The countdown is on

The anxiously-awaited film stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the title roles, and a stellar lineup backing them up. It’s directed by Philip Kaufman, who brought two literary works to the screen beautifully: The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Can he tackle Hemingway? Watch the trailer below and judge for yourself.

“It’s a Hemingway-heavy time at the movies, it seems,” says Entertainment Weekly’s Inside TV blog on EW.com. On top of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, there’s Hemingway & Gellhorn, Hemingway & Fuentes (starring Anthony Hopkins) and The World of Hemingway.

How will HBO’s entry stack up? “Someone better start polishing the Emmys,” EW’s Marc Snetiker writes.

Hemingway & Gellhorn comes to a small screen near you May 28 at 9 p.m. Eastern. For more, check out the website, which includes a couple teasers and an interview with Kidman.

“The current pop culture obsession

That’s how USA Today describes the whirlwind success of Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife, which has sold more than half a million copies, gone through 25 printings and ridden the newspaper’s bestseller list for 31 weeks.

“Paula’s skillful evocation of Hemingway as a budding author, and of his relationship with his first wife Hadley, clearly struck a chord,” Lisa Barnes of Ballantine told the paper.

But The Paris Wife hasn’t been alone in feeding what USA Today calls “Hemingway fascination.” Add to the list Paul Hendrickson’s new Hemingway’s Boat, the recently-published first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, the satirical The Heming Way and articles in Town & Country, Vanity Fair and Salon, Woody Allen’s popular Midnight in Paris and the forthcoming HBO film Hemingway and Gellhorn starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.

Add to this growing list the reissue of the 1992 book Hadley: A Life of Hadley Richardson Hemingway by Gioia Diliberto, reissued with the new title Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.

Not to mention, ahem, this fine project, Papa’s Planet.

Hemingway was famous

But …

Sometimes he got on a roll, and no editor could get in the way. Here’s a sentence — a really beautiful one — that weighs in at 419 words, and by my count, 45 commas, 5 semicolons and a dash. In it, Hemingway manages to riff on critics, Cuba, condoms, the eternal value of art and the unchanging nature of the Gulf Stream. And he pulls it off. In a book about Africa, no less.

Here it is, from Green Hills of Africa:

That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out of the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing — the stream.

Ernest Hemingway at his home in Cuba, circa 1953, standing in front of a 1929 portrait of himself by Waldo Pierce. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Home repair guru Bob Vila recently blogged about his work rehabilitating Hemingway’s Finca Vigía property in Cuba.

Writes Vila:

Several years ago, Finca Vigía was in danger of destruction—from heat, humidity, pests, and the sheer passage of time. At that point, an American non-profit that I co-chair, The Finca Vigía Foundation, joined the Cuban government in a successful effort to save the home from ruin. Today, the estate is an internationally recognized museum full of Hemingway’s belongings and his numerous, fascinating collections (guns, typewriters, fishing rods, paintings and, of course, books).

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Vila in his own words.

“My loving you

It’s a rare surviving exchange between the two. Hadley burned most of their letters after their divorce. It had survived, secretly, in a storeroom of Hemingway’s papers at his Cuban home, the Finca Vigía, which has been in the hands of the Cuban government.

It was Dec. 23, 1920. Hadley was going to a party with the brother of a friend. Hemingway said he was too broke to come. And he was suffering Hadley’s wrath for not kissing her goodbye when they parted at the train station.

“I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye—that was the trouble— I wanted to kiss you good night—and there’s a lot of difference,” he wrote.

This letter, along with reams of unseen correspondences, have found new life in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, a 16-volume collection of his surviving letters to be published over two decades by Penn State, the Hemingway Society and Foundation and the Hemingway estate. The newly-published first volume contains his letters from 1907 to 1922.

“The bulk of the Finca’s contents—drawers and shelves and boxes with thousands of pages of accumulated correspondence and manuscripts—quietly became the property of the Republic of Cuba,” writes A. Scott Berg, in a Vanity Fair article detailing the expedition that brought these manuscripts to light.

Writes Berg:

We had come to Cuba hoping to find a few literary artifacts. Instead, we found ourselves amid a most significant literary dig, surrounded by “wonderful things.” We had already identified enough significant pieces of quotidian life at the Finca to begin to understand Hemingway’s 20 years there. As we drove back to Havana to report our findings and discuss the future of the documents, I could think only of the serious and solitary artist who lived there, not the swaggering figure of myth. “Writing at its best,” Hemingway had confessed in his Nobel acceptance speech, “is a lonely life.”

