Ongoing preparation for the To Have or Have Not encounter veers again thanks to Curnutt’s Glossary and Commentary. Historical figure Julius F. Stone, Jr., director of Key West Administration, makes a repeat appearance especially for resentment Hemingway felt over turning Key West into a tourist trap, though never denounced him by name in print as “always leery of exposing himself to a libel suit.” Among Stone’s projects: encouraged residents to volunteer hours to clean up the island and recommended “locals wear shorts to enhance the leisure atmosphere,” a suggestion offensive in 1930s Conch culture. Ultimately legal trouble over bad investments led Stone to a vacation estate in Cuba where he lost his property to Castro then expatriated to Australia.
Closer to home and more recent, Curnutt several times refers to a text by scholar Jani Scandura of Minnesota, the first reference about amputation: “Inevitably, Harry’s missing arm serves as a symbol for speculation about the meaning of loss, whether to a body or to a text.” Hemingway cut out much of part 4 including reference in the manuscript to a dismembered arm found in a shark.
But reader (again) digresses: How is it possible Scandura’s 2008 book has acquired to date only one review on Amazon, and that one without comment. Did the many lectures while in draft presented at a wide variety of conferences—“English Institute at Harvard University; the Modern Language Association conference; the American Studies Association conference; the Modernist Studies Association conference; the American Association of Geographers; and the British Society for Historical Geographers”—triumph in saturating her reading audience ahead of publication? Without counting, acknowledgements appear as hundreds of names, institutions, and special collections librarians. Boggles the mind that so much effort, perhaps ironically, now presents as ephemeral.
Her introduction describes the landfill in New York City where remains of the World Trade Center were brought and sorted as prelude to her project about “dumps and depression” and “about history and place and, even more so, about how Americans make place and are placed, and how they memorialize and memorialized their own history through place, making and remaking a past and its relationship to the present.”
Reflection on the material remains of 9/11:
“It became clearer at that point how much history has to do with death, grief, and the fantasies of mourning; how much history is itself a substitute for the ineffable, for that which exceeds discourse and cannot be articulated; and how dependent historical narrative is upon serendipity, materiality, melancholia.” —Jani Scandura, Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression
The print volume looks beautifully and readably designed (acknowledged by name and typesets), published by Duke University Press, and lists currently at about $15 including shipping—several listed as new—from Powells Books Chicago via Amazon.
Postscript 8 SEP 2024: Keynote speaker Curnutt in the Ernest Hemingway Seminar 2024 mentioned “leery of libel” was a Gingrich myth. During 14 days in June 1937 Hemingway chopped out a huge amount of the original draft.
Countdown: 14/308