Hemingway in Italy by
Red cover, red bookmark, there is a pic of the beloved author. Hemingway looks at the photographer who is taking the pic,ironically, maintaining high interest. He was at that time a mature man in Venice.
Incredibly detailed, this book will reveal a lot of curiosities,anedocts; it has been written with sincerity and with the purpose of reporting an incredible story of an incredible man, focusing in particular the attention in the years spent by the author in Italy. I am sure you'll find it intriguing.
It seems impossible to believe it, but Italy has been for Ernest Hemingway the most important country of all his life.
The formative one, let's say, regarding life, regarding love.
Hemingway lived his strongest emotions in our country, seeing death, pieces of human beings here and there, seeing horror, experiencing, discovering the joy of love and sex, friendship, passions; he was wounded in Italy and found comfort, joy and love, thanks to this scaring experience.
Privately, and professionally our country meant to him everything.
Later, also his re-born as writer thanks to a latest girl.
Yes, of course we musn't forget the relaxing years spent in Paris or the ones in Cuba, but in Italy, Ernest fell in love for the first time with an American nurse in Milan when he was still sick after that he was injured in war.
The girl, Agnes von Kurowsky exchanged with him letters, notes; when Ernest recuperated they spent a lot of time in Milan. They visited iconics and important places.
You musn't never think that Agnes was the only girl with which Ernest had strong flirtations. In totaly there were a bunch of girls seduced by the American writer and someone wants to say that somewhere there is also an italian son of Hemingway. Mario Soldati discovered this news...
With the time and decades all places visited by Hemingway became a sort of sanctuary dedicated to him, and appreciated by tourists as well. It could have been a winery, a hotel, a place where he just passed by rapidly, where he was injured. You find a memory-touch everywhere. No one want to forget that man but everyone, in every part of Italy would want to say that Hemingway passed in their land. Why? Simply because Ernest Hemingway was a man with a strong character, with strong opinions and emotions but was very sociable with everyone. He loved food, he loved eating and drinking.
He was sociable not just with writers, editors, people of his same environment but also with all the rest of people; this treat of his character, this being sociable with everyone like also his brilliant intelligence, created a miracle: he entered in the heart of people for then, staying there forever.
Shocked because abandoned by Agnes, Hemingway returns in America destroyed but also with the idea of finding mrs. Right. Chicago: there he meets his first wife Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. Married, at first Hemingway would have wanted to return to Italy in a wonderful honeymoon but at friend of them, suggested the left bank of Paris, a cheap hotel.
The following ones will be the Paris years of the couple.
Jean Mirò, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach who "nested" under her wings everyone thanks to her bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Life was simple, romantic, less aggressive than the one seen in the past in Italy; sweet. The First World War was over, and now Hemingway collaborated with the Toronto Star. In 1922 he covered an important italian conference in Genoa where he described Benito Mussolini a colleague like him in policy as a "dragon" and fascists "a brood of dragon's teeth."
Fascinated again by Italy he insisted for bringing his wife to Italy.
Later he would have interviewed Mussolini. His opinion in the 1950s: "A coward in the war and as a crooked journalist."
The book analyzes also the catholicism of Hemingway, while slowly he would have divorced a first, second and third time; the last wife was Mary Welsh.
These ones are the years of Cuba, Spain, but also the moment spent in Venice and the crucial meeting with one of the most powerful muse he experienced: Adriana Ivancich.
As always Hemingway could be spotted at the Harry's Bar, Cipriani.
Mary was not worried by someone like Adriana, after all; other women worried her; she has always been cold and distant regarding these numerous infatuations of her husband, some of them platonics like the one, it seems, with Adriana, because she knew him well.
If Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea is just thanks to his infatuation for Adriana. The writer wrote her: "I love you more than the moon and the sky and for as long as I shall live."
Ivancich hanged up herself decades later the suicide of Hemingway.
Hemingway loved to report in his books and short stories the daily-life seen, experienced, and no one has been excluded so the best thing you can do once you'll finish to read this book is to grab a book written by him for trying to understand realistically who he had met in the reality. No one is more powerful than Hemingway in portraying realities, people.
In this sense Hemingway has been privileged, but now I also understand why once Gertrude Stein suggested him of giving up with writing for magagazines and newsmagazine. Too sincere and direct: simply adorable!
Richard Owen created a real jewel. I read this book in a few hours. It is brilliant; the author has visited all the places where Hemingway stayed in our country, from Rapallo to Taormina, passing from Milan to Cortina, Venice, the places of war: to my pont of view it helped to create a vivid, passionate, human reconstruction of The Man and The Writer.
I thank Chicago University Press and Haus Publishing for this physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
No comments:
Post a Comment