A great writer

Hemingway in Love

I have just read this memoir of a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, written by one of his close friends and confidants.

Many years ago, when I was much younger, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I recognised the succinct style which he typifies. I enjoyed the story. I also have come to recognise in the title, and in some of his other titles, the point he was making that we are all involved in some of the world-changing events of our lifetimes, even though they may be taking place a long way away. Other examples would be the dropping of the first atomic bomb, or the events of 9/11.

When he was writing, in 1940, I believe Hemingway was pointing out that the Spanish Civil War was a precursor to the Second World War, a trial run if you like. 

And I believe that the Old Man and the Sea, which I read a few years afterwards, also has a kind of "universal hero" aura about it. 

I didn't recognise this feature in A Call to Arms. I read this novel about Hemingway's World War I experiences in Italy later still. Perhaps if I re-read it some day I might see it differently, but thinking back I wonder if the events it describes were too close to Hemingway for real comfort, and he had not, understandably, been able to process them so completely.

Finally, many years later, in fact only a couple of months ago, I got round to reading The Sun Also Rises, his first effort. (See my post of 21 November last)

Hemingway in Love is basically about Hemingway's marriages, about his relationships with all four of his wives, though the process of the break-up of his first marriage, and his developing relationship with his second wife, takes up most of the attention of the book. In fact one could say that Hemingway's regret (remorse, guilt?) about his treatment of Hadley, his first wife, was the main theme of the book.

This memoir is an account, presented as verbatim, of Hotchings' chats with Hemingway during the 1950s while he was visiting the older man in France, Cuba or Key West, where he owned a house, or even during a fishing trip reminiscent of the Old Man and the Sea.

The light the book throws on the novels is not great; it mainly relates to The Sun Also Rises, and for my money does not add a great deal to what we learn from that novel itself. Hemingway admits that his friends, depicted in that first novel in thinly disguised form, were incensed that he had paraded them, warts and all, before their crowd of acquaintances in Paris and elsewhere, and most of them hardly spoke to him again! He misjudged the thinness of the disguises he used -- that is what we learn from Hemingway in Love.

Here is a very human writer, who shows us his strengths and his weaknesses as a human being. For that, as a start, his books are worth reading. Try them!

Celebrating the Past

A Reunion for 1976

Last weekend Margaret and I travelled to Northland to attend a reunion of the 1976 intake of students at Bay of Islands College in Kawakawa, where we were both teachers.

On the way up we stopped for a walk and rest at Rangiriri, close to a large roadworks project straightening State Highway 1.

This is the view looking east from the school gateway.

When we got to Paihia, we stayed in a cottage at Te Haumi, the beach immediately before Paihia town.

This the view looking up the harbour towards Opua and the wharf and marinas. When I lived there a group of us built a boat ramp at the other end of this beach, to ease the pressure on the ramp at Waitangi. Our old concrete slab is still there. I don't know how much use it gets now, but it certainly improved our popularity with the locals in those days.

This is the view at the northern end of the beach one afternoon, complete with doggy-doos bin! We are looking across the Bay to the area between Opua and Russell.

We spent a morning in Kawakawa sitting in the Trainspotter cafe watching the train run down the middle of the State Highway, and then visiting the Grass Hut shop, where we bought a calendar of prints by Hundertwasser. The shop is owned and run by one of our former pupils.

The reunion itself was fun: the students are now in their mid-fifties. We were also able to re-acquaint ourselves with the school buildings, and with the ten or so fellow-teachers who are still young enough to turn up.

On the way home, we had a stop at Orewa.

This was an older shop on the main road along the beachfront, towards the Auckland end.

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This Friday the U3A Sketching Group met at the Te Rewa Rewa Bridge to try our hands at getting it on paper. It proved to be a real exercise in perspective because of its curvaceous design!

So I walked down the walkway a little way to get a more side-on view and eliminate the perspective problems.

Saturday we took the grandchildren to the Multi-ethnic day at the racecourse. Some of the time we sat in the grandstand and watched the dancers performing on the stage. I did a quick, rough sketch of the scene:

Historical Project

Over the past couple of months I have been working on a project which has absorbed a lot of time and energy.

This year is the centenary of the founding of the New Zealand Labour Party, and I have undertaken to try to arrange the mounting of an exhibition to celebrate our history in New Plymouth.

Along the way I have found a lot of interesting material. Not all is suitable for exhibition.

But we have fastened on the building of the first State Housing precinct as a suitable peg to hang the exhibition on, because it is tangible, interesting, and contributed a lot to the development of our city.

After a lot of trawling through old newspapers, I have found the reports of the opening of the first houses in New Plymouth in May of 1938. Others working alongside me have located models of state houses from the Auckland University School of Architecture, and maps and plans from the Housing Corporation archives in Wellington

So we are making some progress on that front.

Some of the other details are interesting too. The branches here were kicked off by none other than Walter Nash, who lived here from 1916 to 1920. Labour supporters were active in the local body and general elections of 1918 and 1919.

Nash was also a key person in setting up community support arrangements for people suffering in the influenza epidemic. And probably his most successful project here was in carrying a vote on changing the rating system to unimproved value.

After twenty years of effort, the party eventually managed to elect its first MP, Fred Frost, who had been a clergyman. He served from 1938 until 1943. That parliament was extended to five years because of the war. When he was beaten in 1943, his unpopularity was partly due, so the records say, to his turning up at an event in shorts and open necked shirt!

He was elected in the strong swing to Labour in 1938, just weeks after the first state houses were occupied, and while the drive to build plenty of them had not been halted by the war. So those houses are an important symbol of Labour Party history here.

These three houses featured in a photo in the Taranaki Herald the week they were occupied in May of 1938.
They do not appear to have changed a great deal in their shape in the eighty years since.