At a quick glance, Ernest Hemingway and Joe Haldeman would
seem not to have much in common. One flourishing in modernist times, the other
most certainly in post-modern times, the two nevertheless share some important
qualities: both are writers and war veterans.
Regardless that one is realist and the other speculative, one WWI and
the other Vietnam, their commonalities shape their ideas in ways that others without
similar backgrounds cannot relate to.
Not only an homage to a writer he obviously knows a lot about,
Haldeman’s 1990 The Hemingway Hoax is
a lustful, violent novella that examines the dirty parts of the psyche via time
travel and parallel universes.
The Hemingway Hoax
is the story of Joe Baird. A humble
Hemingway scholar married to an attractive woman half his age, life is getting
worse rather than better, that is, until meeting the con man Sylvester
Castlemain in the Miami railway station one day. Suggesting the two collaborate on a scam to
“find” the manuscripts that were supposedly stolen from Papa’s girlfriend at
the Paris railway station, Baird begrudgingly agrees, and sets about doing
research into the correct typewriter, paper, ink, and style. Heading back to Florida after research at the
Hemingway section of the JFK library in Boston, a strange thing happens:
Hemingway himself appears in the carriage warning that if Baird continues with
his ruse, the world will collapse. Baird
doesn’t know whether to believe the apparition or not, but after being thrown
into a parallel universe, things only get stranger: if he is to finish the fake
manuscript, he’ll have to face the Hemingway figure again, and again, and…
Wheels spinning within wheels spinning within wheels, The Hemingway Hoax is a complex story
looking only at the narrative structure.
Changing times and switching between different versions of our reality,
the beginning and end of the story are two different places. Requiring thought to weave together the
strands of setting and character, the surreal outcome does not belie the
straightforward, realist premise. Thus,
readers should beware that while Haldeman uses the sci-fi motifs of time travel
and parallel universes, his ultimate aim is something more meta-textual.
Almost like an act of catharsis, The Hemingway Hoax is exceptionally graphic from a sex and violence
point of view. Haldeman seeming to
exorcise demons of his wartime experience, Baird likewise goes through a series
of iterative, visceral wartime remembrances, depending which reality he gets
himself into. Hemingway also troubled by
his time in WWI, Baird acts as a nexus of the two writers’ nightmares of blood
and injury, several of the scenes gut-twisting, literally and
figuratively.
In the end, The
Hemingway Hoax is a thought-provoking story whose conclusion does not belie
its simple beginning. The thought needed
more in the area of plot and direction, the story’s other concepts are shrouded,
moving in unexpected directions—love triangles, treachery, and honor all
playing out. Chapter titles the names of
Hemingway books and stories, the imprints of Papa are all over the story. Whether Haldeman's ruse is successful, well, the reader will have to decide for themselves. (If the meta-fictional use of Hemingway is of
interest to the reader, they might also look into Dan Simmons’ less-fantastic The Crook Factory.)
Baird's wife is not half his age: she's 35, he's 52, "half again as old as she," as the novel tells us. Baird and Castlemaine (note the spelling) meet in "a run-down bar in Key West" (page one), not in a Miami train station. The manuscript's were stolen from Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, not his girlfriend (and long before he assumed the Papa persona).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the corrections. I listened to the audiobook, so the name spellings were a crapshoot, and apparently for the rest wasn't listening close enough - the danger of the audiobook. Thanks again.
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