Papa Hemingway (16 page)

"As for Lillian, Christ, she didn't understand anything, did she? She's a good girl who should have been practicing 'dead-man's float' in the shallow water and had no business on the high dive. After you finish a book, you're wiped out. As a writer herself I thought she'd know that. I had just finished
Across the River
and New York was a release. But all she saw was the irresponsibility that comes after the terrible responsibility of writing. So she put down dialogue in her shorthand without understanding that I get so bloody tired of sounding like me that I invent ways of not sounding like me. Sometimes I leave out the nouns. Sometimes the verbs. Sometimes the whole goddamn sentence. As a writer I put them all in, but when I've just finished a book and come to New York for a few days to see friends and have fun and be irresponsible, I can do what I want and say what I want, but Lillian doesn't know any of that, so cartoons you into a gin-crazed Indian."

"Did you read John O'Hara's reaction to her profile?" I asked. "Appeared in
The New York Times"

"No."

I found the clipping in my wallet—I had been meaning to send it to Ernest. I gave it to him and he read it aloud:

"The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway's private life was made by a publication that reported on Hemingway's drinking habits somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer. It also included some direct quotes, in tin-ear fashion, of what were passed off as Hemingway's speech, but sounded more like the dialogue written for the Indian chief in
Annie, Get Tour Gun.

The inability to write the way people talk is a common affliction among writers. But for Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody's drinking is one for the go-climb-a-lamp-post department. The magazine had printed numerous little attacks on Hemingway by a semianonymous staffman who has gone to his heavenly reward, just as it printed attacks on Faulkner by a critic who has returned to his proper chore on the radio. With the long piece on Hemingway the magazine achieved a new low in something."

"That's damn nice of John. Is it all right if I keep this?"

"Sure. Lillian told me she sent you the proofs and you approved them."

"Sure she did. They arrived in Cuba on a Monday morning when the piece was already locked into the next issue. Ask Mary. But, anyway, what was there to correct? The whole damn thing was awful.
Awful.
Everything telescoped to fit into
The New Yorker
distortion machine. I'm never going to have another piece about me ever if I can help it. I had a nice private life before with a lot of undeclared and unpublished pride and now I feel like somebody crapped in it and wiped themselves on slick paper and left it there. I ought to move to Africa or stay at sea. Can't even go into the Floridita now. Can't go to Cojimar. Can't stay home. It can get on your nerves really badly, Hotch. I know some of it is my fault, but some of it isn't too. If I had had any brains, once Miss Mary was safely out I should have stayed in that second kite at Butiaba. Anyway, that's how I feel after that Cuneo mob has raked me over. Sorry to be Black-Ass. I'll look at the scenery and try to cheer up."

"Marlene phoned me the day
The New Yorker
came out," I said, "in an absolute fury. She was incensed that no one had told her who Lillian Ross was and that she was doing a piece, and then more incensed that it was so distorted."

"Can you imagine," Ernest said, "that after having spent the whole night with the Kraut and me, hearing all the things we discussed, all Lillian could write about was that the Kraut sometimes cleaned her daughter's apartment with towels from the Plaza. Hope you talked Kraut out of lawsuit."

"She's over it."

"So am I," Ernest said. "Lillian writes well—I thought her Hollywood pieces were superior, didn't you? And the piece on Sidney Franklin—well, I judged her on that—but my judgment blew up in my face."

In my opinion, what had happened was this: when Lillian had begun the Sidney Franklin profile, Ernest had told her she was as unqualified as anyone he could think of, since she knew nothing about bullfighting or bullfighters, had never been to Spain and did not even have any interest in American sports. She was equally unqualified to write about Ernest, for she knew as little about this kind of man as she did about bullfighters, but the difference was that in writing about Sidney Franklin she had Ernest to guide her, and in doing Ernest she had no one.

