The Never-Ending Research Trail Takes Us Back to Hemingway's Youth

Found in a used bookstore today: this biographical novel—Hemingsteen, by Michael Murphy, published in 1977. It even boasts a blurb from the biographer Carlos Baker. I’d never heard of it, never seen it, but now with I had. Having only now just cracked it open and read the first chapter, the book has something going for it. The author does a bang-up job of getting inside the young man’s head and it seems as if the novel butts right up against my book, Hemingway at Eighteen. It seems to be imagining the young man on the verge of something bigger, something like the life of a writer that will soon come his way.

If nothing else, given its status as fiction, I still would not have hesitated to quote this one passage from the first chapter. In this moment the character, just having graduated from high school, is lying in bed thinking about his future. He remembers some of the stories he wrote for the school’s literary journal:

They were splendid stories at the time that they were written, now they were not so splendid, nor was hunting with his father, talking with his mother, playing with his sister and his little brother, hiking with his friends, nor football, track, and swimming, and the boys and all the girls. Nothing, or almost nothing, that had been any good was any longer any good. Nor right and propoer for the thing for which he yearned.

Marvelous, I say, as the boy turns eighteen.

Hemingway Sighting: Martin Cruz Smith's "Havana Bay"

Novelists write fiction, of course, and Martin Cruz Smith writes exceptional novels, often featuring the brooding Moscow investigator Arkady Renko. In Havana Bay, published in 1999, Smith sends Renko to Cuba to poke around after the apparent death of a Russian colleague. I picked the book up recently and plunged in to take a break from a couple of intensive projects. Smith’s depiction of Havana and other Cuban places squares with my experience — five relatively short visits over 15 years — and also expands my knowledge of many details, practices, and aspects of Cuban life. “It’s complicated” is how I put it in an article a few years ago, after hearing that explanation over and over. Smith’s descriptions of the Havana cityscape as well as the interior mindscape of his Cuban and Russian characters are terrific.

Smith works in a brief Hemingway reference via an American expatriate in Havana, who claims ownership of a vehicle once owned by Hemingway, a 1957 Chrysler Imperial convertible.

Well, that’s nice, but it might not be actually true. I don’t know whether Smith was taking liberties or subtly trying to suggest this particular character was a liar (I haven’t quite finished reading). Hemingway owned several cars while living about 20 years at his hilltop estate outside Havana. A Buick. A Plymouth. And, notably, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker convertible, blue with orange interior, according to various accounts, including a documentary film about the car’s restoration. Well, who really cares? I’ve never been much of a car guy.