critical consciousness.

Kant's understanding of how the mind imposes order on the outside world--in part through the categories of space, time, and causality--was unsatisfactory on a number of levels, and generations of critics wrestled with the fundamental problem that Hume articulated and that Kant believed he had settled.  Namely, how does the mind order the world in such a way that it appears to possess continuity and coherence? And what is this self or mind apart from the impressions it receives? The absurdity of Locke's idea of the "blank slate" made Kant's reconstruction of the inner life all the more important. 

To get some idea of what Kant was worried about, imagine that you were to forget the past, to sustain a brain injury that eradicated your memory and therefore your personality. Would you still be the person you had been?  What is this Self in which we place so much faith, that we give our name, that we trust to be there when we need it? ("Just be yourself" we say, and. "Be true to yourself"). This sounds like an argument you might have had in a college dorm room--it probably was--but even this crude formulation of the problem suggests something of the difficulty we face when thinking about our inner life and how it is connected to our sense of self.

 
What does any of this have to do with Hemingway?

No writer I can think of so carefully (or carelessly) blended his writing and his life; or, to put it another way, I can think of no other writer whose literary achievements are as inextricably bound to a particular way of life, a way of life that, as Mary Dearborn makes plain, Hemingway deliberately cultivated and consciously pursed.  He lived his books as few writers have lived theirs, and when he could no longer live a life centered on hunting, fishing, drinking, and pursuing women not only did he cease writing, he ceased living.  Beginning in 1958, Hemingway slipped into paranoia, ill-health, and senility; he no longer was the man he had been, and therefore the writer he had been.

It is the story of the slipping out of a life that Leonardo Padura Fuentes tells in Adios Hemingway. Mario Conde, the hero of Fuentes's wonderful Havana mysteries (try Havana Blue), has retired from police work to become a writer. His former partner and now chief of the Havana police asks Conde to investigate the identity of a body that has been unearthed on Heminway's former Finca, now a museum, or mausoleum, dedicated to the writer's years in Cuba.  Conde, who once revered Hemingway and took the novelist as his role model, has come to despise "Papa," to see the American ex-pat as  loutish and cruel, a man who was, in fact, capable of murder.  Conde takes on the job of identifying the corpse and finding the killer, and in doing so he unearths not just the body of an FBI agent and the killer, but also the central mysteries of Hemingway's life. 

While Conde sets out to solve a murder, the reader is led back in time to Hemingway's final days in Cuba. I loved these sections for their rich evocation of the writer's life, and for their intelligent exploration of the connection between the self and the artist. In Heminway's case, this connection was absolute and therefore is a provocation to think about the meaning of literary art.

Fuentes's explores with great economy and delicacy the connection between the self-identity of Hemingway and his sense of himself as an artist.  Once he can no longer live as he has lived, once he must renounce the outward roles he has played--as a hunter, a drinker, a lover--his inner world shrivels to nothing. He can't finish Death in the Afternoon because he can no longer evoke the drama of a bullfight. And, lacking the ability to write, why go on living?

That so slender and so unpretentious a novel would lead me to reread Hemingway, to search out a new biography, to write for days in my notebook about the relationship(s) between the writer's life and the writer's perception of his inner self, all of this speaks volumes about Fuentes's art.  I have just ordered Fuentes's big novel about Trotsky, The Man Who Loved Dogs and am looking forward to writing about it in a future episode of Talented Reader.   What is summer for but the discovery of exciting new books and writers? 

Have a cigar. 

George Ovitt (6/19/2018)