Ernest Hemingway would not have liked you

When I was twenty-five, I visited Ernest Hemingway’s grave. I was at the tail-end of a six-month trip around the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. I was carrying a small brick of old HarperCollins paperbacks, which I’d made my way through as I made my way around. (You can read my piece about Havana’s cottage Hemingway industry, which was one of my very first pieces of freelance foreign correspondence, here.) As I recounted later, in a piece that was otherwise about Geoff Dyer:

I was reading The Garden of Eden at the time, the best of Hemingway’s posthumously published novels, and brought it along in case I felt the urge to say something. But when I started reading a random passage out loud, it seemed entirely out of place. Here I was, shin-deep in snow, feeling it seep through my inappropriate boat shoes, reading about beautiful people enjoying summer (and experimenting with gender fluidity, as it happened) on the south coast of France.

Luckily, someone had brought a copy of the collected stories and left it on the grave, where it had frozen solid. I picked it up, prised it open, and pulled the pages apart until I found a ‘A Day’s Wait’ from Winner Take Nothing. It is a story about a man with a sick child. The doctor has given the child his temperature in Fahrenheit, but the child only knows Celsius. As a result, he believes his temperature is through the roof and is worried he’s going to die. It was a good story to read, because it’s short and it was cold out. I took a selfie with the headstone and walked back to my hotel.

My interest in Hemingway never faded. I still own a small library of books about the man: Carlos Baker’s 1969 biography, Anthony Burgess’ 1985 appraisal, Lesley Blume’s splendidly gossipy Everybody Behaves Badly, about the writing and publication of The Sun Also Rises. I have been to Pamplona seven times. I know Hemingway’s grandson and great-grandson. I have watched Ken Burns’ six-hour documentary three times. (It’s good, though I still get annoyed by how it was discussed in the media, as though Burns had uncovered some great trove of new information, particularly about Hemingway’s relationship with gender. The documentary, which in the end spends less than five minutes on the topic, doesn’t say anything that