Papa Hemingway (17 page)

"Do you think you'll write another book about the last war— with that background?"

"No, I don't think so.
Across the River
is my book. I only write once on any one theme; if I don't write it all that one time, then it is not worth saying. You know that old Greek gent Heraclitus? 'One cannot step twice in the same river, for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you.' I never start out with a plot in mind, and I've never yet set out to write a novel— it's always a short story that moves into being a novel. I always make it prove that it can't be written short. There's only one requirement to being a successful writer if you have talent-stay healthy."

"Also to work every day, or damn near every day, don't you think?"

"Yes. That's why I like to start early before I can be distracted by peoples and events. I've seen every sunrise of my life. I rise at first light—the wars ruined my sleep, that and my thin eyelids—and I start by rereading and editing everything I have written to the point I left off. That way I go through a book I'm writing several hundred times. Then I go right on, no pissing around, crumbling up paper, pacing, because I always stop at a point where I know precisely what's going to happen next. So I don't have to crank up every day. Most writers slough off the toughest but most important part of their trade—editing their stuff, honing it and honing it until it gets an edge like the bullfighter's
estoque
, the killing sword. One time my son Patrick brought me a story and asked me to edit it for him. I went over it carefully and changed one word. 'But, Papa,' Mousy said, 'you've only changed one word.' I said, 'If it's the right word, that's a lot.'

"I like to write standing up to reduce the old belly and because you have more vitality on your feet. Who ever went ten rounds sitting on his ass? I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

"But I've had my writing problems; don't think I haven't. When I asked Mary to marry me, I had a gaping hole in my head from having smashed a car into a water tower during a London blackout and I didn't know if I could write again, or do anything else. I had tried to write but no go. Mary gave up her career as a London
Time
correspondent, and in two and a half months everything began to fall in place. Except the writing. Tried for one year, but still no go. The turning point was out in Sun Valley when we were tracking a big elusive buck for Miss Mary, and for eight days we trudged through the deep snow from first light to dusk. On the eighth day Mary shot him, and the next day I started to write.

"There are only two absolutes I know about writing: one is that if you make love while you are jamming on a novel, you are in danger of leaving the best parts of it in the bed; the other is that integrity in a writer is like virginity in a woman— once lost, it is never recovered. I am always being asked about my 'credo'—Christ, that word—well, credo is to write as well as I can about things that I know and feel deeply about."

"Papa, you've often talked about maybe writing a book with an American locale . . ."

"I always wanted to, but had to wait till after my mother's death. You understand? Now I don't know. My father died in 1928—shot himself—and left me fifty thousand dollars. There's a paragraph in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
that. . . well . . . took me twenty years to face his suicide and put it down and cathar-size it. The thing that bothered me the most was that I had written him a letter that was on his desk the day he shot himself, and I think if he had opened that letter and read it he wouldn't have pulled the trigger. When I asked my mother for my inheritance, she said she had already spent it on me. I asked her how. She said on my travel and education. What education? I asked her. Oak Park High School? My only travel, I pointed out, had been taken care of by the Italian army. She didn't answer, but instead took me to see the lavish new music wing she had built on the house. Of course, that's where the fifty G's had gone. My mother was a music nut, a frustrated singer, and she gave musicales every week in my fifty-thousand-dollar music room. When I was in school she forced me to play the cello even though I had absolutely no talent and could not even carry a tune. She took me out of school one year so I could concentrate exclusively on the cello. I wanted to be playing football out in the fresh air and she had me chained to that knee-box. Even before her music-room period she was in constant pursuit of musical personalities, trying to lure them to her soirees. On one such occasion I found myself being dawdled on the knees of Mary Garden. Since I was big for my age, it was a tossup just who would dawdle who, but she dressed out at one eighty-five and got the nod.

"Well, as for that fifty-thousand-dollar music salon, I got a small return on my inheritance by putting up a punching bag in the middle of it and working out there every afternoon until I left Oak Park. And that time when I left, it was for keeps. Several years later, at Christmastime, I received a package from my mother. It contained the revolver with which my father had killed himself. There was a card that said she thought I'd like to have it; I didn't know whether it was an omen or a prophecy."

