Papa Hemingway (11 page)

Roberto arrived and Ernest poured him a glass of the maudlin wine. Roberto had just come from a jai-alai game in Havana and Ernest discussed it with him in Spanish. While they were talking, I picked up a copy of
The New Yorker
in which E.B. White had written a parody of
Across the River,
calling it "Across the Street and into the Grill."

When I finished reading, Ernest interrupted talking to Roberto and said, "The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard
Lampoon.
The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal." It was incredible to me that while Ernest was carrying on his animated conversation with Roberto he had simultaneously been able to run a re-con on what I was reading. I was to learn that for him this was an effortless accomplishment, the ability to assimilate simultaneous occurrences. In a room full of people he would give complete attention to the person he was talking to and yet monitor other conversations. It was never safe to assume that Ernest was either distracted or out of earshot.

When I came into the living room early the next morning Ernest was already busy writing letters at his stand-up typewriter. He called me into his bedroom. He was cheerful, as he always was in the early morning, and the Black-Ass of the night seemed to have been put to rout.

"This portable you brought last time," he said, "is being used by a number of people, all of them extremely nice, but each time I go to work on it something new is lacking. I have a cat named Sun Valley who can hit five keys at a time. Am composing letter you may find interesting."

The letter in the typewriter was addressed "Your Arrogance:" and it contained Ernest's vitriolic reaction to one of the big news events of the day, Francis Cardinal Spellman's going through a gravediggers' picket line. The letter had Ernest's peculiar spacing characteristic; when he was at work on a manuscript or writing letters that "counted," he spaced three or more times between words so that the page looked like this. Ernest did this to slow himself down and emphasize the importance of each word.

The letter in the typewriter was a masterpiece of invective. "I don't think he will have any doubts about how you feel," I said.

"It doesn't sound too friendly?"

"Only to a gravedigger."

"Did you get a chance to read Carlo's fable?"

The night before, Ernest had handed me a manuscript to read before going to sleep. It was a fable written by one of his Venetian friends, Count Carlo di Robilant. When we were in Venice, Ernest had written two fables for children of his friends, and with his approval I had sent the fables to Ted Patrick, the editor of
Holiday;
they were about to be published and Ernest had asked me whether I thought
Holiday
might also publish Count di Robilant's offering.

Where his friends were concerned, Ernest's generosity with his money, his possessions and his time, which to him was much more valuable than the other two, was boundless. Lillian Ross's career with
The New Yorker
was founded on the success of her profile of the bullfighter Sidney Franklin; she told me that when she first started it she consulted Ernest, whom she scarcely knew, and he edited, rewrote and advised every step of the way.

When his young Venetian friend Gianfranco Ivancich decided to try his hand at writing a novel, Ernest invited him to stay in the guest house at the
finca,
gave him advice and sustenance, and tried strenuously to place the book with Scribner's.

There were a half-dozen old pals, down on their luck, who received regular remittances from Ernest, and he responded with dispatch to any cry of emergency emanating from any friend who "mattered," a category that embraced several hundred people.

Late that night Ernest came into my room, carrying a clip board which had a sizable sheaf of manuscript trapped in its metal jaw. Ernest seemed tentative, almost ill at ease. "Wanted you to read something," he said. "Might be antidote to Black-Ass. Mary read it all one night and in the morning said she forgave me for anything I'd ever done and showed me the real goose flesh on her arms. So have been granted a sort of general amnesty as a writer. Hope I am not fool enough to think something is wonderful because someone under my own roof likes it. So you read it—and level with me in the morning."

He put the clip board down on my bed table and left abruptly. I got into bed, turned on the lamp, and picked up the manuscript. The title was written in ink:
The Old Man and the Sea.
Night bugs popped against the screen, huge brilliant moths buzzed insistently, sounds drifted up from the village below, but I was in the nearby port-town of Cojimar and then out to sea, having one of the most overwhelming reading experiences of my life. It was the basic life battle that had always intrigued Ernest: a brave, simple man struggling unsuccessfully against an unconquerable element. It was also a religious poem, if absolute reverence for the Creator of such earthly wonders as the sea, a splendid fish and an old man's courage can be accepted as religious.

"I will keep it as part of the big book," Ernest said the next morning, after I told him my reaction. "The sea part. I'll do the other parts, land and air, before I publish it. I could break it into three books because this one is self-contained. But why do it? I'm glad you agree it can go out on its own. There is at the heart of it the oldest double
dicho
I know."

"What's a double
dicho?"
I asked.

"It's a saying that makes a statement forward or backward. Now this
dicho
is: Man can be destroyed but not defeated."

"Man can be defeated but not destroyed."

"Yes, that's its inversion, but I've always preferred to believe that man is undefeated."

Mary told me she had typed
The Old Man and the Sea
day by day and that more than any other of Ernest's books, it seemed to originate virtually letter-perfect, the pages devoid of Ernest's usual intensive editing.

Late that afternoon Juan drove me to the airport to go back to New York. As the car pulled away from the
finca,
I looked back at Ernest, who stood on the steps, leonine against the massive house, renewed by the power of his new writing accomplishment.

