Hemingway Detritus

Meriam Webster defines detritus as

a product of disintegration

Fair enough. It is the debris that is left behind after a late night party. The cigarettes stubbed out in coffee cups. Empty bottles under the couch. Perhaps a half eaten pizza on the coffee table. Can it also be what is left behind from a life? More precisely, the life of that famous author: Mr. Ernest Hemingway?

A while back, I thought things were getting out of hand when The Paris Review ran an article by Lien Tan about Hemingway’s recipe for making a hamburger. It starts off in a parody (at least I thought it was a parody) of Hemingway’s style

Fingers deep, I kneaded. Fighting the urge to be careless and quick, I kept the pace rhythmic, slow. Each squeeze, I hoped, would gently ease the flavors—knobby bits of garlic, finely chopped capers, smatterings of dry spices—into the marbled mound before me.

Oh come on. Give in to the urge to be careless!  Or was there something more meaningful going on?

I had made burgers before, countless times on countless evenings. This one was different; I wasn’t making just any burger—I was attempting to recreate Hemingway’s hamburger. And it had to be just right.

To be clear, this is what we are talking about

Thank the Lord, in the end, Ms Tan got it right. She writes

I had never experienced such a combination of flavors in a burger before and found myself eating far too quickly.

Not to worry! She slows down before anything untoward could occur.

Flash forward. Now we have a fairly earnest report of an exhibit of a whole trove of Hemingway stuff at the Morgan Library.  The New Yorker offers the highlights, including this tidbit

More amusing, if a little sad, too, is the unsent note, dashed off in a datebook, haranguing Harold Ross, then editor of The New Yorker, for a bad review by Alfred Kazin of “Across of the River and Into the Trees,” a novel that, technically, lies beyond the framework of the exhibit, since it was published in 1950. The note is a work of self-parody, really, and probably hints at Hemingway’s exorbitant drinking. “Please inform Mr. Alfred KAZIM (or KASIN) or however the poor shit spells it,” Hemingway thunders, a well-pickled Falstaffian by this point, “he can stick (STICK) his review up his ASS repeat ASS.”

Oddly, it seems that the great one was rather fond of this retort in particular. Here he is responding to a critique from F. Scott Fitzgerald on the first draft of his first novel.

…  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famously candid critique of a draft of that novel, a critique … closes, rather wanly: “A beautiful book it is!” Below this, Hemingway has scribbled, “Kiss my ass,” and his initials, “EH.” A curious and self-conscious detail, those initials, since, for years, no one, presumably, would see this notation except the notator.

It is old news that papa Hemingway was a bit of a rascal and a narcissist. It is also well known that he was a brilliant self-publicist. An inspiration for Warhol?  It seems that each and everything he did, he did with an eye for how it would play to his audience. The peculiar thing is that we are still enthralled by the drama that he created about himself for the purpose of enthralling us.