By the time we reached the Limone check point at the border, Ernest had restored his spirits with the pleasures of the Alp-winding scenery. The Limone customs guards, however, gave us the kind of reception they must reserve for the more obvious gold-runners. They ordered us out of the car, and we stood in the road while they went through the baggage, checked the upholstery of the car, probed the tires, and even examined the contents of the spare cans of oil that Adamo carried in the trunk. The name Hemingway meant nothing to the chief guard, who quite obviously couldn't read and who was convinced that the pillow Ernest had been using to give support to his lame back contained shredded plutonium.

Ernest was amused by the performance. "You can't blame them," he said. "Did you take a good look at the three of us? Adamo in that oversized pink safari jacket of mine, me in my stocking cap and beard, and you in your gangster slouch? Three of the gamiest bastards I ever saw. If I were the guard, I'd line us up against the nearest wall and shoot us."

The trip over the Alps into Nice was exhilaratingly beautiful. The Lancia took the corkscrew turns with the rhythm of a fast pendulum, which Ernest enjoyed greatly.

"When I first came to France from Italy," Ernest said, "I came third-class on the train. There was a pretty Swiss girl in my car, and since the train was going very slowly on the ascent, I decided to solidify my position with her by jumping off the train and picking some of the beautiful mountain wildflowers that were growing by the track, while running alongside the train. But what I didn't know was that there was a tunnel a short distance ahead around a curve, and also didn't know it was the custom to lock the train doors when going through tunnels. So I couldn't get back in and I had to cling to the side of the train all the way through that black tunnel. There was very little clearance and I was all skinned and bleeding and my clothes were torn when the conductor finally unlocked the doors and I climbed back in. Through it all, somehow managed to hang onto the bouquet of flowers. Despite blood, soot and rips, Swiss girl very impressed. Dressed my wounds. Made out okay."

In Nice we checked in at the Ruhl, a magnificent seaside hotel. Ernest immediately sent for the barber and instructed him to shave off his beard, trim his mustache severely and shape up what postburn hair existed. "It might avert another Cuneo," Ernest explained.

We had planned to overwhelm Monte Carlo that night, but Ernest's injuries, particularly his back, were troubling him so much that he asked me to handle the wheel while he planned to set up headquarters in the Casino's bar. We each put up ten thousand francs and Ernest suggested the number seven if that was okay with me. "Play it with red and
impair
," he said, "and make them fear us the way they now fear us at Auteuil."

Adamo brought the car around after dinner; Ernest asked him if he knew the way to Monte Carlo (foolish question). He said yes, yes indeed, he had driven there many times. "Would it be all right," he asked, "if I opened it up this once to show you what she can really do?" Ernest said okay. Monte Carlo is about thirty kilometers from Nice, and Adamo had his foot on the floorboard the whole way. It was a wild ride. With a screech of brakes he pulled up at what he thought was the Monte Carlo seaside, but in reality we had made a giant loop and landed right back at the Ruhl. Adamo looked up at the hotel, blinked, and said, "What do you know about that? They have a Hotel Ruhl in Monte Carlo too!"

Seven was the number all right, usually in combinations, and
impair
did all right, but red was cold from the start and I laid off. Around eleven-thirty, with about a hundred eighty thousand francs in front of me, I could feel the board begin to go so I cashed in. I went into the bar. Ernest was asleep in a leather chair, an unfinished drink on the table beside him. I gave him his split and he was very pleased, as he always was with good performance against heavy odds.

On our way out of Nice the following morning we passed a road direction to Cap d'Antibes, and Ernest said, "One June I was at Cap d'Antibes with a group that included Charley MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes. It was the custom then for the Riviera to shut down for the summer, considered too hot, but Charley and I persuaded some of the places at the Cap to stay open for the first time. Charley was wonderful fun and we had a fine time. He was the master of the baroque practical joke and there was nothing from mother's milk to

Pope's ring that Charley held sacred. First-class gent. Well, one balmy evening Charley and I staged a prize fight, all in fun of course, with seconds in each corner and buckets of champagne instead of water. We had a pact not to hit at heads.

