The Literary Road To Sainthood

Discussion in 'Music, TV, Movies & other Media' started by Flanders, Sep 27, 2014.

  1. Flanders

    Flanders Well-Known Member

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    Humberto Fontova’s information about Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) might not register with young Americans. The guy’s been dead for 53 years. The one thing that stands out for me is that Hemingway’s love of brutality is forgiven because he is an “artist.” This is a lot to forgive:

    . . . Ernest Hemingway worked for Stalin’s KGB and nobody (among the “smart set”) seems to bat an eye.

    According to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev "the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name "Argo" in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London. This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale Univ. Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society.)

    "Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is very pure and beautiful. I'm encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time." Perhaps this was fitting praise from Hemingway for a regime that transplanted Stalin’s into the Caribbean. Except that Castro and Che Guevara’s regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a slightly higher rate than did Stalin’s.

    Hemingway knew full well what was going on “behind the scenes” of Castro and Che’s “pure and beautiful” revolution. To wit: as commander of Havana's La Cabana prison and execution yard in the early months of the Revolution, Che Guevara often coached his firing squads in person then rushed up to shatter the skull of the convulsed man (or boy) by lovingly firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, Che consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. His second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out to better view his darling firing-squads at work, often in the company of distinguished friends. Havana resident Ernest Hemingway was one of these.

    XXXXX​

    "James, I'm sorry." Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him, and he said, "Years ago, after we'd done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. “There's something you should see,” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.

    “They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town.” Continues Linville (who is recalling Plimpton’s account.) “They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew (italics mine), the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.

    “The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.”

    Ernest Hemingway’s Grandsons Continue Their Granddad’s Disgusting Legacy
    Humberto Fontova | Sep 26, 2014

    http://townhall.com/columnists/humb...randdads-disgusting-legacy-n1897307/page/full

    More than being forgiven Hemingway is elevated to sainthood because he practiced his art in the publishing industry. I, for one, never saw him as a saint. This is part of a message I first posted a dozen or so years ago:

    What bunk metaphysical poet John Donne unintentionally dumped on the current world with a little help from Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961). Irrespective of how Donne’s words have been interpreted by twentieth century religious bottom feeders the most profound observation Donne made was that “Everybody dies.” That frivolous allegation was harmless enough when it was expressed in his own time; so it is no wonder he remained obscure until Ernest Hemingway dug him up in 1940. It is just too bad that we will never know what put Donne onto his penetrating insight.

    Hemingway’s motive for resurrecting Donne is suspect because he played fast and loose with Donne’s assertion in order to buttress his own politics. Common sense insists that John Donne could not possibly have had the butchery of modern totalitarian governments in mind when he wrote his dubious small masterpiece some 400 years ago.

    As for Ernest Hemingway: In that final second before he killed himself, did he still believe the “No man is an island” drivel he had made so famous? Or did he simply prove the hard way that every man is an island when all is said and done?

    This is what Hemingway had the character Robert Jordan say of his father in For Whom the Bell Tolls:

    “He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.”​

    Hemingway spent his adult life slaughtering things because his father had committed suicide. Every time he killed something he was granting his father absolution. When the burden finally became unbearable, Ernest Hemingway decided that his own suicide would serve as the definitive pardon. What might he have written had he been able to forgive in a less violent manner?

    Finally, it’s safe to say that Hemingway would watch Muslims beheading their captives with as much relish as he watched Che Guevara doing his gruesome murders. Question: What do Hemingway’s admirers in publishing think about it when a journalist is the one being decapitated?
     

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