Iberia (83 page)

 

Quintana
: Much was truthful and very sweet in its picture of
Ernesto. But the bad things about me…I remember the day I
introduced Hemingway to Ordóñez, here in Pamplona. It’s
not good to be made fun of.

 

Vanderford
: You keep asking questions, Michener. What did you
think about Hemingway?

 

Michener
: One of the things I’m proudest of in my life is that
when I was in the trenches in Korea,
Life
magazine sent me the
galleys of Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
. Wanted me
to make a statement to sort of back them up in their venture
of publishing the whole thing in one issue. So there I sat,
absolutely cold turkey, knowing nothing about the book and
remembering the debacle of
Across the River and into the Trees
,
and how the critics had slaughtered him, and I was praying
that this one would be good so that he could regain his
reputation. So I read it by lantern light with the Chinese
popping at us from across the valley, and a great lump came
in my throat, and when I finished I wrote something about
feeling good when the daddy of us all won back the heavyweight
crown. I was the first to read it. And stick my neck out. It was
used in full-page ads across the country. One of the best things
I ever did.

 

Vavra
: Did he ever say anything about it?

 

Michener
: I met him only once. For about twenty minutes. I was
working in New York, and Leonard Lyons, who was a close
friend of Hemingway’s, called at lunchtime and said, ‘Papa’s
in town. He’s having lunch at Toots Shor’s. You want to meet
him?’ I did, very much, but couldn’t get away. About four in
the afternoon I was walking down Fifty-first Street to my hotel,
and as I passed Shor’s I thought, Hemingway may still be in
there. So I went inside. Lyons was gone but Hemingway was
in a corner surrounded by men I didn’t know. Only one I knew
was Toots Shor. After a while I introduced myself and
Hemingway was embarrassed and I was embarrassed. He knew
what I’d written about
The Old Man
, but we were both
embarrassed. So he did all the talking, and I remembered two
things he said. That the time came when a man didn’t want to
be known locally as a distinguished Philadelphia novelist but
wanted to put his work up against the best in the world. He
had put his up against Pío Baroja and Flaubert, and any man
who was satisfied to be idolized locally was a crapper. He also
said he couldn’t stand what the movies had done to his things.

 

Quintana
: When he saw
The Sun Also Rises
he was very angry,
and I asked, ‘Where are you going?’ and he said, ‘To have a
fistfight with Darryl Zanuck.’ He asked me what I thought of
the picture, and I said, ‘Terrible. They made me short, with a
ruddy face and very large cheeks. And they used a Mexican
actor to play me…a Spaniard!’ Ernesto laughed.

 

Fulton
: He was always concerned with how he looked. You might
even say he was vain. Arjona, the photographer from Sevilla,
took a shot of him on a cold blustery day. Came out very bad.
Reluctantly Hemingway signed a copy for me, ‘To John Fulton,
with best wishes from his paisano, Ernest Hemingway.’

 

Vavra
: But when I pushed my copy of the same picture under his
nose, he groaned, ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll sign that one again,’ so
he drew a cartoonist’s balloon out from his mouth and inside
wrote the word ‘Mierda,’ and that’s all he would do.

 

Fulton
: Tell about the bullfight articles you’d written?

 

Vavra
: I showed him some criticisms I’d written for a magazine
in the States, and he read them carefully, put them down and
said, ‘It’s easy for a critic to make wise-cracks. It’s easy to be
clever. But its goddamned hard to be truthful. Now you sit
down and write half a dozen more and I’ll go over them with
you. And we’ll cut out the cheap cracks. Because a real critic is
after the truth which the writer or the matador doesn’t see for
himself. Cheap cracks are the concern of vaudeville.’

 

Michener
: In these last years what was he like as a man?

 

Vanderford
: Class all the way. And with me he was a gentleman,
too. He must have been irritated that I looked so much like
him. Baseball cap and everything. But I’d had my beard long
before I tangled with Hemingway. Anyway, he could have raised
hell about me but he didn’t. I remember when someone showed
him one of his novels I had autographed: ‘All that glitters is
not gold nor is every man with a white beard named…Ernest
Hemingway.’ He looked at it, laughed and told reporters, ‘I
don’t care what the sonofabitch signs so long as it isn’t my
checks or my contracts.’ He showed class.

