Hemingway on his 126th birthday
Not long after my maternal grandfather died, I was helping clean out his house and came across a copy of the copyright renewal edition of The Sun Also Rises, which I believe he was reading in the days before he died. I kept it. Prior to that, I’d dabbled. Once I had it, I think I may have read the whole thing cover to cover in one sitting. Roughly fifteen years ago, it was the first time in ages that a book had affected me so profoundly. That silly little bit of AI came from the prompt “Ernest Hemingway riding a clam.”
By Adam Faraca, Aficionado and Unofficial Expert
7/21/20253 min read
I’ve never actually been to the Hemingway Houses in Chicago, despite living like a hundred miles away and having been to that particular ‘burb several times. I was actually planning on going to the Hemingway House in Cuba, but their national blackout days before my planned arrival put the kibosh on that. And with Trump’s travel bans, I’m not going any time soon. I don’t think I’ve been to the Toronto one, but I really couldn’t tell you much about my brief time in Canada. I’ve been to the Key West one enough times that I’ll probably someday just work there, maybe as a tour guide. Walloon Lake, Penn State, and the JFK Presidential Library are also low-hanging fruit on my Hemingway Bucket List.
I got married at the Key West house. One of the idiosyncrasies of the off-site location where we had our reception was that they required us to make and print our own menus off of their own menu items. So, I went with a bunch of Hemingway puns for various cocktails. The “Green Hills of A. Faraca” was a key lime margarita, if memory serves me well. The walls of my home are adorned with yellow and palm covered oil paintings of the Key West house. I have two entire shelves of books by, about, or tangentially related to Hemingway. I even casually inquired about the graduate degree in Hemingway Studies that Kent State University offers.
I’ve never actually had an Arturo Fuente Hemingway Cigar. They’re widely available, so it is not because of any lack of opportunity. I have three bottles of Papa’s Pilar Hemingway Edition, with leather cases, notebooks, and fountain pens. My wife’s Mont Blanc is a Hemingway Edition. The prize of the whole Grand Faraca Library is a signed copy of To Have and Have Not (which is not a great book, but I mean come on, signed!). I’ve conversed with scholars and biographers of the man. I even wrote a short story in which Hemingway is the villain. I’ll post that sometime soon.
So, more than one and a quarter centuries after he was born, why does he remain so popular? Divisiveness. It is trendy among poorly read individuals to be a Hemingway hater. I’ll double down on that. I’ll quadruple down on that. He’s an easy man to hate. He was abrasive, had four wives, drank, and had a list of enemies that would make Richard Nixon green with envy. He also emphasized separating the author and the work, which I don’t think most of his haters are capable of. If you buy one of his books, open it to certain passages, and ignore historical context, you can easily point to stuff that some people would find objectionable. But if you don’t have at least some haters, are you really doing whatever your thing is right?
It is kind of amazing to think that until relatively recently Paris was a Bohemian city with a relatively low cost of living. Almost unthinkable now, but it was considered “cheap” well into the 20th century. You can’t really talk about Hemingway without mentioning Paris, right? The Salon, the who’s who list of expatriates, all that jazz? It doesn’t involve Hemingway directly, but the French film Cezanne et Moi captures the feeling much better than Midnight in Paris, or any of the rest of the variety of films that have tried to capture that creative enclave.
I recently reviewed Wrestling With Demons on this blog, highly recommend. The Garden of Eden is one that a modern audience might appreciate. It was experimental when he wrote it and might do well now. It won’t, too much of the modern readership have become haters, but it could. I ordered a copy of the expanded edition of A Moveable Feast that came out a few years back. The A&E documentary on Hemingway is decent, but none of his works have ever been adapted into anything good. I’d suggest the Nick Adams Stories if you are looking for something you can segment. Happy birthday, Hem.