"But Charley, in a flurry of champagne and mistaken strength, tried to cream me. Twice while we were in clinches I warned him to cut it out, but two more times he threw roundhouse rights to my head. I then dumped him for keeps with a right chop. We had to carry him out of the ring. Well, I didn't see Charley much after that, but, one day in Cuba, years later, I received a cable from him asking whether he and Helen could stop by to see us. Naturally I invited him. Poor Charley was by then very sick and knew he was going to die. We had lunch and it was pleasant, but sad. Mary took Helen on a tour of her vegetable garden, leaving Charley and me alone. 'Hem,' he said, 'it's not true that we were just passing through. I came down here especially to see you. Listen, Hem, something's been bothering me for a long time. You remember that night at Cap d'Antibes? Well, they've got me on pretty short rations and I wanted to ask you something—sort of a last favor—that prizefight of ours—would you promise me never to write about it?' That was Charley for you—came all the way to Cuba to ask me that."

We stopped in Cannes, which is about twenty minutes from Nice, because Ernest was feeling rocky; he said he doubted whether, the pain being what it was, he could make it to Aix-en-Provence, which was our day's destination. He had two Scotches, two fried eggs, unbuttered white toast and a piece of pickled herring; that lifted him enough for us to continue.

The window of a
charcuterie
caught Ernest's eye when we were passing through Bourgogne, and he asked Adamo to stop. "If I'm not mistaken," he said, "they're showing tins of Capi-taine Cook's mackerel in white wine. Haven't seen Capitaine Cook since 1939." Ernest invested all his Monte Carlo winnings in tins of the Capitaine's mackerel, containers of
pate de fois gras,
bottles of Cordon Rouge champagne, and jars of pickled mushrooms and pickled walnuts. We could barely fit all of it into the Lancia.

That night in Aix-en-Provence, Ernest and I dined at the four-forked, one-flowered Vendome, where the
specialite
was
carre d'agneau arlesienne;
afterward we sat for a long time over coffee and wine; Ernest consumed more wine than I had ever before seen him drink. He talked steadily and with a curious immediacy as if the talk somehow alleviated his pain, which I knew intensified at night. He was talking about books, how many worthless ones he had read on the boat.

"Did you read John O'Hara's
A Rage to Live?"
I asked. "I thought it was very good. First book of his I've liked in a long time."

"No, haven't read John's book yet. Mean to. When I first read him, it looked like he could hit:
Appointment in Samarra.
Then, instead of swinging away, for no reason he started beating out bunts. He was fast and he had a pretty ear but he had the terrible inferiority complex of the half-lace-curtain Irish and he never learned that it doesn't matter a damn where you come from socially; it is where you go. So he kept beating out bunts instead of trying to learn to hit, and I lost interest. Am awfully glad if he has a good book. I'd written him off and am always happy to be wrong. The writing Irish cannot stand either success or failure, so if book is good we can expect him to become fairly insufferable, but we can always keep away from his joints and if he writes good, that is all that matters. It was damn pretty the way he put the shiv in
The New Yorker.

"But look at what's being written. The guy who wrote
The Naked and the Dead—
what's his name, Mailer—was in bad need of a manager. Can you imagine that a general wouldn't look at the co-ordinates on his map? A made-up half-ass literary general. The whole book's just diarrhea of the typewriter. The only truly good novel, maybe great, to come out of World War II is
The Gallery.
I say 'maybe great' because who in the hell can tell? Greatness is the longest steeplechase ever run; many enter; few survive.

"I logged a lot of reading time on the S.S.
Africa
and reread
Huckleberry Finn
, which I have always touted as the best American book ever written and which I still think is. But I had not read it for a long time and this time reading it, there were at least forty paragraphs I wished I could fix. And a lot of the wonderful stuff you remember, you discover you put there yourself."