Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir
by A. E. Hotchner

Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir
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Book Summary Information

Author: A. E. Hotchner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-06
ISBN: 0306814277
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Da Capo Press

Book Reviews of Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

Book Review: Defeat not an option
Summary: 5 Stars

It was this book, PAPA HEMINGWAY by A.E. Hotchner, that revealed to the world upon its publication in 1966 that Ernest Hemingway died in 1961 not of an accident while cleaning a gun but of an intentional self-inflicted gunshot. If that was all this book had to offer the world on Hemingway, it would not still be in print. He provides an up close and personal portrait of a man he admired and called a good friend, but a complicated personage all the same. This is not a critical, exhaustively researched biography weighing 10 pounds; it is memoir by someone who experienced life with the man firsthand, an account that comes across with honesty and enough detail for readers to draw their own critical conclusions.

Hotchner was a young writer dispatched by a magazine in 1948 to find the by then world famous Hemingway in Cuba and negotiate an article. Hotchner's terror at the assignment turned into high surprise as Hemingway took to him and brought him right into his inner circle. Hotchner never talks about himself really, so we don't know what Hemingway saw in him, but it had to be something because Hemingway was not a man who trusted easily, who required exacting standards in his pals, who also included restaurateur Toots Shor, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper and Ava Gardner. Hemingway was at the top of his powers in 1948, living as he thought life should be lived and settled in with his fourth and last wife, Mary, who could stand up to him. On the pretense of editing work, he takes Hotchner along for European adventures, making fun while also disclosing memories of his earlier days, and most important, what inspired his classic novels. As they move into the 1950's together, Hotchner also catches evidence of Hemingway's battle with mortality. He has a tough road back to health after surviving a plane crash in Africa, and then, trying to work again, he is bowled over by the response to THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (the Pulitzer) and the Nobel Prize. Castro, with whom he thought he had an understanding, takes his home and sanctuary. He is briefly revived in the outdoors of Ketchum, Idaho, but depression and paranoia begin to tear at him. What now seems a brutal electric shock treatment at the Mayo Clinic, especially for a man who never believed in analysis or being penned up, who wanted to do his own fighting, preceded his death.

Summary of Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

Between 1948 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, ran with the bulls in Pamplona—and once Hotchner even masqueraded as a matador and Hemingway?s manager in an actual bullfight. Everywhere they went, they talked. For fourteen years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared their thoughts and as Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene of the twenties, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction, Hotchner took it all down. His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa—in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, and in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961—provide the material for this utterly profound, and truthfully compassionate best-selling memoir about the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. With a new introduction by the author and with never before published photographs from his personal collection, Papa Hemingway is a mesmerizing portrait.

First published in 1966, this adulatory memoir made news by revealing that Ernest Hemingway's 1961 death was a suicide. It also provided the mythmaking, Nobel Prize-winning author with an opportunity to promulgate his preferred public persona from beyond the grave. Chronicling their friendship over the final 14 years of Hemingway's life, A.E. Hotchner vividly captured the writer's appeal as a man and his genius as a storyteller in extensive direct quotes. He draws from contemporary notes, tape recordings, and (he reveals in the foreword to this edition published for the Hemingway centennial) disguised excerpts from personal letters that Hemingway's widow, Mary, refused him permission to use. In conversation, Hemingway sounds like one of his own fictional heroes: terse, witty, profane, manly. Hotchner, in his mid-20s when they first met in 1948 and, he freely admits, "struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe," seldom evaluates either the veracity of or the motivations behind the writer's anecdotes. He makes no claim to be objective, which adds to the emotional force of the painful final chapters showing a desolate, depressed Hemingway convinced he could no longer write. By no means the whole truth, Hotchner's loving portrait shows Hemingway to readers as he wanted to be seen and as his most ardent admirers saw him. --Wendy Smith

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