Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character.

Curnutt, Kirk

Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character. By Ron McFarland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014. 280 pp. Paperback $35.00.

Hemingway devotees who wince at fictional depictions of Papa will likely look askance at Ron McFarland's Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a Fictional Character. "Yes," they will say, "we chuckled at the glib imitation of expatriate Ernest in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) by that bald guy from Law and Order: LA and later House of Cards, (1) but for the love of Agnes, could we have a portrait that's not a caricature?" Appropriating Hemingway actually relieves this wariness, however. Analyzing both famous and obscure dramatizations of the writer, it provides a useful companion to John Raeburn's classic Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as a Public Writer (1984). Raeburn examined how twentieth-century celebrity culture trapped Hemingway in a distorted public persona. McFarland looks at how a dizzying array of romans a clef, historical novels, thrillers, science fiction, stage plays, and poems have perpetuated that image. I especially commend his savvy in discussing a certain fictional coffee klatch with Don Ernesto that nearly a decade later still pays its author dividends. (2)

Readers guessing what texts a study like this might cover will reach easily for Paula McLain's The Paris Wife (2011), which at last count has sold close to three million copies, or the 2012 HBO stinker Hemingway and Gellhorn starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Some will guess works by creative-writer friends, whether Joe Haldeman's The Hemingway Hoax (1990) or Erika Robuck's Hemingway's Girl (2011). Others may reach back a little further to Ray Bradbury's poignant lament for Hemingway's suicide in "The Kilimanjaro Device," which first appeared in Life in 1965. (3) Still others may remember John Dos Passos's portrayal of Hemingway as the obnoxious George Elbert Warner in Chosen Country (1951), his revenge for Hemingway mocking him as the effete Richard Gordon in To Have and Have Not (1937).

These are all obvious choices. Who among us, on the other hand, remembers Vincent Cosgrove's The Hemingway Papers (1983)? Or Karl Alexander's Papa and Fidel (1989)? Or Ben Pleasant's 1997 play The Hemingway/Dos Passos Wars? Or The Paris Pilgrims (1999), the posthumously published novel by the screenwriter of Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man (1982)? (4) How about The Left Bank Gang, a 2005 graphic novel by the Norwegian artist known only as "Jason" (John Arne Seateroy)? Or the Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati's "To Ernest Hemingway," a 1964 triptych that meditates on the difference between expatriation and exile? In other words, this study contains a lot of unfamiliar material for even veteran scholars.

Reading the book, one is struck by how, regardless of genre, fictionalizations of Hemingway tend to cluster around certain pivotal biographical moments. The theft of the early manuscripts from the Gare de Lyon while an inattentive Hadley searched for Evian is an obvious one. That scene shows up not only in The Paris Wife but is the impetus behind several early 1990s' novels, including, in addition to Haldeman's The Hemingway Hoax, MacDonald Harris's Hemingway's Suitcase (1990) and Gerhard Kopf's Papa's Suitcase (1994). More recently, the stolen valise also drives the plot of Diane Gilbert Madsen's Hunting for Hemingway (2010). At the later end of the biographical spectrum are treatments of Hemingway's death. "Few appropriators have resisted the impulse to investigate or in some way reflect on Hemingway's suicide," McFarland notes, calling attention to Joyce Carol Oates's "Papa at Ketchum, 1961," from her story collection Wild Nights! Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008), as well as Christopher Cook Gilmore's Hemingway (1988), which ends with the words, "He squeezed the trigger" (125).

Hemingway's Cuban years also lend themselves to countless thriller/espionage treatments, whether the WWII-era U-boat patrols (Dan Simmons's The Crook Factory, 1999) or the later Castro revolution (the aforementioned Papa and Fidel, whose author, Karl Alexander, also wrote the time-travel classic Time After Time [1979], in which H. G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper into the late twentieth century (5)). The most interesting Cuban appropriation is undoubtedly Leonardo Padura Fuentes's Adios Hemingway (2005), in part because Fuentes revived the beloved star of his Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons) series, Havana detective Mario Conte, to investigate the 1958 disappearance of an FBI agent at the Finca Vigia. As McFarland boldly claims, "No other appropriator attempts to get us as intimately connected with Hemingway's thinking and his emotional state as [Fuentes]" (120). That is because the sections of Adios Hemingway devoted to Hemingway find him struggling to finish The Garden of Eden, a novel, we should note, in which other appropriators rarely show interest.

