SITTING IN HEMINGWAY'S CHAIR

A biography focuses on Ernest Hemingway’s life and legacy.

O’Kon first became acquainted with Hemingway as a 6-year-old boy in 1943 when he saw the film adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was from then on “smitten” with the literary icon. During the next several decades, O’Kon not only read every published work of Hemingway’s, but also traveled the world, retracing his steps, in particular “the bars he frequented.” And while some of the furniture in Hemingway’s favorite “haunts” may have been replaced, the author sat in “Papa’s” barroom chairs in the very waterholes the novelist himself frequented in Havana, Key West, Madrid, Pamplona, and Paris. As the author of four history books and an expert on Mayan civilization as an archaeologist-engineer, O’Kon credits his own life of globe-trotting adventures directly to Hemingway’s influence. More than a biography of an acclaimed novelist, this is also the account of a man who has dedicated his life to tracking not just Hemingway’s remarkable journey, but also his vibrant, masculine raison d’être. Indeed, as O’Kon recounts in one of the book’s most revealing chapters, he had an unexpected run-in with Hemingway in 1955 as a teenager visiting Havana, where the 56-year-old writer, using the coy pseudonym “Hemingstein,” challenged him to a boxing match.

Much of O’Kon’s narrative exploring Hemingway’s life covers well-worn terrain, from his exploits in the Spanish Civil War and clandestine activities during World War II to his distinctive staccato writing style and thematic literary obsession with life and death. But the final chapters challenge previous accounts of the Nobel laureate’s infamous death. Detailing myriad head injuries Hemingway sustained during his life—including from automobile accidents, falls, boxing bouts, and fistfights—O’Kon contends that the literary legend suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Comparing Hemingway’s condition to that of football players diagnosed with CTE in recent years, the book makes a compelling case, though it perhaps oversells its conclusion as the definitive, “accurately assessed…cause of his death.” Assured of its own grasp of Hemingway’s life, the biography claims to be “truer than the others.” As confident as this declaration may be, the evidence appears to be the author’s multidecade retracing of the luminary’s steps and sitting “in Hemingway’s chairs.” Unfortunately, while the work includes a bibliography of sources consulted, it does not contain a single citation and lacks the archival research characteristic of more scholarly biographies. In addition, O’Kon is dismissive of academics, who, he claims, fail to adequately appreciate the novelist and who struggle to “put an intellectual spin on Hemingway’s writings.” The volume’s dearth of citations and archival inquiry may be off-putting to readers skeptical of O’Kon’s self-assessed, unrivaled “personal knowledge of the author.” Yet while billing itself as a biography, the book is perhaps more accurately a memoir—a reflection on how Hemingway’s actions and legacy affected the life of O’Kon, whose own escapades are covered in ample detail. This is as much a love story of an author who could never escape the magnetic pull of Hemingway’s “writings, his adventures, and his joie de vivre.” This approach may be too fawning for some readers, particularly those looking for a traditional biography.

A vivid, if flawed, account that’s enriched by the biographer’s personal connections to Hemingway.