ALMOST HEMINGWAY

Portrait of a swashbuckler.

Negley Farson (1890-1960) was a daring foreign correspondent, ardent fisherman, and bestselling author of novels, adventure stories, and memoirs, notably a paean to fishing. “If any of Farson’s books can be said to contain incandescent prose,” write journalists Bowman and Santos, “Going Fishing is the one.” While Farson’s professional life flourished, his personal life was volatile: He was a womanizer, drank to oblivion, and was beset by self-hatred—qualities, along with his devotion to writing, that invite comparison with his more famous compatriot, Ernest Hemingway. Despite leg injuries that required repeated surgeries, bouts of malaria, alcoholism, and marital woes, Farson “lived each day as if it were a door that needed kicking in.” “Beneath the tilted brim of his fedora,” the authors write admiringly, “he squinted at life through a lazy whirl of cigarette smoke,” charming men, seducing women, “using his job as a globe-roving reporter to carry out his boyhood wish to travel the world and write.” Although Farson “managed to hide the deepest parts of himself,” the authors draw on his memoirs, letters, and reportage to create a lively chronicle of his peripatetic adventures, which involved working in Russia for a shady arms merchant in 1915; becoming a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps; quitting his job as a Mack truck salesman to sail across Europe, with his wife, in 1925; traveling by mule through Spain; reporting from Turkey, London, and Rome; covering the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam; whale hunting off the Shetlands; interviewing Gandhi (and witnessing his arrest) in 1930; meeting Hitler and Roosevelt. Across the course of his many adventures, he tried several times to stop drinking. After treatment at a sanatorium in Germany, he stayed on the wagon through most of a trip through Africa in 1938, but his resolve didn’t last. Several more stays in asylums preceded his “total surrender to booze” before his death.

A brisk tale of an eventful life.