The Trip to Echo Spring (18 page)

He remembers, he continues, the jars being thrown into the fire, where they popped in the heat, the alcohol going up in little flares. He remembers the snakes in the back-yard, but there are no people in this memory, only things. He can't, he says, remember who was
responsible for burning the snakes, and so he goes on wandering through his past until he encounters people for whom he can pray.

In the next paragraph he remembers his mother ‘cleaning things out' and ‘making a good clearance', which leads him directly to another fire. This time Mrs. Adams burns things in the basement that ‘should not have been there'. Dr. Adams returns home and sees the fire burning in the road beside the house. ‘What's this?' he asks.

‘I've been cleaning out the basement, dear,' my mother said from the porch. She was standing there smiling, to meet him. My father looked at the fire and kicked at something. Then he leaned over and picked something out of the ashes. ‘Get a rake, Nick,' he said to me. I went to the basement and brought a rake and my father raked very carefully in the ashes. He raked out stone axes and stone skinning knives and tools for making arrow-heads and pieces of pottery and many arrowheads. They had all been blackened and chipped by the fire. My father raked them all out very carefully and spread them on the grass by the road.

Nick is told to take the game-bags and the gun into the house, and bring a newspaper back out. He finds one in the pile in his father's office. His father spreads all the blackened bits of stone on to the paper and wraps them up.

‘The best arrow-heads went all to pieces,' he said. He walked into the house with the paper package and I stayed outside on the grass with the two game-bags. After a while, I took
them in. In remembering that, there were only two people, so I would pray for them both.

Recently I'd read in an essay by Paul Smith called ‘The Bloody Typewriter and the Burning Snakes' that in an early draft of this story the mother says two sentences, not one. The second is ‘Ernie helped me' – the only time, apparently, in all the typescripts of the Nick Adams stories that Ernest's name is used in place of Nick's. This isn't, as Smith is at pains to explain, to say that ‘Now I Lay Me' is necessarily autobiographical, or that it really happened, though it has a tendency to be quoted in Hemingway biographies as gospel fact. Not so. It's fiction, with all the wonderful, ungraspable fluidity that suggests. But even without the anchoring presence of Ernest's name, the scene is overwhelmingly articulate about the effects a corrosive dynamic between parents might have on a small child.

There was a great fashion, a while back, for making the burned and broken arrowheads a metaphor for castration, and in some way it's undeniable, although doing so takes away from Hemingway's refined, ferocious attention on objects-as-they-are. There's such a note of grief in the description of those damaged snakes and damaged arrowheads and knives, a conjuring of the child's marvellous gift for attention (and thinking this I remembered a line in Edwina Williams's curious memoir of her son, in which she recalled how his powers of observation were much stronger than other children's, and that he could stare mesmerised at a single flower long after another boy would have flung it down). That one person can wilfully damage or exert power over another, and that this damage can be enacted not so much symbolically as materially, in the beloved, consoling world of things, can leave
a child with impossible, indigestible sadness and rage – a feeling not dissimilar, I'd guess, to having a shard of blackened stone lodged within one's chest.

It seems at least some of this unhappy relationship was drawn from life. In her son's estimation, Grace Hemingway was a bustling, domineering woman, while her husband was gentle and evasive; sometimes overcome by depression and sometimes by fits of rage. Ed was a lifelong teetotaller and suffered until his death an intense anxiety about money. He made his wife and children keep account books and even when they were almost grown was still enforcing petty rules about dancing and library cards. ‘Excited and exacting', his daughter Marcelline put it; ‘irritable and exacting'. He spanked his children, but he also had a sense of honour and a love of the outdoors that were immediately infectious. Grace, on the other hand, exerted her personality in ways her son had baulked against since boyhood – as well, of course, as having dressed him in infancy as a girl. ‘Isn't that old River Forest woman terrible?' Hemingway once wrote to Hadley, long after their divorce. ‘I don't know how I could have been whelped by her but evidently was . . . a winner in any all time Bitchshow.'

