Done and sodding dusted: goodbye Hemingway! Well, up to a point

I am very pleased to say — very pleased! — that the web version of my sodding Hemingway bollocks is now completed. I have just posted the final two ‘chapters/essays’.

Here they are, In Sum - Part I: Something of a curate’s egg and In Sum — Part II: At the end of the day it’s each to his own.

The next phase is to turn it into a book so that I can get it printed up by Kindle Direct Publishing but that is more the kind of pissing round with laptops and publishing software etc I enjoy.

The ultimate irony of doing this Hemingway crap is that my reason for doing it had bugger all to do with Hemingway or his work or anything like that. It’s just that I decided to write a blog post about what a great writer he wasn’t after reading The Sun Also Rises and all the claims made for it, and it evolved.

My sole motivation was to ‘do a project’, and crucially to do it properly, not cut corners and to finish it. Well, now I have.

Well, I suppose in one sense these things are never quite finished, but as far as I am concerned I have fulfilled my self-imposed task and doing that was the whole point of the exercise.

New book review, Hemingway's rather silly novel To Have And Have Not. Bet you don't know whether I like it or not. Guess.

 Here it is.

New book review, Mary Dearborn's biog of Hemingway

 You can find it here.

The queen of England is dead, but then rather a lot of other people also died yesterday

A date to remember: September 9, 2022, the day a 96-year-old woman died in Britain. It was not unexpected given her age. She was Mrs Sarah Coady, of 83, Tosson Terrace, Heaton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Tyne & Wear in the north-east of England.

She lived to a grand old age, did Sarah and she will be missed by her two sons Terry and Jim and her daughter Joan, her grandchildren Wayne, Kevin, Anthony, Louise, Meg and Liz. She will not be missed by ‘the nation’ and ‘the nation’ will not mark her passing with 12 days of mourning.

There will be no wall-to-wall coverage on TV and radio of her life and death and the newspapers will not carry page upon page of photographs of her, young and old. Finally, there will be no longwinded analysis wherever you care to look in the media of what Sarah’s death means for ‘the nation’ and what the future holds for her extended family. The reason is that ‘the nation’ did not know Sarah Coady.

If all that sounds a little sour — I’m obviously obliquely commenting on the death of the queen of England and there is, as far as I know, no Sarah Coady who once lived in Tosson Terrace (though I did, 43 years ago, at no. 105) — it’s because I am more than a little bemused by what is happening in Britain as I write and shall be happening for the next 12 days (though I did read Charles — sorry, Your Majesty Charles III — has ruled, as only a ‘king’ can rule, that there will be seven days of mourning after the funeral and that isn’t for a week or two yet).

I am sincerely trying to work out my lack of ‘grief’. I had and have nothing against Liz Windsor or any of her family. On the other hand I can’t get my head around the idea of ‘kings’ and ‘queens’ ‘ruling’ us their ‘subjects’. I’m nobody’s bloody subject.

Yet all my Facebook friends except one, my guitar tutor who is one of the saner men I know, has apparently gone to pieces over the queen’s death. But why? Did they really ‘love’ Brenda as they do their partners, children and family? I would be destroyed if anything happened to either of my children (one now 26 and the other 23 and off gallivanting around South America), but that is it.

For the media, of course, it is a grand opportunity to print or broadcast the dead queen’s life story (as though it had changed since the last ten times her life story was documented), print loads and loads of piccies we have all seen before, gush, gush, gush about the poor woman, but crucially a poor woman none of us knew.

From what I hear Elizabeth Windsor was an intelligent woman of character who was diplomatically talented in that she had to steer clear of politics and who furthermore had a gift for mimicry and could be very funny. And I admire her for that. But did I ‘love my queen’? No, I did not. Am I heartbroken that she has died (at 96, fancy! None of us saw that coming)? No, I am not.

Is there something wrong with me? Am I, in fact, saying what others also think but believe it best not to do so publicly?

Answers please on a postcard to the usual address.

If by some chance you are bored . . .

Another five pages of this Hemingway crap posted if you are interested, five parts covering the final 16 years of his life. Almost 20,000 words, so someone had better sodding read it. You can find the the new pages here:

1945-1961 — Part I: Fourth marriage, more writing, public profiles and ever growing fame

1945-1961 — Part II: Health declines, Hemingway falls in love and his new novel is mauled by the critics

1945-1961 — Part III: Fighting off the academics and redeeming his reputation a little

1945-1961 — Part IV: Cheating death in Africa, the winning the Nobel Prize and entering his anecdotage

1945-1961 — Part V: Surviving a ‘dangerous summer’ but the end comes fast

NB By the way, there’s a little told about Edward Gibbon. I might have recounted it here before, but what the hell. I went to look up the exact ‘noble’ involved and the circumstances and came across the tale in another blog. So I have shamelessly copied his or her account and as my penance I will leave a link to it here.

He or she writes:

Edward Gibbon approached the Duke of Gloucester and presented him with a copy of the newly published second volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

Gloucester had received the first with warmth and it only seemed right, thought Gibbon, that he should get part two. In Gibbon’s day these people were your celebrity endorsements. 

To Gibbon's dismay, the Duke took the book, smiled brightly, and placing it on the table said, ‘Another damned thick heavy book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?’

And everyone laughed, but not Edward Gibbon because he'd just thrown five years of his life into bringing that second volume to birth.