Papa Hemingway (18 page)

"He said he had been a taxi driver in Montmartre when one night Zelda came out of a night club and hailed him to take her back to the Ritz. She stopped somewhere to pick up Scott, and when they got to the Ritz, Scott made arrangements with Pierre to drive them to Le Havre the following morning. Next day when they arrived at Le Havre, where they were boarding a boat for America, Scott was seized with a brilliant idea. He had just purchased a new Hotchkiss, which was being loaded onto the boat; what better than to have a true Frenchman drive it in America. Pierre pointed out that he spoke no English and had no clothes or passport with him, but, as usual, Scott's enthusiasm and persuasiveness prevailed and Pierre abandoned his taxi at the dock; some kind of temporary papers were issued, enabling Pierre to debark.

" 'But Monsieur Hemingway,' Pierre told me, 'from the moment I arrive here life has been a nightmare. This beautiful car, Monsieur Fitzgerald will not allow me to change the oil and the grease. He insists they are
French
oil and
French
grease and they must not be changed. So this beautiful car is burning up. Look at it! Right before my eyes. I show him the black smoke; he knows what is happening but still he will not let me put in any oil or grease. Please, can you not influence him?'

"It was a beautiful mansion, right on the water, rolling green lawn, but the big trees made it kind of melancholy. Scott and Zelda were being dressy and grand and were bearing down heavy on the sauce. Scott knew I liked burgundy so he had six bottles of wonderful vintage on the table, all uncorked. Turned out they were drinking Moselle and the burgundy was just for me. Six bottles
uncorked.
Can you imagine? There was a very attractive colored maid serving dinner, and every time she passed a dish Scott would say, 'Aren't you the best piece of tail I ever had? Tell Mr. Hemingway.' The girl never answered him and kept her composure. He must have said it to her ten times. 'Tell him what a grand piece of pussy you are.' Like that, over and over.

"After dinner Scott started up about Gertrude Stein. It was a thing he never let up on. Gertrude had once said that Scott's flame and my flame weren't the same. Scott was so damn insecure he decided she meant I had a bigger or brighter flame than he did. When he first brought it up, I said all the talk about flames was Stein horseshit since we were both serious writers who would write the best we could until we died and there was no competition between flames or anything else. But he kept on. And on, and on.

"When it came time for me to catch my train, Scott had passed out and Zelda had disappeared; since no one knew the whereabouts of Pierre and the Hotchkiss, I had to stay overnight, obviously the way Scott planned it.

"Next morning Scott appeared in a blue blazer and white flannels, clear-eyed and vigorous, and wanting to play forced games like croquet. There was only one train a day so I went along with the activities until it got near train time, when I made it clear that I was going to catch this one. Scott and Zelda insisted on coming to the station with me, but delayed leaving the house so that making the train would be a tight squeeze, if not impossible. Scott rode with his feet sticking out of the window. He was being churlish about my not staying and when we got near the station he suddenly swung his feet around and kicked out the windshield, cutting his foot in the process. He told Pierre to drive to his doctor's. I told Pierre to keep on to the station, and
then
to the doctor's. Scott turned savagely abusive and hysterical and I had to slap his face hard to quiet him down. Zelda huddled in a back-seat corner, sobbing. There was glass and blood all over. Poor lovely Scott."

Ernest watched a string of passing carts, still thinking about Scott. "After I left, I wrote Scott that I'd like to see him again when he was sober enough to talk and not stinking all the time. I told him that neither of us was a tragic character, that we were writers who should write and that's all we were, and he should give up the false and worthless pose of being tragic. Of course, his marriage to Zelda was tragic, and I told him that someone as jealous of his work as Zelda was, was always competing with him and out to wreck him—I told him it was obvious to me the first time I met her that Zelda was a crazy. But

Scott was in love with her and did not see the obvious. Being a rummy made him very vulnerable—I mean, a rummy married to a crazy is not the kind of pari-mutuel that aids a writer. I told Scott that because I thought the brutal truth might shake him out of himself, and then I tried to set him up by pointing out that Joyce was as bad a rummy as he was and that most good writers were rummies. How the hell can you bleed over your own personal tragedies when you're a writer? You should welcome them because serious writers have to be hurt really terrible before they can write seriously. But once you get the hurt and can handle it, consider yourself lucky—that is what there is to write about and you have to be as faithful to it as a scientist is faithful to his laboratory. You can't cheat or pretend. You have to excise the hurt honestly. That's what I told Scott. And I told him that at this point in his life, hurt as he was, he could write twice as well as he ever could, booze or no booze. Zelda or no Zelda. Tried to build him up. Light a fire. Didn't work. He resented my telling him and he was angry and it didn't work at all."