The article includes a number of his letters, but to see them in his own hand, with the long lines he uses to cross his t’s and the flourish he gives the tails of his y’s, check on Vanity Fair’s slideshow of Ernest Hemingway’s Life in Letters.

Just because Ernest Hemingway

The first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway is hitting the shelves. This new collection — expected to reach 16 volumes — includes all of his correspondence, most of it never before published, including reams gathered from the Finca Vigía, his home in Cuba. (The first volume spans 1907 to 1922.)

The work is the product of the Hemingway Letters Project, a venture of Penn State University, the Ernest Hemingway Society and Foundation and the Hemingway estate. It was overseen by Sandra Spanier, general editor of the project and a Penn State English professor, whose team gathered and transcribed some 6,000 letters.

Fortunately for her, Spanier says, Hemingway was a pack rat. Maybe not so fortunately for the readers. It will take about 20 years to roll out all the volumes.

Below is a video of Spanier talking to Hemingway’s son Patrick about the letters.

Also new on the shelves is journalist Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.

“I do believe we’ve had far too many biographies and critical explanations of the man, each one contradicting the last,” Hendrickson tells Salon. “I didn’t want to join that group. If I was going to do something, I wanted to do something different, which would lead to point B.”

Salon calls the book “masterly.”

“On board Pilar,” writes Kevin Canfield, “Hemingway wrote, loved, argued, drank and, for a time during World War II, went looking for enemy submarines. And it’s a boat, Hendrickson believes, that may have had a distinct impact on the evolution of Hemingway’s prose.”

Read more of the Salon interview with Hendrickson here.

It’s been a big year for Hemingway books (and films and theater for that matter). Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife, about Hemingway’s first bride Hadley, rode the bestseller charts for weeks. Former Esquire editor Marty Beckerman took the satire route with The Heming Way. 

In the article, “Surviving Hemingway,” granddaughter Mariel Hemingway and her daughter Langley return to Sun Valley, Idaho for a fashion shoot, photo spread and to share thoughts on the Hemingway legacy on the 50th anniversary of his death here. That legacy, unfortunately, is as much about suicide as it is about his literary successes.

“To me the Hemingway legacy has been to change it,” says Mariel Hemingway, who has become a crusader for healthy living. “I don’t want there to be a legacy. I want (daughters) Langley and Dree to be able to go off in their lives and not have to carry the burden of thinking, Oh, because there is mental illness in my family, I’m going to go crazy. I think it’s been my responsibility to open that up and really look hard at ;myself so that I didn’t give them any crap.”

Nicely said.

In an accompanying article, “The Muse,” Paul Hendrickson, author of the forthcoming book Hemingway’s Boat, plays detective in search of the inspiration for his classic short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Not much scandal here. The two shared tea, it seems, or more likely, bourbon. But Hendrickson posits New York socialite Helen Hay Whitney inspired the character Helen in the tale of a failed writer and his rich wife. She was the woman, he writes, who Hemingway said offered to pay his way to Africa and he declined.

“There was a lot more to the story,” Hemingway told a friend, “but I wrote the Snows as a study of what would or could have happened to me if I had accepted the offer.”

I wonder what other gems are in Hemingway’s Boat. More on that here soon.

"View of Toledo." El Greco. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Here’s what I like,” Ernest Hemingway said to his son Patrick, nicknamed Mouse, then a sophomore at Harvard.

Accompanied by New Yorker writer Lillian Ross, who was working on a profile of the famous writer, Hemingway was visiting New York and taking Patrick and Mary Hemingway for a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They paused at a Renaissance portrait of an un-Hemingway-like character – a pale, baby-faced boy with wide eyes and a pageboy haircut against a green landscape.

"Portrait of Federigo Gonzaga," Francesco Francia. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It was the landscape that stirred Hemingway. “This is what we try to do when we write, Mousie,” he said, gesturing to the trees against the horizon. “We always try to have this when we write.”

From there, he led Ross on a confounding tour of artwork that caught his eye at the Met, between swigs from his flask. The New York Times recently highlighted this peculiar chapter in the life of Hemingway, better known for his love of liquor and bullfights.

