JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

Posted by jdbernard743

· December 23, 2015

My Love Affair With Books

What do you notice when you visit someone’s home for the first time?

It’s not a trick question. It’s a reminder that first impressions are indelible and shape our perceptions. Do you focus on the décor? Lifestyle? Art? Floor coverings? Kitchen smells? Toys, or something else?

The first thing I notice are books – or their absence. If there are none I get suspicious. If people don’t read I wonder where their ideas come from or whether they have historical perspective on the present? If books are in evidence I imagine a narrative about their owners. Are there lots of them? Are they mostly fiction? Hardcover? Paperback? How are they displayed? Are they new or do they look like college leftovers? All of these things tell me something about the lives of their owners.

I was an early but not an avid reader. Ellen Smith, my high school English teacher, helped change that and I was reminded of her last week as I blogged about Hemingway.

She would scold me mercilessly if she knew that my treasured 1952 edition of The Old Man and the Sea bears the Roosevelt High School Library stamp and shows a due date of January 4, 1955. I nicked it and by my calculation, at 5 cents a day (the 1955 overdue book rate) excluding interest, I owe roughly $1095 in library fines. I vow to settle that debt with a donation to the RHS Foundation, and it will be worth every penny because The Old Man and the Sea and Grapes of Wrath, were my introduction to literary fiction and the world of literature. Ellen Smith I love you. Maybe now you can RIP. I will make it up to you.

While my love affair with books was born in high school it grew significantly when Professor Sophus K. Winther walked me through War and Peace in a college literature class and changed the vector of my college experience. Together, Mrs. Smith and Dr. Winther cultivated in me a lifelong passion that has brought an astonishing amount of pleasure and information.

I am hooked on books. I’m vulnerable and impressionable around them. I almost never pass a Bargain Books table or leave a bookstore empty handed. I’m embarrassed to say it I don’t read all of them but my intentions are good. I might buy one because its subject is something I want to know more about, the author is someone I admire, or because I remember an admiring review in the New York Times Book Review. It doesn’t matter. I’m hooked.

Lucky for me my wife feels the same. In fact, she reads more and faster than I do, but we share a love of books. We own Kindles and our smart phones have Audible and iBooks apps but we both think there is nothing like the real thing – hardcover or paperback. It’s sensual; the feel, look, and smell of a new book invite a communion with the author that the devices can’t. When we travel we compromise in order to save space and weight, and often an Audible book read by the author provides an unusual insight into its meaning. I’m thinking of H is for Hawk which we listened to in Rome this spring, but when possible we both prefer the feel of the hard cover, the look of the typeface and smell and sound as the cover is opened for the first time.

I don’t read Romance novels (and neither does M) but I devour thrillers – the male version of brain candy – and other interests run the spectrum from literary fiction, to art, history, politics, philosophy and sports. I don’t keep all the books I buy, but I keep all those I think have enduring value or are personally meaningful. These “savers” are an important part of the interior decoration in our home.

The world is full of book lovers. I meet them all the time, seated on the floor of independent bookstores, drinking lattes at Starbucks, browsing Bargain Book tables, asking questions at author readings, enrolling in writer’s workshops, and picking through used books at yard sales. On January 20, 2016 Seattle will have a new place for book lovers to congregate and celebrate.

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is the latest creation of literary entrepreneur and gadfly David Brewster. David is a former Seattle Times journalist who left the mainstream in 1976 to found Seattle Weekly, a freely distributed alternative newspaper. In 1999 he was the driving force behind the transformation of Town Hall from a Christian Science Church to cultural forum. In 2007 he started Crosscut, a non-profit journal of informed opinion on politics, culture, and technology, and now in 2016 comes Folio, located in dedicated space in the downtown YMCA building at the corner of 4^th Avenue and Marion Street.

Mr. Brewster describes this latest endeavor as “a gathering place for books and the people who love them.” Its aim is to be general-interest library and cultural center. Its mission is to promote and deepen public appreciation of the literary arts through the preservation of book collections, a circulating library, book-related cultural programming, and workspaces for writers and others.