It was all coming apart, anyhow. After that week in Florida Hemingway only saw his father once more. In October 1928, a few weeks after the birth of his son Patrick, he visited his parents in what had been his boyhood home: 600 North Kenilworth Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois, the house his mother had both designed and paid for. During the visit Ed seemed tired, irritable and not at all well, though he didn't discuss the worries that had begun to bear down on him like a ton of bricks. He'd planned on retiring to a practice in Florida, and had bought up land during the real estate boom as an investment.
But now the crash was under way, and his finances as well as his health were precarious. He'd been diagnosed with angina pectoris and diabetes – ‘a touch of the sugar', as he told his colleagues.

After Hemingway left, Ed wrote him a brief, fond note. In with the letter was another envelope, addressed ‘To My Son'. Inside there was a poem, written in Ed's slanting hand:

He'd put the same odd quotation marks around the word ‘Dad' in the letter, too.

A month went by. Then on 6 December, he woke with a pain in his foot. The doctor in him immediately foresaw diabetic neuropathy, gangrene, amputation: an unspooling ticker tape of grim eventuality. In pain and increasingly frantic about an unpayable debt, he told Grace that he was scared. She suggested he talk to a doctor, but he didn't. He went out and returned to the house before noon, going down to the basement, where he burned a few papers. Then he called up to his wife that he was tired and would rest before lunch. He went into his bedroom, closed the door and shot himself in the right temple with his father's .32 calibre Smith & Wesson.

At that moment, Hemingway was eating lunch in the Breevort Hotel in New York, where ten years later Cheever would drink whole
afternoons away. His companion was his five-year-old son Bumby, who'd just arrived from Paris. After lunch, they went to Penn Station and boarded the Havana Special to Key West. Just outside Trenton a porter delivered a telegram from Oak Park. It read:
FATHER DIED THIS MORNING ARRANGE TO STOP HERE IF POSSIBLE.

Reeling, he got off the train at Philadelphia, leaving his small son to travel on in the care of the porter. He only had $40 in cash; not enough to get home. He telegrammed Max Perkins, asking him to wire money by way of Western Union. Then, figuring Max had probably already left the office, he telephoned Fitzgerald, who was living at the time in Delaware. Scott answered the phone immediately; immediately agreed. A few days later Hemingway wrote from Oak Park:

You were damned good and also bloody effective to get me that money . . . My father shot himself as I suppose you may have read in the papers. Will send you the $100 as soon as I reach Key West . . . I was fond as hell of my father and feel too punk – also sick etc. – to write a letter but wanted to say thank you.

Punk:
a word a woodsman might use to describe a tree that's rotten; that looks all right until you realise you can tear into it with your bare hands. To Max Perkins, a week later, he added more details:

Various worthless land in Michigan, Florida etc. with taxes to pay on all of it. No other capital – all gone . . . He had angina pectoris and diabetes preventing him from getting any more
insurance. Sunk all his savings, my grandfather's estate etc. in Florida. Hadn't been able to sleep with pain etc. – knocked him temporarily out of his head.

Dr. Hemingway, who sometimes washed his son's mouth out with soap, sometimes beat him with a razor strop, who was sometimes implacable, turned temper on a ha'penny, who drove into his boy a principle of honour and sportsmanship that never wholly left him, who passed on from hand to hand those nourishing loves for the Michigan woods, for clear water, jacksnipe, wild geese, dead grass, new corn, deserted orchards, cider mills and open fires. Open your mouth, boy. One more stone to swallow down.

The plane was passing through a region of turbulence. We hiccupped up; bounced down. A mood of mild tension filled the cabin. The stewardesses were smiling their determined smiles. The air was chilly and smelled of banana chewing gum.

