Finding Florida: Ernest Hemingway

Allen Josephs, Ph.D.

University research Professor - University of West Florida

In early Summer, 2021, The Clever Chicas Project was gifted with two days to discuss Ernest Hemingway, a key Florida figure from the 1930s forward, with leading Hemingway scholar Dr. Allen Josephs, University Research Professor at University of West Florida. Dr. Josephs has written 10 books, including “On Hemingway and Spain: Essays & Reviews 1979 – 2013” and “White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture;” four critical editions of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, and numerous articles published in the Atlantic, New Republic, New York Times Book Review and other scholarly publications.

Further, Dr. Josephs is a great friend of this project, as he was present in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France, in Summer, 2018, when the crusade for this project began. As an original compañero supporting this work, we thank you, Dr Josephs, for your unwavering commitment to your students, your art, and your craft, a craft you have shared in English and Spanish with curious minds all over the world.

This interview began with a series of written questions, shared here, and was followed with a 'sit down' session in Gainesville, Florida, where he shared insights on Ernest Hemingway's life and times in Europe, America, and the Gulf Stream.

May we ride again soon, our dear Compañero. Duende to you always--in all ways.

Gracias por todos.

Questions and Correspondence

Stone Meredith:

“Professor Josephs, your 2014 interview with Allie Baker and the Hemingway Project gives us much insight into your deep, life-long knowledge and connections to Spain and to Hemingway in Spain.

In this interview, let’s work to mine some of those major themes for Hemingway’s life and time and work in the New World, specifically Key West and Cuba.

While you are known to many as an expert on Toreo and Bullfighting Culture, thanks to your vast publications (including White Wall of Spain, 1983; Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida, 2002; Beyond Death in the Afternoon, 2013, and On Hemingway and Spain, 2014), there’s another large side to your connection to the natural world. As you note in your 2014 interview, you loved fishing from the age of 12.  

In the New World, including Cuba and Florida, Hemingway wrote some of the greatest exploits of fishing in his novels and in his letters published in Esquire magazine in the 1930s.  

Do any of those works speak to your love of fishing, as a pastime—or perhaps as something deeper?

Allen Josephs: Oh yes. The key document to how Hemingway worked/thought/felt is virtually his only piece of “automatic writing.”

I am thinking of course of that excised original ending to Big Two-Hearted River” excoriated by Gertrude Stein and published posthumously by Philip Young, in which he lets his guard down, imitates GS, and tells frankly of his innermost yearnings and feelings and loves.

The two things he mentions are fishing and the bulls, which are intimately connected in EH’s psyche.

I understand this connection completely because they are likewise entwined in my own and were before I read Hemingway.

If you have ever fought a large marlin to a standstill with gossamer thread or subdued a toro bravo with a piece of cloth you will understand what I mean—both involve the puny human’s ability to conquer the wild force of nature with technique and art.

Most of us have not been very successful at either.

I had a fly rod world record blue marlin on for about 5 minutes once in Costa Rica—all I wanted was any marlin on a fly but no, I had to hook a world record fish after a week of NO strikes

And yes, I thought briefly and ever since of Santiago.

And the small animals I caped in Spain were nothing like that rampaging fish but they were trying to kill me, and I could (and you would too) see it in their eyes.

I wrote an essay on the meaning of fishing in EHs work, and I commend interested parties to that essay, maybe my best on Hemingway.

Some may remember my reading it at the Michigan Conference in 2012.

And some may remember Bob Lewis’ comment when I finished.

SM:

Before you went to Spain for the first time around your 20th birthday, you’ve shared that you read The Old Man and the Sea in high school and loved the sound—the sound of the words. 

But at that point in your life, you had not discovered the deepness of the rituals and the many cultures involved in the story.  You were young, and you had not yet found your life travelling Spain and following Hemingway’s path and your own through the rituals of history and tradition and sacrifice.

If possible, can you look back to that high school reading, to holding that book in your hand, and remember any idea that changed through your life of exploring the deeper meaning of the text and the character you call old Santiago?

And can you also remember any ideas that stayed the same, unchanged over time?

AJ:  Hard to remember with any accuracy what I felt at 17

Here's what I know

I thought I liked the humanities, and I took Theater and World Lit and Creative Writing.

But I did not really like much of it and I couldn't stand Silas Marner and the like.

I began to think I did not like "literature."

Except Shakespeare, which I loved and which I still remember--

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/

creeps in this petty pace (Macbeth / Act 5, Scene 5)

--that's one that rings loudly in this pandemic idiocy.

But I loved to READ and would forego sleep to finish a book.

All of Edgar Rice Burroughs (which EH read too as it was being published by his prolific neighbor).

The Saint by Leslie Charteris, the Perry Masons, all the Classic Comic Books, the swashbucklers, etc.

Plus every magazine and book on fishing I could find

And then I read The Old Man and the Sea and the combination of fishing and readability worked its magic

I devoured it and still love it--the cadences still hook me and the descriptions of the fish are perfect.