Folio is a member-supported nonprofit that offers a range of membership levels so that all book lovers can enjoy its facilities. The general public is welcome and non-members may access the collection on line, read books at the library, and attend Folio’s programs with some restrictions. At an open house last week we saw several large rooms taking shape with bookcases full of donated books, large tables with electrical connections, and corners with comfortable chairs arranged for quiet conversation.

Of course there are other places to write and share an interest in books. For the past three years I have experimented with spaces and places to read and write, mostly libraries and coffee shops, but none of them offer the combination of good workspace, economy, and community that Folio promises. There are other shared co-working environments, more all the time, that offer space for a fee. This month Seattle Magazine’s Essentials column features two new ones, The Cloud Room and Coterie Worklounge, that are clubby membership spaces with bars and cafés onsite, but at $300 and $160 per month respectively they are pricey. The same is true for the simpler workspaces at “The Office” at Ada’s Technical Books, but again, at $20/day is expensive. The $125 Folio membership promises access to work areas, a library, and reading rooms for a year.

Kurt Vonnegut invented the term “karass” in Cat’s Cradle to identify “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner even when superficial linkages are not evident” (Urban Dictionary). It’s Vonnegut’s way of saying we all seek community. Folio’s mission is to create a “community of the book” and it may very well be my next karass.

How fabulous!

Now – let me see what’s in your bookcase.

Check out Folio at: http://www.folioseattle.org/#!learn-more/cp7y

Facebook

Google

Twitter

1 Comment

Categories : Books, Fashion/Lifestyle, Uncategorized, Work and Adventure

Posted by jdbernard743

· December 14, 2015

· 1 Comment

Eat Like Hemingway

One of the hot trends in dining today is the “themed” restaurant, and this year’s theme of choice in Seattle is the Hemingway-inspired boite. By my count there are three new places using Papa’s adventures and lifestyle to inform their spaces and menus.

As with other trends it is difficult to know what kicked this one off. I’m not aware that it’s a resurgence of interest in Ernest’s writing or a re-evaluation of his importance in the literary world although I do believe he is underappreciated. My guess is that it’s the romance of the Hemingway legend.

Three years ago I reread A Moveable Feast, the Hemingway memoir of Paris in the ‘20’s when he, Hadley, and their son, Bumby, lived in a walkup flat on Rue Cardinal Lemoine. As a writer I was reminded of the book’s rich insights into Hemingway’s writing process and the window it opened into the ordinariness of his daily life as a young writer in Paris. Bumby, aka Jack, was a friend of mine until his death in 2000, and A Moveable Feast rekindled my interest in Hemingway the writer in contrast to the Hemingway the myth. Moved by the memoir, two years ago I visited the Paris flat, drank Pastis at Les Deux Magots, ate oysters at La Coupole, browsed book stalls on the Rive Gauche, made a pilgrimage to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and this fall I spent time at the Hemingway house and museum in Key West.

The 1920’s is a romantic epoch for literature lovers who are able focus on the romance without having to cope with the real life aggravation of cold winters and 5-story walkup apartments. With this as background it’s not surprising that Hemingway’s adventures continue to inspire and add interest in contemporary settings.

In our city, where attractive, innovative, restaurants and cuisines are flourishing; the romance of the Hemingway era provides an atmosphere for the creation of intimate spaces evocative of that earlier time.

The three new Hemingway-inspired spots are all quite different reflecting the many aspects and places that played a role in the writer’s life or lives as the case may be. After all, he lived and worked in France, Italy, Spain, Cuba, and China as well as a number of locations in the US.

Of the three local restaurants, I think my favorite is Ernest Loves Agnes (reviewed in this magazine September 29, photos above), although all three offer something special. This café’s name is a trivia player’s dream. At 18, before the US entered WWI, Ernest went to Italy to serve as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. An Austrian mortar shell exploded near him and he was badly wounded by flying shrapnel. An American nurse named Agnes von Kurkowsky nursed him back to health and they had an affair. In the end Agnes, who was 7 years older, rejected Ernest. These facts would just be part of the Hemingway biography were it not for the fact that they became the inspiration for the tragic literary romance in A Farewell to Arms, in which an American ambulance driver is nursed back to health by an English nurse who later dies in childbirth.