So popular are the major biographical moments that McFarland could have organized his chapters thematically around them. Yet their recurrence also points out what episodes by comparison get short shrift: Oak Park and Petoskey, oddly enough, the Camargue, China, the Hurtgen Forest, and Dangerous Summer-era Spain do not seem to have inspired many re-imaginings. Nor, we can be grateful, have the notorious sexual experiments between Hemingway and fourth wife Mary Welsh that fed into the erotic role reversals of The Garden of Eden received the Fifty Shades of Grey treatment.

The first section of Appropriating Hemingway is structured chronologically, tracking fictionalizations by biographical period. Afterward, McFarland offers three genre-oriented chapters, one on speculative fiction, another on cinema, TV, and stage appropriations, and one on poetry. The middle of these offers a sterling reminder of how, even more than in print, nuance seems to go right out the window when depicting Hemingway. Amid the cinematic disappointments (In Love and War [1996], a retelling of Hemingway's Italian wounding and love affair with his Red Cross nurse, starring Chris O'Donnell as Ernest and Sandra Bullock with Agnes von Kurowsky) and outright disasters (the aforementioned Hemingway and Gellhorn), we are reminded of the precursor to Midnight in Paris, Alan Rudolph's The Moderns (1988), as self-serious and ponderous as Allen's treatment is subversively larkish. Character actor Kevin J. O'Connor essentially does the same impression that Corey Stoll would more than two decades later for Allen--in other words, playing Hemingway "irreverently" as "a sort of brilliant clod" (193) (6)--although O'Connor is barely onscreen long enough to call his role a cameo. Then again, perhaps brevity has a value: McFarland is especially critical of the "epic, five-part, six-hour biopic" Hemingway, broadcast the same year The Moderns was released. Despite Stacey Reach's physical resemblance to his subject, the color-by-numbers script and uninspired direction reduced its glamorous settings and expensive sets to a dull tour of "four decades, four wives, many locales, and a complex character undergoing a daunting range of traumas and transitions. One might argue that it simply could not be done and should not have been attempted" (192).

Readers who bear an enduring grudge against Reach, O'Connor, O'Donnell, and Clive Owen are advised to start with the sections on drama and poetry, if only because the majority of these appropriations are unfamiliar. The best known drama might be Michael Hollinger's An Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf (first performed in 1994, published in 2003), which enjoyed a run as recently as 2009. Set in the three days following Hemingway's death, it concerns a suicidal Hemingway aficionado named Victor who intends to starve himself to death. An Empty Plate is something of an anomaly inasmuch as Hemingway is a looming presence and not a character, but Hollinger's script nevertheless contains some of the tendencies that make Hemingway a difficult subject for dramatists: alternately flippant and sentimental in tone, drawing far too much text from Hemingway's own works, the dramas surveyed tend to tackle the legacy in its broadest outlines, often missing the contradictions of the man himself and "reducing] Hemingway, and ipso facto his writing, to the status of historical artifact" (177). It seems safe to say the most interesting approaches are the most experimental: Frederic Hunters The Hemingway Play (1975, revived 1986) stands four Hemingways from four different life stages next to each other onstage, allowing them to "to be quite critical of each other" to deconstruct his strengths and weaknesses (169). More recently, James Rutherford and Elliot B. Quick's The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway (2013) offers a "mashup" approach in which Oscar Wilde's 1895 comedy of manners is relocated to 1926 Paris and interlaced with passages from The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. If the idea of a self-described "rollicking macho-queer tragedy of disappointed love" in which Wilde helps Hemingway come to grips with his "latent homosexual urges" at least sounds original (184), the title does not. Somebody should tell Rutherford and Quick that as a pun "The Importance of Being Ernest" is beyond tired, having at this point been dragged out of the joke book for dozens of headlines, book chapters and articles, and roundtable discussions. Then again, Papa Goes Wilde probably is not any better.

McFarland's short list of poets who have written about Hemingway is impressive: Archibald MacLeish (whose "Years of the Dog" [1948] supplied John Raeburn the title Fame Became of Him), Ogden Nash, E. B. White, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Derek Walcott have all written about the Hemingway legacy in verse. Predictably, most of these works mourn the emergence of Hemingway's Papa persona and denounce fame as the mask that eats the face. Perhaps more interesting are works by academic poets who retrace Hemingway's footsteps, writing about their travels to his old stomping grounds. These names may not be immediately recognizable (Gerald Locklin, Richard Eberhart, Philip Schultz, Robert Dana, Martin Espada, John Logan), but they are intriguing for what they suggest about the ethics of literary tourism. McFarland even offers a judicious assessment of his own contributions to this genre: his 2001 chapbook, The Hemingway Poems, won the Pecan Grove Press competition, in part he suspects because his approach is more comedic than elegiac. Some readers may dismiss a critic talking about the inspiration and intentions behind his own creative efforts as self-indulgent; yet McFarland's commentary on his treatment of the 1936 Key West fistfight with Wallace Stevens ("Altercation"), or the "imaginary reconstruction" "Hemingway in Africa: The Untold Story"--inspired by a passage from Michael S. Reynolds's Hemingway: The 1930s (1996)--is valuable for his confessional analysis of poetic license and the authorial choices that inevitably color all of these fictionalizations.

