When you read enough of a writer, one who writes realism, even if fiction, but not a pure fictionalist, not Dickens, Hemingway, you read things in the writing that you know to be true because you know the writer's life. I have been reading Hemingway's fiction for over thirty years but it has been only recently, maybe in the last five years, that I read that he had a near photographic memory, and knowing that you can then pick up one of his novels again, A Moveable Feast, and see the character trait. How he could write in 1960 of his Paris days with such accuracy of total recall that there is another book, Hemingway Walks, taken from A Moveable Feast, that is a Baedeker's it is so accurate. You can walk each step Hemingway took from the Luxembourg Gardens to wherever, back to his flat or to Sylvia Beach's or to the La Closerie Des Lilas. I did. With Hemingway Walks in one hand and A Moveable Feast in the other I walked Paris in his footsteps.
Hemingway was a very photogenic man and there are zillions of photographs of him. His "say cheese" smile is the most famous. But that was not the real Hemingway, those were posed photographs. I have never liked posing for photographs nor posed photographs. They tell you little about the subject. It is candid photographs, if they are good, in which you can see the character traits, as well as in the writing. Hemingway was the most truthful writer ever. His goal at the start of every story was to "just write one true sentence, the truest sentence you know" and with those eyes he knew the truth, he forgot nothing, he saw all. The most characteristic photograph I have ever seen of Hemingway is a candid. He is looking down, I think on a bull fight but now I am not sure because I cannot find that photograph except in my mind. In my mind and I believe somewhere in Google images Hemingway is leaning over a rail and his eyes are boring into the scene. He is not there, only his eyes are there and his mind. It is Hemingway's honest boring eyes and his prodigious memory that make more understandable his brutal realism. I do not know why Hemingway bored with those eyes and that memory into some of the most horrific scenes any human has ever seen, the women's factory that was blown up in Italy and Hemingway's job was to collect the pieces of the women's bodies that he could, or the sound of the crack the bicyclist's skull made, like an eggshell, in a racing track accident, or the avalanche victim who had struggled so desperately that when his body was recovered the skin and the muscles were worn away down to the bones of the back of the neck as he struggled beyond pain and in vain to break through suffocating snow to the surface and air. That is what Hemingway saw and that is what he remembered and he wrote truthfully about it. It is Brutalist School architecture in literature. Did he see nothing else or was it human nature to see and to remember in horror all of the details that his mind could not help but sear forever in him? Was his near photographic memory a curse as well as the lodestar of his writing? Both, for he lost his mind and blew off his head which contained his mind and all of those memories of the brutality he had seen.
I have seen this mind in men of science, the medical examiner's that I have spent all of my professional life around. Like them Hemingway's father was a doctor. They have fine minds and work only in brutality. They perform the process of evisceration with the casualness of a face lift. Hemingway was brutally honest with himself. He knew that decades of head injury and alcoholism had caused him to write that which embarrassed him. To the end, in Islands in the Stream, he wrote brutally honestly of being penetrated anally by a female lover. "Now we are the same, do you see?" "Yes." He was not embarrassed to do that nor was he embarrassed to write about that afterwards, nor to destroy that but to let the world read it. Hemingway was as complex as a man could be and he held little or nothing back about his complexity but aside from The Garden of Eden there is no more similar true writing on his sexuality, which I am convinced is the great untold story of Ernest Hemingway's life and the missing key to a complete understanding of the most courageous writer, certainly in all of America's letters, and that I know of in any writer in the world, ever. When you read enough of Hemingway and see enough photographs of him it is there, the sexual ambivalence, the androgyny. He saw it, with those penetrating eyes turned inward as often as outward but perhaps recoiled in confusion. The only thing he wrote as little about was his father's suicide. Perhaps the man who sought and wrote about pain and brutality could just not go there. I love you Papa. Whoever and whatever you were, I love you.
Hemingway was a very photogenic man and there are zillions of photographs of him. His "say cheese" smile is the most famous. But that was not the real Hemingway, those were posed photographs. I have never liked posing for photographs nor posed photographs. They tell you little about the subject. It is candid photographs, if they are good, in which you can see the character traits, as well as in the writing. Hemingway was the most truthful writer ever. His goal at the start of every story was to "just write one true sentence, the truest sentence you know" and with those eyes he knew the truth, he forgot nothing, he saw all. The most characteristic photograph I have ever seen of Hemingway is a candid. He is looking down, I think on a bull fight but now I am not sure because I cannot find that photograph except in my mind. In my mind and I believe somewhere in Google images Hemingway is leaning over a rail and his eyes are boring into the scene. He is not there, only his eyes are there and his mind. It is Hemingway's honest boring eyes and his prodigious memory that make more understandable his brutal realism. I do not know why Hemingway bored with those eyes and that memory into some of the most horrific scenes any human has ever seen, the women's factory that was blown up in Italy and Hemingway's job was to collect the pieces of the women's bodies that he could, or the sound of the crack the bicyclist's skull made, like an eggshell, in a racing track accident, or the avalanche victim who had struggled so desperately that when his body was recovered the skin and the muscles were worn away down to the bones of the back of the neck as he struggled beyond pain and in vain to break through suffocating snow to the surface and air. That is what Hemingway saw and that is what he remembered and he wrote truthfully about it. It is Brutalist School architecture in literature. Did he see nothing else or was it human nature to see and to remember in horror all of the details that his mind could not help but sear forever in him? Was his near photographic memory a curse as well as the lodestar of his writing? Both, for he lost his mind and blew off his head which contained his mind and all of those memories of the brutality he had seen.
I have seen this mind in men of science, the medical examiner's that I have spent all of my professional life around. Like them Hemingway's father was a doctor. They have fine minds and work only in brutality. They perform the process of evisceration with the casualness of a face lift. Hemingway was brutally honest with himself. He knew that decades of head injury and alcoholism had caused him to write that which embarrassed him. To the end, in Islands in the Stream, he wrote brutally honestly of being penetrated anally by a female lover. "Now we are the same, do you see?" "Yes." He was not embarrassed to do that nor was he embarrassed to write about that afterwards, nor to destroy that but to let the world read it. Hemingway was as complex as a man could be and he held little or nothing back about his complexity but aside from The Garden of Eden there is no more similar true writing on his sexuality, which I am convinced is the great untold story of Ernest Hemingway's life and the missing key to a complete understanding of the most courageous writer, certainly in all of America's letters, and that I know of in any writer in the world, ever. When you read enough of Hemingway and see enough photographs of him it is there, the sexual ambivalence, the androgyny. He saw it, with those penetrating eyes turned inward as often as outward but perhaps recoiled in confusion. The only thing he wrote as little about was his father's suicide. Perhaps the man who sought and wrote about pain and brutality could just not go there. I love you Papa. Whoever and whatever you were, I love you.
