Getting a Zero

Cats in Finca Vigía. Ernest Hemingway Photographs Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Brooks is still in Cuba, or still using it as a dateline. Naturally his favorite spot on the tourist itinerary has been the farmhouse of Finca Vigía, a few miles outside of Havana, where Ernest Hemingway started making his main winter residence a little before his 40th birthday and his marriage (the third) to Martha Gellhorn, in 1939. Brooks's meditations at that melancholy spot are the subject of his new essay, "Getting to Zero", and it's pretty unnerving.

It takes the form of what could have been a sketch for a chapter on Hemingway in The Road to Character, starting with a quick description of Finca Vigía as the setting, then outlining the elements of the novelist's long decline, as human and writer, during the 20 years he lived there, with his many severe moral failings, and finally looking for that redeeming feature that you can use in your own struggle to become a nice person, with eulogy virtues, like St. Augustine or D.D. Eisenhower. As you work through it, though, you're drawn irrepressibly to another kind of reading. The first sentence—

Havana — Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba seems like such a healthy place. It is light, welcoming and beautifully situated.

—for example, immediately makes me think:

Cleveland Park—David Brooks's house in the D.C. area seemed like such a healthy place. It had vast spaces for entertaining.

And when I get to

Realms of Gold

Key West, 1946, Via Steve Newman.

"Are you familiar with the American author Ernest Hemingway?" Keats asked, lounging in front of the fire.

"Certainly," said Chapman. "Indeed I knew him personally toward the end of his life."

"Did you then? How was that?" Keats wondered.

"Well, it was in Key West, of course. I was tutoring the children of some friends of his, in music and rhetoric, and he often popped in of an afternoon on a visit, after he'd finished his day's writing, and would stop by in the schoolroom to cast a critical eye on the lessons, though in fact he was hardly critical. And he admired my taste in vintage clothing."

"He did?"

"Naturally. I was well acquainted with all the town's thrift shops, of which there are many, and I was pretty well dressed in those days, on practically no income. I possessed some extraordinary hats, for instance."

"Hemingway was interested in vintage clothing?" Keats raised his eyebrows a notch higher.

"Not especially. But he was concerned about luggage, you see. He was planning a trip to Idaho, for some mackinaw fishing, or lake trout, and was in despair about his suitcases, which were in a state of disrepair. But while remarkably generous in many respects, and a wealthy man, you understand, he was deeply frugal on certain subjects, and luggage was among these. He hated the thought of shelling out hundreds of dollars on a suitcase. So he asked me to take him around the shops to see if he could find something suitable on a second-hand basis."

Keats put another log on and stood up to stretch. "And did he?"

"Did he what?"

"Did he find something suitable?"

"Ah! Unfortunately not. I did my best, but in the end Papa got a brand-new bag."

Gettysburg addressed

It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg today, and by one of those amazing coincidences a book about the battle just dropped into David Brooks's Kindle. It's got tons of quotes from letters by the soldiers, so a column ought to virtually write itself.

Unfortunately Allen Guelzo's new Gettysburg: The Last Invasion turns out to be kind of negative. Some of the things it has to say about the soldiers are really not very nice. Much better to turn to James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, from 1998, which explains that the warriors were motivated by

“patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.” The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight. [jump]

Image from Petey and Petunia.

Insider Fret

From Bob the Angry Flower.

People are getting very Pastor Niemöller out here in the aether. Here's the Telegraph's tech blogger Mic Wright:

I’ll now immediately fall foul of Godwin’s Law – “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches” – but history offers too important a lesson not to make that connection. The punch-card powered computerised census of Germany enabled by IBM in 1933 and subsequent efforts thereafter made it far easier for the Nazi regime to identify Jews, Gypsies and others it deemed undesirable. [jump]