By Reviewed by Ron Charles
Sunday, May 29, 2005
WELCOME TO HAVANA, SEÑOR HEMINGWAY
By Alfredo José Estrada. Planeta. 341 pp. $22.95
When it comes to imitating Hemingway, nobody does it better -- or worse -- than Papa himself. Since the author's suicide in 1961, his heirs have meted out unfinished material that should serve as a warning to other great authors to clear their desks when they feel the end coming on. Just as this pillaging seemed over, on the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth, the son also rises: Patrick published an unfinished fictional memoir by his father called True at First Light (1999). Surely the well must be dry now. Isn't it pretty to think so?
More fun than reading bad Hemingway by a posthumous Hemingway is reading bad Hemingway by living impersonators. For almost thirty years, the best examples have come from the International Imitation Hemingway Contest, started in Century City, Calif., by Harry's Bar and American Grill, itself an imitation of Harry's Bar in Florence, which in turn is reminiscent of the bar that Hemingway frequented in Milan. Harry's eventually enlisted the co-sponsorship of the PEN Center, which in 2002 turned the contest over to Hemispheres, United Airlines' in-flight magazine. The winner, to be announced in the July issue, will get two round-trip tickets to anywhere in Europe that United flies.
Alfredo José Estrada shouldn't bother entering. He's too good. And besides, his debut novel, Welcome to Havana, Señor Hemingway , isn't a parody like "The Old Man and the Flea" (winner 2002). It isn't even really an imitation, although long passages will sound familiar to anyone who knows Hemingway's best work. Instead, it's a marvelously entertaining tribute to the man who left such a deep imprint on American literature. It's also a fascinating portrayal of Cuba in the early 1930s when American tourists, including Hemingway, fled Prohibition to party on the island nation already crumbling into political chaos.
Estrada presents the novel as a story about his grandfather, Javier López Angulo, who graduated from Harvard and came back home to Havana to mope around, drink around and sleep around while taking himself very seriously and planning to write a novel. Javier's father is a wealthy importer who tolerates his aimless son with repressed annoyance. A family friend gives Javier a job selling ads in a Cuban magazine, a task that leaves him lots of free time to loaf with Freddy, the son of the president of an American bank in Cuba. The Depression decimated the island's economy, but these two charming young men take only a cursory interest in the social unrest all around them. Revolution seems somehow too impolite to tempt them.
One night at a bar, Hemingway, who appreciates Havana for the anonymity it affords him, picks Javier out of the crowd and challenges him to a fight. (One of the novel's self-referential jokes involves Hemingway's efforts to track down an imitator who's been running up debts on his tab.) When Javier stands up to the pugnacious celebrity, he wins Hemingway's respect, and the two of them spend the next few months on a moveable feast, drinking and fishing around Cuba.
This may be the most endearing rehabilitation Hemingway has received in our time. Yes, he's still a shameless womanizer, carousing even while Pauline, his second wife, is pregnant, and drinking himself into a stupor every night. But Estrada emphasizes the playful energy of the young writer. This isn't the depressed, pretentious Hemingway lecturing us about existential conflict in the arena of life and all that bull. This Hemingway is handsome, enthusiastic and horny. Drawing from Hemingway's unpublished letters and journals from the 1930s, Estrada shows a man who just wants to go fishing with his buddies, but pouts if he doesn't catch the biggest marlin. He wants to impress his friends by drinking more daiquiris than they can. He loves to be with his wife and his kids -- and a floozy from the dance hall.
The book's best sections involve Hemingway's flirtatious friendship with another character drawn from real life, Jane Mason, who lives on a lavish estate in Havana with her inattentive husband. Widely considered the model for Margot in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Jane comes across in Estrada's novel as alluring, witty and sophisticated -- which apparently she was, even when she tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window. More than just the historical and biographic details, Estrada gets the tone just right: the brittle gaiety and arch cynicism that shield these people, for a time, from the gnawing unhappiness of their lives.
Welcome to Havana, Señor Hemingway depicts that willful avoidance of unpleasantness as a national affliction. Estrada moves from bar to café to boat to clubhouse, revealing grim glimpses of political tension that everybody of privilege tries to ignore. But chilling, Hemingwayesque episodes of violence keep interrupting these desultory lives. Indeed, scenes of brutality between radical students and military police are so effectively drawn and begin to collect with such ominous power as the revolution breaks out that it's a crushing disappointment to see Estrada finally retreat into romantic comedy. That ill-considered choice blunts what could have been a truly stunning conclusion.
Perhaps the author knew better than to follow Papa to the bitter end. Nobody felt the burden of getting a conclusion just right more than Hemingway. In the final moments of Welcome to Havana , Estrada turns away from his larger-than-life hero to record the last gestures of one of the mad imitators who so vexed Hemingway in France and Cuba. It's a bit of black comedy that acknowledges the fatal effects of slavish imitation, but ultimately Estrada is his own man, and this entertaining novel is all his own, too. ·
Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.