Almost Hemingway

Carlos Santos, Rex Bowman

Description

Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway’s who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway’s in ways that compelled writers for publications as divergent as the Guardian and Field & Stream to compare them. Unlike Hemingway, however, Farson has been forgotten.

This high-flying and literate biography recovers Farson’s life in its multifaceted details, from his time as an arms dealer to Czarist Russia during World War I, to his firsthand reporting on Hitler and Mussolini, to his assignment in India, where he broke the news of Gandhi’s arrest by the British, to his excursion to Kenya a few years before the Mau Mau Uprising. Farson also found the time to publish an autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, which made him an international publishing sensation in 1936, as well as Going Fishing, one of the most enduring of all outdoors books.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Lost Generation whose art competed with a public image grander than reality, once confessed that while he had to rely on his imagination, Farson could simply draw from his own event-filled life. Almost Hemingway is the definitive window on that remarkable story.

Introduction: Remembering Negley Farson
1. Europe, 1925
2. The Old General
3. Fish Mad
4. England and War
5. Russia
6. Crash Landing in Egypt
7. Life in the Wilds
8. The Exotic Life of a Foreign Correspondent
9. Whaling Adventure
10. Among the Spaniards
11. Russia Again
12. Meeting Ghandi
13. Covering Hitler and the World
14. Writing a Best Seller
15. South American Bender
16. Taking the Cure
17. His Life in a Novel
18. Mired in African Mud and Acrimony
19. A Bomber's Moon
20. Writing a Masterpiece
21. Back to Russia
22. Back to Africa
23. Road's End
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780813946689
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Almost Hemingway
Almost Hemingway
The Adventures of Negley Farson, Foreign Correspondent
Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2021
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bowman, Rex, author. | Santos, Carlos, author.
Title: Al most Hemingway : the adventures of Negley Farson, foreign correspondent / Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021023500 (print) | LCCN 2021023501 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946672 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946689 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Farson, Negley, 1890–1960. | Women journalists—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN4874.F38657 B69 2021 (print) | LCC PN4874.F38657 (ebook) | DDC 070.92 [B]—dc22
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023500
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023501
Illustrations courtesy of the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Negley Farson Papers, Accession Number 07561, Box 8
Cover photo: Farson fly-fishing, location unknown. (University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Negley Farson Papers, Accession Number 07561, Box 8)
To adventurers everywhere
Contents
Introduction: Remembering Negley Farson
1. Europe, 1925
2. The Old General
3. Fish Mad
4. England and War
5. Russia
6. Crash Landing in Egypt
7. Life in the Wilds
8. The Exotic Life of a Foreign Correspondent
9. Whaling Adventure
10. Among the Spaniards
11. Russia Again
12. Meeting Gandhi
13. Covering Hitler and the World
14. Writing a Best Seller
15. South American Bender
16. Taking the Cure
17. His Life in a Novel
18. Mired in African Mud and Acrimony
19. A Bomber’s Moon
20. Writing a Masterpiece
21. Back to Russia
22. Back to Africa
23. Road’s End
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Illustration gallery follows Chapter 13
Almost Hemingway
Introduction
Remembering Negley Farson
P EOPLE FAMILIAR WITH THE sunny zenith of Negley Farson’s life could not have foreseen that he would be so widely forgotten today. He would have seemed, no doubt, to them, as memorable as Babe Ruth’s swagger or Dick Tracy’s jaw. “Almost everything happened to him that befalls a living man,” journalist Arthur Krock of the New York Times once remarked. 1
He was a man whose life invited wonderment. His son, Daniel, who inherited his father’s fondness for liquor, described him as a “smiling giant of a man” who “did the things that most men dream about.” 2 Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis called him “a grand man who found every hour exciting.” 3 Taking stock of Farson’s ceaseless rambling, one reviewer simply dubbed him a “mutinous existential renegade.” 4
The chain-smoking Farson was once known in saloons and taverns across the globe simply as Negley—in some remote valleys in the high Caucasus, he was known as “Negley Farson Chicago Daily News,” thanks to a native guide who mistook Farson’s employer for his full name. 5 Even Farson’s boyhood defied convention: he was raised by his grandfather, a former Civil War general never too busy tossing creditors off his porch to spend time bringing up his ward. From the very beginning Farson lived a life of adventure, and he later chronicled it in clear, exhilarating prose, much of it crafted by campfires, on riverbanks, atop mountains.
