Ernest Hemingway — Cuba 1949
“ I’m trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass!”
Early in 1949 Ernest Hemingway did manage to get Adriana out of his head long enough to do some serious work on Islands in the Stream and wrote to Charles Scribner telling him he was now hard at work again on his war trilogy, and was well into the part that covered the time he used his boat Pilar as a sub hunter. He explained to Scribner that he was now working slowly because his health wasn’t too good, especially the constant ringing in his ears. He also explained that he wanted to write slowly because he wanted to write better than he had ever written before.
Hemingway was also reading a good deal, including Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, which, as Carlos Baker describes, Hemingway considered:
“…a disgraceful and ignoble book, and called its author an opportunistic coward who had never fired a shot in anger. He believed that Shaw had portrayed Mary Welsh [who had once been Shaw’s lover] as a fictional girl named Louise, Leicester Hemingway [Hemingway’s younger brother] as a ne’er-do-well named Keane, and himself as a character called Ahearne…”
He also read — in galley proof — the Italian anti-fascist novelist, Elio Vittorini’s new book, In Sicily, for which Hemingway wrote the introduction, and a novel he admired greatly for its grittiness and ‘utter truthfulness’.
