“Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway”

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg, now living in Miami and Hendaye, France, is obsessed with unraveling a mystery about Ernest Hemingway.

“Hemingway went through four wives,” he writes, “alienated his three sons, and betrayed more friends than you can count on two hands. The winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature saw the killing of bulls at the corridas in Spain; he gaffed marlin and bluefin tuna off the coasts of Havana and Key West, and he slayed big-game animals in Africa and grizzly bears in Montana. He was self-absorbed, and narcissistic. He told great yarns in the bars of Paris, Pamplona and Havana.”

Hemingway was driven to be seen as a hero’s hero whose own exploits fed his novels. The truth is more complicated. As a young man, Hemingway, working for the Red Cross, was wounded when a mortar shell exploded in a frontline trench during World War I; his fellow soldier, Fedele Temperini, died next to him. 

Hemingway made much of his own (relatively minor) wounds and concocted a story of how he tried to save Temperini, when in reality Temperini, the true hero, shielded Hemingway from the blast. 

In “Wrestling with Demons: In Search of the Real Ernest Hemingway” (publication information available on DeBerg’s website, curtdeberg.com) the author identifies five “demons” that shaped Hemingway: “his parents’ disapproval, remorse, chronic pain, anguish, and a deep-seated sense of rivalry with other writers and war combatants.” Fear of being found a fake pushed him on.

The book is unique. Each section begins with a letter to Hemingway as DeBerg explores Hemingway’s favorite haunts; that’s followed by a fictional conversation with MDH (“modern day Hemingway”), a biographical essay and finally a warts-and-all memoir in which DeBerg draws out similarities with Hemingway (DeBerg survived a debilitating light plane crash; Hemingway survived two).

This is Hemingway: “Safaris, deep-sea fishing, booze, Europe, women, sex, adultery, plane crashes, betrayals, injuries, illnesses and, finally, suicide.” For DeBerg, “This book has allowed me to address, and even exorcise, some of my own demons as I refer to a famous, larger-than-life man who is, in a very personal way, my kindred spirit.”

"Ernest Hemingway And Tony Oliva: A Tale Of How The Great Writer Helped The Great Ballplayer"

Curt DeBerg, originally from Rock Rapids, Iowa, retired from Chico State as a business professor in 2020 and moved to Hendaye, France. Smitten with the travels and travails of Ernest Hemingway (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954), he published "Traveling The World With Hemingway." But DeBerg is also a lifelong fan of the Minnesota Twins, a totally unrelated preoccupation, right? Maybe not.

Let's go back to the late 1950s, and zoom in on Cuba. A man named Joe Cambria (known as "Papa Joe") scouted for the Washington Senators there "and he liked to have a drink or two in Havana's Floridita bar" (no stranger to Hemingway). In 1961 the Senators moved from Washington and became the Minnesota Twins.

Papa Joe had his eye on a young slugger named Pedro and wanted the Twins to take him on. The trouble was that the young man wasn't so young; in 1960 he would be 22, too old for Twins owner Calvin Griffith to consider. 

Around the same time Hemingway (known of course as "Papa Hemingway"), a baseball fan himself, "was sixty years old and in failing health. He and his fourth wife, Mary, were forced to leave their bucolic estate in Havana. For nearly twenty-two years, the Hemingways had made Cuba their home base."

Could Papa Hemingway have met Papa Joe? DeBerg imagines it happening in his short tale, "Ernest Hemingway And Tony Oliva: A Tale Of How The Great Writer Helped The Great Ballplayer" by Curtis L. DeBerg ($9.95 in paper, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle). For Pedro was Tony Pedro Oliva, inducted on July 24, 2022 into baseball's Hall of Fame.

DeBerg imagines that with Papa Hemingway's help, Pedro was able to use his younger brother Antonio's "birth certificate to fabricate his age in order to obtain a travel visa to the United States." So Pedro became "Tony" Oliva, three years younger than he really was, signing with the Twins as a nineteen-year-old.

Did any of that really happen? Even Tony Oliva's biographer doesn't know for sure. DeBerg's earnest yarn invites readers to think that it could have.