Algren at Sea (44 page)

“A fellow named Nate Bolden whipped Zale twice one winter in the White City ring,” I went along, “that was before the war. One night after the war, I caught a cab on the Southside and noticed that the driver was the same Bolden. ‘I saw you beat Zale,' I told him.

“‘Which one was he?' Bolden asked me. He wasn't punchy. He'd just never bothered learning the names of the men he'd fought. Some had been white; some black. At 160 pounds he'd whipped top-ranking light-heavies. Now he was driving a cab.”

I'd thought that was a good story but it hadn't come off. Hemingway regarded me thoughtfully. Hemingway was a thoughtful-looking fellow.

“Go ahead,” he said, “help yourself.”

It was pretty good Scotch. In fact, it
was
the Best Procurable.

“Everybody thought Leonard would whip Britton,” Hemingway recalled, “because Leonard was smarter than everybody and Britton wasn't smarter than anybody. But after Britton had whipped him, I asked him what he thought of Leonard. Britton said Leonard was the smartest fighter he'd ever been up against—‘He was thinking all the time in there,' Britton told me, ‘and all the time he was thinking, I was busting hell out of him.' I put
that
in a story,” Hemingway added.

“A Lithuanian named Radek had Cerdan out on the ropes in Chicago, but the bell saved Cerdan,” I remembered, “and Cerdan got the decision even though he didn't know who was holding up his hand. Later he said it was an improper way to win. That's the very word he used—‘improper.'”

“Carpentier liked to use words, too,” Hemingway told me. “When he whipped Bombardier Billy Wells he said, ‘Vice, as vice, is bad. But viciousness in the ring is essential.' What he meant was that Wens had had him the first round and let him go. So Carpentier knocked him out in the second.”

The lion looked at the bison. The bison looked at the elk. All three were agreeing on something.

“Battling Siki was paid off to lose to Carpentier,” Hemingway wanted me to know, “and the nigger knocked him cold.”

I didn't know how to get back to my rhinoceros.

“Jack Delaney's real name was Ovila Chapdelaine,” Hemingway went on, “he gave Oom-Paul Berlenbach the business. Do you know what the business is?”

I didn't know what the business was. I hadn't even known Oom-Paul was sick.

“Delaney was holding a druggist's pestle in the thumb of his glove,” Hemingway explained. “He stood with his back to the ropes, waiting for the judge's decision and a second took the piece out of his glove, and he got the decision. That was ‘the business.'”

“Well, it wouldn't have looked very good, when the ref was holding up Delaney's hand, for a hunk of iron to drop out of it, would it?” I inquired. I had to get off this boxing thing before the man confused me with George Plimpton.

But Hemingway only looked at me as though trying to decide something.

It was the Best Procurable alright. If it had been any better it wouldn't have been procurable at all. The distiller would have kept it all for himself.

Somebody behind me was eyeing me. I turned fast. That damned swordfish.

“You were saying something about somebody getting caught in quicksand,” Hemingway reminded me. “How'd he get out?”

“It was a rhinoceros,” I remembered. “Darryl Zanuck had dug this pit in Africa and pushed the brute into it. He must have had help. The hyenas came around. You know what the worst thing about a hyena is?”

“You told me. Its smell.”

“No,” I corrected him, “it's because when he laughs he giggles. I picked that up somewhere.”

“Are you living in Paris?” he asked.

“No, I lost my passport.”

“They'll issue you another.”

“That wasn't how I lost it,” I had to explain. “I meant they won't renew it.”

“Why not?”

“They won't tell me why.”

“The Shipley woman,” Hemingway said, “she won't tell
anybody
why.”

“I'd like to talk to her husband,” I said.

“Help yourself,” he suggested.

I did.

“Another big deal is the lioness,” I reported, because I thought Hemingway ought to know. “The old man don't hunt. He has two old ladies in his stable he's pimping and just lays under a tree while they go out and run down an elk and drag it home. He won't even help drag. He just lays under that tree till his old lady comes back from the supermarket dragging the groceries. He don't even help drag. When dinner is over they move on so the hyenas can come up and crunch the bones.”

There was a silence. Hemingway had run out of fighters and I'd nearly run out of hyenas.

“Another thing,” I felt he ought to know, “if he catches you sleeping he'll bite off your face.”

“Was
that
in the movie?” Hemingway asked quickly.

“No, I picked it up somewhere.”

Hemingway got out of bed painfully. He was fully dressed. There were guests waiting.

He sat among them gravely serious. He carried an air of tranquility. He didn't throw a punch at anybody. He didn't stagger. He didn't brag. He listened, perceived, and he liked having company. What he brought to a table of many guests was the feeling that everyone understood one another. I remember hearing Spanish spoken, and French, and of understanding not a word of what was said; and of knowing, when I spoke English, that some of the guests didn't understand me. But because of Hemingway's presence everything seemed understood.

I spent that afternoon and the next day, which was Christmas, with the Hemingways. He was a big man who had had a big life; that had made those who had known him bigger.

