Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (3 page)

“Toby, thanks, but look, Cuba is a big island. And ‘Papa’ doesn’t own it.” Then, half-kidding, I added, “Why doesn’t he take everything from Havana up? And I’ll take from Havana down, like Veradero. And he doesn’t have to ask me up, and I don’t have to ask him down.”

Toby felt bad, but loyally went up to the
finca
to see “Papa” and then drove down to the house on the beach I had taken for the winter.

“Papa says he’s peed off at you about this Fitzgerald thing,
but he’s having a lot of other trouble. That little Italian princess is there [the one who had sat for her portrait as the aging colonel’s
inamorata
in
Across the River],
and Miss Mary ain’t too happy about that, even if the girl came over with her Mama as chaperone. It’s just Papa worried about his age and needing to feel young again. I still think when things get better for Papa he’ll get over his mad on you.”

I thought of the Charlie Chaplin running gag. I didn’t want to be at the whim of a man who asked me in when he felt good and threw me out when the light turned red. But Toby was still determined to keep working on “Papa.”

A few years later—after the opening
of On the Waterfront
—I was back at the Bruces’ in Key West when another phone call came in from “Papa.” He was back on top again: After striking out with
Across the River,
he had hit one out of the ballpark with
The Old Man and the Sea.
Finally he had come to the perfect story for his knowledge and feeling and enthusiasm. Here was a Hemingway redeemed, at the top of his form, pleasing the critics as much as he had displeased them his last time out, raking in, along with the praise, a lot of money, which was important to him, too, and setting himself up for the Nobel he already felt he deserved.

Once again the Bruces insisted I get on the phone to say hello to “Papa.” This time he was in the happy euphoria of Charlie’s tormentor in
City Lights.
He had not yet seen
Waterfront,
he said, but he had heard from Harvey Breit that it was “great.” Harvey had also told him I was finishing the
Waterfront
novel I had started when it looked as if Hollywood resistance would keep the movie from ever getting made. “You’ve really done a lot of good work,” the benign “Papa” kept pouring it on. Aside from the
City Lights
image, I couldn’t help thinking of the cliché or truism about the Germans “who were either at your feet or at your throat.”

But I managed to thank Ernest and to congratulate him.
“The Old Man
is really something,” I told him. He deserved a lot of points for trying so hard and being so true to the best
that was in him when he was good. When the artist in him won the Indian-wrestling match with the bullshit artist, I was tempted to add, but restrained myself.

“Maybe when Toby comes over next time you’ll come over with him,” “Papa” said. He was back to inviting me in again. Next time. How many fallings-in and fallings-out would there be between now and next time? Anyway, I didn’t tell him in this friendly chat that now I had my own chip on the shoulder. Another mutual friend, reporter Sam Boal, had told me the story. He had crossed to Europe with the Hemingways and the Peter Viertels. Mrs. Viertel was my first love, Jigee, and my first wife. When our daughter was only two, Jigee and Peter, a young Hollywood friend of mine, had seduced each other and I had lost her. Probably because I was jealous, I resented Peter’s hero-worshiping friendship with “Papa.” They all (including Jigee) made a fetish of shooting well and what I call “the Pamplona syndrome,” a kind of self-conscious stylish rowdyism that irritated me. On the trip over—according to Sam—“Papa” had made it uncomfortably obvious to everybody that he was drawn to Jigee, and vice versa. He would invite her down to his stateroom and read aloud to her from the work-in-progress, the flawed
Across the River.
Jigee, usually a tough critic, had been awed, flattered, and taken in. On deck, Mary Hemingway had leaned on the railing with Sam Boal and said, “You think he’s going to marry her? I don’t think the son of a bitch can afford it.”

At the Gritti Palace in Venice—so the “in people” gossiped—Jigee had practically moved in with “Papa” for a month. Later, from Ketchum, Idaho, my daughter, then almost twelve, had written me that she had met a very nice man who liked to ski and shoot with Mommy and who read aloud to her and liked cats a lot.

I didn’t wish Peter Viertel much good luck, but he
was
my daughter’s stepfather now and, according to her, an attentive and helpful one. I resented “Papa” butting in on them, a law unto himself, his own morality. I wished the literary life
weren’t so ingrown and incestuous. First Peter, my young novelist-friend; then “Papa,” and then Irwin Shaw, Peter’s best friend, cornered by “Papa,” not in Sloppy Joe’s but in “21.” Ticked off by the success of Shaw’s
The Young Lions,
“Papa” had asked him what was apparently the standard Hemingway question, “What do you know about war, for Christ’s sweet sake?” As Irwin described it to me later, “I told the son of a bitch that I’d be waiting at the bar if he wanted to go outside with me.” “Papa” never came back to the bar. I would have bought a ticket for that one.

