* * * * *
The Importance of Being Earnest and Not
Being Kurlansky
By Gerry Dawes
Author of Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain
There is the new book out by Mark
Kurlansky, The Importance of Not Being Ernest: my life with the uninvited
Hemingway, another book that points out many of Don Ernesto’s well-known
flaws, Hemingway bashing being a fashionable sport for the last couple of
decades at least. Kurlansky is the
author of a wad of books, many of them best sellers and many of them very good. Some of you (and I) have read and applauded
some of his other books, especially Cod: a Biography of the Fish That
Changed the World and The Basque History of the World*. *I had
some reservations about his suppositions in The Basque History and the
fact that he apparently never made contact with a single member of the Basque
separatist group ETA before writing the book.
Many of you will find Kurlansky's
observations in The Importance of Not Being Ernest interesting. Some of you, especially those who love
Pamplona, will find parts of it not to your liking, especially Kurlansky's
contempt for Pamplona’s Fiestas de San Fermín* and his claim that no one goes
there for the fiesta, but because they are just trying to "out Hemingway
Hemingway." Needless to say for those of us who have known and loved
los sanfermines that is polemical, but there is more. Also
problematic is that he seems not to have interviewed any of the people who go
to San Fermín thus compounding his woeful ignorance of the history and significance
of San Fermín and the reverence for the fiesta that most regulars--Navarros,
Basques, Spaniards and foreigners--have.
*I suspect that he has a general
contempt for Spain itself and seems not to really know the country. He labels the Spain chapter in Not Being
Ernest, The Patent Leather Soul of Spain and claims on pp. 93-94 when he
was living in France and used to go to Spain that “Spain was dark and
depressing, quiet with people afraid to speak.
The last fascist country—but the food was superb.”
I lived in Franco’s Spain for eight
years and while his dictatorship was a weight on the country, getting lighter
every year, Spain was hardly “dark and depressing or quiet.”
Maybe
he decided it was clever to juxtapose Federico García Lorca’s poem about the patent
leather souls (from the patent leather tricorn hats) of the repressive
Guardia Civil (the paramilitary police that was not exclusive to the Franco
regime*) and assign that moniker to all of Spain and thus Spaniards.
*Lorca's
poem Romance de la Guardia Civil Española was published in 1928, so it
was not about Franco´s Guardia Civil and to paint Spain and Spaniards with the broad
brush as having Patent Leather Souls is a disingenuous gimmick.
"They
ride the highways
with patent leather souls.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal,
they ride forth and command
the silences of dark rubber
and the fears like fine sand."
And, as
to the food being superb, that likely was in San Sebastián, where he went, across
the border from Saint Jean de Luz in France, but the rest of Spain in those days did not
have universally good food, due in part to the widespread use and re-use of cheap
and substandard olive oil in many places.
The rise in quality of Spanish cuisine in general had much to do with
the rise in standards for olive oil, which is used in most dishes in Spain,
then, especially outside of Atlantic Spain, i. e., Mediterranean Spain, where
the use olive oil as the main cooking oil was predominant.
Kurlansky, whom I have met on a few
occasions, even had dinner with at Marichu restaurant in New York and with whom
I thought I had a friendly relationship, two years ago published The
Unreasonable Virtue of Fly-Fishing, in which he claimed that the fictional
Jake Barnes (not Ernest Hemingway) and Bill Gorton had gone to Burguete fly
fishing after the Fiestas de San Fermín, not before as is clearly
described in The Sun Also Rises. Since I knew Kurlanksy, in a private
Facebook message to him I pointed out that this was an error that he might want
to correct in a future edition. (Hemingway and Hadley did go to Burguete both
before and after San Fermín, but Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises went
before.)
Early on in Not Being Ernest he
claims he began as a kid reading Hemingway "with The Sun Also Rises,
a truly awful title." I don't think I have ever heard anyone say or
write that about the title, but I guess that's his opinion, which he follows up
with a paragraph, which is not his opinion, it is a fact-less observation and it pisses
me off because it is about me.
I told him I had been to San
Fermín seventeen times and had stayed in Burguete several times over the years,
usually before the fiesta and once during the Christmas holidays.
I got not so much as an
acknowledgement for my corrections, for two years anyway, until The
Importance of Not Being Ernest came out. I was stunned to find this
on page 132, a whole paragraph about me drawn from my message about the error
in Fly Fishing, fortunately without mentioning me by name.
