Papa Hemingway (7 page)

We were the only ones in the restaurant, and the ancient, mustached
patron
, M. Francois Demettre, recognizing Ernest as he entered, shouted his name joyfully and embraced him; he immediately poured
aperitifs
to counteract the outside chill. M. Demettre's hobbled basset hound, named Byrrh, after the
aperitif
we were drinking, rubbed against Ernest's leg for attention and got it.

We were seated around a large, scarred round table, as close to the room's potbellied stove as M. Demettre could manage.

After a wonderful lunch Mary and Jigee went to their appointments at Elizabeth Arden's and left us to the comforts of the glowing stove and an equally glowing Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

"Pauline and I had a flat very near here," Ernest said. "Good old Pauline. Her crack about Mike Ward—Mike was one of the toughest guys I ever knew, rather deaf, and so devoted to me that Pauline said about him, 'If Ernest killed his own mother Mike would say, "Well, it was his own mother, wasn't it?"'

"I'll never forget the time I set up operations in a box at the finish line of the six-day bike races, to work on the proofs of
A Farewell to Arms.
There was good inexpensive champagne and when I got hungry they sent over Crabe Mexicaine from Prunier. I had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times in manuscript and now I worked it over thirty times in proof, trying to get it right. I finally got it right. While I am in my box working one night, in comes Mike, his left hand swollen like the Pride of Your Garden, if you were growing squash. Mike sat down and explained that he had been at Henry's Bar the night before—that was a famous Paris bar where the walls were papered with bad checks—and Mike, who was pretty deaf, was standing at the bar when he heard two guys next to him mention my name, although he couldn't make out what they were saying. So Mike says he goes up to one of them and says, 'Are you a friend of Ernie's?' The guy says no, so Mike creams him. 'I figure he's got no right talkin' about you if he ain't your friend,' Mike says. 'But maybe I did wrong, huh, Ernie?'

"There was another tough little guy I used to know in New York around that time, name of Marty McCarty, who was a dock hustler, but he used to pretend he had an office in 'Wald Street.' He'd come in to have a drink and he'd say: 'Well, Ernie, every day I get my exercise walkin' up from my Wald Street office past the Umpire State Building and the Christer Building right on out to Coogan's Bluff.' Then he'd carry on about how the kids kept him up nights—little Marty with a stomach ache and he'd have to get up five, six times to get him a drink of water, or Betsy with a toothache—it was always something about the kids, every time he came in, and it wasn't until he died and I went to his funeral that I discovered he didn't have any although he was married for twenty years.

"But I started to tell you about Pauline—we were on safari in Africa, way out in the bush, and Pauline suddenly says, 'I miss little Patrick so, I fear we must go back.' I say, 'Where is he now, Pauline?' She says, 'I haven't the faintest idea.' She never mentioned him again."

"Did Pauline really like safari and skiing and all that, or did she only do it to please you?" I asked.

"Well, the one who liked skiing, who really liked
doing
things was Hadley. I remember one winter Hadley and I went skiing in Germany at a lodge run by a Herr Lint. I was an instructor and we earned our keep that way, but the previous season eleven of Herr Lint's fifteen guests had been lost in an avalanche—Herr Lint had warned them about the snow but they had disregarded his advice. Well, losing eleven guests is a very poor advertisment for a ski school, so the season I was there with Hadley there were no guests at all, and to make matters worse there were terrible snowstorms, one right on top of the other. During the storms there were all-night poker games,
sans voir
to open, and the principal antagonists at the poker table were Herr Lint and the proprietor of a rival ski lodge. Herr Lint lost his lodge, all the ski equipment and a piece of property he owned in Bavaria. Have an account of that in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.' Call him Herr Lent. Of course, Herr Lint couldn't pay me, but I was able to live on checks I got from the Kansas City
Star—
eleven dollars for straight pieces and between eighteen and twenty-one bucks for a Sunday spread complete with photos. Not much, but the kronen was seventy thousand to the dollar and for three hundred and fifty thousand kronen you lived pretty good."

