Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Hemingway: The Final Years, Michael Reynolds

c. 1999 (first set of notes completed)

Part One: The Fortunes Of War, July 1940 to November 1944

Chapter 1: Ringing the Changes, July to Early Winter, 1940
WWII -- Germans were in Paris
First wife Hadley and son Jack were in Chicago
Second wife Pauline Pfeiffer with two sons Patrick and Gregory waiting for divorce papers (on grounds of desertion)
for past 1.5 years, Hemingway had been living in Cuba with Martha Gellhorn while still married to Pauline

Chapter 2: To Mandalay and Back, January to September 1941

Chapter 3: Voyagers, September 1941 to Christmas 1942
Back in Sun Valley with Hollywood movers and shakers
Submarine threat in Gulf of Mexico intense
Ernest Hemingway's private war against German submarines

Chapter 4: American Patrol, January to July 1941
The Pilar; hunting submarines

Chapter 5: Intermezzo, August 1943 to May 1944
Martha and Ernest had been a couple for seven years; four clandestine; three married
Apart: sweet, tender letters
Together: huge arguments; Martha wanted to travel, report, WWII; constrained with H. in Cuba
H. moves in on Martha's Collier's; becomes the magazine's lead journalist; to NYC, on way to Europe as war correspondent
Hemingway's and Martha's marriage over; only on paper

Chapter 6: Putting on the Ritz, June, July, August 1944
June 6, 1944 -- D-Day, Hemingway on the Empire Anvil, one of a hundred transports headed to France
Saw Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah on his briefing maps
Arrived at Omaha; with binoculars used Coleville church steeple as his guide but brought back to England per military policy; few correspondents allowed to go ashore that first day
Writing from Dorchester Hotel, London; talked to RAF pilots
Hemingway actually flew bombing missions with RAF pilots on Normandy (other correspondents did also)
Spends nights with Mary Welsh in the London hotel, 1944; in peacetime, scandalous; in wartime, no one thought about it; she was married to a correspondent who was in France
Welsh: twice married; once divorced at the time she was with Hemingway; she had multiple liaisons, as did he
Hemingway assigned to Patton's Third Army grouping at Nehou
Then assigned to First Army just as Omar Bradley broke out
Joins up with 22nd Infantry Regiment Colonel Charles "Buck" Lanham
Ernest: part-time journalist; irregular soldier; gatherer of intelligence

Chapter 7: Down Among the Dead Men, September to November 1944

Part Two: A Fall From Grace, 1945 to 1952

Chapter 8: Starting Over, March to December 1945
Eager to return to Cuba; Mary Welsh agrees with trial union in Cuba
End of 1945: divorce final for Martha and Hemingway; Mary now felt like a fiancee
Mary was getting used to Cuba; Hemingway did not care for the nightlife; was cutting down on his drinking and getting back in shape
Working on For Whom The Bell Tolls

Chapter 9: Rules of the Game, 1946
Remembering all the monumental authors he had ever read -- Homer, Proust, James, Joyce -- Hemingway loosely envisioned a book that would bring together everything he had learned about structure, landscape, and character
The book went through a huge metamorphosis over 15 years -- the sea war became what is now called Islands in the Stream, and The Old Man and the Sea; the air was eventually abandoned; and the ground war would become the memories of a bitter Army colonel dying in Venice, Across the River and into the Trees.
For the next 15 years, often fishing with his sons off Bimini, Hemingway's memory and his fiction would return again and again to the apartment above the sawmill on rue Notre Dame des Champs where he first found his voice.
Finally, of things past would produce his Paris memoir -- A Moveable Feast.
Mary depressed; not "up" to his previous three wives; -- p. 158; had not "laid any bricks" as one of my girls friends once said
Hemingway himself depressed; many arguments with Mary; often sulked; if all else failed, he threatened suicide
A week after Hemingway's 47th birthday, he learned that Gertrude Stein his literary mother and godmother to his first son, had died in Paris, leaving tiny Alice to nurture her memory
Hemingway saves Mary's life; burst fallopian tube; hemorrhaging; on way to Idaho; Mary never forgot that her life was saved by Hemingway
Sun Valley Lodge for Mary (see p. 138): with Hadley, he left Chicago for the Latin Quarter of Paris; with Pauline he moved into the St Germaine area and then Key West; with Martha he moved to Finca in Cuba. With each marriage; he gave up some of his favorite spots and few friends at each; now moving to Idaho for Mary.
Sun Valley Lodge for hunting and fishing with his three boys
Returned to the novel he now titled Islands in the Stream
Ketchum, Idaho