Ernest and I were now driving through beautiful Van Gogh country, and we arrived in Nimes in time for lunch. "You remember the last time we were here?" Ernest asked. "With the Viertels? From Paris to here was fine, but I started to lose a little faith when we couldn't get them out of the car to see the Maison Carre there in Nimes that beautiful morning. I think you and I were the only ones who went in. Did Mary? You know, for a dime they wouldn't have seen the arena, and to Peter, Aigues-Mortes was a place to take a picture. Well, what can you expect from a guy who by his own admission had had only two sleepless nights in his entire life. Count 'em, gentlemen, two. Probably all those eighteen-month no-tax chaps, including Herr Irwin Shaw, the Swiss banker, and other charter members of the Klosters Kaffeeklatch will be the founders of the next great American fortunes. The former fortunes were founded by the people who didn't fight in the Civil War."

As we drove along, Ernest was reminded of many things. Of the time at Aigues-Mortes when he and Hadley stained themselves with walnut juice so they could crash a gypsy dance; they were broke and the vision of free-flowing wine was their inspiration, but there was nothing to drink at the dance and it took a week for the walnut stain to wear off.

When we passed through Lunel, we stopped to admire a monument in the center of town, a black, life-sized bull mounted on a white stone pedestal. "This is the home town of Sangle," Ernest said, "one of the greatest bulls that ever lived. They used to tie a rose between his horns and paid a prize of three thousand francs to anyone who could pick it off."

We stopped fcr the night in Montpellier, where a big street carnival was in progress. We drove slowly past the wheels of fortune, the weight-guessers, the shooting galleries, the games of skill and chance; Ernest wanted to rekindle our attack on the red-eyed pigeons, but when we stopped and got out of the car he had to beg off. "If I tried to take aim I'd be as likely to shoot myself as the pigeon."

The following day our route took us through Beziers to the walled city of Carcassonne in the shadow of the Pyrenees. In Beziers we stopped to ask directions (Adamo never forgave us) of an ancient gentleman who was sunning himself on the steps of the Cathedrale St. Nazaire. As we continued on our way, Ernest said, "Have you noticed that toothless people the world over, regardless of language, sound the same?"

In Carcassonne we stayed at the Hotel de Cite, which is one of the most unique and beautiful hotels in Europe. It has a medieval atmosphere and all its rooms look upon the ramparts of the town. "Most of the wall and the towers of the city are faked," Ernest said, "but the restoration is so wonderful, who gives a damn?"

When we went down to dinner, Ernest was surprised and pleased when an old New York friend came over to the table to greet him. Ernest invited him to dine with us and over drinks inquired about the gentleman's wife, whom, it seemed, Ernest had liked. The man explained that they were separated and Ernest said he was genuinely sad to hear it. There were three children. "The thing I've got to decide, Hem," the man said, "is whether to make another stab at it or tell her to go to Reno. She'd like to try again, but she says she'll go to Reno if that's what I want. Frankly, I don't know. I miss the kids . . ."

"How long you been separated?"

"Four months."

"You got dough laid away?"

"No. Hell, who can save anything? I live on what I make, and you know what I make."

"Well, Barney, one thing you have to remember is that the economics of people having bust-ups is almost fatal. You not only lose the children, no matter what you're promised, but you go straight into economic slavery, and what's left, unless you hit jackpots, is never enough to satisfy anybody else. Maybe I just read all this in an article by Hotch here, who had a piece on the subject in a magazine. But if you ask me, any sort of
modus vivendi,
if you can keep from fighting, can be better. The last time with Miss Martha it was a break to break up, on account no children, no love, she was making more money than I was and convinced she had a much better future without me and was probably right since our interests and tastes were not the same and I liked to write and could not match her in ambition. Nobody can advise anybody. I don't want to try."