Ernest Loves Agnes feels like it could be Paris in the ‘20’s. The cozy space (formerly the well-regarded Kingfish Café) is divided into two long narrow rooms, with booths in one and tables along the wall of the other. Both sides are decorated with photographs of Hemingway’s Finca Viglia in Cuba and the small plate offerings on the menu are served on mismatched antique china by a friendly knowledgeable staff. On a recent visit we shared an appetizer of eggplant and red pepper caponata on artisan toast and a cheese plate that featured a bleu, a French double crème, Spanish manchego, and cheddar with a basket of razor thin toasted baguette slices. Everything was delicious and well presented.

The second of the three Hemingway-inspired restaurants, Manolin (Man-o-LEEN), is the creation of Renee Erickson, of Boat Street Café, The Walrus and the Carpenter, and The Whale Wins fame. This time Renee and a quartet of new partners have created a Caribbean centered menu long on fish and interesting spices. The space is less intimate than Ernest Loves Agnes and features hard surfaces, primary colors, a polished concrete floor, and bright lighting. It’s “a clean well-lighted place” like the Hemingway short story of the same name. In 2015 Bon Appetit named it one of America’s 10 best new restaurants. Pas mal, eh?

The name comes from The Old Man and the Sea, the 1952 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Manolin is the name of the young protégé of “old man” Santiago. Other than the name the Hemingway connection is less clear. What is clear is the popularity of this new spot. With a no reservations policy it’s not easy to get in. Last Friday my wife and I walked in at 5pm and were told it would probably be an hour for a table for two. It was only because two friends walked in about the same time that we were able to capture the last four-top without a long wait. At 5 o’clock? Who eats at 5 o’clock?

We did and it was deliciously different. Like Ernest Loves Agnes this is small plates spot and the four of us shared several – salted plantain chips, albacore ceviche, Tuscan kale with cojita cheese and sweet red peppers, grilled beef with lardo, sautéed squid buried in a molded squid ink fried rice, and a whole grilled branzino (European seabass) – innovative offerings full of exotic flavors.

The last, but not least, of the Hemingway-themed restaurants is Bottle and Bull. Drinking and bull fighting, two of Mr. H’s favorite pastimes. Proprietor Jessi Waldher and husband, Chad, operated Marcy’s Bar and Lounge in hometown Walla Walla but missed the energy of the Seattle/Bellevue scene. They settled on upscale Kirkland for their enterprise and created Bottle and Ball as a hip, noisy, lifestyle bar and bistro. Bottle and Bull combines the dimly lit décor with photographs we saw at Ernest Loves Agnes with the hard surfaces of Manolin and a giant antique wooden bar to offer young professionals of the Eastside a trendy watering hole to gather and gawk.

Jessi is charming and knowledgeable and her staff well trained. After we ordered our food the waiter brought us the pickled egg with salmon mousse and caper appetizer – unsolicited – asking us to try it on the house. It was a clever way to introduce us to the cuisine. Puckery and savory, it was a complete surprise.

We followed with an apple and Brie flatbread with caramelized onions and fresh tarragon sprigs accompanied by a wild watercress salad with thin slices of watermelon radish. Everything was clean tasting with flavors enhanced by fresh picked herbs.

It’s only suitable to end this Hemingway-theme with some drink suggestions. Bottle and Bull is the most creative on that side of the menu with drinks named for Papa’s characters or adventures. The Robert Jordan (From Whom the Bell Tolls), Blood and Sand (bullfighting), Stockholm’s Prize (Nobel Prize) and Snows of Kilimanjaro (short story) are just a few on their craft cocktails list.

There is something about being located on the top of the Left Coast that seems to keep Seattle from getting the kind of recognition it deserves – whether it’s the Seahawks’ powerhouse, the inventive restaurant scene, or the fact that so many Broadway-bound plays start their tryout runs here. We’re in a secret spot and there’s something special about discovering a place as creative as our city. This is about more than “surviving Seattle.” It’s about linking a particularly creative literary period, in the nation’s second most literate city, with a particularly creative period on cutting edge of American cuisine.

