Hemingway once said of Cuba: "I love this country and feel like at home. A place that makes people feel like home, in addition to the hometown of birth, is the place where fate returns. ”
Beginning in 1939, Hemingway lived in Havana, Cuba, for 22 years, a period when his literary achievements were at their most remarkable. The famous "The Old Man and the Sea" was born there, and its main characters are also based on Hemingway's Cuban friends. In 1962, Hemingway died, and the Lookout Hill where he lived was transformed into the Hemingway Museum, attracting a large number of book fans to punch every year.
Like many people, the author Liu Xiaoqian came to Havana and also followed the footsteps of this literary giant. But the difference is that in the past six years, he has made nine in-depth visits to Cuba as a journalist, witnessing many historical events such as castro's death, Obama's visit to Cuba, and the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. At the same time, he tried to document the social atmosphere and the state of the people in Cuba: from film school students to literary giant Hemingway, from state-run ice cream shops to cigar factories in the city, from bards to musicals, from free pricing in wet markets to the abolition of "white cards" for people to leave the country... What he saw was a country frozen by time, with hidden enthusiasm under the calm, and the combination of difficulties and vitality, which may be the reason why Hemingway lived in this country for many years.
With the permission of the publishing house, this article excerpts several passages from the chapter "In the Name of Hemingway" in the book, telling the author's experience of visiting Hemingway's former residence Lookout Villa in Cuba, and recreating the life trajectory of a generation of literary giants in Cuba.
"Hurricane Skips Cane Field", subtitle: A Chinese Journalist's Cuban Experience; Liu Xiaoqian; Beijing United Publishing Company; Youfeng Culture Production; March 2022.
Looking back now, many of the ideas I had when I first went to Cuba changed more or less with the deepening of my understanding, except for one thing: if I could only visit one attraction on the island, I would choose the former home of the American writer Hemingway.
Maybe in the eyes of the locals, this has a hint of blasphemy, but I don't think so. On the contrary, it is actually a compliment. Because only truly beautiful countries and cities will naturally germinate this kind of contest of goodwill. Just as we usually look for the most elegant part of the beauty's facial features, we will not take the same problem to embarrass another type of person.
It takes about half an hour to drive from downtown Havana to Lookout Hills, but it depends on the driver's identity. If he were a local with a slight involvement in tourism, he would have followed Cuba's Central Highway all the way south, where Hemingway's house was on the southeastern outskirts of the city. Foreigners who live in Havana for a long time will not get lost, which is a must-visit address for relatives and friends to visit Cuba. The most worrying thing is the brother who wants to earn some extra money. Once, when I had been to Lookout Hill a few times, I stopped a private car at the gas station on the corner, it was an old rusty red Chevrolet, the driver was very young, and the spacious imitation leather seats, although old, could not see the scratches and sweat stains left by the daily pick-and-drop passengers.
We both hid our own selfish intentions, and the negotiated fare was half cheaper than usual, and he could also save a few foreign exchange coupons in his spare time. After all, in Cuba, the cheapest thing is time, and he may not be the owner of the car.
Half an hour later, however, the view outside the car window confused me. We drove into a small fishing village, the wind was salty, and the wheels slowly ran over the sand road mixed with shell fragments. I propped my arms on the back of the chair in the front row and leaned forward with my upper body, as if the driver's seat had a more accurate perspective than the rear seat.
"Not this place, the house is not by the sea." I say.
Indeed, the sea could not be seen from the hall and bedroom windows, and unless one climbed up a white square tower in the manor and looked out from the room on the top floor, one could catch a glimpse of the sea shimmering with white dots of light in the canopy of palm trees like fireworks. In that small room, there was a standing telescope and a wooden chair with blue cushions. Hemingway would write there.
The driver did not know the address, only that the owner of the house was a big writer who had written "The Old Man and the Sea", so he drove straight to the direction of the fishing port.
We inquired in the direction with the villagers who passed along the road, but there were fewer Cubans who knew Hemingway than I thought. When the sign labeled "Lookout Hill" finally appeared in the field of vision, another half an hour had passed. I was a little too upset to go, so I gave more money for oil. All added together, and the price of a normal taxi is about the same.
Hemingway's former home , Lookout Hills
I read Hemingway's novels, but it has been difficult to resonate, but there is a kind of pilgrimage fascination with his life. At the age of 20, I studied Spanish in Madrid during the summer, and as soon as the course was over I took a train trip to Paris. The apartment that Hemingway and his first wife had rented was just a few streets from the youth hostel where I had stayed, and there was a commemorative plaque on the outer wall of the building.
"This is the Paris of our youth, so poor, yet so happy." Every visitor will silently recite the line engraved on the sign.
