BOOK REVIEWS · 105 Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the Twenties is not an easy read but it deserves reading. The philosophers whose concerns Berman details surely affected the creative process ofmanyartists during the 1920s. That the correlations are so precise as Berman suggests I doubt. I do, however, respect many of his insights , and I most certainly agree with him that Hemingway, among the fictionists , most particularly reflected the failed quest ofhis age—to paraphrase Berman's paraphrase ofWhitehead—to understand,justify, or accept the existence of pain and suffering in an allegedly orderly universe. "That proving impossible," Berman concludes,"Hemingway's workconstitutes a view oflife inexplicably endured, tragedy without tragic meaning" (148). —ArthurWaldhorn, Emeritus, The City College ofNewYork Sailing to Hemingway's ('uba. By Dave Schaefer. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 2001. 265 pp + bibliography. Paper $19.95. Seafaring journalist Dave Schaefer obviously has read a lot of books by and about Ernest Hemingway. He puts what he has learned to good use in Sailing to Hemingway's Cuba, an account of a 2,000 mile voyage from his home in Burlington, Vermont to Marina Hemingway in Havana. Schaefer, who has written extensively for several boating publications as a journalist and freelance writer, makes no claim to having produced a scholarly work. What he has turned out is a readable narrative of a personal odyssey undertaken to exorcize "a ghost from a young man's dream" ofliving a life ofglamour and adventure by following in Hemingway's footsteps. Hemingway specialists won't find anything new here, but general readers are likely to find the book informative and entertaining. At the age of61, by coincidence the same age at which Hemingway used a favorite shotgun to end his life, Schaefer decided it was time to break out of the predictable work routine he had followed for forty years since graduating from journalism school at the University of Wisconsin. "I was tired of charging up the same old hills, following the same predictable paths," he writes. "It was time to explore a hill covered with palm trees instead ofsugar maples." He determines to chart a course to Cuba and sail off to track down his high school hero, the larger-than-life writer Ernest Hemingway. While following Hemingway's path was his main objective, part of the lure of Cuba for Schaefer was the desire to visit the island in the twilight of 106 · THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW the Castro era,'before a wave ofAmerican tourists rush in and golden arches spring up across Havana's skyline. After being offlimits for most Americans for forty years, Cuba is beginning to open up now.Tourism, the largest and fastest growing industry in the country, has become the island's major source of hard currency. Despite the draconian U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, an estimated 200,000 Americans visited the island last year. Setting out on his twenty year old, thirty-two-foot sloop Dream Weaver from his dock on Lake Champlain, Schaefer begins a challengingjourney for a weekend sailor. Cruising alone, with friends occasionally joining him as crew for a few days, he sails south through the Champlain Canal to the Hudson River, skirts the East Coast briefly, and then travels through the Intracoastal Waterway to the Florida Keys. In Key West, while shipyard workers at nearby Stock Island prepared the Dream Weaver for the ninety-mile trip on the Gulf Stream to Havana,Schaefertakes timeout tovisit well-known Hemingwaysites. "Key West has had its ups and downs," he writes,"but some constants remain over the years: smuggling, stunt drinking, a celebration of seaminess; all good stuff for a writer." Constant, too, is the lure of Hemingway for tourists, even though many of the writer's haunts from his early years there no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. He scouts out Sloppy Joe's on Duval Street; the real Sloppy Joe's from 1933 to 1937, now called Captain Tony's, on Greene Street; and the old boxing arena in Bahamas Village. At the last stop, the Hemingway house on Whitehead Street, Schaefer detects "just faint vibrations" ofthe writer's presence from the carriage house studio. It is time to shove...
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Jun 15, 2004
Jacek Niklinski + 6
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