On our way down the narrow streets leading away from the restaurant, trying to sideslip the cutting wind, we passed a bookstore and Ernest stopped to inspect the contents of the window, which prominently featured copies of a recently published book by a young writer. On the window was a sign that read:
all signs point to a brilliant future for this author.

"You ever read this bird?" Ernest asked.

"No," I replied.

"Well, I have," he said. He took a pencil from his pocket and wrote across the bottom of the sign: "All signs wrong."

Ernest wanted me to see the neighborhood where he had first lived; we started on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where he had lived over a sawmill, and slowly worked our way past familiar restaurants, bars and stores, to the Jardin du Luxembourg and its museum, where, Ernest said, he fell in love with certain paintings that taught him how to write. "Am also fond of the Jardin," Ernest said, "because it kept us from starvation. On days when the dinner pot was absolutely devoid of content, I would put Bumby, then about a year old, into the baby carriage and wheel him over here to the Jardin. There was always a
gendarme
on duty, but I knew that around four o'clock he would go to a bar across from the park to have a glass of wine. That's when I would appear with Mr. Bumby— and a pocketful of corn for the pigeons. I would sit on a bench, in my guise of buggy-pushing pigeon-lover, casing the flock for clarity of eye and plumpness. The Luxembourg was well known for the classiness of its pigeons. Once my selection was made, it was a simple matter to entice my victim with the corn, snatch him, wring his neck, and flip his carcass under Mr. Bumby's blanket. We got a little tired of pigeon that winter, but they filled many a void. What a kid that Bumby was—played it straight—and never once put the finger on me."

Since cables had been arriving from Herbert Mayes, demanding to know when I'd be back with the missing chapters, on our way to Harry's New York Bar on the Rue Daunou, we stopped at a cable office and I sent a message that the chapters were still in work but not to worry.

Ernest had been one of Harry's earliest customers, and although Ernest did not particularly like the bar any more, because it was "over quaint," he still liked his old friend Harry and went to pay his respects. On the frosted-glass door was the legend:
c'est gentil d'etre venu
. Pennants from American colleges decorated all walls except the one in back of the bar, which was covered with paper money; the face of the cash register was covered with coins; a straw monkey holding boxing gloves dangled from the ceiling above the bar; and a prominent sign exhorted:
help stamp out sports cars
. "All they need," Ernest said, under his breath, "is Noel Coward leading a community sing." He ordered Scotch and half a fresh lime.

"Back in the old days this was one of the few good, solid bars, and there was an ex-pug used to come in with a pet lion. He'd stand at the bar here and the lion would stand here beside him. He was a very nice lion with good manners—no growls or roars—but, as lions will, he occasionally shit on the floor. This, of course, had a rather adverse effect on the trade and, as politely as he could, Harry asked the ex-pug not to bring the lion around any more. But the next day the pug was back with lion, lion dropped another load, drinkers disbursed, Harry again made request. The third day, same thing. Realizing it was do or die for poor Harry's business, this time when lion let go, I went over, picked up the pug, who had been a welterweight, carried him outside and threw him in the street. Then I came back and grabbed the lion's mane and hustled him out of here. Out on the sidewalk the lion gave me a look, but he went quietly.

"In a crazy way, that's what started me on
A Farewell to Arms—
figured if I was getting that aggressive with lions, time had come to put my juice into a book instead. All the other writers who were sort of in my mob and living in Paris then, had already written books about the war, and like the last girl on the block who hasn't been married, I felt my time to write a war book had come. But for years I had been telling these writers most of my good war stories and I discovered they had put them into their books. So when I finally got around to doing my war novel, I found that the only country left was Italy. I was safe there because few of them had been to Italy, and certainly none of them knew anything about the war there.