Along toward midnight, all the other diners having left a good hour before, I mentioned to Ernest that the waiters wanted to close up. He had begun to repeat stories he had told me that afternoon—a thing he had never done before—but there was no other manifestation of how much he had been drinking.

He insisted on finishing the bottle of wine. "I was healthy and in really good shape," he said, "before they banged me up in this one. Was down to two hundred six and had pressure down to one sixty over seventy. Before that, had it down to one forty over sixty-five but Doc said was too low. Now it's all shot to hell and how can you write out of that? Or do anything else?"

"Papa," I said, indicating the two forlorn waiters who

were maintaining a vigil, "I think they want to go home."

"Boy," he said, "you have to learn to drink under the withering fire of the fixed stare or the guided missile. During the war I had set up headquarters for my Irregulars in a farmhouse that was smack on the front line. It was designated at command headquarters as Task Force Hem. The Germans frequently sent patrols right into our front yard. Well, you know the artist John Groth? He came one night on his way to some assignment and we put him up. During dinner the German eighty-eights opened up and hit around us pretty good, shattering plaster and window glass; when it cleared, Groth crawled out from the potato cellar, where he had dived with the other eaters when the first pieces of plaster started flying around, and he said, 'Mr. Hemingway, how could you sit there eating cheese and drinking wine when they had us under fire?'

" 'Groth,' I said, 'if you hit the deck every time you hear a pop, you'll wind up with chronic indigestion.' You going to finish your wine?"

I pushed my half-filled glass over to him. His speech was getting slurred at the edges.

"They shot a lot of our good guys in the war but the beauty of our country is that there's a good guy born every minute. You know what the French call war?
Le metier triste.
You're looking at a man who's been shot at two years longer than General Grant. The sad goddamn science."

"The wine's gone, Papa."

"What month is it?"

"May."

He counted on his fingers. "September I will have an African son. Before I left, I gave a herd of goats to my bride's family.
Most
overgoated family in Africa. Feels good to have African son. Never regretted anything I ever did. Only regret things I didn't do. Bob Benchley once suggested we should maybe take it easy. That he and I were criticized because we didn't slow down. I said, 'Okay, Bob, we'll slow down.' 'When?' he asked. 'When we are old and full of other people's sleep,' I told him. Good old Bob . . . and Maxwell Perkins . . . and Charlie Scribner ... I miss Charlie badly. Goddamn! Who is left that ever stuck together when things were really impossible? You are who is left. The reppo-depot is empty, and there are no replacements."

He got up and started toward the two waiters. "I am sorry I kept you so long," Ernest said in his facile, Midwestern French, "but it was necessary." He tipped each of them a week's salary, shook their hands and went out.

Going up in the hotel elevator, he said, "I heard Carl Brandt died. Was never my agent. Never had an agent. But always heard good things about him. Well, the grave's a fine and secret place but from there it's hard to collect ten percent." He got off the elevator tentatively, not completely trusting his feet, but his room was near the elevator and he did not have far to go. He hesitated at his door for a moment; his eyes narrowed in thought. "You know the real
metier triste
?" he asked. "Writing. There's a
metier triste
for you." He opened the door to his room and I started down the hall toward mine, but a moment later he called to me and came down the hall as I turned back. "What you should know, because we level with each other," he said, "is what my mother said that time I went back for my inheritance. 'Don't disobey me,' she said, 'or you'll regret it all your life as your father did.'" His eyes were fixed on a point at the end of the hall, where his mother stood in the doorway of the big frame house in Oak Park. He started to say something more about her, but his eyes left Oak Park and returned; he punched my arm and said, "See you in the morning," and this time he went into his room for keeps.

