What Fun to Make Mockery of Hemingway ‘Masterpieces’

After a lapse of three years, the Imitation Hemingway Competition was held again the other night at Harry’s Bar in Century City. I was one of five judges, as I had been for the past several years.

The setting is appropriate since Harry’s Bar in Venice, Italy, is the setting of Ernest Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which some critics called the author’s parody of his own work. In the book the Colonel says, “You find everything on earth at Harry’s.”

My fellow judges were Barnaby Conrad; Bernice Kert, author of “The Hemingway Women”; Ray Bradbury, and Digby Diehl. As usual, we were asked to pick a winner and runner-up from the one-page entries of 10 finalists. Some were good and true, others were very bad Hemingway indeed.

Our winner was Ken Bash, a Malibu horticulturist and aspiring screenwriter. Bash just happened to be coming into the bar for a drink, so was present at the dinner and festivities.

His entry began: “We were drinking at the bar in Harry’s when it exploded. It was early morning and the sun was bright and painful and rising on the tall glass towers when the rocket exploded to announce the release of the bulls and we all rushed out to see the big, brave, mature and viciously horny bulls toss the television executives as they came up the escalators.

“Harry brought out light appetizers and the good champagne. I had the prosciutto which lay very fine and lean on the plate and the melon which was sweet and ripe and the flesh reminded you of a woman you had known. . . .”

There was, of course, a lot of wine and a woman or a “girl” in every entry, those being staples of Hemingway’s work.

Runner-up was William Roskey of Columbia, Md. His entry began: “The sun rose in the east that spring and it set in the west. By early April the villagers had noticed this and spoke of it in hushed tones among themselves. It was a sign, they said, that the fascists would be defeated by summer. . . . “

The villagers take this news to the chief of the guerrillas, but he rebukes them. They go home “in the cold hard rain. The rain was very wet and it fell down as a good rain should. Straight down from the angry pewter skies onto the land of brown mud and black rocks. The villagers never spoke of the sun rising in the east again.”

We gave an unprecedented honorable mention to a piece that Conrad had inserted among the entries, insisting it was an unpublished Hemingway story, complete with his handwritten corrections.

It began: “The day we drove back from Nancy to Paris after being interrogated by the Inspector General it was very cold and you knew snow was coming but it had not begun to sift yet and the road we came in on was the old highway to Verdun, iron fast and straight as death, or as people imagine that death is. Outside the Ritz I said goodby to the driver, who was very fast and good. He had been a motorcyclist and had been injured rather horribly. It was a matter of the genitals.”

I protested that if it was genuine Hemingway it was very bad Hemingway indeed; much worse, in fact, than some of the entries. The first sentence was much too long for Hemingway, for one thing, and the reference to the motorcyclist’s genital injury was too obviously a parody of Jake’s emasculating war injury in “The Sun Also Rises.”

I rather favored an entry by Lisa Franks of Springfield, Pa. It was a parody of “The Sun Also Rises,” especially the ending, in which the frustrated lovers, Brett and Jake, after having imbibed several bottles of rioja alta , are riding in a taxi through Madrid.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett says. “We could have had such a damned good time together.”

And Jake replies, “Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

It is a crime to parody that line, but I thought Franks’ was funny. Her entry was called “The Mumms Also Rises,” and concerns the drinking of champagne. Brett knocks at Ernest’s door, Mumms in hand. She says, “Oh, Ernest, we could have had such damned good wine together.” She raises the bottle to her lips, drinks, and says, “Isn’t it gritty to drink so?”

OK. Not terribly funny. But at least a try. Why she substituted Ernest for Jake I don’t know.

After the judging we had a five-course Italian dinner, with three kinds of wine. Diehl made an appropriate speech and read the winning entry, as is customary. The wine was good and cold and the meal was a movable feast--a phrase of Hemingway’s that I have never understood.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. . . .

Oh, heck. That’s Scott Fitzgerald, isn’t it?