"I've always had that problem—other writers pinching my stuff. During World War II, I traveled around quite a bit with a writer I had known a long time. I talked things out with him, the way you would with a friend. One day over drinks I told him how I had figured out that the best air-raid alarm was the attitude of cattle in the field. 'I can watch a herd of cows,' I told him, 'and tell you long before you hear any sounds, that planes are approaching. The cattle stiffen; they stop grazing. They know.'

"A couple of days later I saw other correspondents congratulating my writer friend whom I had told about the cattle. I asked what it was all about. 'He wrote a wonderful dispatch for his paper on how cattle react to planes,' one guy told me. I investigated and found that my pal had been picking my brain for some time and writing a series of articles based on the information that I had intended using in my own dispatches. 'Listen, you bastard,' I said to this writer, 'if you steal another thing from me, I'll kill you.' Two days later he switched to the Pacific theater of operations.

"There was another 'name' writer who used to steal my short stories as fast as I could write them, change the names of the characters and the locales and sell them for more money than I got. But I found a way to stop him. I quit writing for two years and the son-of-a-bitch starved to death."

The entrance to Le Trou dans le Mur is on the Boulevard des Capucines across from the Cafe de la Paix, but true to its name, you can pass by it a half-dozen times without seeing it. Ernest wanted me to see how he had positioned himself at the back of this mirrored
bolte—
more celebrated in the Twenties than now—whenever vendettas were threatening him. "The day after
The Sun Also Rises
was published," Ernest said, "I got word that Harold Loeb, who was the Robert Cohn of the book, had announced that he would kill me on sight. I sent him a telegram to the effect that I would be here in The Hole in the Wall for three consecutive evenings so he'd have no trouble finding me. As you can see, I chose this joint because it is all mirrors, all four walls, and if you sit in this booth at the back you can see whoever comes in the door and all their moves. I waited out the three days but Harold didn't show. About a week later, I was eating dinner at Lipp's in Saint-Germain, which is also heavily mirrored, when I spotted Harold coming in. I went over and put out my hand and Harold started to shake hands before he remembered we were mortal enemies. He yanked his hand away and put it behind his back. I invited him to have a drink but he refused. 'Never,' is actually what he said. 'Okay,' I said, resuming my seat, 'then drink alone.' He left the restaurant and that was the end of that vendetta.

"Brett died in New Mexico. Call her Lady Duff Twysden, if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett. Tuberculosis. She was forty-three. Her pallbearers had all been her lovers. On leaving the church, where she had had a proper service, one of the grieving pallbearers slipped on the church steps and the casket dropped and split open.

"Those days with Lady Duff Twysden ruined poor Loeb for the rest of his life. That and one other thing: he was an authentic Guggenheim but he never got one of his recommendations approved. Not one. There's rejection for you, in spades."

"Besides Loeb and Lady Duff Twysden, were any of the other characters in the book based on people you knew who had gone to Pamplona with you?"

"Sure. The whole mob. Based on. Not exact. Pat Swazey was the closest—he was Mike Campbell in the book. Bill Smith, who was an awfully good guy I used to fish with, was pretty much Bill Gorton. Jake Barnes . . . well, hell, Jake . . . when I was in the Italian army I had been nicked in the scrotum by a piece of shrapnel and had spent some time in the genitourinary ward and saw all those poor bastards who had had everything blown off. Most of them from anti-personnel mines that were rigged to hit between the legs, on the irrefutable Hun theory that nothing takes a soldier out faster than to have his balls shot off."

"But Jake didn't have his balls shot off, did he?"

"No. And that was very important to the kind of man he was. His testicles were intact. That was all he had, but this made him capable of feeling everything a normal man feels but not able to do anything about it. That the wound was a physical wound, and not a psychological wound, was the vital thing."

"But you know, Papa, despite poor Jake and his tragic fate, I never really felt anything 'lost' about that group. Maybe it's just a reflection of my debauched state, but by the end of the book I felt a certain survival strength in those people, not at all the utter hopelessness of a 'lost generation.'"