Anyway, as to incestuous: It seemed that sooner or later every writer messed around with every other writer’s wife. In the literary world, everybody knew everybody else, too well. It was what most people thought life in Hollywood was like.

There were a lot of galloping egos in Hollywood, but they would have had to run like John Henry to keep up with an ego like “Papa’s.” Gary Cooper and Cary Grant and Freddie March and other movie stars I knew would never crowd me with, “What-do-you-know-about …?”

Not that I could fault Ernest that last time on the phone: He couldn’t have been nicer. He was actor-nice when he wanted to be and, even when dispensing patronizing crap, still fun to talk to.

I didn’t take Ernest up on his invitation. I never did go to the
finca.
The next time I saw him was about two years later in Havana, just after Fidel and his
barbudos
took the city. I was covering the story for a magazine. I was in a dark, narrow restaurant Toby had recommended, and it was fun because a young
Fidelista
captain and a bunch of his young guerrillas were there drinking and singing revolutionary songs. All of a sudden, “Papa” was there, towering over me at the table.

“Did you go to Jigee’s funeral?” he asked me. She had died a terrible death, lingering in agony for weeks after her nightgown caught on fire from a cigarette. When I said no—I had been in Mexico and had not heard about it until it was over—“Papa” said, “I hear Peter wasn’t there, either. That isn’t right.
One thing we do, we bury our dead.” He didn’t exactly salute, but made a small gesture as if about to. I was seething again. I got very quiet, like that time about fifteen years earlier in Key West when he first came at me. Damn it, Jigee had been
my
girl, not “Papa’s.” We’d had six years together, and a daughter we were both very proud of, and we had managed to stay close through the years. All “Papa” had done was brush against her for a little while. “Bury our dead.” The posturing. Why was the
beau geste
so important to him? There was something so …
literary
about it. How much was he actually
feeling
for Jigee? I was tempted to ask, “What in hell do you know about Jigee, for Christ’s sweet sake?” Instead, I just put my head down.

After a few moments, he asked me how long I planned to be in town, and I said until I got the story and had a chance to interview Fidel. To my relief, he didn’t say anything about coming out to the
finca.
I’d had it with Hemingway and his goddam
finca.
I had the feeling he wasn’t too crazy about my being over here covering the
Fidelista
victory. I knew he was thinking that, like prizefighting and deep-sea fishing and war, Fidel now belonged to him. I had been in Veradero when Batista took over in 1952, and now I had seen him fall. But Cuba unquestionably belonged to “Papa” until he decided to let it go back into the public domain.

Just the same, there are those marvelous stories and that clean language and the Nobel he deserved. He was true to himself when he was standing there throwing away hours and days of longhand, starting over, and over again, never giving up the quest for
good, better, best.
He deserved to be admired, as I admired him, from afar.

He wrote “The Battler” and “Fifty Grand,” high on my own list of favorite fight stories. “The Undefeated” is a beauty on bullfighting.
Death in the Afternoon,
for all its excesses, has a lot to say about the dangers any artist faces, about the need to be brave in the face of danger and adversity.
Green Hills of Africa
is cruel but full of natural wonder. His stock will go up and go down and up and down. He had a curl in the middle of his forehead—or was it his brain?—but when he was good, good and dedicated, he was very, very good. And so, in the end, I had to forgive him all the personal stuff that got in the way.

When Toby Bruce drove out to recover at my place after the funeral in Ketchum, where “Papa” had put a shotgun to his head and put an end to the agony—just like
his
Papa—we talked about all he had done, the books, the long journey and the friends. Toby was badly shaken. “He was really good people. He had a lot of hangups. Hating his Mama and ashamed for his Daddy. Trouble with his brother Leicester, who was always jealous of Papa. It was a pretty good life until it went bad. He got a lot of fun out of life. When he was on vacation, there was nobody more fun to be around. I was always hoping you two would finally hit it off. Until this last year, at the Mayo Clinic, when they told him he couldn’t drink, couldn’t do this ‘’n’ that, all the things he loved, well, life just wasn’t worth going on with anymore.”

For Toby’s sake, I tried to say only the best things about Ernest. Things that were true, and leaving out the bad, the way he had to puff out his chest like a pouter pigeon, and bait me with bully questions about Lee Houck and Pinkey Mitchell and Pete Latzo.