Chapter 10: Year of the Dog, 1947
47 years old; aging quickly; hairline receding; liver disease
had not published a book in six years; would not publish another for three more years
1940: a lion among writers
1947: a literary relic
evolving: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac
a young veteran Norman Mailer was finishing The Naked and the Dead

a 1000-page manuscript; apparently ignoring his own advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald to write short novels
Max Perkins dies, unexpectedly, from pneumonia; for 20 years was Hemingway's editor
Pauline nurses Mary back to health
Failed revolution, Dominican Republic

Chapter 11: Enter Biographers, Stage Left, December 1947 to September 1948
end of chapter, in September, Mary and Ernest to Italy
talk of suicide continues
young assistant editor from Cosmopolitan magazine visits Hemingway in Cuba; Aaron Edward Hotchner wants to do series on Future of Literature; 

Chapter 12: Sentimental Journey, September 1948 to May 1949
Italy
meets 18-y/o Adriana Ivancich; falls in love with her

Chapter 13: Venice Preserved, May to December 1949
erratic mood swings continue; talks of death continue
by end of chapter, back in France

Chapter 14: The Middle Parts of Fortune, January to October 1950
Back to NYC and then back to Cuba

Chapter 15: Roadstead of  the Heart, November 1950 to February 1952
listless, depressed; lovesick for Adriana
Adriana and her mother show up in Cuba; live with Hemingways
The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway's mother in nursing home in Memphis at age 79; hallucinations; senile;

Part Three: End Game, 1952 to 1961

Chapter 16: The Artist's Rewards, March 1952 to June 1953
everyone agreed: The Old Man and the Sea -- stunning, told as simply as a fable, and as tenderly as a love letter
Cuban coup; Batista in power; business as usual

Chapter 17: The Phoenix, June 1953 to March 1954
to Spain, Kenya, and the plane wreck that almost them their lives


Chapter 18: Fortune and Men's Eyes, March 1954 to January 1956
back to Venice; a changed man after the plane crash: his beard whiter, his eyes frequently vacant, his moods mercurial
thirteen months after leaving Cuba, now returned
Nobel Prize winner
now writing his story of his African adventure; Mary was a character in the book and would have a larger role than Pauline had in Green Hills of Africa
father's death February, 1954; mother's move to new nursing home in Minnesota
end of chapter: receives a letter from Sylvia Beach with re: to her memoirs

Chapter 19: Intimations of Mortality, January 1956 to March 1957
movie-making, fishing off coast of Peru
sailed to Spain, but unable to get to Africa due to conflicts on the continent

Chapter 20: Cuba Libre, April 1957 to December 1958
thinking of his memories as a series of short stories

Chapter 21: Exiles from Eden, January 1959 to January 1960
from Ketchum, following the Cuban revolution
Hemingway really starting to lose his sanity; becoming paranoid

Chapter 22: The Body Electric, January 17, 1960, to July 2, 1961
board the Union Pacific's "City of Portland" on first leg back to Cuba
arrive in Cuba
Hotchner his editor
clearly mentally ill by now; refusing treatment
anonymously treated as patient George Saviers
discharged from NYC hospital; back to Ketchum, Idaho
Bay of Pigs
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
chapter ends as clock ticks to 7:30 am July 2, 1961
born in July, blown up in Italy in July, Pamplona in July, for Hemingway, July was a memorable month
61 years old

Coda, October 26, 1998
a short one-page chapter

Chronology at the end of the book

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