To thine own self be true.” – Hamlet 1.3.78.
My first introduction to Ernest Hemingway was through his short stories. I was a 19-year-old soldier from Michigan, stationed in West Germany, when I went to our post library and checked out a newly published collection of Hemingway’s short stories entitled The Nick Adams Stories. As I began to read the stories of this central character, Nick Adams – growing up in Michigan, going off to war as a soldier, and then returning home to be a writer – I felt as though I had found a literary “twin,” a fictional character who seemed to mirror where I came from, and what I felt deep inside as a young man. But something else occurred. For the very first time in my life, I fell in love with the written word, specifically Hemingway’s prose. It was while reading this one inspiring book, that I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world.
Immediately, I began to read what was then considered to be the definitive Hemingway biography, Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. From his earliest childhood onward, I was completely shocked by the similarities between my life and that of the biographer’s subject. Both Hemingway and I were born in Illinois, and in the month of July (our birthdays are ten days apart). We both grew up in Michigan, and shared a love of autumn that went to our very souls. At the age of eighteen, both Hemingway and I enlisted in the army and were shipped overseas, he to fight in Europe during World War One, me to help protect Europe during the Cold War.
What I suddenly began to understand is why I so identified with the Nick Adams character in the collection of short stories I had just read – for the most part, he and Hemingway were the same person. It wasn’t so much that I was feeling such a kinship towards this fictional character, Nick Adams, as I was identifying with the character’s creator, this writer named Ernest Hemingway. Over the next many years, I became obsessed with all things Hemingway. After the army, when I returned home to Michigan, I started college where I took literary courses on Hemingway, along with creative writing classes. With Hemingway as my “male muse,” I started to write short stories, a stage play, and even published some poetry. Not only was I determined to be a writer, and write like Hemingway, it is safe to say (because it was true at the time) – I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway.
Subsequent to my early college years in Michigan – having studied enough grammatical French so as to conjugate verbs better than most Frenchmen – like Hemingway, I decided to sail to France at the age of 22 to be a writer. Whereas he went to Paris, I headed to the French Riviera, specifically Nice. Reminiscent of the “lost generation” of 1920s Paris, I, too, fell into a group of ex-patriates and ecsentric bon vivants. The major difference between the 22-year-old Hemingway and me was that he was actually writing everyday, whereas I was just soaking in my exciting daily experiences (i.e. doing “research” work) with the honorable intension of putting them all down on paper someday. C’est ça, la différence!
When I made the decision to leave France, and move back to the United States, I made sure that I went to Paris first, on Hemingway’s birthday, to pay him homage. Using my favorite Hemingway work, A Moveable Feast, as my personal travel guide, I dragged my English girlfriend all over the City of Lights, going to every single café that Hemingway mentioned in the book, and drinking whatever he drank in each establishment. I even had my girlfriend photograph me, standing in front of Shakespeare and Company (Hem’s favorite bookshop in Paris), posed exactly as he is in the photo of him with the shop’s owner, Sylvia Beach. But the Hemingway obsession was far from over.
Two years later, I was living in Carmel, California, and was engaged to be married (not to the English girlfriend that I left behind in Europe). My fiancée and I lived in a small cottage which I named Windemere (after Hemingway’s boyhood cottage on Walloon Lake). Although I proposed in the spring of that year, I purposefully chose September 3rd to be our wedding date. My reasoning was that it would give us an adequate amount of time to plan the wedding, it was also Labor Day weekend, my parent’s wedding anniversary – oh, and it just happened to be the same date that Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley. The following year, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Geneviève, whom I named after the patron saint of Paris.
A year after the birth of our third child, my wife and I left Carmel and moved to Sonora, California, where I opened my first restaurant, which I named – you guessed it – Hemingway’s Café Restaurant. Pictures of Papa Hemingway covered every square inch of wall space I had, and the daily changing menu featured a mixture of cuisines representing the many places associated with the restaurant’s namesake – French, Italian and Spanish dishes, highlighted with wild game and fresh fish. Whatever specific restaurant dishes, or drinks, that Hemingway would mention in his books (e.g. raw Carpaccio and the Bellini apéritif from Harry’s Bar in Venice) were staples on the menu.
During the four years that I owned Hemingway’s, I wrote for a local newspaper about my crazy life as a restaurateur and father of, now, four children. I also wrote articles about beer and wine for several trade publications. What I wasn’t writing was The Great American Novel, the one thing that I had dreamt of doing since I first read Hemingway’s work. In a nutshell, what Hem had, and I didn’t, was the daily discipline to put a certain number of words on paper each and every day. By the time I sold Hemingway’s in 1989, and moved to Seattle, I had spent nearly half my life referring to myself as a writer – although all I had in my foot locker were several unfinished novels and screenplays, a few short stories, a small sampling of poems, and a multitude of cocktail napkins and scraps of paper with story ideas.
In November of last year, at the age of 64, I published my first book, The Pono Principle. It’s a self-help, personal growth book – it is not a novel. That is the book I was destined to write first, a book that has the potential to help others on their life journeys, and not just be a self-serving release for my literary ego. Although it took me 45 years to get here, here I am. I now have a book that I am proud to have my name printed upon, a positive message to share with the world and, most importantly, a newfound conviction that I was never meant to be another Hemingway – but only the truest representation of me.