Outside the gates of the
finca,
watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about
The Old Man and the Sea
, and I realized it was Ernest's counterattack against those who had assaulted him for
Across the River.
It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, "Through! Washed Up! Kaput!" suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, "One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war."

In the early fall of 1952 Ernest asked me to fly down to discuss an ambitious television project which one of the networks had proposed. I was surprised to discover that he was already at work on a new book; it was the first time I had been at the
finca
when Ernest was book-writing and the change in him was dramatic. The discipline of morning work was absolute. The door of his bedroom was inviolate until one o'clock, when he would emerge and mix a drink to cool out before lunch. While having his drink he would read newspapers and magazines because, he said, he was too empty to talk. In the afternoon he would nap, having started work at five or six in the morning, but by late afternoon he was ready for the drinking and companionship he enjoyed. Toward the end of dinner, however, he would begin to withdraw into himself, for his mind had turned to the creative problems of the morning, and by the time he went to bed, which was always early when he was working, he knew the people, the events, the places and even some of the dialogue he would encounter the following day.

I apologized for being an interruption—I had not known he was working and the television project could surely have waited. "Wouldn't have asked you down," Ernest said, "if I couldn't handle interruption, but never think of you as an interruption. As you know, Leland Hayward talked me into publishing
The Old Man
in
Life
now and not wait for the long book, so what I'm working on is another sea part for the land, sea and air book. But I've got to stop the TV hordes invading from the north. They sweep down like the Huns with their deals and residuals; you tell them not to come when they write or phone but they come anyway, and you tell them no again when they get here, but they all want their dime's worth of publicity and they wire to Miss Louella or Miss Hedda that they have you under contract. Last week I was put under siege by a wet-palmed press agent named Richard Condon, who came out and drank gin by the yard and sweated so heavy I thought he'd pass out, all the time trying to con me into a deal he'd dreamed up. The way I am being bombarded these days with television wheeler-dealers, was thinking this morning maybe it's something you could handle. You're in New York where you can screen the dross from the brass and I'd be willing to go on your nod."

I had never written for television, but as a result of this simple suggestion—and we never had any agreement beyond it—over the following years I dramatized many of Ernest's works, among which were "The Battler," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "The Killers," "The World of Nick Adams," "The Fifth Column," "Fifty Grand," and
For Whom the Bell Tolls.

"Now to begin with," Ernest said, "there's this series CBS wants me to do that I wrote you about. It would be a series based on my stories and I would introduce each one. They say they would shoot sixteen of these introductions at a clip right here at the
finca.
Very big income being mentioned, and for a writer who's always in debt, it is music for tired ears. After I got your letter suggesting I record a few things, I made three wire reels on three days straight, and the first two were worthless. This is the third. In the first my throat wasn't sore but the soft palate swollen and sort of a hangover from the really choked-up sore throat I had when it was so sore you couldn't swallow. Then I did forty-eight hundred words week before last and forty-nine hundred this last week and I was pooped.

"But I'm spooked about the whole thing, Hotch. If there was some way we could sell the stories without me talking or mugging, I would give anything. I'm going so damn good now, and in a real
belle epoque
, and every morning I wake up worrying about TV and all its angles. The money would be a nice cushion, but as long as I'm hitting around a thousand words a day of the really good, it is okay to borrow to eat from Charlie Scribner. I pay him interest and there is three and a half times as much book as I would be justified in borrowing on.

"Charlie has an 876-page book by a 135-pound writer named 'Colonel' James Jones, who according to his own publicity went over the hill in 1944 (not a vintage year for that), and it recounts the 'colonel's' sufferings and those of his fellow inmates in the Army of the United States to such a paranoic degree that it gets almost sad if you are a type who saddens up easy. I don't believe 'Colonel' Jones will be around for long. But maybe he will be with us forever. Maybe you could cover by obtaining the services of 'Colonel' Jones to, say, exclusively belch on television. Anyway, it is Charlie's idea of a book next to something by Taylor Caldwell. But I will just write on as good as I can. There is an old Spanish proverb that says if you have a twenty-dollar gold piece, you can always get change for it. If any of this is too metaphysical, knock me on the head with your own mallet."

Despite the potential security which the television money represented, Ernest's distaste for the microphone, the camera, and "public" performance conquered all, and the series was never done.

I phoned Ernest in the late spring of 1953 because he had not answered any letters for many months; he apologized and explained that there had been a big pile-up of
merde
after Pauline's death and that had put letter writing and all other writing out of commission.

"How are you really, kid?" he asked. "I wish we could see you. I don't have a real pal down here—you know what it's like —and I sure wish you were here for what fun there is. But I think we're about to stir ourselves. Plan to go to Africa next summer. Been away too long."

"Is your safari all set?"

"Yes, even got my old pal Philip Percival to un-retire and be our White Hunter. Mary's looking forward to it like her first Christmas. Will you be able to join?"

"I don't think so, Papa. I have this new eater, name of Holly, who's just enrolled, and the former one, Tracy, is now off the bottle and onto filet mignon, so it looks like a year close to the typewriter and the supermarket."

"You can bring them along. Kids love gazelle milk. Very nutritious."

"Will you come through New York on your way?"