Categories : Books, Fashion/Lifestyle, Food/Restaurants

Posted by jdbernard743

· December 8, 2015

· 1 Comment

The Emperor’s New Guns

I took this picture of Seattle’s iconic landmark on Wednesday and planned to write a column about it, but then a nut case in Colorado Springs shot up Planned Parenthood and a couple of jihadi terrorists blasted their way into history in San Bernardino and that column disappeared in a cloud of gun smoke.

This is a column I didn’t want to write. I’ve written it before (see Cowards and Bullies, April 19, 2013) and though I didn’t want write it again it’s a burning issue that isn’t going away until we do something. Given the bloviators on the 2016 campaign trail and the gutless wonders in Congress,” something” may not happen soon enough to prevent another bloody massacre.

I don’t really understand it, but the 2^nd Amendment really has legs. In 1919 Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater was not a protected right under the 1^st Amendment, but open carry i.e. “the act of publicly carrying a firearm on one’s person in plain sight,” is permissible in a majority of states without restriction. That firearm can be anything from a .22 caliber pistol to a semi-automatic military style rifle loaded with a high capacity magazine. What’s the disconnect here? Why are limitations on other fundamental citizen rights acceptable but not on the 2nd Amendment? The “strict scrutiny” test of judicial review requires the state have a “compelling interest” to limit a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. What could be more compelling than protecting the lives of its citizens? The fundamental right to own an armor piercing semi-automatic weapon?

With Sandy Hook Elementary, Aurora, Umpqua, Charleston, Colorado Springs, and San Bernardino in the rearview mirror why the fuck aren’t we doing SOMETHING to make America a safer place?

Have we lost our collective minds? Are we drinking a new mind-altering Kool Aid that makes us believe it is more humane and compassionate to own a high capacity, semi-automatic military firearm than it is to “burden” online sellers by asking them to initiate background checks on their buyers? Americans are like the Emperor’s subjects who were afraid to tell him he had no clothes? This is outrageous. The Emperor has new guns and they are killing us. It’s outrageous. I don’t know about you, but I wish these gun buyers had undergone extensive background checks – and so do the families of the people they killed.

We’re supposed to be a nation of laws, and the brilliant founders of our country put in place a set of checks and balances – three branches of government – with a Constitution as the primary governing document. The underlying supposition is that the legislative branch will enact laws that are the will of the people for their protection and general good, the executive branch will enforce those laws and the Supreme Court will safeguard us from those that violate the Constitution. So, where are the reasonable, common sense regulations that govern gun ownership responsibility? Polls repeatedly tell us that the majority of Americans favor reasonable laws governing the responsibility and ownership of guns. So where are they?

Last week, in the wake of San Bernardino, the gutless wonders in the US Senate, most of whom have taken campaign money from the gun interests, defeated a bill that would have expanded background checks to include online sellers and gun show purchases. The National Rifle Association and right-wing zealots act as if owning a gun is going to prevent an intrusive, totalitarian government from taking away our rights. Trust me, if the government wants to take away your rights they will be gone in a heartbeat and your gun will still be in the closet.

Ted Cruz says schools would be safer if teachers were armed to protect their students. I’m sure Mrs. Hamilton who teaches my 5-year-old grandson would be ready, willing, and able to quick draw her securely stored handgun and drill the terrorist who breaks into her kindergarten classroom with a modified AR-15 semi-automatic rifle like the ones used in San Bernardino. What do you think?

Marco Rubio and others say that Paris and San Bernardino wouldn’t have been prevented by gun control legislation. They argue that this is a reason not to enact further legislation. While it’s true that these terrorists would not have been deterred, is that a good reason not to enact reasonable limitations on gun purchases? What’s so sacred about Internet or gun show sales? Why are they exempt? If I didn’t want my gun purchase tracked I’d buy it there too. The same is true for private sales. I’d feel safer if there was a law in place regarding them too. It’s too big a burden on the seller? Bullshit. The San Bernardino terrorists bought their assault rifles from a neighbor. No background check required. Lives can be saved if terrorists, demented individuals or criminals can be stopped from buying weapons? Let’s expand background checks to close these loopholes. Currently someone whose name appears on the US “no-fly list” can walk into a gun shop and buy a military style weapon. What is going on with that?

On Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving, 185,000 guns were purchased from legitimate gun dealers and 185,000 background checks initiated. That’s an astounding number – and those were just the legal purchases. What about the online, gun show, and private sales? We don’t know who bought them or how many there were.

Terrorists will always be able to get guns. Their organizations are quasi-military. They’re on a war footing with war-like resources. Paris has strict gun ownership laws, but the terrorists came down from Belgium and who knows where the weapons were purchased. We probably can’t do much to prevent this kind of terrorism, but the San Bernardino killers bought their AR-15 assault rifles from a neighbor. Maybe their Muslim/Pakistani/Saudi connections and recent travel would have raised flags if a background check had been conducted.

Terrorism is all about scaring the bejesus out of people. It’s working. We’re scared. Do you think Americans would have bought 185,000 guns in one day if they weren’t scared? I had a great day at the Space Needle on Wednesday. I didn’t think much about it then but now I realize it’s a great “soft target.” I’m not easily scared but I won’t be going back any time soon even if friends come to town who haven’t seen it. There are plenty of other places to take them. Maybe I’m getting timid in my old age or maybe just smarter. Last weekend I watched The Wiz and until the wimps in Congress get some bigger balls I’ll think of them as descendants of the Cowardly Lion. Grrrr…

Breaking News: Moments ago the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on a 2^nd Amendment case involving the constitutionality of an assault weapons case. That means that the lower court ruling upholding a ban on assault weapons will stand. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia were apoplectic over the decision but the 7-2 decision means they have no power to change the outcome.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case could be read as an indication of the justices’ unwillingness to further define the contours of the Second Amendment in light of the current political climate. Huffington Post Legal Affairs Analyst

Gun legislation is still a local issue but this ruling means a state can ban assault weapons. It’s another tool in the kit that will make America safer – assuming there are state legislators with the courage to vote for the ban.

Categories : Politics, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· December 3, 2015

· 1 Comment

From 9/11 to Broadway?

Come From Away is a clunky title for a fast moving energetic musical and 9/11 is unlikely subject matter, but the two are currently joined in an upbeat but touching stage production at Seattle Repertory Theater.

The musical’s title comes from a Newfoundlander expression for visitors who arrive on The Rock, as locals refer to their island home. Written by two Canadian playwrights, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away tells the story of one of the 38 commercial flights that diverted to Gander Newfoundland as the World Trade Center catastrophe unfolded. This unusual effort is co-produced by the La Jolla Playhouse and Seattle Rep with road previews in both locations. Like Memphis, another La Jolla/Seattle Rep collaboration and the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best New Musical, Come From Away may very well be Broadway bound. Yesterday the sold out Seattle production was extended another week, closing on December 20 instead of the 13^th as originally planned.

The story revolves around the crew and passengers of an American Airlines flight that is stranded for four days while the New York event plays out. The people of Gander open their homes and hearts to the crew and passengers and like any good theater piece we are drawn into the story as the passengers, crew and townspeople share their heartbreak and hospitality.

9/11 was an emotional roller coaster, and it’s difficult to explain how this outlier artistic effort is able to straddle the tragedy of the main event and the humor and humanity of the people in remote Gander while the crew and passengers sit out their interrupted journeys. It is a triumph that the writers are able to pull it off.

The very musical cast shows us the real life experiences of the crew and passengers – much of the dialogue is verbatim from recorded interviews – in a mixture of dialogue and song. Its story line is made richer by the fact that the Boeing 777 Captain is a woman (Beverly Bass was the first woman Captain at American Airlines and the founder of the International Association of Women Airline Pilots). Her story, alone, is worth telling and the play gives voice (literally) to her career as an female pioneer in the cockpit. Throughout the play she manages the diversion, cares for her passengers, and tries to reassure her husband Tom, in Dallas, that everything is OK. That alone doesn’t put Come From Away in the Tony award category but a good story is a good story and this one is. It may be that my experience as an international commercial pilot who transited Gander several times raised my emotional interest in the subject but that’s a personal connection not the reason I think it’s a winner.