It's from A Feast of Flow, an essay about Paris that Hemingway actually wrote in Cuba. There are many non-fiction works based on Paris, and one of the most famous ones was written by the author nearly 40 years after leaving the city, which is difficult to imagine for the time-sensitive publishing world, but it also gives me a lot of comfort to an author like me who suffers from procrastination in writing.
I often wonder if recounting the past in a climate where climatic conditions are diametrically opposite would skew memories. "A Feast of Flow" is a case worthy of scrutiny, in my vague impression, Hemingway's Paris seems to be too cold, and the drinking bureau that rises and falls between paragraphs should not only satisfy the writer's alcohol addiction, but also have the function of driving away the cold and warming up. But when I came to Lookout Mountain, I understood it all at once.
The author looks inward from the window in the Beijing United Publishing Company picture
Here, everything is the opposite of Paris. The Caribbean Sea has an approximate rainforest climate, with wide-leaved greenery growing out of control that summer cannot match in any temperate region. Also casting the spell is the house itself, which is divided into eight spaces of varying sizes: the living room is hung with a huge painting of the Matador, the cover of the first edition of Death in the Afternoon is this picture, and the floral cloth sofa is the only feminine decoration in the house; A corridor leading to the backyard with ochre square bricks was used as a restaurant; There were two large and small study rooms, and the more famous writers tended to choose smaller desks, and when Hemingway grew wider, he simply moved the typewriter to a half-height bookcase in the bedroom and stood under a specimen with a deer's head.
After visiting Lookout Hill at least five times, I still don't remember the door. This may be because there is no sense of boundary between space and space, whether it is inward or outward, it is transparent. The line of sight can pass through the glass window in the corner of the house, skimming over english novels and old magazines on the shelves, skimming over the bottles on the side tables, the stock of wine still remains on the day the owner leaves, like a clock that has been stopped in the ruins of an earthquake, and finally through the window on the other side. If you look around indoors, the huge wooden windows one after another give the house an atmosphere of an open-air courtyard, which seems to be designed to satisfy the voyeurism of outsiders. This transparency is completely different from the inexplicable and dark European apartment.
Hemingway's desk and bookshelves. Beijing United Publishing Company Photo
However, the richness of Lookout Hills has little to do with architecture. If you look closely, you will find that the house has a kind of handmade origami simplicity. It is full of right angles, and the only curve appears on the arches of the dining room and bedroom, although it adds a touch of sacredness to the religious site, but it is not a stroke of god in the architecture of the same period. The real stones are hemingway's appends, whether it is the specimens of animal heads he obtained from hunting in Africa, or the private paintings and souvenirs. Lookout Hill is like a vacuum time capsule and like a sleeping animal, which can feel its shallow breath. It seems that because of this, no matter how noisy tourists arrive here, they dare not make loud noises, for fear that they will run away after being woken up.
On the white wall behind the bathroom door were written strings of small letters in black pencils, like a marching ant colony, and also like a crooked morning exercise team in the early morning. Ordinary visitors are not allowed to enter the house, so most people who walk around the scene have a hard time discovering the secrets of this bathroom corner. Even if you notice, you can't see the contents of the words clearly. If I were to speculate, I would probably think it was the word count of each manuscript. But before I came, I had seen a close-up of the wall in an album: "Ants" was actually Hemingway's weight. More precisely, it includes a specific date and weight for the day. The scale is placed in the corner. I found out that Hemingway would initially record his weight before summer came, which was also the peak of his weight, surpassing 240 pounds several times. When he managed to drop to around 200 pounds, he began recording every day like an addiction, even into the summer. At this time, only a year after Hemingway swallowed his gun and committed suicide, too much intense desire for control may be a precursor to collapse.
Specimens of animal heads on the wall. Beijing United Publishing Company Photo
Lookout Hills always gives me a sense of ambivalence. In the mood of a fellow book lover, I guess Hemingway, who wanted to live here for a long time, has a collection of more than 9,000 books as evidence. In fact, Hemingway lived in the house for 22 years, the only property he bought outside the United States. At the same time, Lookout Hill exudes an atmosphere that can be abandoned at any time. It's like a summer palace, and even though The Death Knell Is For and For Whom the Death Knell and The Old Man and the Sea were born, it's essentially not much different from the place where Hemingway wrote on his travels.
Maybe Lookout Hill is a suitcase for writers. Borrowing from Naipaul's metaphor, Hemingway portrayed the Lookout Hills of the 1940s and 1950s as a man desperate to get out of the house.
That's exactly how Hemingway treated it. In July 1960, after writing down his weight at Number 24 on the wall of his bathroom, he left Cuba the next day and never returned.
