January 21, 2014 - Michael Chabon & Mariel Hemingway

EPISODE NUMBER: 10050 (January 21, 2014)
GUEST: Michael Chabon | Mariel Hemingway
SEGMENTS: cOlbert’s Book Club - Ernest Hemingway | Better Know a Hemingway | Michael Chabon & “A Farewell to Arms” | Mariel Hemingway on Ernest Hemingway | Sign Off - cOlbert’s Book Club - Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”
SUIT REPORT: Rugged Safari Outfit | Black Military Boots | Neckerchief | Hunting Riffle
VIDEOS: Tuesday, January 20, 2014

Tonight’s third installment of cOlbert Book Club was a joy to watch and to blog about. I am a big fan of the works of Ernest Hemingway. Yes, I was “forced” to read A Farewell to Arms in high school, but I truly loved it. I’ve read it again a couple of times, most recently in the past few days since I heard it would be the subject of tonight’s book club. I fell in love with it all over again. I am not a literary genius by any means, but I enjoy getting lost in Hemingway’s worlds. Friends of mine have been to Hemingway’s house in Key West, FL and told me about the six-toed cats that roam the grounds. They are descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s original cat, Snowball, who had six toes on his paws! I hope you enjoyed tonight’s episode and, like Stephen, drank sangria, whiskey and chardonnay. Which we all know is a perfect combination! Enjoy this Episode Guide, Hubsters.

cOlbert’s Book Club - Ernest Hemingway

In the opening credits, Stephen jumps off of the phrase “BOOK ‘EM STEPH-O”

“Stephen Colbert presents the cOlbert Book Club. Tonight’s selection: ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway.”

• Tonight is a special night. A night that is cold. And dark. And hard. And filled with regret. A night that we discuss a writer named Ernest Hemingway. Now sit down. And be quiet.
• I’m surrounded by dead animals: a wild boar, elephant tusks, a bear skin rug, a marlin and an authentic leopard throw from Deepest, Darkest Pottery Barn.

cOlbert’s Book Club - Better Know a Hemingway

• For the first six years of his life, Hemingway’s mother dressed him as a girl, even calling him Ernestine. Which he in no way spent the rest of his life compensating for.

• At age eighteen, he volunteered for World War I as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was wounded by mortar fire, but still carried an Italian soldier to safety, for which he received The Italian Silver Medal of Bravery and more importantly, unlimited bread sticks [shows graphic of Olive Garden bread sticks].
• After the war, Hemingway joined a group of literary ex-patriots in Paris, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Owen Wilson. (Great Midnight In Paris reference!)
• In 1926, Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, based in part on his experiences of running with the bulls. It is considered his greatest work, partly for his portrait of The Lost Generation, but mostly because he somehow managed to type it while fleeing bulls.

• Three years later, he finished tonight’s book, A Farewell to Arms. Which addresses the philosophical question: If you’re saying farewell to your arms, what do you use to wave goodbye?

cOlbert’s Book Club - Michael Chabon & “A Farewell to Arms”

Stephen: You’re an enormous fan of Hemingway. True?
Michael: Yes. Lifelong.
Stephen: Why do you think Hemingway is a great American Master? Why are kids forced to read this in school?
Michael: Of all the books you might get forced to read in school this is one of the ones that is least painful to have to read. I think the thing about Hemingway that just stays with me and I think that has stayed with all of us over the years is the writing itself - is the Hemingway style you talked about.
Stephen: So spare.
Michael: Sparing use of adjectives.
Stephen: If he had actually been paid by the word, he would have starved to death.
Michael: That’s the thing. He learned how to do it by working as a journalist. And his big innovation. The thing is, if you pick up a book of early Hemingway - something from the 1920s - it reads absolutely as something fresh that might have been written yesterday. The writing is so lean.

Stephen: For a manly man how come there’s not so much of the sexy time?
Michael: Speaking as a manly man … (Michael and audience laugh) For the time he was writing in, he did push some boundaries in terms of what was acceptable in a work of fiction in terms of taboos, but they were still fairly strong and he had to edit out a lot of the language. I think he used more four letter words and so on in the original drafts and a lot of that was taken out.
Stephen: If you want to write something that is so emotionally spare, why do a novel? Why not write manuals for Ikea furniture? You know, put peg B in slot A. Which is probably sexier than some of the stuff that he wrote in here.

Stephen: Let’s talk about the book itself. He survives the war, goes off with Catherine; she dies in childbirth. Spoiler alert. It spoils your mood.
Michael: It’s a funny book in a way.
Stephen: Hilarious!

Stephen: Now I read that Old Man and the Sea. I like that one, cause that’s super short. I did a book report on it in 6th grade. I’ll never forget it.
Michael: How’d you do?
Stephen: I got an A. I don’t want to brag. In that book there’s an old man and there’s the sea. Is Fredrick the old man in this book and is Catherine - her name begins with a C - is she the sea? Is there any parallels or commonality between those two stories? Or is she the marlin?
Michael: That’s hard to make a connection between those two books.
Stephen: I did it. I just did it. I did it twice. I should have been the guest on this show.

cOlbert’s Book Club - Mariel Hemingway on Ernest Hemingway

• Tonight is all about Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose books have been turned into at least 15 feature films, including Islands in the Stream, The Killers and my favorite, Ernest Goes to Camp.
• Hemingway was a badass, even about the act of writing. Famously saying:

• So poignant. But calls to mind the quote from Hemingway’s cleaning lady, “Dear God! What the hell happened in here?!”

Stephen: You’ve actually done a documentary about what some may call escaping the Hemingway curse. What do you think that is?
Mariel: I don’t think there actually is a curse. I think there is the myth. I think there is a misconception of what Hemingway is supposed to be. It’s kind of like how you’re dressed and how you’re behaving the entire night. It’s really what people’s perception of Hemingway is.
Stephen: But not everybody nails it like this.
Mariel: You did nail it. You did get it right. But the idea that it’s about like being a misogynist and being “I’m gonna kill everything” - I really think that he really understood love stories and I really think that he understood the communication between men and women or relationships. Even though it was a story about war I really feel that his understanding of women and the subtleties of life, not just the machismo and kind of big things.

Stephen: To impress the ladies after reading Hemingway - those of us who are fans of his - feel like we have to go to the frozen fish aisle and wrestle the Gorton’s Fisherman fish sticks and just PUNCH IT before we put it in the microwave.
Mariel: There is that!

Mariel: I read A Moveable Feast while we were in Paris. A Moveable Feast is about my grandfather going through Paris when he was married to my grandmother and he had my father who was mentioned in the book and his name is Bumby in the book.
Stephen: So, is that just like reading a family diary to you or does it feel like a book?
Mariel: Oh, no. It definitely feels like a book. I wasn’t alive when he was alive. But there’s definitely something about it that was special. I mean, to have your father tell you stories about Café Lipp and the different places that he actually grew up in and seeing Cézannes in the Louvre is a pretty powerful way to hear about it.

Stephen: For such a great American writer - some would say he’s the greatest American writer of the 20th century - why did he write so much about other countries? Isn’t there something in America to inspire an American writer? He doesn’t need Paris. We have Epcot. Does that offend you as much as it offends me?
Mariel: No, but you have to understand. You saw how his mother dressed him for so long. He wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sign Off - cOlbert’s Book Club - Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”

• Folks, that concludes our cOlbert Book Club on Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I hope you learned a lot, cause I know I did. For instance, Italy is a country in Europe. I always thought it was a type of food.

What are your thoughts on tonight’s episode? Have you read A Farewell to Arms? Are you a fan of Ernest Hemingway? We invite you to share your opinions with us in the comment section below.