But they weren't going to give the money back in the mutuels.

Seven years later, cornered by death, a professor with a notebook came at him out of the shadows.

“He had read, or glanced at, I could soon see,” the professor reported, “not only my essays, but practically everything any one had written on the modern novel in the United States. I fancied Hemingway flipping the pages, checking the indexes (or maybe he got it all out of the book reviews in
Time
)
,
searching out the most obscure references to himself, trying to
find the final word that would allay his fears about how he stood; and discovering instead, imbedded in the praise that could never quite appease his anguish, qualifications, slights, downright condemnations . . . ‘A whole lifetime of achievement,' I wanted to shout at him, ‘a whole lifetime of praise, a whole lifetime of reveling in both. What do you want?'”

For you to go away. Was that asking too much?

“Okay, so you've written those absurd and trivial pieces on Spain and published them in
Life,
” the professor wrote, “okay, you've turned into the original old dog returning to his vomit. We've had to come to terms with your weaknesses as well as your even more disconcerting strengths—to know where we are and who, where we go from here and who we'll be when we get there.”

(“These damn students,” Hemingway once complained, “call me up in the middle of the night to get something to hang on me so they can get a Ph.D.”)

“Hemingway,” the Ph.D. concluded, “sometimes puts down the closest thing to silence attainable in words, but often what he considers reticence is only the garrulousness of the inarticulate.”

There is a corruption of prose which is jargon.

Gentlemen, I give you jargon: “Silence and platitude. Platitude and silence. This was the pattern of what never became a conversation. And I felt, not for the first time, how close Hemingway's prose style at its best was to both; how it lived in the meagre area of speech between inarticulateness and banality: a triumph wrung from the slenderest literary means ever employed to contrive a great style—that great decadent style in which a debased American speech somehow survives itself.”

This is jargon: its “Yes” is not “Yes”; its “No” is not “No.” It is jargon because it diffuses meaning in order to conceal, rather than reveal, the writer's thought. It is jargon because it conveys the impression that the writer is employing Elegant English at the same time that it enables him to falsify his thought. It is jargon because it seeks to make an idea, that is easily refutable, irrefutable. Put into prose, the writer's thought here is that Hemingway was uniquely fortunate in having devised a great style while he had nothing to write about. Put thus honestly, the writer would appear asinine. Jargon, therefore, is the corruption of prose deriving from the writer's own corruption.

“But what were we doing talking of ‘next books,'” the professor continues,
“when I could not stop the screaming inside my head—‘How will anyone ever know? How will I ever know unless the critics, foolish, biased, bored, tell me, tell us?' I could foresee the pain of reading the reviews of my first novel, just as I could feel Hemingway's pain reading the reviews of his later work. And I wanted to protest in the name of pain itself that not separated but joined us.”

Had the man driven from Montana to Idaho to interview Hemingway or to present himself as a victim? Hemingway hadn't sent for him.

“But all the while he [Hemingway] kept watching me warily, a little accusingly.”

Hemingway knew about lions and he knew about lionesses. He had been the man lying with blue wounds from elbow to wrist; he had been the English girl dreaming herself dead in an Italian rain. He had felt the wind of buzzard wings; and knew what it felt like to be an ex-fighter driving a cab. He had seen the elephant, he had seen the owl. He had smelled the hyena:

Small wonder Hemingway kept watching warily.

“I stood for a moment,” the interview concludes at last, “watching Hemingway banging at the closed doors, rather feebly but obviously tickled to be able to feel. ‘Shit,' he said finally to the dark interior and the empty
street; and we headed for our car fast, fast, hoping to close the scene on the first authentic Hemingway line of the morning. But we did not move quite fast enough, had to hear over the slamming of our car door the voice of Mrs. Hemingway calling to her husband, ‘Don't forget your vitamin tablets, Daddy.'”

Hemingway knew the action:
the trip had been worthwhile.

“I came to gamble” is the land-gambler's brag and
Deal
is his one command. Don't tell us about your lovelife
—Deal.
While one deck is being dealt another is being shuffled so not a moment will be lost: all moments tonight arc stolen from wife, children and home, we have to get in as much play as we can. And every deal seems slow.

Poker upon the roving deep isn't poker on dry land.

When goony-birds dip the deadly hours, pursuing, fleeing, again pursuing, the automatic foghorn mourns, the long deck tilts as the waters shift and the waters shift once more: then a rain-dashed fleck through an open port and the dealer lays down the deck.

Play stops. Talk stops. Even the engines below us wait; the port is closed.

Then like a great heart hauling hard, the engines begin to throb once more, the long deck tilts as the waters shift and the waters shift once more: the automatic foghorn mourns and the cards go around and around once more.

Seaman of The Republic, castoff care-nothing from suburb and slum, unschooled craftsman and long-schooled drunk, skilled mechanic sick of the land or drop-out dropping yet, under the moon of the East China Sea, with a pack of stained cards on a green-baize board, all are now gathered together: