Word: hemingways
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hollywood Props. Hemingway later published The Sea in Being separately -as The Old Man and the Sea-and, largely as a result, won a Nobel Prize. But he never released the Thomas Hudson narratives. Now they have been made public by Scribners and Mary Hemingway, admittedly only after long deliberation. The decision may be challenged, for Islands in the Stream is in many ways a stunningly bad book. At his best, Ernest Hemingway the writer knew that Papa Hemingway the public figure was his own worst literary creation. One suspects he would have eventually got round to slashing Islands...
...book is divided into three sections. The first, called "Bimini," ends when Andrew and David, Hudson's two young sons by an estranged wife, are killed with their mother in a distant automobile wreck. (Patrick and Gregory, Hemingway's two sons by his second wife, were injured in an auto crash in 1947.) In "Bimini," though, Hudson's confrontation with this tragedy is mercifully kept brief. Most of the section is a summer idyl, drenched in martini golds and Gulf Stream blues, centered around the sons and an only slightly too epic fishing trip on what...
Honest Lil. Section 2, called "Cuba," is Hemingway at his most expendable-navigating in full anecdotage without benefit of plot. We learn that Tom, Hudson's eldest son by his first wife, has just been killed over Europe in a Spitfire.* For one brief, delirious moment of pure fantasy, Tom's grieving mother appears and, after turning out to be none other than Marlene Dietrich, goes briefly to bed with Hudson. Such diversions, alas, are all but drowned in endless talk, mainly in Havana's Floridita Bar, where Hudson, now completely taken over by Papa Hemingway, holds...
Magic Circle. The supreme example of lost control, of course, is death. Throughout his lifetime, Hemingway seemed to be rehearsing for his death like an actor fearfully trying to prepare himself for the mad scene in King Lear. Yet Hemingway's ways of coping with the idea of death were rarely effective artistically. His "Ernestoic" pronouncements seemed jejune because they were so often, so flagrantly fronting for self-pity. Only when he could escape his self-preoccupation, as in The Old Man and the Sea, could he be taken seriously...
...some ways, Islands in the Stream is a rambling family anecdote. Yet in it, Hemingway occasionally succeeds in escaping total self-preoccupation-through love. Only faintly disguised as fiction, Thomas Hudson's recollection of his sons, in life and death, is clearly an attempt by the author to weave some sort of protective magic around them. Hemingway was an openly superstitious man. But anyone with children will find that easy to forgive. What father does not secretly believe he can avert tragedy by imagining it in advance, or hope that he can protect his children by holding them steadily...