On the other hand, I recently blogged about Art and Life in a post about Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge. Come From Away shows us again how art can elevate and simplify the emotional impact of a complicated set of facts and experiences.

A reviewer in the LA Times expressed his belief that there was not a broad based audience or Broadway future for Come From Away. How so? Is it because the geography is Newfoundland or there aren’t any big name stars involved? That’s too parochial for me, and it doesn’t resonate. This is rollicking good musical, and a touching universal story with a superior cast. I predict it WILL go to Broadway. I’ve never returned to see a play or musical for a second time in the same run, but M and I have tickets again on Saturday. It’s too good to miss. I laughed, cried, and stomped my feet – sometimes at the same time. Don’t miss it.

Categories : Art, Music, Theater, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· November 18, 2015

· 1 Comment

Hemingway Revisited

Who should wear the crown of America’s greatest writer? Reputations wax and wane, and today’s opinion makers would undoubtedly choose from a different set of names than the critics of 50 years ago. For much of the 20th Century Huckleberry Finn was regarded as The Great American Novel and Mark Twain as its greatest writer. Then the forces of political correctness weighed in calling Twain’s portrayal of Jim racist and the reputation of both novel and author plummeted. School libraries questioned its suitability for inclusion. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye ascended for awhile but suffered the same fate for different, more puritanical, reasons.

Between Twain and Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald stand out as writers whose stylistic innovations changed the way novels are written. Other writers have claimed our attention – Saul Bellow, John Updike, William Styron, Joseph Heller, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace – but none have succeeded in holding it the way Hemingway and Fitzgerald have done. The Great Gatsby is now widely regarded as America’s greatest novel, and while it deserves its place in the canon of American literature it’s difficult to elevate Fitzgerald over Hemingway when the standard is lifetime contribution.

Both writers continue to command our attention. Both fell from grace for non-literary reasons, Fitzgerald was a drunk who squandered his gifts in Hollywood and Hemingway like a character in one of his own novels, grew old, impotent, and terminally depressed. Both reputations have suffered at the hands of political correctness.

In spite of their flaws I find greatness in many of these writers but I’m especially drawn to Hemingway – to his importance as a literary rainmaker and to the complicated personality behind the literary figure.

In the fall of 1939 Hemingway wrote these words as part of a eulogy written about a friend who was accidentally killed on a Snake River hunting trip. Later the eulogy was abridged and after Ernest’s death in 1961 the words were incorporated in the Hemingway Memorial on Trail Creek Road in Sun Valley. It is difficult to imagine a more moving paragraph than this one carved in stone on Trail Creek. I’ve been to the Memorial more than once with “leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies.” It is a magical place and fitting tribute to one of America’s greatest but most controversial writers

It’s not easy to write about Hemingway – the man, the myth, or the work – so much has already been written. Despite criticism of the man I’m an admiring fan. Today his reputation and Nobel-worthy achievements are often conflated with the boorish macho behavior that has become a lightning rod for critics who would rather diminish the man than celebrate the writer. He is, after all, a writer who transformed American, indeed world, literature.

I confess that I‘m as confused by the two Hemingways as any critic, but I feel connected in some way that’s difficult to explain. Though he was older than I was his son, Jack, and I were friends until Jack’s death in 2000. We met through a mutual friend in Ketchum and played tennis at his place or mine several times. I knew his wife, “Puck,” and after her death his second wife, Angela. I knew all three of his daughters and when Mariel married Stephen Crisman, Jack brought them regularly to my restaurant for lunch.

Recently, on a trip to Key West I visited the Hemingway House and Museum. The estate is still its largest residential property, and its limestone house and wall are built of stone quarried on the property. At 16’ above sea level it is the highest spot on the island. Asa Tift, who made a fortune in the marine salvage business, built the house in 1851. Ernest and Pauline, his second wife, purchased the estate for $8000, the amount owed in back property taxes. The lovely stone house and dark surrounding wall are unlike anything else in Key West where almost all the structures are made of wood. Entering the gate into the palm-shaded grounds is to enter into a very different space from the brightly sunlit one outside, and even though the house and grounds are a museum they are still inhabited by 40+ descendants of the polydactyl (6 toed) cats Hemingway loved. It’s easy to imagine what it was like when he was there. I found it profoundly affecting and it renewed my appetite for Hemingway lore and history.

The years in Key West were Hemingway’s most productive. He had published The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and was working on A Farewell to Arms when he and Pauline returned from Paris to purchase the Key West estate. He settled into a writing routine with the solitude and relative anonymity he needed as well as the excitement and camaraderie of big game fishing nearby. He built a writing studio above the kitchen outbuilding and soon ordered the Pilar, a deep-sea fishing boat,from a Long Island New York boat builder. During the Key West period, from 1927 to 1937, he published A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing, In Our Time, Death in the Afternoon, and Green Hills of Africa, an extraordinary output for 10 years.

In 1937 he left Key West to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist and the experience there provided material for his next novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls. While he could be charming he could also be boorish and bullying. The film Hemingway and Gellhorn (Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent, was his third wife) makes this abundantly clear. His contradictions are many and the things that led to his hyper-masculine, macho behavior are some of the same things that provided core material for his fiction. The quest for adventure in WWI gave us A Farewell to Arms. Big game hunting in Africa gave us The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Deep-sea fishing provided source material for The Old Man and the Sea. Boxing was the background for The Killers. He was a complicated character like many of the fictional characters he created.

His end was not pretty. As his health deteriorated his creative gift dried up too. Today’s diagnosis would be bi-polar. Earlier it was called manic-depressive behavior. Whatever you call it, it was his curse. He experienced the world as few of us have and he produced more great literature than almost anyone in American letters but at a terrible cost to himself and his family. I am full of admiration for his sense of adventure and his literary accomplishments but equally aware of the costs.

Was he a nice man? Probably not, though he managed to maintain a coterie of close personal friends. In hindsight his behavior was likely not within his control. The family is cursed with hereditary mental illness. According to his granddaughter, Mariel, who has had to deal with her own mental health issues, seven members of the Hemingway family committed suicide, including her grandfather, great grandfather and sister, Margaux. Her other sister Joan (aka Muffett) lives in with a caregiver as she continues to struggle with her mental illness. In 2013 Mariel produced a documentary about the family, called Running From Crazy that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She remains a tireless advocate for mental health awareness, treatment, and support and has lent her voice to the work of my friend, Lucinda Jewell, at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.

Whatever his personal demons, there can be no doubt that Ernest Hemingway is among the greatest and most prolific of American writers. Like Mark Twain before him his gifts extend across the writing spectrum – newspaper reporter, magazine columnist, war correspondent, travel writer, playwright, non-fiction author, novelist and arguably the best short story writer in American literature. Before my recent trip to Key West I started Paul Hendrickson’s excellent 2011 book, Hemingway’s Boat, and on the trip I saw a replica of the boat, Pilar, in a fishing store in Islamorada. The timing enhanced my curiosity and renewed my interest in the man and his work.

The Key West years were his most prolific and among his most stable personally. Last year I spent time with Jon and Leslie Maksik, two friends from Ketchum, who were staying in the apartment at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine where Hemingway lived during the years recounted in A Moveable Feast. That experience felt strangely personal as I climbed the stairs to his apartment and sat in the room where he, Hadley and Bumby (Jack’s childhood nickname) had lived. This year I feel lucky to have completed the pilgrimage to another key (no pun intended) location in the Hemingway story. That leaves Havana, where the Pilar rests and rots in the yard of his former home, the Finca Vigia. Maybe that’s the next station on my pilgrimage, the next getaway in my effort to escape Surviving Seattle’s November rains. I’ll have to think about it. In the meantime there’s a monsoon brewing outside, the winds are gusting, and the lights just went out. Maybe it won’t be a hard decision. Havana sounds great.

Categories : Books, Travel, Uncategorized