Papa Hemingway (28 page)

When we went to Picabo country for pheasant, Ernest studied the terrain and deployed us, using hand signals to communicate as if we were a patrol behind enemy lines. Outside of Hailey one day he spotted the dry remnants of a corn field, which he staked out with infinite care, for we had no dogs, stationing us at the corners and sending us in a few minutes apart. The maneuver forced any unseen ground-hugging pheasants toward the center, and when our forces finally converged, not aware of the hidden birds, they suddenly burst upward, a rising curtain of pheasants; we all shot doubles, and Ernest reloaded and dropped a second pair that had circled around and passed over.

Ernest had a few strict rules: guns in the car must never be loaded; guns being carried through or over fences must be broken at the breech; a bird, when spotted, must never be pointed at or the bird will be spooked and never bagged.

One afternoon Ernest spotted a big snowy owl sitting high in a tree and he shot it in the wing. He picked it up and inspected the damage. "Have to be careful holding owl," he said. "Once held an owl the wrong way and it grabbed my stomach with both talons and wouldn't let go. Very mean characters."

In his garage Ernest established headquarters for the owl. He set up a box for him, which he lined and covered with his hunting clothes, and fitted a cane into the box for a perch. From that moment on, Owl became the autocrat of the house. At the outset there was deep concern about his eating; Ernest trapped mice every night so he'd have a fresh breakfast, and at noon he was given duck heads and rabbit heads because Ernest said he needed feathers and fur for roughage. When Owl began to polish off his morning mouse and thus establish himself as a captive eater, Ernest then shifted his concern to whether Owl would eliminate satisfactorily. "Eating's one thing, crapping's another," Ernest observed. It was only after there were significant droppings for proof, and a slight flurry of doubt was dispelled over whether Owl was drinking water, that Ernest began to relax about him. Mary wanted to give him a name, Hammerstein I think it was, but everyone just called him Owl.

I asked Ernest why he had shot him. "Plan to train him. Maybe make him think he's a falcon," he said.

Owl, because of his noted wisdom, became the household arbiter. There was, for instance, the beginning of a quarrel one evening between Mary and Ernest over whether a piece of elk's liver she was about to cook was fresh. Everyone smelled it but the vote was inconclusive, with Mary vigorously affirmative and Ernest vehemently negative. Ernest pulled out his Swiss officer's escape knife, cut off a piece of the liver and carried it out and offered it to Owl. Owl wouldn't touch it. "Owl knows better than us what's fresh," Ernest said, and the liver was given to the cats.

Owl and Ernest became great pals. Ernest talked him into sitting on his hand, and only once in a while did Owl get crabby and try to take a chunk out of a finger. Whenever we returned to the cabin from anywhere, Ernest went in to see

Owl before he went into the house. Of course, all the game that had been hanging in the garage had to be taken out once Owl's wing started to heal and he could move around.

Ernest seemed content with the eating and drinking routines he had imposed on himself. He drank a glass of wine at lunch, a moderate amount for dinner, and kept his evening Scotch down to two drinks. His favorite lunch was a glass of red wine and a sandwich of peanut butter and raw onion. For the first time since I had known him he went out freely to other people's houses for dinner, for they were all good friends who let him make his own drinks and whose simple Ketchum food he could trust. He always brought the wine, which he selected from his stock of good but relatively inexpensive bottles. "I gave up expensive wines for Lent of 1947," Ernest once explained, "and never took it up again. Also gave up smoking long before that because cigarette smoke is the nose's worst enemy and how can you enjoy a good wine that you cannot truly smell?"

Evenings that he didn't go out, Mary, who was an imaginative and light-fingered cook, would prepare ducks or partridge or venison in a variety of ways; afterward Ernest would read for a few hours or, if he felt like it, he'd sit in front of the big fire and talk about the old days out West. "There was this Easterner who came to me one day and asked me to help him shoot a grizzly. 'It's all my wife wants; night and day she's after me, and since we were just married I'd like to please her.' Hell, I say, the grizzly is the hardest of all bears to shoot, the toughest and the smartest. I haven't shot a grizzly in eight years.

"Well, I am out with this husband and wife one day, and we are stalking a moose for food when there's a sound in the brush and three grizzlies uncover. They are gargantuan sons-of-bitches. I tell the wife to get behind me because we have no time to try to get to cover. The husband, who is some distance away, has already covered and is out of the action. Now, a grizzly will drop when hit right but he will usually recover and charge and won't drop again until he's dead. That's what makes them so damn dangerous. The nearest grizzly, an eight-hundred-pounder, takes one look at us and charges straight on. I drop him with a neck shot and then, as he starts the get-up, I drill him in the shoulder for keeps.

"The second grizzly charges as I am reloading and I empty both shells into him practically point-blank. He is dead on arrival. Now the third grizzly, who has cased the fate of his buddies and wants no part of it, turns and starts up the hill and I have to peg him four times before I put him away for good. The new wife emerges from the shadow of my behind and she says to me, 'My mouth is dry. Please cover me while I go to the stream to get a drink.' That's all she ever says about the whole episode. And they want to know if Margot Macomber was drawn from real life!"

On Sunday afternoons Ernest and I watched pro football on television and shot skeet in back of the house during half time. Friday nights, Ernest played host to a half dozen of his male friends who would arrive to watch the fights. Ernest was the bookmaker, quoting odds, covering all bets, marking them down carefully in a small ruled notebook. During the fight he would discuss the punches, or lack of them, being displayed, and he was particularly discerning about in-fighting. On the occasion when Gene Fullmer fought Spider Webb, Ernest was caustic about Webb's performance and at one point exclaimed, "There! He finally threw his one-punch combination." He was very solicitous about keeping his guests' glasses filled, and after the fight, food was served and the talk was good—the same convivial atmosphere Ernest created with the group that regularly convened in his
finca
in Cuba.