"What concerns me more than the economics," Barney said, "are the kids. I have a good relation with them. That means a lot to me. If I could see them regularly and keep that. . . well, I know how tough it will be supporting two houses on the same income . . . but. . . aw, I don't know . . ."

Ernest then discussed his own sons in terms of his relations with them after his divorces. He told about Patrick, who had been living with Pauline in Key West, and how on one occasion when he came to visit Ernest in Cuba he had come down with meningitis. The meningitis induced a delirium in Patrick that made hell out of everyone's life at the
finca,
but with the help of Sinsky Dunabeitia, Roberto Herrera, Taylor Williams, who was staying in the Little House, and Ermua, the great pelota player, Ernest had pulled Patrick through the crisis and nursed him back to good health. Ernest said there was one stretch when

Ermua had to sleep with his arms wrapped around Patrick to keep him from harming himself. For four weeks, Ernest said, he had averaged less than four hours sleep a night.

Patrick, of course, had no memory of these delirious months after his recovery, so that when his mother told him that he had fallen ill in Cuba and Ernest had abandoned him and she had taken him back to Key West and claimed to have done all the things for him that Ernest had actually done, the boy believed her, and it was a long time before Ernest could reestablish himself with Patrick.

"This is only to tell you," Ernest said, "that you can't figure on retaining much of children these days if you split up. But the real thing about Pauline is that when women have any feeling of guilt, they tend to get rid of it by slapping it onto you."

Barney asked how Ernest got along with his sons now that they were grown. "Pretty gcod, I think. We see each other when we can and we like each other pretty good. The boys haven't developed, though, the way I thought they were headed. The number-one son, Bumby, who was O.S.S. and parachuted behind the German lines and who I had pegged as career Army, is now a West Coast stockbroker. Gigi, who was the adventurer, crack shot, rider, roper and hell-raiser, is pre-med and set on doctoring.

"Patrick, who has the nickname Mousy, is the one I told you about, Harvard
cum laude,
married a Baltimore socialite. Figured to be the Thinking Man's Hemingway, but he's the one set himself up in Africa, licensed White Hunter and a damn good one, and is conducting a big experiment in plantation corn."

"Do they consult you about their work and plans?"

"Yes, we all keep in touch. Just answered Bumby, who asked advice on salary arrangements with new firm. Wanted to know about a drawing account. Told him drawing account was the enemy of man, and expense account was its evil little brother."

The next morning arrived in a shroud of wet fog. We delayed leaving and when we finally did leave we traveled cautiously along the partially obscured road to Toulouse; Ernest refused to stop in Toulouse, even for coffee. "This town has the ugliest people in the world," he said. "As a matter of fact, you can drive all the way from Nimes to Paris and never see a pretty girl."

Twenty kilometers south of Toulouse, where apparently pulchritude took a sudden surge upward, Ernest said it was okay to stop for lunch in the little town of Muret, where we dined very well on
champignon de bourgogne
and a bottle of Sancerre. The bar was cheerful; the kitchen aromas were good. "One good thing about France," Ernest said, "you don't get any rummies around." His eyes had lost some of their ominous yellow color and I could tell that his pain had lessened somewhat. Our waitress was blessed with non-Toulousian features, and breasts that bubbled over the top of the circular cut of her dress. Ernest asked her to have a glass of wine with us, which she did, and she would have driven with us to Biarritz if her boy friend, who was the local mailman, hadn't bicycled up as we were paying the check.

We arrived in Biarritz, which is just north of the Spanish border on the Bay of Biscay, toward evening, the mist solid all the way and the beauties of the Pyrenees to our left totally obscured. We checked into the Hotel Palais, which had once been the summer palace of Napoleon III, and as far as I was concerned still was. My room was high-ceilinged sumptuous splendor with a balcony that seemed to touch the spray of the ocean as it cascaded against a formidable stand of offshore black rock. Ernest said he was so moved by his accommodations that he had changed his shirt.