“But Hemingway the art lover?” writes Charles McGrath. “If you haven’t read ‘A Moveable Feast’ or seen ‘Midnight in Paris’ … you might not know that through Gerturde Stein, Hemingway became friendly with many of the painters there. He even had a small personal collection, including etchings by Goya and paintings by Gris, Miro and Klee – artists who in some ways mirrored his own modernist aesthetic.”

Ross’s profile was a beguiling one in which Hemingway seemed steep in self-parody, down to the fake Indian-speak he adopted during parts of the interview. McGrath seemed confounded by Hemingway’s choice of paintings to linger over. For sure, they were an odd mix. In addition to the painting above, “Portrait of Federigo Gonzaga,” by Francesco Gonzaga, Hemingway paused to admire Titian and van Dyck, El Greco and Cezanne, an artist that inspired Hemingway as a young writer in Paris. Some were portraits, some landscapes, some images of a suffering Christ. (The Times presents a partial slideshow here.)

“Are there any common traits in the paintings Hemingway picked out?” McGrath writes. “Well, beards maybe.”

Maybe. But if anyone followed me around the museum, they might be stuck for commonalities between what caught my eye. A self-taught art lover, Hemingway’s tastes were probably random and unrefined. But from his commentary over the Gonzaga portrait, it’s clear that what Hemingway saw in a painting isn’t what I would see. I see a sappy boy of noble birth. Hemingway saw how details of a landscape adorn the subject. Hemingway saw meaning in the look in the eyes, in a gesture, in a shape.

"The Harvesters," Pieter Bruegel. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What he called his favorite painting in the museum, Breugel’s “The Harvesters,” was closed during that visit. A sign on the door read “NOW UNDERTAKING REPAIRS.

“They have our indulgence,” Hemingway said with a swig from his flask.

Writes Ross:

“I sure miss the good Breughel,” he said as we moved along. “It’s the great one, of the harvesters. It is a lot of people cutting grain, but he uses the grain geometrically, to make an emotion that is so strong for me that I can hardly take it.”

It wasn’t beards Hemingway was looking for. It was details. And it was those details he quietly tried to incorporate in his own work.

“I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne,” he told Ross. “I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy I learned from him.”

Hemingway comes off as a blustering showoff throughout Ross’s profile. I don’t know what Mr. Paul would think of Mr. Ernest’s writing. Master’s don’t always approve of their pupils’ work, but Hemingway was indeed a good student.

David Frey photo.

Author Fred Waitzkin says as a boy learning the ropes of big game fishing, he was “fired up by the Odyssean blue-water conquests of Ernest Hemingway.”

Waitzkin writes a loving portrait of big-game fishing, with overtones of the demise of big-game fish, on outsideonline.com. 

“Hemingway inspired me to learn how to read the ocean for color changes, weed lines, and feeding birds—the detective work of big-game fishing,” he writes. “I wanted to be like him in all respects. I wanted to write great books and battle 800-pounders and bring them back to the dock for enduring glory.”

But trouble lurks in the waters Hemingway once trolled. The big fish Hemingway used to catch off the coast of Bimini are mostly gone now, their numbers depleted by commercial fishing vessels.

“Big-game fishing in its twilight is far-fetched and sometimes inescapably sad,” writes Waitzkin, most famously the author of Searching for Bobby Fischer. “But it is also beautiful and oddly enduring, in the manner of all dreams and myths.”

“rt BIG announcement -Happy to say #AMoveableFeast The Movie by #ErnestHemingway is in the works. Go to: http://t.co/InoEfuI and like. xo”

So I did. The Facebook page doesn’t add much information. Just these words: “Coming to theaters soon.
Produced by Mariel Hemingway.”

Mariel Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson, secured the film and TV rights for A Moveable Feast in 2009 and began shopping the project to studios. The posthumous memoir details the lives and love of her grandparents in their Paris days. “It’s fascinating to observe my grandfather as a young man, coming of age, before he was known to be what he eventually became, one of the great writers of the 20th century,” Mariel Hemingway told Variety at the time.

An actress, Mariel Hemingway is also the author of three books, most recently, Mariel’s Kitchen: Simple Ingredients for a Delicious and Satisfying Life. She and her daughter, model Dree Hemingway, are featured in the September issue of Town & Country in a story and photo spread titled “Surviving Hemingway.” (See it here on her blog.)

“To me the Hemingway legacy has been to change it,” she said of the specter of suicide that has surrounded the family. “I don’t want there to be a legacy.”

As for his literary legacy, it seems Mariel Hemingway may be having some luck keeping it going on the silver screen.