Once a champion collegiate athlete, Farson was in St. Petersburg, Russia, when the 1917 revolution broke out, working as an arms merchant and spending his evenings drinking with the young, infamous journalist John Reed. During World War I, Farson joined Britain’s Royal Flying Corps—feigning Canadian citizenship to enlist—and flew as a pilot over the Egyptian sands. His daredevil antics led to a plane crash in which he sustained injuries that would plague him for the rest of his life, though they did not blight his zeal for dangerous exploits. He lived on a ramshackle houseboat on a remote Canadian lake for several years, surviving on the salmon he caught and the ducks he shot. He sailed a small boat across the entire continent of Europe, navigating swirling rapids to cross borders bristling with bayonets as European statesmen prepared for the next war. He traveled on horseback across the Caucasus before Stalin could finish closing off Communist Russia to Westerners; he witnessed Gandhi’s arrest in Borivli, India; he met Hitler, who patted Farson’s blond-haired son on the head and called him a good Aryan boy. He was aboard the RMS Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic, when it crashed into another ship in New York Harbor.
In the late 1930s, he traveled across South America by car; when the roads became too rough or disappeared altogether, by canoe and zipline. Looking for a greater challenge, he crisscrossed Africa, hobnobbing with Pygmies, witnessing tribal scenes previously seen by only the most adventurous white men. He lay abed recuperating from malaria in Accra, on Africa’s Gold Coast, on the day that the great earthquake of 1939 destroyed much of the city. In an age when foreign travel was not as convenient or common as it is today, Farson astonished his readers by popping up in faraway places, occasionally in the custody of police officers. When World War II came, he was in London, watching as German bombs obliterated the neighborhoods around him. He then sailed across the submarine-laden waters of the North Sea to Murmansk in the hope of witnessing the Russian armies’ herculean battle against their Nazi enemies.
All the while, Farson struggled to cope with an injured leg for which he suffered through more than two dozen surgeries, some of them botched, the frustration of a nearly sexless marriage that he eased by seeking solace in a string of mistresses, and an addiction to liquor that he developed to deal with his physical pain and marital agony. Though his hardships were many, and great, his appetite for life proved greater. He lived each day as if it were a door that needed kicking in. To his mind, men who spent their time merely trying to get rich were pitiably dumb bastards.
By the time he had settled into his secluded home in Devon, England, Farson had earned a reputation as one of the United States’ greatest foreign correspondents, a world-famous trout bum, and a best-selling author of rumbustious adventure books. He had become one of the world’s most recognizable rovers, quite a distinction given Americans’ esteem for the talented pool of foreign correspondents, those plucky know-it-alls, who prowled the world’s capitals during the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of the foreign news bureau. In that troubled era, foreign news was the equivalent of today’s reality TV; the correspondents were the stars of the show. As British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once reminisced, “They were the Knights-errant of our time; rescuers of nations in distress, champions of the downtrodden and oppressed, who smote the offending dragons hip and thigh with breathless words rattled off on their typewriters.” 6 Or, as the New Yorker magazine lamented in 1956, foreign correspondents were “an interesting creature, who flourished most luxuriantly in the 1930s and [are] now almost extinct. The men of Farson’s breed—if such a congeries of eccentrics and prima donnas can be called a breed—were not so much serious as cynical.” 7 British correspondent Alexander Cockburn was equally nostalgic for a lost era when he bemoaned that “correspondence has somehow lost its glamour and its career appeal. Gone are the great days of a [William] Shirer or a Farson, when European correspondents were cocks of the walk, face-to-face with Fascism, or watching bombs fall from the roof of the Savoy.” 8
Farson’s physical strength, coupled with his striking good looks, set him apart from his colleagues, who likened him to a world-weary hero of a Lord Byron poem or the protagonist in an O. Henry story. 9 “He epitomized tough masculinity, and didn’t give a damn for anyone,” BBC journalist Cyril Watling noted. 10 Krock also admired Farson’s physical magnetism: “He was a college athlete who never lost the consciousness of his tall, strong body and its well-being, of the love for the sports of wave, stream and field.” 11
The similarities between Farson and Ernest Hemingway were too obvious for their contemporaries to ignore. They were both big-chested lovers of life, barroom drinkers, sailors, fishermen, big-game hunters, womanizers, writers of magnetic, muscular prose, Farson reveling in the real world, Hemingway inventing his own. Born in the same decade, they had life trajectories that were a series of parallels—never intersections, for the two men never met—that compelled others to constantly compare them. “Negley Farson was a reporter who lived an impossibly adventurous life,” wrote Stephen Bodio in A Sportsman’s Library. “As macho as Hemingway’s image, he roamed the world with typewriter, fly rod, fedora, booze, and cigarettes.” 12 “Negley Farson, the American foreign correspondent, writer and man of action, was in the years between the wars as famous a he-man as Ernest Hemingway,” wrote the British newspaper the Guardian. 13 British writer Colin Wilson actually admired him more than Hemingway: “Farson was the only man I have ever met who seemed cast in a bigger mould than other men. Unlike Hemingway, who tried hard to play the archetypal hero, and who, as a consequence, o