SUSEGANA (TREVISO) «He wanted to be buried in Bassano del Grappa where some of his friends from the American Red Cross are buried, next to the river. He was Italian. Seventy years ago they didn’t give the Nobel Prize to an American but to an Italian created by fire.” One of the most touching moments of the evening desired by Martino Zanetti President of the Hausbrandt Group with John Hemingwaygrandson of the most famous Ernest. A meeting conducted with grace and skill by Valentina Gasparet of Pordenonelegge last Thursday in the splendid Col Sandago estate, in Collalto.
THE WOUNDING
A journey that touched places and books. First of all the Veneto, with the serious injury suffered at a very young age in Fossalta di Piave. «The major next to him died instantly, it was July 8, 1918 – said John. He was driving an American Red Cross ambulance. He risked bleeding to death due to the hundreds of splinters that hit his legs. He was only 19 years old and I believe that pain and shock never left him. Uncle Lester never forgot the scars he saw on Ernest’s legs while they were out fishing off Key West. I suspect that he suffered from post-traumatic stress and that the psychic fragilities that were already circulating in our family found fertile ground: my father was bipolar, my mother was schizophrenic, my great-grandfather and uncle Lester committed suicide.” A Great War that he recounted in the memorable pages of “Farewell to Arms” and of “Across the river and into the trees”of which Gasparet read this short passage: “The colonel raised his eyes to look at the play of light on the ceiling, they were partly reflected by the canal, they made strange but constant movements, changeable as the current of a freshwater stream changes and stays there, continuing to change under the movements of the sun”. A perfect way to introduce the theme of writing and the literary vocation of John, author among others of “A Strange Tribe – Family Memoirs” and the noir “Ron Echeverrìa: a Miami story”. “I realized that I liked writing when I was 13, while I was reading “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. I remember that one day my uncle Lester came up behind me and said with his Chicago accent that my grandfather had written that book for people like me. I couldn’t imagine greater support and at the same time delicate on the part of an adult towards a teenager. Ernest was a genius and a poet of fiction, he had an obsession with perfection of the written page, of the search for truth. Every sentence had to be rigorous, clean, immediate, clear, with every word in the right place and every expression corresponding and coherent to the story told. Italian at heart, he looked for beauty, he couldn’t make a bad impression. Once, in 1919, he wrote to his friend James Gamble: “I have so much nostalgia for Italy that when I write about it, that special something comes out that you can only put into love letters”. «And he left us many love letters» underlined Valentina as she led the audience by the hand to Lignano Sabbiadoro, where John will arrive today for the fortieth edition of the award named after his grandfather who went there on 15 April 1954. In company of his wife on board the Kechler family’s Lancia Aurelia. They stopped in Lignano Pineta and upon reaching the beach Hemingway, fascinated by the characteristic reed thickets, wild pine forests and islets, pronounced the famous phrase “But this is Florida, or rather it is the Florida d’Italia!”for a certain resemblance to the panorama of the Everglades. When asked which book to start reading Hemingway with, John answered without hesitation. “With “The Forty-nine Stories””, but perhaps “The Old Man and the Sea” could be an equally valid start. Then, off the record, he went on a limb about current events.
NEWS
«There’s no doubt I will vote for Trump, there wasn’t with him no conflictthese democrats are warmongers and can’t stop the Mexicans who invade us: 30 million have now passed through the border. A genocide is taking place in Gaza, a war unleashed by Netanyahu to avoid losing power. And as far as Putin is concerned, I say to Europe, Ukraine and the United States: You must not joke with the bear otherwise it will eat you.”
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