Late last year (it's January 2002 as of this writing) I read Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, a book he wrote in conjunction with the filming of the PBS series of the same name (which I have not seen yet, I think because it has not aired yet. Some of it-- suddenly I am moved to hope that Palin never reads this, not that he ever would-- was fairly innocuous, the kind of semi-touristy semi-historical semi-journalistic thing I've watched him do on previous PBS outings. Alot of it was really neat, though, history I didn't know or had forgotten, bits where one or another of various Hemingway myths got de-bunked or straightened around (many of the myths propogated by Hemingway himself), interesting observations as to the food, drink, and/or culture of various places around the world where Hemingway had spent a considerable amount of time.

Then came Ketcham.

Having majored in English, & then done 2 years in grad school for English Lit, I learned a great deal of horse shit about a great many authors. None of them moreso than Hemingway. Women professors loved to trot out his faithlessness, drunkeness, clumsiness, & arrogance, while male professors tended to try and assert that everything the man ever said was either a lie or an exaggeration, or a lie about an exaggeration, & then point out that he was arrogant. I always suspected envy on both sides. The strangling point came when, in my second year of grad school, one of the PhD's over the Grad Program taught a course tht included Hemingway. She was nicer to him than most, since she had studies under Matt Bruccoli at the University of South Carolina, but Hem still didn't come through completely unscathed. Then, back in the Grad Office after class, one of the other Grad Assistants went on and on about how rotten Hemingway wrote, and that her students could write better (we were all teaching Freshman Composition), & that if she wanted to read this kind of simplistic crap she'd just read her students' papers. I actually had to leave the room to avoid pointing out to her that a) I'd read her students' papers, and no, they couldn't write better than Hemingway, b) they didn't have anything in the way of a chance at writing even half as well as Hemingway had so long as she was their instructor, and c) reading her students papers was a dandy idea, as so far it seemed a novelty to her.

What Palin did with the recollections & reconstructions of the last weeks of Hemingway's life at the ranch at Ketcham, Idaho, before the morning he shot himself with a shotgun, was chilling, astounding, & illuminating. There were things I hadn't known-- about the shock therapy, for instance-- things that I knew but that didn't really take root in my understanding of Hemingway-- that he killed himself first thing in the morning, that they had him on ALOT of drugs, that he was unhappy about that because it messed with his memory & comprehension of things around him-- that made a great difference in my memories of him & my appreciation of his work. The title is a line from Big Sur Poem, which may have seemed a glib toss-off before, but shouldn't now.

So this is how I say thanks. Many of you are probably suddenly very glad I don't know you.