"I got a note from a reader (one
he didn't bother to acknowledge) telling me that he had been to San Fermín
seventeen times and stays in the auberge (I thought auberges were in France,
Hostal Burguete is a hostal) that Hemingway stayed in on the Irati*.
Seventeen times. I don´t know that Hemingway would have wanted to go
seventeen times. Out Hemingway-waying Hemingway. I wanted to tell
him that Navarra is a beautiful place, and he ought to forget about Hemingway
and get to know it. But I suspect he would not have understood, so I said
nothing."
(*Burguete is not on the
Irati; in fact, the Irati at its closest point is at least 12 kms. away; where
Hemingway claimed to have fished as Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises is
even farther away, some 16 kms. nearly ten miles each way on foot over
sometimes mountainous terrain.)
I was under the impression that
serious "journalists" like Kurlansky reached out to people* they are
writing about to find out what the real story is, but not the grand Kurlansky,
far be it for him to understand the importance of being earnest.
(*He obviously got my Facebook note about his The
Sun Also Rise error, but instead of simply answering the note, he saved it
to use as the basis for the fact-less paragraph he wrote about the unnamed guy who
had gone to San Fermín 17 times.)
I wrote the following on Facebook
Messenger and, of course, got no answer, nor did I get a comment about the
numerous instances of errata I found in the book.
"Mark, I got your Hemingway
book yesterday and have already read 138 pages, underlining multiple passages.
Much to my shock and annoyance, I encountered your unattributed diatribe about
me, the guy who wrote about your mistake (repeated in this Not Hemingway
book*) that in The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton went to Burguete AFTER San
Fermin, which Hemingway did do in other years, but not as Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
*Page 95, The Importance of Not Being
Ernest: “In The Sun Also Rises, Jake and Bill catch trout there after
festival. In real life, he went fishing before
the festival.”
No, Kurlansky, as I tried to tell
you nicely two years ago, you got it ass backwards. In real life, Hemingway and Hadley and friends
went to Burguete both before and after the fiestas in different years, but in The Sun Also Rises, as I wrote to you, again
well before you published The Importance of Not Being Ernest, that
“Hemingway was 130 pages into The Sun Also Rises and up in Burguete before he
gets back to Pamplona for the fiesta.” And, expert that you are, you should
know that Burguete is not on the Irati, as you wrote.
I also included Hemingway's Burguete & Mythical Feasts in the Mists of the Historical Pass of Roncesvalles in Navarra: Scenes from Homage to Iberia from my blog and which is also a chapter in Sunset in a Glass: Adventures of Food and Wine Road Warrior in Spain, so he had more than ample information about Burguete's location and my long-time (more than half a century of involvement with Navarra), yet he still went ahead and put his erroneous observations in his book.
I went to San Fermín 17 times, not
just because of Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises, but more
because of James A. Michener’s Iberia (unmentioned by Kurlanksky in Not
Being Ernest), because Michener inspired me to meet Matador John Fulton and
Iberia Photographer Robert Vavra. I came to Pamplona for fiesta for the first
time with John Fulton and yes I was thrilled to meet Juan Quintana, who was the
model for Montoya in The Sun Also Rises and I subsequently became friends with him.
American Matador John Fulton and Juanito Quintana in Pamplona during Fiesta 1970.
Devotees of the Fiesta, many of whom
have gone for decades with fail, go for a variety of the reasons. While Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises may have given many
of them inspiration to go in the beginning, Michener’s chapter in Iberia on Pamplona (and subsequently his novel, The Drifters, partially set in Pamplona) drew
just as many. And regardless of who and
what first inspired them to go, sanfermineros return year after year
because of the friendships they make among Basques, Navarros, the foreign
contingent and the camaraderie. Memories
and oral histories from San Fermín stack up to the sky.
But your statement "I wanted to
tell him that Navarra is a beautiful place, and he ought to forget about
Hemingway and get to know it. But, I
expect he would not have understood, so I said nothing." is pure bullshit,
Mark and shows a real lack of respect for me and a shockingly cavalier attitude
to following ethical journalistic practices of verifying things you write about and
especially whole paragraphs used to make some cockeyed point.
As it my not knowing Navarra, Señor
Pomposo, I published an article in The New York Times about the
marvelous villages in the Navarran Pyrenees back in June 1994. In the early 1990s I wrote
full chapters on most areas of Navarra for both the Berlitz Travellers Guide
to Spain and Penguin Travellers Guides to Spain and I have
traveled in Navarra, outside of San Fermín, more than 50 times.