For through all those years I had been unable to forget the first encounter, when he was bellying me up against the rear wall of the Bruces’ patio and asking me what was essentially a literary question: “What do you know about prizefighting, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

But if we were to turn the question around—if we were to put it to him, “What do you know about writing, for Christ’s sweet sake?”—we’d have to give him the round and raise his hand at the end of the contest.

And so may Ernest or “Papa”—or whatever he felt driven to call himself—rest in peace, a peace he hunted for through sixty-two years of arrogant self-doubt—for Christ’s sweet sake.

[September 1985]

T
HE NEW YORK TIMES,
that bulky, grey journal of moderation, could hardly wait for Joe Frazier’s butcher-boy arm to be raised in token of vindication victory over the ghost of Cassius Clay, the mythopoeic Muhammad Ali.

After fifteen rounds more closely contested than any “Fight of the Century” in the history of heavyweights under Queensberry rules, the
Times
had drawn from the phenomenon every possible advantage. A long and crisply reported Sunday Magazine piece. An entire page devoted to pictures of the event. A front-page action-photo and news story. Another full page in the sports section. Then, after all this printable pander, having extracted its last vendable ounce from the most highly publicized fight since Kid Cain flattened Young Abel, the
Times
retreated to nobility.

In a pious postmortem editorial it decried the fight, calling it “a performance that degrades and dehumanizes the state and society that encourage it.”

When one pauses to think of all the dehumanizing elements in our society, the Pentagon destruction of Asian hamlets, the defoliation of peasant rice-lands, the brutalization of our soldiery that leads them to slaughter old men, women, and children because, like the good Nazis before them, they thought they were carrying out the order of the day, when the Mafia breaks bread with the mayors and the city councilmen, when
the state troopers and the National Guard gun down blacks, students, hippies, peace marchers, when great profits are gouged from ceaseless wars and army intelligence spends your money tailing liberal politicians, when the individual is fed like a helpless Charlie Chaplin into the giant maw of the computer, when the ghettos are allowed to fester while billions are squandered on inhuman devices, when corporate profits soar while rats feast on the toes of Puerto Rican children, when known killers and their patrons enjoy the company of film and nightclub celebrities at Caesar’s Palace and the Copa, when the American dream shatters into nightmare, when Tom Jefferson is cruelly transmogrified as George Wallace, and Abe Lincoln as Mayor Daley, when children in a dozen crippled cities stare up at a sky they cannot see and breathe something that once was air, should we not wonder if the good grey
Times
knows what is dehumanizing whom?

Against this cyclorama of social horrors, a boxing match engaging two finely trained athletes respecting rules of restraint that alas do not apply to Indochina, such a contest as was Frazier vs. Ali a.k.a. Clay should not drive us to despair but give us hope that individual skill, spirit, and courage have not been leveled by the glacier of future shock.

Yet the
Times
would have us believe that this Queensberry epic, this drama to rival the best theater New York had to offer last season, signals “the declining days of past civilizations.” Having sold its share of newsprint heralding “The Fight,” the bloodless
Times
moves on to its annual suggestion that professional boxing be outlawed.

This writer once wrote a novel called
The Harder They Fall,
considered, on what used to be known as Jacobs’ Beach (or Cauliflower Alley), the harshest put-down of boxing ever written in America. It exposed the deliberate exploitation of a manufactured champion, the chicanery, the greed, the casual disregard of fighters’ sensibilities and economic needs that is pugilism at its worst. But our interest was in the reform of boxing, not its execution. In the film, Bogey’s last, liberties were
taken in the name of sensationalism posing as poetry: at the curtain Mr. Bogart, actually an odd amalgam of the late fight promoter Hal Conrad and myself, is pounding away at a typewriter that obliges with the conclusion:
Boxing must be destroyed.
I wrote an answer in
Sports Illustrated
attacking my own film for trifling with my convictions. Protect it, I said, don’t destroy it. I consider myself a reformer and a muckraker, yes, maybe even of the old school of Tarbell and Steffens and London when he wasn’t racisizing. But I know a good thing when I see it. Fistfighting is a good thing. It is like gold in that it is found in a nugget cluster of baser metals often buried in the mud. “The Game,” as Jack London called it sixty years ago, is full of baseness and immersed in filth. Every great fight is such a rare nugget, and one can only understand a choice encounter of champions if he sees it in this context of gold-rock-mud. To see only the mud, like the editorial preacher, is to stumble over and fail to discover the gold. To see only gold is to accept the worst with the best and to excuse the mendacity so commonplace in our society that we bring it home and lay it on and live with it like wallpaper.