I had no idea I would actually meet the Old Man one day.

That Bob Lewis and I would sit on the front stoop of his cabin in San Francisco de Paula near the Finca.

Smoking cigars and drinking rum and listening to Gregorio talk about the lions on the beach

By this time (1988) he looked like Santiago would have and his exaggerations had the ring of truth.

I knew at 17 that Hemingway spoke a unique brand of truth.

I had not yet heard of the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion.

But I knew.

I knew it was right.

SM:

As this interview focuses on ideas of Hemingway in the New World, his world of origin, you’ve noted, to paraphrase your idea, that Santiago is the literal triangularization of Africa, Spain, and Cuba.  And in your 2014 interview, you also talked about meeting the man, Gregorio Fuentes, on whom elements of this character are allegedly formed. 

There are many academic conversations about who Santiago is…on where he ‘came from’ in Hemingway’s imagination. Can you talk about that formation a bit?

And can you also address the very real presence of the two cultures, Spanish and African, in the Cuba of Hemingway’s time, the time when he lived and worked from his Finca Vigía?

AJ:

As I implied in the previous answer, Gregorio Fuentes' bio is what EH uses for Santiago's

Born in the Canary Islands

Sailed to the coast of Africa where he saw lions on the beach

Emigrated to Cuba and became a fisherman

But at the time EH wrote the story Gregorio was still young and robust

He worked as Hemingway's "Captain" on the Pilar, so Gregorio is not the literal physical model

He is the psychological model and the character model and the geographical model

And Gregorio was not shy about claiming so

He claimed credit to Bob Lewis and me for the lions on the beach

Almost as though he had written it himself

But Santiago is also a composite character made of the fishermen EH knew

Carlos Gutierrez, Anselmo Hernandez, Gregorio Fuentes and doubtless others

Peter Buckley did a photographic study that included photos that EH owned

One of those is an excellent b&w of Anselmo Hernandez sitting in his dugout fishing craft

There is a young man standing in the bow

If they're not EH's physical models for Santiago and the boy Manolin I am sorely mistaken

Gregorio was perfect for EH's character purposes

But Anselmo, old and tough and wiry, was Santiago incarnate

Except for the sea-blue eyes which I doubt he had

EH took a real story he had heard in Cuba by early '39 and made it the modified plot

Then he replaced the old man in the story he heard with Gregorio in bio and character

(The real old man in the '39 story was crying and was 'defeated' by the sharks eating his fish)

And in my opinion he used Anselmo for the Old Man's physique

No I can’t prove it but if you see the photo you will understand

It’s worth looking for

From that composite mix he created Santiago

Who is also composite in his personal history

Canary Islanders are Spanish by conquest

Originally they were a race of giants know as Guanches or Guanchos

Probably of Berber origin

So Santiago is Spanish and African and Cuban

And Cuba was the Pearl of the Antilles

When EH could not go to Spain to see bulls he went to Cuba to fish

And Spain and Africa and Cuba were EHs favorite haunts (yes, Paris too mon dieu)

And out of that ethnic and cultural and linguistic melange

he created one of his finest characters

A primitive fisherman who like all his primitives lives in harmony with nature

Back to Ecclesiastes again

No new thing under that also rising sun

that which befalleth man befallleth beasts

as the one dieth so dieth the other

yea they all have one breath

so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast

for all is vanity

EH's greatest lesson

And the one we never seem to learn

Along with the one about the endless making of many books

SM:

Spirituality is a key part of life in Cuba, for a variety of reasons, including the island’s

connections to Africa and Spain.

To connect to your work with Joseph Campbell, perhaps speaking within his terminologies,

would you speak about the presence of spirituality in Hemingway’s writing about Cuba and

its neighbor to the north, Key West?

AJ:

Everything in EH—and I can’t stress this enough—is spiritual, everything, love, writing, fishing, the bulls, his difficult Catholicism 

That’s the key to understanding EH and his life and work 

It’s ALL spiritual 

The people who talk about his atheism can’t read and have been brainwashed by marxism 

It’s the deep spirituality of Catholicism that attracted him, despite the foolish politics of the “Church”

Read his letters to Harry Sylvester and Ivan Kashkin

It all attracted him, the spirituality of sex, his African “bride’s” belief, and the syncretistic tribal-Catholic melange of Santería 

He knew what he had been taught in Oak Park protestantism—the Congregationalist variety out of New England—was specious, not to say anti-spiritual and that the “Church “ in Rome was a political entity and that to the extent that it was it could not be spiritual

But he also knew that Debba’s belief or the Santería in Cuba, even with the slaughtered chickens (how many slaughtered animals are there in the Old Testament, including almost Isaac and the daughter of the prophet returning home who sees his daughter who comes dancing out to greet him and he must sacrifice her and does as he had promised the Lord)

Everything in Hemingway is spiritual and that is one reason he is so great