conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Hemingway Hoax'?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Hemingway Hoax
  The short stories would be less restricted in subject matter. According to Hemingway, they'd been about growing up in Oak Park and Michigan and the battlefields of Italy.
  That made him stop and think. The one dramatic experience he shared with Hemingway was combat—fifty years later, to be sure, in Vietnam, but the basic situations couldn't have changed that much. Terror, heroism, cowardice. The guns and grenades were a little more streamlined, but they did the same things to people. Maybe do a World War I story as a finger exercise, see whether it would be realistic to try a longer growing-up-in-Michigan pastiche.
  He made a note to himself about that on the computer, oblique enough not to be damning, and continued the eye-straining job of searching through Hadley's correspondence, trying to find some further reference to the lost novel—damn!
  Writing to Ernest's mother, Hadley noted that "the taxi driver broke his typewriter" on the way to the Constantinople conference—did he get it fixed, or just chuck it? A quick check showed that the typeface of his manuscripts did indeed change after July 1924. So they'd never be able to find it. There were typewriters in Hemingway shrines in Key West, Billings, Schruns; the initial plan had been to find which was the old Corona, then locate an identical one and have Castle arrange a swap.
  So they would fall back on Plan B. Castle had claimed to be good with mechanical things, and thought if they could find a 1921 Corona, he could tweak the keys around so they would produce a convincing manuscript—lowercase "s" a hair low, "e" a hair high, and so forth.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: John looked down over his body, hard ropy muscle and deep tan under white body hair, the puckered bullet wound a little higher on the abdomen. Left leg ended in a stump just above the ankle.
  Trying not to faint. His third past flooding back. Walking down a dirt road near Kontum, the sudden loud bang of the mine and he pitched forward, unbelievable pain, rolled over and saw his bloody boot yards away; grey, jagged shinbone sticking through the bloody smoking rag of his pant leg, bright crimson splashing on the dry dust, loud in the shocked silence; another bloodstain spreading between his legs, the deep mortal pain there—and he started to buck and scream and two men held him while the medic took off his belt and made a tourniquet and popped morphine through the cloth and unbuttoned his fly and slowly worked his pants down: penis torn by shrapnel, scrotum ripped open in a bright red flap of skin, bloody grey-blue egg of a testicle separating, rolling out. He fainted, then and now.
  And woke up with her lips against his, her breath sweet in his lungs, his nostrils pinched painfully tight. He made a strangled noise and clutched her breast.
  She cradled his head, panting, smiling through tears, and kissed him lightly on the forehead. "Will you stop fainting now?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He went to the window and opened it in spite of the cold. He filled his lungs with the cold damp air and looked around the familiar orange-and-grey mosaic of chimney pots and tiled roofs under the dirty winter Paris sky.
  He shuddered and eased the window back down and returned to the heat of the brazier. He had felt it before, exactly that huge and terrible feeling. But where?
  There's obviously another force at work here besides imagination and experience; a kind of literary game-playing. I've been a student of Hemingway's writing and life for about twenty-five years; sooner or later I had to mine the old man for material.
  The main character has a lot of autobiographical elements in his various incarnations. I am a middle-aged Boston professor who loves trains and fountain pens, and vacations in Key West whenever possible. My wife is a lot nicer than Lena, though, and none of my friends are, to my knowledge, misogynistic murderers. Pansy was modeled after a science fiction fan I met years ago, a charming and beautiful woman who made a good living as a call girl and didn't mind talking about it.
  Two of Baird's wounds are described from experience, the.51 machine gun bullet to the thigh and the rifle grenade that sprayed me, us, with shrapnel from the waist down. The missing foot is imagination, or nightmare, or maybe an alternate universe: after the first operation on the thigh wound, which was large, the doctor warned me he would probably have to amputate. He didn't.