It was in late 1984 in Lima, when I was about to return to Miami to a new assignment, that the Bank of America country manager, Bill Schoeningh, asked me to write an article about the new product, Versatel, for which I had been responsible.
I delivered a draft the next day, and Bill called me to his office.
‘Have you studied Hemingway‘, he asked.
‘Nope, not a word. Why do you ask?
‘Because your writing style is similar – short, direct and to the point.’
I took his comment as a compliment, and my article was later published, in both English and Spanish, in a company marketing brochure.
Since that day, now a distant memory, I have read almost all of Hemingway’s published works, some more than once. It was William Faulkner who once said that Hemingway ‘had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary’. For me, that’s one of the attractions of Hemingway’s writing – it’s unpretentious.
A few years ago, when I started out on a pilgrimage from France to Santiago de Compostela, just over the French/Spanish border I came upon the village of Burguete, and the rural hotel that was made famous by Hemingway in his novel ‘The Sun Also Rises‘.
And a couple of days later, I came across many visual memories of Hemingway in Pamplona – outside hotels, in bars and on road signs. Hemingway has been well-remembered in Pamplona.
Hemingway was a complex character.
He was seriously wounded as an ambulance driver in WWI in Italy. He spent time in Paris and mixed with the arty group that included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others. He served as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War and witnessed both the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
He travelled extensively and in successive days in 1954, he was badly injured in two plane crashes in Africa. He spent much of his later days between Havana, Key West and eventually Idaho.
In 1954, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But his history of heavy drinking coupled with the legacy of his many injuries, played havoc with his health. In 1961, Hemingway ended his life by committing suicide, as had his father before him. His brother, sister, and a granddaughter – the model and actress Margaux Hemingway, also terminated their own lives.
Like the Kennedy family, the Hemingways seem to have been cursed.
Despite the years that have passed, literary tourists still visit the hotel in Burguete, to sleep in the room reputed to have been his and visit the bars and places he used to haunt in Pamplona.
He may be long gone, but not yet forgotten.
The Irish Rover 