Book Review
If Hemingway Had Written a Racing Novel

By Patricia Lee Yongue, Assistant Professor of English, University of Houston

		Available from VelocePress, $18.95 plus shipping. To order [click here]

If Hemingway Had Written a Racing Novel: The Best of Motor Racing Fiction: 1950-2000, Reno, Nevada: VelocePress, 2004, 197 pp. ISBN 1-58850-048-9, $18.95.

VeloceToday has already dipped into the often strange world of racing fiction by reviewing the works of Burt Levy. Recently, Richard Nisley, who also contributes non fiction automotive work to many of our favorite magazines such as "Vintage Racecar", edited a selection of the best racing fiction. Enter Patricia Lee Yongue, Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston, who is both a serious car enthusiast and a student of the Ernest Hemingway legend, i.e., the perfect person to review Nisley's book.

Richard Nisley’s enticing proposal responds to Ernest Hemingway's celebrated celebration of the true bullfighter as the exemplar of "grace under pressure." Nisley likewise responds to the widespread belief that Hemingway was the originator of the famous dictum "There are only three true sports; bullfighting, mountain climbing and motor racing. All the rest are mere child's play." Sad to say, Hemingway claimed no such stature for auto racing--or for mountain climbing. Both high-risk disciplines were outside his provenance. And he would never have claimed a podium finish for bullfighting. In "Death in the Afternoon" (1932), Hemingway explains that bullfighting is not a sport, but a cultural rite, a dramatic "tragedy."

Nonetheless, the American imagination has willed bullfighting a sport and Hemingway the apologist especially for dangerous sport. "If Hemingway Had Written a Racing Novel" thus also constitutes racing aficionado and novelist Nisley's query why Hemingway, "champion of all things male," ignored the race car driver, easily the equivalent of the bullfighter and perhaps a more representative heroic model. Bypassing auto racing altogether was tantamount to scorning it as humbug.

Ernest Hemingway stands beside his Lancia B10 sedan while on a trip through Europe in 1954.

In interwar Europe, where Hemingway was traveling, writing fiction, and working as a journalist, racing was brilliant and enormously popular. World War I had stimulated not only new race car technology and design but also nationalism and the hunger in men for dangerous physical activity. Super-charging and eight-cylinder engines dramatically increased horsepower and what Robert Daley calls "the velocity of death." Spectators thronged and race car drivers became national heroes. Moreover, Grand Prix racing became an international rather than an exclusively French event. Racing, in other words, seemed a Hemingway novel waiting to happen!

But if Hemingway himself remained a Scrooge about auto racing, many racing novels and stories resurrect the spirit--sometimes the specter--of what should have been. Nisley's collection offers an excellent sampling of not just the genres encompassed by racing fiction but probably the best racing fiction produced during the past fifty years. Five of the authors--Charles Beaumont, John Bentley, poet Dan Gerber, William F. Nolan, and Hans Reusch--have racing experience. The other eleven authors are seasoned, knowledgeable motorsports writers who have hung out at races, with racers, with mechanics and crews. Sylvia Wilkinson, the only female writer represented ("On the 7th Day God Created the Chevrolet", 1993), did timing and scoring for Bobby Rahal. All the authors are aficionados.

While none of the authors, thankfully, write like Hemingway, because Hemingway vilified imitation as foolish and unmanly, their style approximates the turns and straights and violence of the sport. Talent, skill, technical expertise as well as seat of the pants sense, finesse, desire, lust, love of the road as well as the race, fierce pride, fraternity as well as competition, self-reliance as well as teamwork, cunning, immersion in physicality are all recreated with Hemingway-like directness.

This anthology is a venue both for starting and returning to racing fiction. Stock car racing, sports car road racing, Le Mans, Mille Miglia, and Grand Prix/Formula 1 are represented. Indy racing is absent. In terms of quality, the three fine short stories--Charles Beaumont's "A Death in the Country" (1957), William F. Nolan's "The Ragged Edge" (1957), and Ken W. Purdy's "Change of Plan" (1952)--are very much à la Hemingway. The chapters from the thirteen novels, so well-selected as to approximate short stories, may leave readers a little frustrated, but ready to implore favoritebookstore.com or the local library for the rest of the story, in case they do not already know it.

