A maverick war correspondent,
Hemingway's third wife was the only woman at D-Day and saw the liberation of
Dachau by Paula McClain I
hired a car to take me from beautifully ruinous Old Havana, through ravaged
parts of the city most tourists never see, to the nearby village of San
Francisco de Paula, a dusty speck of a place that was once home to Cuba’s most
famous American expat, Ernest Hemingway. Having painted him into
two historical novels and become an accidental aficionado of his life, I have
made it a point to visit all of Hemingway’s residences—from Oak Park to Paris,
from Key West to Ketchum—but this time I actually came looking for someone
else: his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. It was she who found the 19th-century estate
Finca Vigía (Watchtower Farm) in the want ads of a local paper in 1939, and
she who undertook extensive renovations, at her own expense. The Finca has
been a museum (Museo Hemingway Finca Vigía) since just after the writer
committed suicide, in 1961. Each year
between 80,000 and 120,000 visitors come up the lane to pay about $5 to look in
the open windows, for while the grounds are accessible and all the entrances
are flung wide, the house itself is permanently cordoned off to preserve its
contents. Just 28 when she took
on her first war and in her early 80s when she took on her last (the U.S.
invasion of Panama), Gellhorn covered virtually every major conflict of the
20th century. After the Spanish Civil War
she reported on the Japanese invasion of China, the Czech Crisis, the Winter
War between the Soviet Union and Finland, and all significant theaters of World
War II (including the liberation of Dachau).
Later she covered the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the conflicts
in Vietnam and Nicaragua. She had a
chance introduction to social worker Harry Hopkins, at a 1931 party in
Washington, DC, and she began to write for him, along with a small team of
reporters, when Hopkins started the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The team would travel to parts of the country
hit hardest by the Depression and report back to Hopkins, who would pass on a
narrative portrait of what Americans were enduring to President Roosevelt—not
facts and statistics but the human story, the view from the ground. At 25 the youngest reporter on Hopkins’s
team, Gellhorn received travel vouchers and $5 a day to go from town to
dejected town, beginning in Gaston County, North Carolina, where she
interviewed the families of mill workers and sharecroppers. She saw more poverty, syphilis, slow
starvation, and utter despair than anything her life up to then could have
prepared her for. Her reports are
sharply drawn and moving portraits of people who were buckling, swinging free
of all hope and yet too proud to go on relief. She admired their grit, and wept for them, and
shook with rage. All of this comes
through in the writing, which was being sent by Hopkins, without Gellhorn’s
knowledge, to Eleanor Roosevelt as well as FDR. She was invited to dinner at the White House
to share stories of what she had seen. Nearly
a year into her post Gellhorn was fired for inciting a riot among unemployed
workers in rural Idaho, and Eleanor wrote to say that she was welcome to live
at the White House until she could find her feet again. For two months Gellhorn stayed in what would
later be named the Lincoln Bedroom, helping Eleanor answer sheaves of mail from
people in dire straits. Gellhorn claimed
Eleanor as a private hero and became galvanized during her time at the White
House to use her voice and considerable energy to expose the suffering she had
seen and give it a broad, loud platform. She would write fiction, using real life
models. The resulting book, thrown off
in a few short, burning months, became The
Trouble I’ve Seen, a collection of four novellas that was praised
far and wide. According to the Saturday Review of Literature, it seemed to
be “woven not out of words but out of the tissues of human beings.” It made Gellhorn the literary discovery of
1936. Read extensive article and see
pictures at https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a22109842/martha-gellhorn-career-ernest-hemingway/
Ten miles east of
Havana is Ernest Hemingway's Cuba house--Finca Vigia, meaning "lookout
house". Built in 1886 by a Spanish Architect Miguel Pascual y
Baguer, Finca Vigia was purchased by Hemingway in 1940 for a cost of $12,500. There, Hemingway wrote two of his most
celebrated novels: For Whom the Bell
Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. A
Movable Feast was written there as well. See pictures at http://www.hemingwaycuba.com/finca-la-vigia.html
Ernest Hemingway was a master using
bullfighting terms and
described a corrida as “the only
art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of
brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor” in Death in the Afternoon. Find a glossary of bullfighting terms
at https://www.madrid-traveller.com/bullfighting-terms/
There is some persistent confusion
about lead and led. Lead is both a noun and a verb. There are several unrelated nouns
spelled lead: one most commonly refers to a metal (as in,
