NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Film critic Jeffrey Lyons is out with a new book about Ernest Hemingway.
WCBS 880's so-called "Man at the Movies" sprinkles his commentaries with quips, anecdotes and turns of a phrase that hint at a deeper understanding of entertainment and history — much of it learned as the son of a newspaper columnist.
His father, Leonard, had a more than 20-year friendship with the literary giant.
That included a childhood trip for Jeffrey and his brothers to Hemingway's Cuban retreat in which "Papa" Hemingway taught the kids how to shoot a gun.
His father's long friendship and that childhood meeting is recalled in Lyons' new book, "Hemingway and Me: Letters, Anecdotes, and Memories of a Life-Changing Friendship."
"My brother that day asked him, 'Mr. Hemingway, how do you write a novel?' He said it's very easy. You put everything you've ever known about everybody into your characters, but then you pretend the words are being tattooed on your back that way you'll keep your sentences short and to the point," Lyons said during an interview with WCBS 880's Paul Murnane. "No visitors came to the home while he was writing, he wouldn't tolerate any interruptions, he would keep track of book sales and his weight every day. You can still see the markings on the wall next to the scale that he weighed himself on every morning."
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Lyons remembers that Hemingway told his father that he would write three versions of a novel and then burn the two he didn't like.
"He didn't want the rough notes to survive," Lyons said. "And that brings to mind the book 'A Moveable Feast.' Hemingway and my father had an arrangement to meet in Paris one time and my father was delayed for two days for some reason. Hemingway was there in the lobby of the hotel, where he had stayed before going to cover the Spanish Civil War, and the concierge noticed him sitting there and said,' Mr. Hemingway you may have forgotten this but there's a trunk in the basement with your notes.' He spent the next day going through the notes and it was there that he discovered the original draft for 'A Moveable Feast.' Had my father been on time, who knows, the world might not have had that."
Hemingway died by suicide on July 2, 1961. His widow, Mary, asked Lyons' father to announce the death of the Nobel Prize-winner.
"It was my father who told the world," Lyons said.
The book is available now. It features a foreword by Liam Neeson.
Lyons is the author of Stories My Father Told Me and the coauthor of 101 Great Movie for Kids, as well as three books of baseball trivia, Out of Left Field, Curveball and Screwballs, and Short Hops and Foul Tips.