 

Fulton
: He seemed anxious to help me and other Americans.
Asked me, ‘What can I do to help?’ I said, ‘For instance, you
can ask Ordóñez to let me serve in one of his fights as
sobresaliente [understudy].’ He said, ‘You’re an American and
I’m an American. If I can help I will.’ Two days later he told
me Ordóñez had said, ‘Sobresaliente is for boys who are down
and out.’ But Hemingway said, ‘This is a good fighter,’ so
Ordóñez agreed. ‘I’ll set it up for Ciudad Real.’ I waited and
the Ciudad Real date came and went. Then I had a letter from
Hemingway’s secretary telling me that Hotchner, who had
never faced a bull, had got the job as sobresaliente. That fight
was important to me…could have been very important in my
career. It was disgusting to learn that such a mockery had been
made of bullfighting.

 

Quintana
: In the last year Ernesto was the prisoner of the people
around him. But he still behaved with gracia. The people of
Pamplona loved him.

 

Vanderford
: But Hemingway could be ungracious too. Back in
1929 a little old lady…A retired school-teacher, I’d guess. She
approached him and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, I saw my first
bullfight this afternoon and frankly I didn’t like it as well as I
thought I would from reading your description.’ He could
easily have replied, ‘Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,’ or
something neutral like that. But he asked, ‘How much did you
pay for your ticket?’ She said, ‘Three hundred pesetas.’ He
pulled some bills from his pocket, thrust them at her and said,
‘Here’s your money.’ She wouldn’t accept it.

 

Quintana
: On the other hand, people who were jealous of him
were always trying to make scenes. They didn’t know him, so
they said he was a drunk and a fighter.

 

Vavra
: I found that out when I tried to track down the truth about
the famous incident with Matt Carney. In a bar I heard some
guy saying, ‘Matt Carney tried to drink a toast with Hemingway,
but the old man grabbed the bota, threw it a mile and cursed
Matt vilely.’ This didn’t sound like the Hemingway I knew, so
I asked around to get the true story. Seems Hemingway was
giving a party and Matt tried to barge in. He was drunk and
abusive, but Hemingway treated him gently and said, ‘I can’t
drink with you now.’ It was Carney who used the foul language,
not Hemingway. Matter of fact, Hemingway tried to ease him
away so the cops wouldn’t arrest him. That’s how they slander
Hemingway in Spanish bars.

 

Vanderford
: Michener still hasn’t said what he thinks about the
Hotchner book.

 

Michener
: In our family it caused a brouhaha. Mari, as the wife
of a writer, sided with Mary Hemingway. She thought the book
was an unwarranted and inaccurate invasion of privacy and
she wanted the courts to forbid its publication, even though it
was our own publisher, Random House, who was defending
the right to publish. Mari told Bennett Cerf, ‘I side with the
enemy.’ I felt the opposite. Hemingway was a public figure and
relevant facts about him should not be held from the public. I
take my attitude on such matters from the Supreme Court
decision in the case where some jerk called Senator Joe Clark
a Communist. Clark sued for libel, and the Court held that
when Clark entered the race for the Senate he offered himself
as a public figure, which made him fair game for anything
anyone wanted to say against him, so long as it wasn’t part of
a malicious conspiracy.

 

Vanderford
: How does this apply to Hemingway?

 

Michener
: Hemingway went to great lengths to constitute himself
a public figure and Hotchner had every right to comment about
the operation.

 

Vanderford
: Even about the suicide?

 

Michener
: Especially the suicide. Hemingway’s whole public life
was dedicated to the creation of a legend. And a legend with
certain implications. Therefore, the suicide must not be seen
as the act of a casual individual but as the culmination of a
carefully prepared legend. Now, either the final act was in
conformity with legend or it wasn’t.

 

Vanderford
: What do you think?

 

Michener
: I’ve told you I wanted it printed.

 

Vavra
: But when it was printed? What then? Because of its errors
it’s a betrayal of friendship. On the part of a guy who, it seems
to me, had never really understood or known Hemingway. If
you’re going to do something like that you have to do it right.
Tell the whole story and be honest about it.

