A NH Writer's Life: Robert Wheeler Through Hemingway's Eyes

Windham NH

28 August, 2021

7:26 PM

Description

By BEVERLY STODDART, InDepth NH Second in a series: A NH Writer's Life Part One – Paris By Beverly Stoddart Can a book change a life? If you are Robert Wheeler, it most certainly can. And did. In 1986, Wheeler had a transformative moment in his life. He read Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published book, The Garden of Eden, sending him on a journey of discovery of all things Hemingway. In my interview with Robert, I ask if he considers himself an Ernest Hemingway authority. The notion puts him off. "No," he says, "I don't want ever to be seen as the authority. I'm not the authority. I think the more you know, the less you really do." He agrees that I can call him the go-to person on all things Ernest Hemingway. He has been given the honor of writing the foreword for the reissue of Hemingway's first breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises. It will publish in January 2022. Robert Wheeler is an author, photojournalist, lecturer, student of jiu-jitsu, and in his heart, a teacher. Whether it's teaching returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq or adults finally getting their chance at a college degree with night classes at Southern New Hampshire University, he loves teaching. He volunteered at the Strafford County Jail, where he taught hardened prisoners the beauty of prose. He coaches kids at a local jiu-jitsu academy where he, too, is a student. The love of teaching shines through him as he speaks about students he has encountered over the years. For indeed, you have to embody generosity and the joy of others to be a good teacher. "My introduction to Hemingway was a couple on a jetty in Southern France, fishing, and they just made love the night before. The Garden of Eden. I couldn't believe it. I slammed the book down." "I realized you could travel and learn other languages, romance, real love, different cultures. Everything exploded at that point." The journey took Wheeler to Paris to see how Hemingway transformed from a young married man in his twenties to become a writer. After Paris, he traveled to Spain and Cuba on this search for Hemingway. "I don't think you can completely write honestly about something unless you've had it. During that time of being in Paris, I wasn't sure what I was ever going to do with my life, only knowing I had gone there to write a book about Hemingway. So, I was alone in the dead of winter, where I woke up alone. I walked alone. I had lunch alone. I took photographs alone. I went to the museums alone and slept alone." "All of a sudden, the whole city started opening up, not through Hemingway's eyes, but Hadley's eyes. (Hemingway's first wife). The whole city changed for me. I could imagine what she was thinking. Hemingway could have destroyed the normal person by what he did to her. Instead, she loved him unconditionally and gave everything she possibly had and just loved Ernest and supported him so beautifully. His book The Sun Also Rises becomes famous, and goodbye – he gets out of that relationship and goes off into another one." "Hadley tumbles into that horrible little hotel on the Left Bank, where I bribed a cleaning person to get up into her room. I couldn't believe it when I sat there and saw the bars and remembered the quote, "the world is a jail, and we're going to break free from it together." She was standing there looking through bars, and she's looking down. That was odd. I go to Paris to write about Hemingway and see it through his first wife's eyes. The city presented itself in a different meaningful way. Hadley happened to me." From that experience came Robert Wheeler's first book, Hemingway's Paris: A Writer's City in Words and Images. The book is a journey through Paris as Hemingway saw it. As a skilled photojournalist, Wheeler takes us on the journey through pictures and words speaking to the reader; you too can walk this journey and see love and loss the way Ernest and Hadley did. "I love to share," he says. "Writing is so easy. We shroud it in all these rules and regulations. I think I'm a musician – I hear music in the cadence of a sentence." "I walked the walk. I went on the same bike ride I read about. I've been to a lot of the spots that moved me. I loved that he was a travel writer. You can go right back there and see what he saw. A lot of people send me photographs from around the world and say, I'm standing near where you were. Go walk by the river. It's unbelievable." "I get asked how do you get such timeless photographs? How did you delete all the cars? I didn't delete anything. It just all lined up. At the Louvre Museum, everybody looks in. I said I'm only going to look out the windows. You should see the views." "I love the lady who wrote the foreword for my book—Jenny Phillips, who is Max Perkins' granddaughter. Max Perkins discovered Hemingway. When Jenny got on board, I knew I had something. She's been on Oprah and did the documentary series that won all these awards, The Dhamma Brothers, where the film shows how spirituality is brought to inmates. (Phillips' documentary was based on the bringing of an ancient meditation program to the inmates at Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Alabama.) So, when she compared the grittiness of the photos to what Perkins saw in Hemingway's writing, I knew I had it." "I knew I had it when Peter Riva became my literary agent. He met Hemingway when he was a young guy. His grandmother was Marlene Dietrich. He said you've captured the essence. Most books are just not written this way. Your voice was different. There was something more there." "Hemingway reinvented the way stories could be told. No longer was it the all-knowing author coming to the piece. It was more about feel. Like when you hear a piece of music and break down in tears, there are no words. There are just tears—the simplicity of his sentences. Structures, to me, are not simplistic. But you are using the right word at the right time and then repeating the right word at the right time. And then you understand his iceberg theory even more." I ask Robert to explain Hemingway's iceberg theory. "Have you ever met somebody, and you meet them, and in like five minutes, you feel like you've known them forever. You just connect. It's that feeling you received in such a short period of time that is the seven-eighths of the iceberg. That feeling when you meet and hear someone, and you just fall in love. I love this person. The music you hear that just reduces you to tears. Something is going on. It's almost like that musical score is just the tip of the iceberg, and there's something way more going on with that person. It could be a piece of art, anything. The iceberg theory to me is when it comes to writing. It's the idea of trying to give just enough to elicit emotion. In the day, Dickens will tell you how you should feel about this and the other thing and this person he is introducing, and he'll let you know. He'll tell you exactly what his character looks like. Think about Brett Ashley in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I think there are only three short, tiny descriptions of her. One is that her hair is cut short like a crow's wing. One is that she is in a sweater, and he uses the metaphor she's like the hull of a ship—a guy metaphor. I forgot the other one. Everybody loves this woman. I'm still in love with Brett Ashley. Guys that I meet, and we talk, and they ask, 'who's your Brett Ashley? And then I'll describe mine. You're allowed that freedom to describe your own. You give enough, and the other person brings their experience to it and fills in the rest. That takes a lot of pulling back the reins. People just want to tell you or show you, but it's something else to make you feel. That's where I like to be. Just the tip of the iceberg shows. It's the strength of the iceberg that's the seven-eighths. So, when Hemingway writes in Big Two-Hearted River, at one point, he just writes, "The river was there." "What he doesn't tell you, but you can feel is that when Nick sees that river, it is his salvation. He's been through WWI and death, and he's traumatized. He's got PTSD before they even had a word for PTSD. He needs to get to that river to get out of the way of society and get back home where everything wants you to be normal, and you're not normal anymore. Hemingway could have written all that. He didn't. The river was there. That takes a relationship. When you write, it's a relationship with the reader. It's a relationship you're entering into, and everybody is going to be different." You wrote in Hemingway's Paris epilogue: "I have given authentic & original testimony to the artistic triumph & personal tragedy of Ernest Hemingway's City of Light." "I've been with the guy since 1986, and I've practically been every place he's been. I've been to all the scholarly things. I belong to the JFK Library. I've spoken to all the Hemingway Societies. You can feel him in Paris." Authentic and original testimony. Robert Wheeler gives good testimony, his story of how he read a book, and through his eyes, we see Ernest Hemingway, Hadley, and, perhaps, ourselves. This story was originally published by InDepth NH.