“It’s Like Fine French Cooking”

Michael Katakis, writer, photographer and manager of the Ernest Hemingway estate, on why people will never tire of the late writer’s works

Michael Katakis is a man of many roles. Last year, this Paris resident was appointed ambassador of the British Library. A well-known photographer, his images hang in some of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, such as the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Geographical Society, The National Army Museum, as well as in a special collection of Stanford University. Yet it is writing that 61-year-old Katakis believes he was truly born to do. “For me, the camera has been a sketchbook to go to the writing. I have been struggling with words all my life. I don’t struggle with pictures. Essentially I would call myself a writer who happens to take pictures,” says Katakis as he sips on his green tea at Taj Hotel, New Delhi. Katakis has one more interesting job. For the past 13 years, he has been manager of the Ernest Hemingway Estate, a job he was persuaded to take up by Patrick Hemingway, the youngest of the late writer’s sons. As the literary rights manager to the estate, all permission requests related to Hemingway’s works are directed at him.

Katakis states that the Hemingway family is currently not granting permission to publish “unpublished works or derivative material” of the author, though last year, the Random House imprint William Heineman did acquire the rights to alternate endings to his most popular work in an edition titled A Farewell to Arms: The Special Edition. This edition, which includes early drafts of essential passages, the author’s own 1948 introduction, a selection of handwritten manuscript pages and the original 1929 cover artwork, was put out with a clear purpose: “To show to his fans and critics the meticulous hard work and discipline that Hemingway put in all his work. Also to help them better understand the author as each ending contemplated is so different from what he actually chose,” says Katakis.

It is the Hemingway estate that has bought him to India. “I came here to talk to Simon & Schuster about Hemingway e-books, what they are doing to develop that here. We want to see how to tap the Hemingway market here, get some Indian writers who have an affinity to the author to give an introduction to his work.” Katakis feels that Hemingway’s work resonates well with each new generation and has been selling more and more every year since the 1950s because it talks about the essentials of life. “It’s like fine French cooking—reduction, reduction, reduction to the point where you plant the idea in the head without really stating it. Hemingway talks of love lost, love found and writes about things which are very humane and relatable. His writing propels you into a certain kind of nostalgia,” he says.

These are things that Katakis, too, has been acutely aware of, having lost his mother as a child and more recently, the love of his life—his wife, anthropologist Dr Kris Hardin—to a brain tumour. Katakis and Hardin together had spent over 35 years travelling the world, visiting places such as China, West Africa, Cuba, Hungary, Morocco, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Italy. He now spends the majority of his time in Paris.

The American-born writer says that he and his wife had left the US since they did not believe in the capitalistic system of governance. “We were not wealthy. We had nothing except our defiance, so we left,” he says. Katakis, who calls himself a “reluctant optimist”, seems to bear an almost childlike naiveté. He believes in utopian world and repeatedly quotes philosophers to enunciate a point, but it is his empathy and keenness to soak in life that astounds you. Whether it is nuances of everyday Indian life in Old Delhi or the apparent longing to read he noticed in the face of an illiterate autorickshaw driver in Varanasi, there is nothing much that misses his eyes.

A keen observer of life who calls himself a traveller and not a tourist because he “despises tourism”, he engages with life in ways that most photographers don’t, and can tell you in detail the fears, hopes and dreams of each subject of his portraits. “A photograph by him is an exercise in clarity, economy and purpose… his photographs treat the world with dignity,” comedian and writer Michael Palin had said at an event in London last year. Katakis’ photographic work is a stunning compilation of monochromatic visuals of everyday life and people in places he has travelled to. “I shoot in black-and-white because I want the subject to be the only focus, without even a pretty blue as distraction,” he says.

His goal is to click 25 extraordinary photographs in his lifetime; so far, he feels, he has only taken seven such images.

Yet, Katakis believes that cameras are intrusive. “The reason why my photography has been received so well is because I care so little about it. One of the secrets of clicking a great picture is that you care about the subject more than you care about the pictures. The problem with most photographers being mediocre these days is that the pictures that they click are reactive and not reflective in nature… they don’t wait for life to reveal itself in their quest for perfection,” he says. “A good photograph, like a good book, must reveal itself,” he pronounces. Everything with him always goes back to writing as he feels great books are fixed in time in a way nothing else can really be. “Books are one of the finest inventions on the face of this earth,” he believes.

Katakis has had a passionate affair with books and writing, strangely enough on account of his difficult childhood in the US. After his mother’s death, this son of immigrant parents started being haunted by images of his ailing mother. To help him get over his fears, his father started reading to him at bedtime and later took him to a library in Chicago and introduced him to a librarian who would change his life. “The moment I walked in, she took me by the hand, showed me the rows of books and said, ‘Every word in all of these books is a thread that will weave a magic carpet for you and make you travel to another world, a kinder world.’ That day changed my life.”

It is books that made him dream of travelling and seeing the places that he had read about: to document them through his lens and words, ultimately adding nine books to his name.

His next book, titled A Thousand Shards of Glass, due for release next year, is on the US. “It is an honest critique of the system. Initially I thought I was writing this book for my fellow Americans, but now I feel it can be used as a warning sign for all those nations that want to emulate us.” Even though it is non-fiction, Katakis says he struggled with the writing, editing it at least 37 times because he wanted to make it simple. Unlike most of his collection of essays, it starts and ends with a poem. “Poetry speaks for what we long [for]… for what might be.” The book is perhaps catharsis for a man who feels that his country failed him.

“After that, it’s finally going to be fiction. Like all fiction, it’s going to be non-fiction designed as fiction,” he laughs. As he finishes his green tea, Katakis sums up his India experience as ‘extraordinary’ and says that he will be back in exactly eight months. This time to travel and document and add yet another chapter to his meanderings across the globe.

Ernest HemingwaymanagerMichael Katakis