 

Michener
: Maybe that’s why I liked it. It was a legend about a
legend. As I read it I said, ‘Hotchner gives me a picture of
Hemingway the brawler, the boaster, the race-track tout, the
Cuban exile. But he doesn’t give me one glimpse of the man
who wrote the great books.’

 

Vavra
: How can you say that’s good?

 

Michener
: Because I think the lives of writers are like that. I think
that now and then the public should see the terrifying
contradictions. I can’t get out of my mind an interview that
Time
magazine carried with Hemingway. They played it up
like the word of God, and one part especially they carried in a
box…for effect…Hemingway saying that as long as man’s juices
were running he was in good shape…and boasted to the world
that his were still running. Very sexy. Very tough. But at the
end of the Hotchner book we are shown a pitiful man who
confesses that his juices have stopped running…nothing in
life…no sex…no fun…so he blows his brains out. I’ve got to
compare him with men like Verdi and Michelangelo and
Hokusai, who never talked tough but who did their best work
when they were old, old men. To them there was something
superior to the running of juices.

 

Quintana
: You’re wrong when you say he committed suicide. I
don’t believe that. Not long before he died I had a wire from
Ketchum, Idaho. From Ernesto, saying he wanted the best seats
at Pamplona. He planned to be with us, that I know. Of course,
he’d been drinking too much and had been told to stop. But
not suicide. That wasn’t in his mind.

 

Fulton
: On the day the news came over the wire I went out to see
Juan Belmonte and told him, ‘Don Ernesto just committed
suicide,’ and Belmonte said, very slowly and very clearly, ‘Well
done.’ In Belmonte’s autobiography there’s a long passage
about how Belmonte had wavered about committing suicide
in 1915. Had an obsession about it, and Hemingway knew this.
Anyway, a little while later Belmonte, the greatest of them
all…Well, he shot himself the same way. Right though the head.

 

Quintana
: And you, Michener, what did you think?

 

Michener
: I think he acted properly. He had built himself into a
legend and when it showed signs of blowing up in his face he
ended it with distinction. An act in harmony with the legend.
He proved he was as tough as he had claimed to be.

 

Vavra
: Then you knew it was suicide?

 

Michener
: How could it have been anything else? Remember that
time Hemingway came through Madrid incognito? Insisted he
wanted no publicity. Big beard. Baseball cap. Hunting jacket.
Wherever he went those six or eight bodyguards clearing the
way for him. It was the most conspicious literary disguise since
Leo Tolstoy used to go around in his muzhik’s costume. And
you could see he loved every phony minute of it. But such
performances run the risk of blowing up. And when his
threatened to do so, he had the gracia to end the legend with
a splendid gesture. The best thing about the suicide was that it
was artistically right. And I’m damned sure he realized it.

I left the dinner party and wandered back to the square, where
by purest chance someone said, ‘That’s Matt Carney over there.
You want to get the straight dope about his fight with
Hemingway?’

It was in this way that I met the legendary Carney, a
forty-year-old California Irishman who, his friends are convinced,
will become a first-rate novelist. Many years ago he came to
Europe to finish a book but as he was knocking about Paris he
was spotted by an agent whose job it was to find male models for
advertising. Carney had the rugged New World look of a
Mississippi gambler, and French advertisers flocked to him in
such numbers that he earned a great deal of money. He was
conned into posing for high-fashion ads and soon found himself
the pin-up boy of Paris. For the past seven years he had been
working on a novel,

Run Out of Time
, but had been somewhat
sidetracked by the purchase of a bar in Torremolinos. He loved
Spain and spoke like a drunken angel, with fiery Irish eloquence,
and as he approached my table I saw that his handsome features
were marked by a colossal black eye, which made him doubly
Irish and doubly handsome.

‘Who hung the mouse on you?’ I asked.

Caro nome che il mio cor,

 

‘A Basque woodchopper with a right hand of phenomenal
speed. But as I went down I had the presence of mind to kick him
in the balls and when he doubled up I knocked out one of his
front teeth. So now he’s a Basque woodchopper with a
phenomenal right and one missing tooth.’