Mark Kurlansky - The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway

Also by Mark Kurlansky

Nonfiction

The Unreasonable Virtue of F ly Fishing

Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and t he History
of Their C ommon Fate

Milk!: A 10,000-Year F ood Fracas

Havana: A Subtropica l Delirium

Paper: Paging Throu gh History

International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way Around the World

Ready For a Brand New Beat: How Dancing in the Street became the Anthem for a Changi ng America

Birdseye: The Adventures of a C urious Man

Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didnt Want to Be One

What?: Are These The 20 Most Important Questions in Human Historyor Is This a Game of 20 Questions?

The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macors

The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food from the Lost WPA Files

The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, Americas Oldest Fishing Port and Most Ori ginal Town

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

Nonviolence: The History of a Dang erous Idea

1968: The Year That Rocked The World

Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Througho ut History

Salt: A Wor ld History

The Basque History of the World

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of Euro pean Jewry

A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbe an Destiny

Fiction

City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvite d Wildlife

Edible Stories: A Novel in Six teen Parts

The Belly of Paris by mile Zola: A New Translation with Introduction by Mark Kurlansky

Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music

The White Man in the Tree and Oth er Stories

Children/ Young Adult

Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseyes Outrageous Idea about F rozen Food

Batt le Fatigue

World Wi thout Fish

The Sto ry of Salt

The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi

The Cods Tale

The Importance of Not Being Ernest

My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway

Mark Kurlansky

Coral Gables

Copyright 2022 by Mark Kurlansky.
Published by Books & Books Press, a division of Mango Publishing Group, Inc.

Cover Design & Art Direction: Morgane Leoni
Cover illustration: Socoa castle as seen from the beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz as rainclouds break up at sunset, July 6, 2014. Credit: Mark Kurlansky.

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The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2022930926
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-463-7, (ebook) 978-1-64250-464-4
BISAC category code BIO013000, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous

Printed in the United States of America

To Marian and Talia, the re al events.

The real events that influence our lives dont announce themselves with brass trumpets but come softly, on the feet of doves.

Josephine Herbst, The Starched Blue Sk y of Spain

and

Nire lagun e uskaldunei

(to my Basqu e friends )

Write a lotbut see a lot more.

Hemingways advice on writing to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan

Table of Contents

Self-portrait of the author handlining cod on a commercial skiff in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, Septembe r 17, 1996

Coevolving with the structure of the brain, language freed the mind from the animal to be creativity, thence to enter and imagine other worlds infinite in time a nd space.

Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

The truth is, I am a dreamer. This used to be a well-known fact about me. It was a frequent criticism. My father claimed I daydreamed in the crib. What is he thinking about? Mark daydreams in school. Daydreaming is not considered good. I suspect that my accusers had no idea the extent of my daydreaming. I was in an alternate universe most of the time. Only those who do daydream understand that this is a strength, not a weakness.

I enjoyed the real world, but enjoying the other one is how I became a writer. I had conversations with myself about ideas, about people, about many things, and I enjoyed these conversations wi th myself.

Now you may be thinking, This is why he spends so much time fishing, because it gives him time to be alone daydreaming. That is the complete opposite of the truth. The wonderful thing about fly-fishing is that it affords freedom from thinking. It is the only time when the dr eam stops.

A good fly-fisher is utterly thoughtless. The mind is working, but you are thinking about what insects are hatching, what is floating in the river, where the river is swift and where it breaks into still pools. Your mind turns into nothing more than a fish brain. You try to think like a trout. Fly-fishing requires that kind of concentration. A trout is focused on survival and I assume it has no time for abstractions. Neither does a go od fisher.

I fish the Big Wood in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter when few other fishermen are there to disturb my concentration, unbothered by the beavers stripping black bark from the cottonwoods, or the elk staring down at me from the steep sage brush mountains, or even a giant moose wandering down to the river to eat willow buds. My interest is rainbow trout, as beautiful an animal as nature has eve r offered.

In the winter of 2012, I had just turned sixty-threeI was watching my artificial black spikey midge drift in the Big Wood trying to lure a rainbow trout along a deep trench on the opposite bank. Maybe it would work better with a drop, a second flyperhaps a larger dry fly floating on the surface where I could see it. Then I thought about how Hemingway fished the Big Wood with two drops, three fli es in all.

Now I was lost. My mind had slipped into that other world. It is true that to be in Ketchum and never think about Hemingway is as unlikely as being in Sherwood Forest with not a thought of Robin Hood. I thought not about the rainbow trout but about the fact that only a half mile upriver along the bank, Hemingway had stood behind his house and blown his head off with a shotgunliterally nothing left of his head but fragments along the black-trunked cottonwood bank, maybe some even in the river where trout and merganser ducks might f eed on it.

Then came a shocking revelation: I was older than Hemingway ever lived to be. I was now older than the grizzled old man who called himself Papaolder than that battle-worn, thinning-white-haired, stooped-old Papa ever lived to be. This made me feel quite old, realizing that the old man in all the pictures around town was actually younger than me. But it was not an entirely negative feeling. I also had a feeling of liberation, as though I had outlived his ghost. I had a whole life ahead of me that Hemingway never had.