In the midst of all our Ketchum pleasures, however, there was an ominous event that Ernest was brooding about when I arrived, and he continued to brood about it every day. There was a Catholic church in Hailey, twelve miles distant, presided over by one Father O'Connor, a man of persuasive charm. He had called upon Ernest soon after his arrival, and as a result of that visit Ernest had contributed the cost of a badly needed new church roof. Ernest felt, reasonably enough, that that should have discharged his eleemosynary obligations for the year, but Father O'Connor had returned a month later with a request that Ernest regarded as an infinitely bigger donation: would Ernest come to the parish house and talk to the forty high school teen-agers who met there every other week. Ernest was stunned, in fact horrified, and tried to resist, but Father O'Connor finally induced him to come on the basis of no speech, only answer questions.

Ernest fumed about it every day. "Why does a man who gives a roof have to make a speech?"

"You don't have to make a speech, lamb," Mary would remind him, "just answer questions."

"When you stand up in front of people and talk, that's a speech."

The only occasion I knew about when Ernest had appeared before an audience and made a speech occurred in 1937 when he spoke to the Second American Writers' Congress in Carnegie Hall on his return from the Spanish Civil War. Of course, reporters on ships occasionally got to him en masse, but he understood them and he could talk rough to them and, somehow, that was different. But this was a formal occasion, compounded by being in a parish house under the aegis of a priest, and Ernest fretted about it every day. He fretted about his throat, which he was sure was conking out, fretted about not being able to talk at the kids' level, and fretted that they probably knew more about his stuff than he did "since I have not read my collected works since they got collected—and don't intend to."

When D-Day loomed, there was an ice storm raging and the roads were difficult. As I drove slowly over the ice-slick road, Ernest sat quietly, staring ahead, saying nothing. When we got to Hailey, we passed The Snug Bar, Ernest's favorite drinking place, and I asked him if he'd like a drink before he faced the parochial music, but he said no, he'd go it cold turkey.

There was about an equal number of boys and girls, average age sixteen; they sat stiffly on folding chairs and looked as frightened and uncomfortable as Ernest did when he walked in. Father O'Connor suggested that Ernest sit and urged everyone to be informal; after a few minutes it was evident that Ernest and the kids were going to get along fine. Mary had asked me to take notes because she had a cold and had not been able to go with us. Ernest checked the notes the following day and made some additions and corrections; this is substantially how the evening with the teen-agers went.

Q: Mr. Hemingway, how did you get started writing books?

A: I always wanted to write. I worked on the school paper, and my first jobs were writing. After I finished high school I went to Kansas City and worked on the
Star.
It was regular newspaper work: Who shot whom? Who broke into what? Where? When? How? But never Why. Not really Why.

Q: About that book
For Whom the Bell Tolls—I
know that you were in Spain, but what were you doing there?

A: I had gone over to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. I took some ambulances over for the republican side.

Q: Why the republican side?

A. I had seen the republic start. I was there when King Alfonso left and I watched the people write their constitution. That was the last republic that had started in Europe and I believed in it. I believe the republican side could have won the war and there would have been an okay republic in Spain today. Everybody mixed into that war, but knowing Spaniards, I believe the republic would have gotten rid of all non-Spaniards when the war was over. They don't want any other people trying to run them.

Q: How much formal education did you have?

A: I finished Oak Park High School—that's in Illinois. I went to war instead of college. When I came back from the war it was too late to go to college. In those days there was no G.I. Bill.

Q: When you start a book like
The Old Man and the Sea,
how do you get the idea?

A: I knew about a man in that situation with a fish. I knew what happened in a boat, in a sea, fighting a fish. So I took a man I knew for twenty years and imagined him under those circumstances.

Q: How did you develop your style of writing—did you do it to be commercial, to create a public demand?

A: In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

A: That depends on the book and how it goes. A good book takes maybe a year and a half.

Q: How many hours a day do you work?

A: I get up at six and try not to work past twelve.

Q: Twelve midnight?

A: Twelve noon.

Q: Have you ever had a failure?

A: You fail every day if you're not going good. When you first start writing you never fail. You think it's wonderful and you have a fine time. You think it's easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you are thinking of yourself, not the reader. He does not enjoy it very much. Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it is no longer easy to write. In fact, what you ultimately remember about anything you've written is how difficult it was to write it.

Q: When you were young and first writing, were you frightened of criticism?

A: There was nothing to be afraid of. In the beginning I was not making any money at it and I just wrote as well as I could. I believed in what I wrote—if they didn't like it, it was their fault; they would learn to like it later. But I was really not concerned with criticism and not in close touch with it. When you first start writing you are not noticed—that is the blessing of starting.

Q: Do you ever anticipate failure?

A: If you anticipate failure you'll have it. Of course, you are aware of what will happen if you fail, and you plan your escape routes—you would be unintelligent if you didn't—but you don't anticipate failure in the thing you do. Now I don't want you to think I've never been spooked, but if you don't take command of your fears, no attack will ever go.

Q: Do you outline a book before you write it, or make a lot of notes?

A: No, I just start it. Fiction is inventing out of what knowledge you have. If you invent successfully, it is more true than if you try to remember it. A big lie is more plausible than truth. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.