For readers who do keep up with Hemingway appropriations, the fun of this book rests in comparing ones own to responses to McFarlands. The discussion of William McCranor Henderson's provocatively titled I Killed Hemingway (1993) brought back dewy memories of writing my first book review for The Hemingway Review, an opportunity that turned daunting when I learned that Henderson was a friend and colleague of Michael S. Reynolds's at North Carolina State University. McFarland even cites an awful pun I cracked when noting Henderson's preceding novel had tackled another American icon eaten alive by stardom, Elvis Presley: inasmuch as I Killed Hemingway extends the farcical treatment of celebrity in his Stark Raving Elvis (1984) to Ernest, I suggested that Henderson had committed an "Elvisceration of Papa" (130). Yowza. (That said, I Killed Hemingway remains a very funny read; Henderson, who attended occasional Hemingway Society conferences while researching the book, even depicts a gathering of the "Hemingway Association" that erupts into a shootout between warring factions). In a similar vein, I chuckled at the description of Dan Simmons's The Crook Factory as a "sizable" book (108); it is indicative of the subtlety of McFarland's wit throughout. I remember giving up on this overstuffed treatment of Hemingway's U-Boat patrol years somewhere around the millennium, convinced the world would end before we ever boarded the Pilar.

Because McFarland's book weighs in at a svelte 233 pages, it is inevitable that a few notable appropriations are overlooked. Nobody will ever claim that John Hersey's "To the End of the American Dream," from the posthumously published Key West Tales (1994), is on par with Hiroshima or A Bell for Adano as a top accomplishment of its authors, but given Hersey's stature its absence is peculiar. Similarly, Nicholas Delbanco's "The Lost Suitcase," from his 2000 story collection of the same name, deserves discussion alongside McLain and Haldeman. These two absences hint at a subtle bias toward the novel over the short story throughout the text. And while McFarland discusses Brian Gordon Sinclair's sextet of one-man plays, Hemingway on Stage (180-182), he does not mention Laurence Luckinbill's adaptation of the Hemingway correspondence, Hemingway (2004-2005), part of a cycle of dramas that also feature the actor as Clarence Darrow, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Considering the critical acclaim Luckinbill won for William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band (1970) and his cult fame for playing the villain in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), his exclusion may be the most glaring absence.

I also would have enjoyed McFarland's thoughts on Zelda: A Musical Based on the Life of 1920s American Icon Zelda Fitzgerald, an expensive and exceedingly awkward rendering of the Fitzgeralds' marriage that crashed and burned in London's West End in April 2004. (It can be found in its painful entirety on YouTube). Here a villainous Hemingway struts around the stage spewing invective at Zelda that makes A Moveable Feast's "Hawks Don't Share" chapter seem downright empathetic. At one point, Ernest even tries to force himself on Zelda, a scene that, interestingly enough, foreshadows a similar episode in Therese Anne Fowler's 2013 contribution to the McLain/Woods literary wives club, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (currently being adapted into an Amazon, com TV series). As McFarland notes apropos of Tennessee Williams's 1980 flop Clothes for a Summer Hotel, no rendering of Scott and Zelda can fail to make Hemingway a bumptious foil to the tragic Mrs. F; Zelda the musical just had the audacity to turn "A Matter of Measurements" into a song and dance. At any rate, these omissions are a minor complaint and in no way undermine the overall value of the study. McFarland's archival work here is both impressive and inspiring.

With any luck, Appropriating Hemingway will launch deeper debates about the difficulties of depicting the author as a dimensioned character. It might even provide a useful research tool the next time Chris O'Donnell or Clive Owen is hired to inhabit the man onscreen, showing these actors exactly what not to do.

Kirk Curnutt

Troy University

NOTES

(1.) Corey Stoll (b. 1976)

(2.) See my Coffee with Hemingway (2007)

(3.) The story was collected in 1969 as the lead entry in I Sing the Body Electric.

(4.) Clancy Carlile (1930-1998), who adapted the screenplay of The Honkytonk Man from his own 1980 novel of the same name.

(5.) The movie version of Time After Time, released the same year as the novel, is perhaps better remembered. The film stars Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange fame as Wells.

(6.) McFarland quotes these words from Washington Post film critic Rita Kempley's review of the movie.