A small miracle that sometimes happens: you come across the book you wanted to read. Even if you didn’t know it. You can discover it from the theme, the style, the atmosphere or the power that that book evokes, but in the case of Sognava i leoni (HarperCollins) by Matteo Nucci all options are valid. It was not easy to reread Hemingway’s life and work by combining devotion and critical sense, nor to deal with the rejection that accompanies his figure in these ‘correct times’, while at the same time using Greek literature and philosophy to explain the meaning of his job. Nucci infused passion into his reconstruction/rereading of Pope Ernest’s legacy and courage as an author in interweaving it with quotes, accepting the inevitable comparison with a giant. We asked him what strengths he drew on.
Let’s start from the beginning: how was it born and what does ‘He dreamed of lions’ represent?
Hemingway was the most influential writer of the twentieth century, but his myth ended up overshadowing him. The fisherman of the famous photographs prevailed over the man who stood in front of the page to create sentences of perfect simplicity. I wanted to talk about the writer, therefore, who is the man, beyond the magazine stereotypes.
The book analyzes Hemingway’s entire production, in light of the changes that occurred in his life, interspersing it with an exegesis of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’: why this choice?
‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is the last book published during his life and a point of arrival in which all of Hemingway’s philosophical research – so to speak – is condensed. He wrote it quickly, but he had been clear about the story for fifteen years. And in fact it had taken him a lifetime to achieve that profoundly complex simplicity. So I used the book as the pearl in which a long, hard and much more painful journey than one is used to thinking shines.
Grace under pressure and pietas: what is the logic of the correlation you propose with Homer?
Hemingway shares the style with the Homeric poems. Of course it is an unconscious conquest, but it often happens that Homer has always been in our veins, without even knowing it. Here, however, the contents also shine. The heroism that Hemingway recounts is the same as that of Homer: men who make mistakes, lose, die, and who however come to terms with themselves, with their own fragility and their own finiteness and for this reason, no other reason, they are heroes.
Hemingway publicly shared his ideas on writing in hybrid texts, such as ‘Death in the Afternoon’ and ‘Green Hills of Africa’: what is left today of principles such as those of truth, identification and omission?
There’s a lot left. In writing schools, certain Hemingwayan laws are repeated like a mantra and no one avoids returning to the most famous questions, such as the “iceberg theory”. It’s a shame that the profound meaning is never grasped and we end up making empty rules out of it. Of course it is up to the school goers to make them live. Which is very rare because generally those who really want to write don’t go to school. Hemingway wrote to heal himself, to live. Those who have the same need today can find decisive indications in those books.
In the book he also explores the writer’s relationship with nature. Why was it so important?
We are used to thinking of Hemingway as one of those Anglo-Saxon Protestants inclined to subjugate and conquer nature, a dimension external to the human being and over which the human must prevail. It is not so. And not only because we are not dealing with a Protestant, given that his education was predominantly Catholic. Hemingway grew up in nature and his story is the story of an immersion. Again it is ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ that shows us this attitude exemplary. The old man kills the fish but is his friend, he talks to him, he is united with him as with all mortal beings. The old man is immersed in mortal nature and the sea in which he lives loves him even when it can bring him death, he calls it using the feminine and not the masculine, la mar, not el mar as young people who want to dominate it do, the sea. The old man is immersed in the cycle of births and deaths. He is the perfect paradigm of the Hemingway hero.
The theme of failure as a condition of human finiteness, the struggle between death and writing, the bullfighter’s game: is Hemingway’s desperation modern?
For those like me who love the ancients, antiquity and modernity do not exist. There is a metahistorical dimension in which humanity shines outside of eras and traditions. Hemingway is not modern. He is eternal.
Why did he use Plato to explain the meaning of Hemingway’s work?
Hemingway’s writing is based on the omission of the main fact and on silence. This silence in the first part of Hemingway’s production, up to ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, is a technical silence, or rather an expedient which serves – according to the iceberg theory – to give real strength to what is omitted. But the closer Hemingway gets to the ultimate meaning, touching on the absolute and being, the more he understands that certain things cannot and must not be said. Just as Plato indicated. It is the law that anyone who deals with the highest truths must follow. What cannot be spoken about must be kept silent. This is Wittgenstein. The outcome of this discovery is a certain form of mysticism.
Is ‘He Dreamed of Lions’ a literary biography or a book about writing?
It is a book in which we chase a man who lived to write and wrote to live. And that he struggled with death and mainly wrote about death. Now, those who fight death deal with love and in fact Hemingway’s research revolves around absolute love. So I don’t know how this book should be defined, but it is certainly a book about love. A book dominated by my love for Hemingway and for his writing. It is a book that contains all my research on the absolute love necessary to fight death.