Ironically, the alphabetically arranged fiction begins where Hemingway left off, in The "Old Man and the Sea"(1952), with the problematic struggle of an aging champion to retrieve victory and to maintain his courage and dignity, to be "destroyed but not defeated." Beaumont's stunning "A Death in the Country" (1957) reconstructs experienced stock car racer's Buck Larsen’s on- and off-track encounters with Tommy Linden, the confident, talented upstart he himself once was. But Larsen's main event is a Hemingway fight to "keep his car in control."

Although, as Nisley observes, Ken W. Purdy’s story of another veteran race car driver, "Change of Plan," has been often anthol-ogized, the story belongs in the new collection as a classic and as a tribute to Purdy, surely a father of modern motorsports writing. It is Purdy, after all, who in The New Matadors (1965) attributes to Count Helmut Ovden (via Stephanie Marshall) the declaration so often attributed to Hemingway.

Purdy's Tazo Nuvolari character, fifty-one year old Pietro Lonetti, determines to win his final race, the post-World War II "Grand Prix Robert Benoist." Piloting an "elderly" Maserati, "Il Maestro" brings the younger drivers to grief: "There was 175 m.p.h. in the car under him and Lonetti wanted all of it." Eerily foreshadowing Papa’s own life situation, the Hemingway problematic here is that Lonetti "wanted all of it" in more ways than one. Unlike skilled Bugatti racer and World War II Resistance martyr Benoist, Lonetti "will die when he wants to." He plans, after his win and a victory lap, to smash his Maserati into the wall.

True to Hemingway's spirit, Nisley's assembly of stories does not make of racing merely "a spectacle with unexplained horrors." It does, however, comprehend Hemingway's idea(l) that a man defines himself through inescapable violence he must manage. Robert Daley had run afoul of motorsports writing tradition in his non-fiction "The Cruel Sport" (1963) by facing squarely the inevitable injuries, fatalities, and vehicle mayhem. In a late chapter from his 1978 novel "The Fast One", he emphasizes the unnecessary violence.

Alex Cavelli, an Alfonso de Portago and would-be Hemingway claimant ("He can bend anything to his will, this car, race, season: this girl, this day, life itself.") thumbs every part of his body at death. Fueled by "an intoxicating rush of feeling," Cavelli risks his winning lead at Le Mans to squash his personal and professional rival, the Phil Hill-like champion, Jack Blakemore, who is three laps down, driving a "half-repaired" Aston-Martin, but empowered by a businessman’s acumen and "the habit of victory." Crossing the Hemingway line between courage and damn-foolishness, between grace and disgrace, between spectacle and "something going on with a definite end," Cavelli drives Blakemore into a two-car "race toward holocaust."

The excerpt from Wilkinson's "On the 7th Day" is the strongest of the stock racing fiction. Thankfully, it serves up less of the cliché let's-get-as-verbally disgusting and drunk-as-bubbas-maybe-really-are fare (like the Stroker Ace excerpt from "Stand on It", 1973) and more of the nitty-gritty of not-so-educated Southern boys hell bent on fixing up cars and racing. "The Chevy had become one of those things in life that, after you've had it for awhile, you can’t imagine life without." Racing is an awful lot like that Chevy.

Most of the best of Nisley's selections take to the road to commemorate Hemingway's unmistakable sense of place. From B.S. Levy's The Last Open Road (1994), as fine travel writing as it is sports car writing, to Nisley's own coverage of the Spanish Grand Prix in The Ragged Edge (1999), the excerpts compel us to see America and also renew our passports. Torrey Pines, Watkins Glen, Le Mans, Monaco, Spa-Francorchamps, Madrid, the Mille Miglia circuit in Italy--okay, okay, Talladega--are no less vital to writer and reader than pistons, tires, curves and straights, dents and death. The excerpt from John Tomerlin's Challenge the Wind (1966), about the Monza race, opens with a dazzling drive to and through Milan that leaves Peter Langley "with a sensation not unlike that of falling in love"--and this reader wanting to see more of Italy and Tomerlin's novel.