The house is built on a hillside, and as you walk down the forest path, you'll pass a swimming pool with a sky blue underside. I've never seen it filled with water. By the edge of the pool, there are a few carved iron chairs painted white, weighing as much as anchors sinking into the water. Further ahead is the cat's graveyard. Four small fan-shaped tombstones, like the small ears of a cat. At the end of the estate is Hemingway's fishing boat. The bottom of the boat is bright red, reminiscent of the scarlet mouth of the shark in the novel. The hull is black and the cabin is brown close to the logs. The deck was painted green and looked like a soft carpet from a distance.
The entire ship is erected by a series of cement piers that resemble tombstones, and the canopy and half-circumferential trail should have been built after the Lookout Hill became the Hemingway Museum, so that visitors can see every detail of the ship more clearly. For example, the name of the ship printed on the stern of the ship, "Pilar", was the nickname of Hemingway's second wife Pauline, and later Hemingway used this name in the novel "For Whom the Death Knell Sounds" about the Spanish Civil War. The ship's name bears "Key West," the southernmost city in the United States, not where ships are made, which Hemingway bought from Brooklyn, but he often drove them out to sea in Key West.
Hemingway, who loves to go out to sea to fish, visual China picture
People who come here will always unconsciously speculate whether the "Pilar" is related to "The Old Man and the Sea", completely forgetting that the latter is only a novella, even if it is based on a real story, the fictional component is always larger.
However, in an island nation surrounded by the sea, the imagery of the ship is often more abundantly interpreted. It is both an expedition and a transcendence, sometimes symbolizing revolution.
The Cuban Revolution began on a ship. In 1956, Castro, exiled to Mexico, sailed a yacht called the Gramma and 81 other partisans from Mexico on an expedition to Cuba. Raul and Che Guevara were also on board. It was another attempt by Castro after his failed assault on the Moncada barracks. The crossing went better than expected, as the Batista government received false intelligence that the roof was blue and that the green-roofed Gramma was able to dock. On the third day after the landing, they were slaughtered by government forces, and the remaining 20 or so people hid in a cane field and later established a base in Mount Maestra.
The image of the boat helped me connect Castro and Hemingway. For quite some time, I, like most people, mistakenly thought they were in close contact. This illusion stemmed both from the black-and-white photos that were ubiquitous in Havana souvenir shops and because castro's penchant for dealing with the literary magnates, from Neruda to García Márquez.
Portrait of Shanghai Mingwei on the wall of the former residence, the classic white beard shape. Visual China figure
However, according to public records, the two have only met once. The encounter took place at the Hemingway Cup fishing tournament in May 1960. Hemingway was the guest of honor, while Castro's appearance had a different story. One is that he won the championship in a fishing competition, and the other is that he accidentally appeared at the award ceremony.
Naturally, I prefer the former, because in Cuba, there are no surprises. Both before the revolution and after the victory of the revolution.
"I'm just a newbie." Blackbeard's Castro took the trophy.
"You're a lucky newbie." The white-bearded Hemingway replied. Life magazine recorded the conversation in its report. The metaphors that burst out randomly in everyday speech are unforeseeable by even the greatest writers. As one of the most famous Americans in Cuban history, Hemingway was interested in the Cuban Revolution
The true attitude of fate has always been a research proposition that historians are keen on. If you look at the number of times he and Castro meet, Hemingway in the English department is obviously not as enthusiastic as other Latin American literary giants. But in retrospect, this judgment was unfair, and the young Hemingway recorded the Spanish Civil War on the front lines, and the fearlessness of other writers was more metaphysically stuck on the manuscript than the fearlessness of other writers. Not to mention that Hemingway was being dragged to the bottom of the sea by his deteriorating depression, and a person on the verge of drowning had no intention of feeling a flowering tree on the shore.
At the very least, Hemingway was close and receptive, and from a literary point of view, Castro resembled a character who would appear in Hemingway's novels.
The brief meeting between the two on the dock was permanently frozen on film by official photographer Salas. Salas, who accompanied Castro on a trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, said nothing in his life's work could go beyond this set of photographs.
Collecting a photo of Hemingway and Castro has been my wish for years. In a shop selling antique photographs not far from Plaza de Armas, I carefully compared each version, even if the differences were subtle.
The winner was a bust of the two: Hemingway, wearing sunglasses, leaned over castro's ear and spoke, who bowed his head in silence. It is an independent moment that has been cut off from cause and effect, and it is difficult to get a glimpse of the truth from it, but that inch of reverie attracts me.
Like all legends, future generations of readers keep only the part they like.