remembering Papa

No diary entries for the past week because I've been too busy!  We came up to Michigan for the International Hemingway Conference and have been going to panels and talks and field trips.  The conference as an academic enterprise ended last night, but we have one last day-long event, a bus trip up to the deepest darkest north, where stories like "The Big Two-Hearted River" are set.  (That is the name of an actual river, which we'll visit.)

We've been to almost all of these meetings since we stumbled on the second one by accident, in Key West in 1988.  It's been a good excuse to go to Europe every other year, with occasional American meetings like this one.  (I think the criterion for selecting a meeting site is "Did Hemingway ever step into the country for at least an instant?")  It looks like the 2014 meeting will be in Venice, which is not so hard to take.

Many of the panels this time have been directly or obliquely concerned with PTSD, which Hemingway had in spades after his wounding in WWI.  It does explain a lot of his odd behavior.  One paper noted that EH described his own PTSD with unsparing accuracy, but of course couldn't cure himself.  He was also bipolar and alcoholic and depressed – just the guy to describe his half of the twentieth century.

He was a difficult man and probably nobody's model for the ideal man nowadays, but he had virtues as well as quirks.  It's funny to reflect that I'm most of a decade older than he lived to be, but most of the time I feel like a young man who has somehow piled on all these years.  Hemingway was the opposite; when he was less than half my age, he insisted that people call him "Papa," and was famously defensive of being an authority on everything.

It's always fun to be in contact with him again, filtered through all these years and all these different viewpoints.  In my life I suppose he's like a crotchety old uncle, to be tolerated and loved.  And a man ferociously in love with his language, with no tolerance for its abuse, and a large talent for expressing his love by example.

Joe