Hemingway in Italy by Richard Owen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway in Italy by Richard Owen Wayne Catan Hemingway in Italy. By Richard Owen. The U of Chicago P, 2017. 174 pp. Cloth $22.95. Ernest Hemingway had strong ties to Italy. He was wounded there on 8 July 1918, and he met his first love Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky at a Red Cross Hospital in Milan during his convalescence. His experience in the Great War gave us the Nick Adams stories “In Another Country,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “Now I Lay Me,” and the novel A Farewell to Arms. He continued to visit the country throughout his life including a trip with his first wife Hadley in 1922, and an exploration with newspaper friend Guy Hickok in 1927. In addition, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, traveled there in 1948 when he was informed that he was “the most widely read author in Italy” (119). This trip, and the meeting of a young Venetian, Adriana Ivancich, during the visit inspired Across the River and Into the Trees. And former Rome correspondent for The Times (UK) Richard Owen chronicles Hemingway’s time and works in the country with his new book Hemingway in Italy. First, Owen’s research details the site (Fossalta di Piave) where an Austrian Minenwerfer bomb exploded three feet away from Hemingway, blasting 227 pieces of shrapnel into his legs and feet. Owen then transitions to the author’s relationship with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, setting the record straight about the nature of the relationship. According to Owen, the relationship was not sexual; it was merely “a flirtation” because she was not “that kind of girl” (37). Owen’s reporting about the couple continues with Agnes and Hemingway betting at the San Siro racetrack, the one featured in “My Old Man” and chapter 20 of Farewell, her breaking his heart, and Hemingway’s trip to Stresa on Lake Maggiore. Hemingway utilized the trip to Stresa for chapter 36 of A Farewell to Arms; Lieutenant Frederic Henry and Catherine row across the lake to Switzerland where he believes he can avoid being arrested for deserting his military duties. In another section of the book, Owen rewinds the clock to 1923 for Ernest and Hadley’s visit to Ezra and Dorothy Pound’s house in Rapallo. Hemingway was impelled to write “Cat in the Rain,” about a couple in a hotel facing the sea in Rapallo, and Owen believes it is Hadley who “yearns for ‘a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her,’ a sign perhaps of her longing for a baby” (89). Hadley received her wish when Bumby was born later that year. In 1927, Hemingway and Guy Hickok toured the country, winding their way back to the Pound house. The tour inspired “Che Ti Dice La Patria,” a story that attacks fascism, which is included in 1927’s Men Without Women. [End Page 154] The ten-or-so page chapters bleed mellifluously into each other. In the chapter “The Biggest Bluff in Europe” Owen writes about Hemingway’s 1922 interview with Benito Mussolini. During the interview, Mussolini “fondled the ears of an enormous pet wolfhound” (84) declaring “We have force enough to destroy any government that might try to oppose or destroy us” (84). The author was disillusioned with the despot and considered him a “fraud and he had the proof ”: when the dictator greeted 200 members of the press—reading a book—at a 1923 press conference, Hemingway “tiptoed over behind the Duce (or so he claimed) ‘to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down’”(85). Because the book can fit in your back pocket (it measures 8.5” x 4.5”) Owen includes numerous important Hemingway sites featured in the country. For instance, Owen guides the reader to a plaque honoring Hemingway at 6 Via Armorari in Milan, the former site of the Red Cross Hospital, then to a museum devoted to Hemingway and the First World War in Bassano del Grappa, the town he mentions in his story “The Woppian Way...