I'd fallen into a world of fathers and sons. By some grisly coincidence, the Florida land boom also played a role in the death of the poet John Berryman's father. As an adult, Berryman was grimly aware of the loss he shared with Hemingway. He once wrote a poem for them both that began ‘Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway', before pleading to some unspecified force:

Over the course of his life, Berryman served as an impassioned teacher and fine scholar, a husband, father, philanderer and drunk. ‘The most brilliant, intense, articulate man I've ever met,' his student, the poet Philip Levine, remembered: ‘at times even the kindest and most gentle.' His own writing began tight and tense, staccato, and then, as his drinking got under way, it changed, blooming by degrees into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dream Songs, a sequence of extraordinary intensity situated sometimes in life and sometimes in death. These poems are narrated by another not-quite self: Henry House, sometimes Henry Pussycat, Huffy Henry or else Mr. Bones, a white, middle-aged American in black-face (layers upon layers of borrowed identity) who ‘has suffered an irreversible loss' and who, while emphatically not the poet, seems to share all the elements of his excruciating biography.

One of the odd things about this compulsive play with names is that Berryman himself experienced a grave and dislocating name change in childhood. Strictly speaking, it isn't possible to say John Berryman was born on 25 October 1914 in Oklahoma, since as an infant he was christened with his father's name, John Allyn Smith. His parents' marriage was by all accounts unhappy from the start. In an autobiographical fragment his mother Martha wrote in old age, she claimed that Allyn Senior raped her and then blackmailed her into marriage. Whether this grotesque story is true or not, it seems that it was her firstborn son and not her husband who received the full intensity of both her love and need.

Smith was a loan officer in the First State Bank, but he lost his job
in 1924, and in the autumn of the following year relocated to Florida, where the land boom was then under way. He was accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law, but the children – John Jr. and his younger brother Robert – were left behind at a Catholic boarding school where, over the course of the next few months, John was systematically bullied. Eventually a neighbour apprised Martha of the situation, and she took a train from Tampa to reclaim her boys, who waited for her in the principal's office, clutching their possessions in paper bags. By Christmas the Smiths were reunited, and all three adults were working in their new restaurant, the Orange Blossom.

For John Jr., it seemed like life was about to improve. In the early 1920s, Florida was a place where fortunes were made daily, and for a brief moment the land rush favoured the Smiths. But in the spring of 1926 the crash occurred, precipitated when a schooner sank in the turning basin of Miami harbour, blocking access for the boats bringing in building supplies. Then, as Martha put it in a letter a long time later, ‘everything went like snow in the sun'. As boom turned to bust the Orange Blossom became untenable and was sold at a loss. The family moved into cheaper lodgings, renting an apartment on Clearwater Beach owned by an older couple, John Angus and Ethel Berryman.

You can figure the rest out from the name. Martha and John Angus began what sounds like a spectacularly ill-concealed love affair. Ethel tried to persuade her husband to move to New York; instead he sold off all his holdings, gave her half, threw in the car as a bonus and asked her to move out. Meanwhile, John Allyn was taking solace in drink and had entered what would turn out to be an abortive liaison with a Cuban woman who later cut and ran with what little remained of his money. John Angus was often in the apartment, and sometimes
all three would engage in tortured discussions as to their future.

As divorce proceedings got under way John Allyn took to spending his days strolling the beach with a gun in his hand, or taking long, distracted swims. One day he apparently went out into the Gulf with Robert tied to a rope, heading so far out into the ocean that John Angus had to be dispatched to bring them back. The negotiations grew more ugly after that, and at some point Martha took five of the six bullets from her husband's .32 and buried them in the sand. On 25 June 1926, the three spent another interminable night in talk. At midnight or so Martha fell asleep on the couch. A little later she rose and saw that John Angus had left and John Allyn was sleeping in what had once been the marital bed. At six she woke again and discovered her husband had left the house and was lying sprawled on the steps in the sun, a bullet hole in his chest. The note he'd left on her dresser read: ‘Again I am not able to sleep – three nights now and the terrible headaches.'