The next day, traveling through Aries, Ernest talked about the grapes and the cultivation of the vines and explained why all expensive wines grow on hills. He did not, that morning, mention the previous night; nor did he ever. It became, therefore, the one and only time he assessed our friendship, which, until then, I had only regarded from my point of view; that is, it had never occurred to me that he esteemed my friendship as highly as I held his. His life was so full of events and people that the fullness had obscured the fact that most of the meaningful individuals of his life had, one by one, disappeared. Certainly when I first met him in 1948 there was none of the need that now expressed itself in 1954.
The Old Man and the Sea
had been published with wide acclaim, and he had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for it, but acclaim, I was discovering, could not provide those who "stuck together when things were impossible." This unquestioning loyalty was what Ernest prized most highly, to be given and to be received, and it was a trait common to all those with whom he had long and lasting relations. But now they were few. The mortality rate was as high as Ernest's standards, and if you inquired about someone who had fallen by the way, Ernest would simply tell you that he or she "didn't measure up."

Perhaps part of the explanation could be found in his dictum: "The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him." But then Ernest's measure of trustworthiness and the lack of it could certainly not be explained in conventional terms. It seems to me, in analyzing this mystique, that the real clue to his lasting friendships could be found in the fact that the people who stuck were straight and unphony and formed in their own image. Dietrich; Toots Shor; Waldo Peirce, the painter; Philip Percival, the White Hunter; Matador Ordonez; Sylvia Beach, of the famed Paris bookshop; Gary Cooper; Willie Walton, the artist; Bud Purdy, the Ketchum rancher; Leonard Lyons, the columnist; Bill Davis, the Malaga expatriate; Winston Guest, the sportsman; Evan Shipman, the poet and track expert; Maxwell Perkins. People who in Ernest's estimation were true to their own identity and whose performance was consistent. That was what Ernest demanded, and it was a virtue he prized above all others.

Those who failed were drummed out with anger and scorn and sometimes sorrow, often drummed out in public, although the incident which Ernest picked for the break was usually a matter of expediency and not the real reason the subject was being "excommunicated." Thus, Kenneth Tynan was brutally ex-exuted on the terrace of the Hotel Miramar in Malaga before a tableful of witnesses for having disagreed with Ernest over whether the matador Jaime Ostos had killed well that afternoon. Peter Buckley, the photographer and writer, was run through and destroyed in the lobby of the Royal Hotel in Valencia for having interviewed Antonio just before the afternoon
corrida,
against Ernest's hotly expressed disapproval. Slim Hayward was summarily guillotined on the sidewalk in front of the crowded Bar Choko in Pamplona for having had dinner with David Selz-nick. Peter Viertel was shot down in the Imperator restaurant in Nimes for whining about his feet, which had become chilled when we were all shooting pigeons at the street fair while waiting for Ernest and Jigee to join us. Spencer Tracy and Leland Hayward were simultaneously executed one afternoon in Peru for having delayed Ernest's marlin fishing in connection with the filming of
The Old Man and the Sea.

Ernest often maintained subsequent relations with the violently jettisoned. Although the jettison removed them from the list of Those Who Counted, that did not necessarily mean that Ernest would not continue to see them. Thus, he subsequently helped Peter Buckley with a book about bullfighting, and hired Peter Viertel to work on the screenplay for
The Old Man and the Sea.
But his basic attitude toward The Fallen was irrevocably curdled.

On this clear, sunny Riviera morning, however, traveling through the vineyard country outside Aries on our way to Nimes, Ernest had dismissed the rancors of the previous night and was remembering with pleasure the bicycle trips he had made through this region. "I know the vineyards of this region by heart," he said. "I used to bicycle through here with Scott in the days when he wasn't a crazy, at least not a bona-fide crazy. We had wonderful, carefree times. The bike is the only way to truly learn the contours of a country, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. I wish I could remember just the good times with Scott and forget all the rest; but it was too painful, I guess. Like the time I went to visit Scott and Zelda outside Baltimore. They had a beautiful mansion there and they invited me for the week end; I said I could only come for dinner, as had to get back to New York because I was working on galleys with Max Perkins. I was met at the station by their chauffeur, Pierre, who was driving a custom-built Hotchkiss, one of the most elegant and expensive French cars of its day. Soon after we started out, I noticed black fumes rising from the engine; when I brought it to Pierre's attention, he told me this sad story: