Papa Hemingway (24 page)

"Did you write any others here?"

"Sure—'A Way You'll Never Be,' for one. I had tried to write it back in the Twenties, but had failed several times. I had given up on it but one day here, fifteen years after those things happened to me in a trench dugout outside Fornaci, it suddenly came out focused and complete. Here in Key West, of all places. Old as I am, I continue to be amazed at the sudden emergence of daffodils and stories."

The theater project which I had come down to discuss involved dramatizations of several of Ernest's stories. Over the following days he read the ones I had already done—
Hills Like White Elephants, The Sea Change, Today Is Friday, Cat in the Rain, The Battler—
and discussed them, but we spent most of our time on the stories I had not yet started work on.

"The problem for the dramatist," I explained to Ernest, "is that the very thing that gives sinew to your short story, challenges the dramatization of it. You long ago explained to me that your stories gain strength in direct ratio to what you can leave out of them, but this can be a fatal handicap to the adapter, who must guess at what was in the mind of the short-story writer."

Ernest pointed out that if what is left out is left out because the short-story writer doesn't know it, then it is a worthless story. It's only the important things you know about and omit that strengthen the story, he said. But he realized what a problem such a story creates for the dramatizer, who, he acknowledged, must achieve a different effect. He then proceeded to reveal that the real thing in back of "The Killers" was that the Swede was supposed to throw the fight but didn't. In the gym all afternoon he had rehearsed taking a dive, but during the real fight he had instinctively thrown a punch he didn't mean to and knocked his opponent out. That's why the boys were sent to kill him.

"Mr. Gene Tunney, the Shakespearean pugilist, once asked me if the Swede of the story wasn't actually Carl Andreson," Ernest said. "I told him yes, and the town wasn't Summit, New Jersey, but Summit, Illinois. But that's all I told him because the Chicago mob that sent the killers was and, as far as I know, is still very much in business. 'The Killers' was another story I tried several times before I invented it right, and that one didn't straighten itself out until I tackled it on an afternoon in

Madrid when a freak snowstorm canceled out the bullfights. I guess I left as much out of 'The Killers' as any story I ever wrote. Left out the whole city of Chicago.

"But come to think of it, I guess the story that tops them all for leave-out was 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.' I left everything out of that one. But you're not planning to use that, although I wish you would. May be my favorite story. That and 'The Light of the World,' which no one but me ever seemed to like. But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women—that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had."

Ernest went down the list of stories, giving me background and telling me in detail about the real-life bitch who was the prototype of Margot Macomber, a woman whose sole virtue was an overeagerness to get laid, "if that's a virtue in your book"; the races at San Siro, the track near the hospital in Milan where Ernest was a patient, which was the true background of "My Old Man"; and the jockey who became a good pal and about whom the story was written. He went over a manuscript of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and changed some of the fictional names to real ones. In this paragraph: "The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, 'The very rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found out they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him," Ernest scratched out "Julian" and wrote "Scott Fitzgerald." Ernest said, "I called the character 'Scott' in the first printing and only changed it to 'Julian' when Scott complained to Max Perkins. Time has come to put it back."

By the end of the third day I could see that the oppressive

Key West heat was certainly doing Ernest no good. His body was covered with prickly heat, and a lymph gland under one arm became swollen. "If this balloons up, we clear out of here fast," he told Mary. "I'd rather eat monkey manure than die in Key West." But the gland eventually subsided and he conceded that survival was a distinct possibility.

Before returning to New York, I managed to have a private talk with Mary, who had been looking after Ernest marvelously, not reacting when he snapped and fulminated, and underscoring his moments of well-being. Ernest depended upon her heavily during those days and made constant demands to which she responded with good humor, but he also was very solicitous about her well-being and how she felt and if she was taking her various medicines, and he was highly complimentary about her cooking and housecare (there was no help). In the morning, to permit her to sleep late, he defended silence as he would have defended the
finca
if it had been attacked by a band of saber-toothed autograph-seekers. Mary and Ernest had become very close and loving and interdependent.

I realized that both Mary and I were relying upon Ernest's huge powers of recuperation. Of course the heat was very bad for him, and Havana was bad for him, and not to have any fun the worst of all. He had always kept tab on his blood pressure and his weight and swallowed a few pills every day with his tequila, but it was a ritual that no one, including Ernest, really took seriously. Now it was different. It had all suddenly become very serious. And the drinking was different too. The Prize, coming as it did on the heels of the crash, had had the impact of another beating.

It was apparent to me that it was essential for him to get away from Cuba and back to familiar and pleasurable haunts in Spain and France. It was bad for him to keep driving himself on the book he was writing. He was like a race horse who had won his race and passed the finish line but couldn't slow down and cool out before the next race. He was still running at full speed, but there was nothing to race against. He needed the quiet, unbuttoned freedom that he had always wisely used as his antidote against stress. For some reason he was now resisting it. Eventually, he would pack up and go, and it would restore him. But for the time being, he was hard to move. I was finding out that when he said he never left any place but with reluctance, he really meant it.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut

and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket.

The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot

long ago and the bones and the sinews

were polished by wear. The claws scratched in

the lining of your pocket and you knew your

luck was still there.

a moveable feast

It took several months to achieve Ernest's exodus from Cuba, but what induced him to go was more a medical occurrence than Mary's and my gentle prods. Mary developed a recurrence of anemia, and when the doctor recommended a more temperate climate, Ernest issued emergency marching orders. "She is down to 3,200,000," Ernest informed me, "which isn't funny. Eisenhower has 5,000,000. Black Dog 5,200,000."

I had gone to live in Rome and it was there that I heard from Ernest when he arrived in Paris. His plans were to drive to Madrid in a Lancia, larger than his last one, which was being driven over from Italy. He wanted to know if I would like to join him for the
feria
of Zaragoza, where the young matador Antonio Ordonez, with whom he had been so impressed in 1954, was performing.

We met at the Gran Hotel in Zaragoza the afternoon before the
feria
was to start. Zaragoza is in northern Spain, 323 kilometers northeast of Madrid. It is an unattractive, crowded industrial city, with what must surely be the homeliest cathedral in Christendom—a cavernous, square, fortlike structure which at night glows with neon trim that runs all around it, and the inside resembles the waiting room of a suburban-Chicago railroad station. The Gran Hotel, the city's best, had possibly been wrought by the same architectural hand.

I was in the lobby when Ernest came in; he seemed to have regained some of his old vigor in the few months since I had seen him, although his face was pinched and heavily lined. He was smiling, and as he came toward me I noticed he had resumed his old style of walking forward on the balls of his feet. We went into the bar to have a drink, and he told me about his trip down from Paris.

"We stopped in Logrono, where we saw two fights. Antonio was wonderful, Giron very good and a Mexican named Joselito Huerta did the damnedest
faena
for exposure and variety and sheer
cojones
I've ever seen. He and Giron both dedicated bulls to us and laid it on the line like one Indian to another. Huerta cut both ears, tail and a foot in a tough plaza where they know bullfighting. Antonio wants to dedicate the best one he draws here in Zaragoza and will really put out. We have been hanging around together and he is a loving, unspoiled kid. Christ, how he can fight bulls! He has the three basics for being a great matador—courage, enormous skill, and grace in the presence of death."

It was good to hear enthusiasm in his voice again—the dullness of Key West gone—and to see him looking forward to the coming
feria
as he had looked forward to things all his life. "Awful glad you got here—it shapes up as a beauty
feria.
Antonio fights three, Huerta and Giron two each, two new kids, one a friend of ours, Jaime Ostos, and Litri, who for me is a bum in spite of Kenneth Tynan, who wrote a book called
Bull Fever
after seeing fourteen fights." It was also good to see him using his left jab.

He ordered another Scotch and half a lime, which he squeezed himself. "Didn't see any press in Paris, or on the way, or here. Been going good. Wrote six short stories when I quit fishing for the
Old Man and Sea
movie, and want to write some more here. Shooting season starts October fourteenth, so maybe we can make them feel the sting of a couple of hot guns from the American West. Georges is already at work on the Auteuil form and I made a preliminary recce before I left, so if you can spare the time we can actuate the old firm around the end of October." I had forgotten how he distrusted chance and how he planned fun as seriously as work, for he considered them of equal importance to Well-Being. He slid his drink closer to me and spoke intently. "Look, Hotch, my head is quite sharp now and not banged to hell like on our last trip to Spain when I was all beat up. So maybe I can make some sense about the bulls and the others things we like to talk about."

A bellboy informed Ernest that the call he had placed to New York City was ready, and he left the bar, which was rapidly filling with pr
e-feria
celebrants. While he was gone, a pretty young girl who had been sitting at the end of the barroom, eating grapes and drinking Tio Pepe, came over and offered me some grapes. "They taste better when you steal them," she said in American. I sampled one and agreed. "That's Ernest Hemingway, isn't it?"

A tall, bony young man who had been hunched over the bar, drinking rum on ice and staring at himself in the mirror, cocked his head at us. "That right? Hemingway? Where?" He had a twang straight out of the Corn Belt. The girl quietly disappeared as the young man introduced himself: said his name was Chuck and explained that he was bumming his way around the world to get atmosphere.

"Atmosphere for what?"

"To write."

"What have you written?"

"Nothing. How could I till I get the atmosphere?"

"How long you been in orbit?"

"Three years."

"You must have seen just about everything."

"Nope. Just Europe."

"Russia and Poland?"

"No. That's Iron Country. I just seen Europe; now I'm headed Far East."

Ernest returned, looking flushed and pleased. "That was Toots. Bad connection but we screamed it out and I got the bet down. Four hundred bucks on the Dodgers to take the Series."

"They ain't got a prayer," Chuck said.

Ernest turned a narrowed eye on him. "Who's the Horsehide Expert?"

I introduced him and explained his mission. "Made up my mind back in Chillicothe I was gonna write like you," Chuck said, unselfconsciously, "so I figgered I better go take a squint at the places you been writin' about."

"Good reasoning," Ernest said.

"Could I see you later on to discuss it?" Chuck asked.

"Well, have some people lined up, but why don't you show up for dinner?"

"Gee, really? You mean it? I mean, I didn't seriously think . . . gosh, I gotta run out and buy a shirt. I had this one on since Antwerp." He left hurriedly.