"The paint was made with lead"), and the other most commonly refers
to a position of advantage (as in, "Our team was in the lead"). The verb lead is pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to a position or advantage is
also pronounced /LEED/, with a long e;
the noun that refers to the metal, however, is pronounced /LED/, with a
short e. To this moderately convoluted situation, add
the past tense and past participle of the verb lead,
which is led and
pronounced like the metal noun lead with
a short e. If you aren’t sure whether to use led or lead as
the verb in your sentence, try reading it aloud to yourself. If the verb is pronounced /LED/, use led. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/led
Lede is the introductory section of a
news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede
Constance Fenimore Woolson, (1840-1894), American writer whose stories and
novels are particularly notable for the sense of place they evoke. Woolson, a grandniece of James
Fenimore Cooper, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. During the Civil War she engaged in hospital
work. After her father’s death in 1869,
Woolson accompanied her mother on travels through the East and South, and in
1870 she began submitting travel sketches and stories to Harper’s, Putnam’s, Lippincott’s, Atlantic Monthly, and
other magazines. Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875)
collected several of Woolson’s local-colour stories. During the later 1870s she spent much of her
time in Florida and the Carolinas, which became the scenes of her best stories. In 1879 Woolson traveled to Europe, where she
remained for the rest of her life. Her
novels, serialized in Harper’s before
publication in book form, include Anne (1882), For the Major (1883), East Angels (1886), Jupiter Lights (1889),
and Horace Chase (1894). All are set in faithfully detailed locales,
and they exhibit a psychological subtlety suggestive of the writing of
Woolson’s close friend Henry
James. She also published a
collection of short stories as Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1886). After a lengthy period of illness, Woolson
died in 1894 following a fall (perhaps intentional) from a window in her
apartment in Venice. The Front Yard, and Other Italian Stories (1895), Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories (1896), and a
volume of travel sketches, Mentone, Cairo and Corfu (1896),
appeared posthumously. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Constance-Fenimore-Woolson
After taking his dog for a walk one day in the late
1940s (1948), George de Mestral,
a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to
the dog's fur. Under a microscope, he
looked closely at the hook system that the seeds use to hitchhike on passing
animals aiding seed dispersal, and he realized that the same approach could be
used to join other things together. His
work led to the development of the hook and loop
fastener, which was initially sold under the Velcro brand name. Serbo-Croatian uses the same word, čičak,
for burdock and velcro; Turkish does the same with the name pitrak, while in the Polish language rzep means both "burr" and
"velcro". The German word for
burdock is Klette and velcro is Klettverschluss (= burdock fastener). In Norwegian burdock
is borre and velcro borrelås, which translates to
"burdock lock". The taproot of young burdock plants can be harvested and
eaten as a root
vegetable. While generally out of favour in modern
European cuisine, it remains popular in Asia. Arctium lappa is known as niúbàng (牛蒡) in Chinese, which was borrowed into
Japanese as gobō, and is still eaten in both countries. In Korean burdock root is called u-eong (우엉) and sold as tong u-eong (통우엉), or "whole burdock". Plants are cultivated for their slender
roots, which can grow about one metre long and two centimetres across. Burdock root is very crisp and has a sweet,
mild, and pungent flavour with a little muddy harshness that can be reduced by
soaking julienned or shredded roots in water for five to ten
minutes. Burdock is a traditional medicinal herb used for many ailments. Burdock root oil extract, also called bur
oil, is used in Europe as a scalp treatment.
See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctium
Composer Michel
Legrand died in Paris January 26, 2019 at the age of 86. His most recent film score was “The Other
Side of the Wind,” composed for Orson Welles’ last film, which was finally
completed and released in 2018. His
approximately 150 scores include Jacques Demy’s 1964 classic “The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg,” a landmark film in which all of the dialogue is sung and which is
believed to mark the only instance in Oscar history in which a composer was
nominated in all three music categories for the same film (best song, best
original score, best musical adaptation). The songs “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch
What Happens,” both of which became standards, emerged from the “Cherbourg”
score. Jon Burlingame
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com January 28, 2019 Issue 2030
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