The Trip to Echo Spring (20 page)

Both of these characters are fictional, but the scornful reference to
most of them
had its roots in true stuff of a different sort. Hemingway began ‘Snows' in the summer of 1935, and was working on it all through the first quarter of 1936. His insomnia was bad that winter, and he often got up in the small hours and crept into the studio to work – because, as he told Pauline's mother on 26 January, when he worked on a book his brain would get to racing at night. Come morning the words he'd written in his mind would all have vanished and he'd be ‘pooped'.

It was the same spell of insomnia that he'd described to Fitzgerald in the letter about non-sleeping being ‘a hell of a damned thing'; the one he'd sent to Baltimore on 21 December 1935, when Scott was still living at 1307 Park Avenue. The letter was supposed to be an olive branch, but a few weeks later Fitzgerald did something that effectively torpedoed the remaining elements of their friendship.

In February,
Esquire
ran the first of three instalments of ‘The Crack-up', a long, painful essay in which Fitzgerald admitted publicly to having a breakdown. It's circuitous and rambling, a combination of speechifying and savage self-exposure. In it he revealed the depths of his depression; his exhaustion; his profound and incapacitating despair. He confessed to disliking all his former friends, writing: ‘I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.' Though not everything he says is strictly true (he denies, for example, being ‘entangled' in alcoholism, swearing that he has ‘not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months'), he leaves the reader in no doubt as to the extent of his emotional and creative debilitation.

Hemingway was horrified. On 7 February he wrote viciously to
Max that if Scott had actually made it to France in the First World War (a regret he'd mentioned yet again in the
Esquire
essay) he would have been shot for cowardice – though he also added that he felt awfully about him and wished that he could help. To Sara Murphy, their mutual friend and one of the inspirations for Nicole Diver in
Tender
, he observed grimly that it seemed like they were all on the retreat from Moscow. ‘Scott is gone the first week of the retreat. But we might as well fight the best god-damned rear guard action in history,' he concluded, trying vainly to boost both their spirits (this letter, one might add, was written with a giant hangover and is composed largely of a long, bragging story about a drunken brawl with Wallace Stevens that ended when Hemingway punched him repeatedly in the face until he fell down in a puddle of water).

It got worse. In the March instalment, Fitzgerald made a pointed statement about the breakdown's prelude:

I saw honest men through moods of suicidal gloom – some of them gave up and died; others adjusted themselves and went on to a larger success than mine; but my morale never sank below the level of self-disgust when I had put on some unsightly personal show.

The man who gave up and died was probably the alcoholic writer Ring Lardner, who'd been one of Fitzgerald's dearest friends and was the model for Abe North in
Tender
. The man who adjusted himself, on the other hand, was in all likelihood Hemingway, who when he broke with Hadley in the autumn of 1926 had suffered a black period of suicidal depression.

In the boxing ring, Hemingway never fought quite clean, and there's something of the sucker punch to his next move. The angry letters continued, but he also used ‘Snows' to broadcast his disappointment and contempt. In the version published that August, also in
Esquire,
he made a scornful reference to ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald', who venerated the rich. ‘He thought they were a special glamorous race,' Harry thinks, ‘and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.'

This time it was Fitzgerald's turn to be appalled. He wrote to Hemingway from the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, where he was spending yet another purgatorial summer, saying:

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write
de profundis
sometimes it doesn't mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night's sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

Hemingway agreed, replacing
Scott Fitzgerald
with
Julian,
but the sentiment remained, along with the contemptuous reference to people who went to pieces.

Cruel as all this sounds, I don't think Hemingway was motivated entirely by malice. He'd been having a rough time of it that winter. ‘Never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through,' he told Pauline's mother, not quite truthfully. ‘It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.' But whatever tolerance for poor old Ed he'd managed to locate was mixed with less admissible feelings of terror, shame and rage. It
seems plausible from the violence of his reaction to ‘The Crack-up' that Fitzgerald's confession had churned up some of this darker soil. A few days after the third instalment was published in April, he'd written again to Max, saying this time: ‘I wish he would pull out of that shamelessness of defeat. We're all going to die. Isn't it time enough to quit then?'

I suppose, thinking these threads through, that you could read ‘Snows' as playing two games at once. On the one hand, it's motivated by a kind of rage at death and defeat and people too weak to stand up straight and do their duty. Harry doesn't want to die and is disgusted by the waste of work he's left undone. His feelings are mirrored by the sinister and surreal ways his death presents itself to him. It comes first as an evil-smelling emptiness, with a hyena slipping at its edges. It comes in pairs, on bicycles, in absolute silence, like the policemen in one of his never-to-be-told stories. By evening it's climbed on to his chest, breathing its foul breath in his face.

And yet, despite all this, Harry's passage out of life is ecstatic. There's something nearly triumphant about his last dream flight, in which he passes first above a pink sifting cloud of locusts and then through a rainstorm, before emerging in front of the vast, annihilatingly white peak of Kilimanjaro itself. In the updraft of these paragraphs, one senses the presence of another Hemingway: the one who knew all too well the voluptuousness of despair; the gravitational pull death exerts upon its subjects. After all, it was he, not Scott, who'd been threatening suicide in his letters for years, long before Dr. Hemingway closed his bedroom door and pulled the trigger.

Was that, I wondered then, what lay behind the years of drinking? Was that how he employed alcohol: to simultaneously ward death off
and lure it in? I thought again of
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway began the book in 1938, when he'd already begun to drift away from the security of Key West and his marriage to Pauline, edging instead towards Cuba and the woman who'd become his third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. In this time of unsettlement and change, he began a new novel about an American man, Robert Jordan, who is fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. There's nothing rotten about Jordan, but part of his struggle is, like Harry, to remain courageous in the face of death. He worries particularly about pain, and that one day he might be in so much pain that he'll be forced to kill himself. It's what his father did, the shameful thing he both can and cannot understand.

Early on, Robert tells the guerrillas that his father is dead. ‘He shot himself,' he says. ‘To avoid being tortured?' Pilar asks. ‘Yes,' says Jordan. ‘To avoid being tortured.' His father wasn't tortured, or not in the way Pilar thinks he means. There's a kind of sympathy in his lie, a willingness to admit to the black undertow that gathered his father in. But later, thinking of his grandfather, the Civil War hero, he realises that they would both be acutely ashamed of his father, who he describes then, distancingly, as ‘the other one'.

Anyone has a right to do it, he thought. But it isn't a good thing to do. I understand it but I do not approve of it.

A minute or two later, he forces himself to admit that his father was a
cobarde,
a coward. ‘I'll never forget how sick it made me the first time I knew . . . Because if he wasn't a coward he would have stood up to that woman and not let her bully him.' At the very end of this
internal monologue, he concludes: ‘He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.'

Robert is possessed of admirable strength of mind, but it must be admitted that he helps his courage along with libations of what he calls ‘the giant killer' – that same substance Hemingway once said he couldn't live without. A friend of Robert's employs a similar turn of phrase, knocking back a great draught of wine and exclaiming: ‘
That
is what kills the worm that haunts us.'

Just as he'd later do in
A Moveable Feast
, Hemingway counterpoints these good drinkers with a weaker character, a man who's almost destroyed by alcohol. Pablo was once the leader of the guerrillas, but now he's a
cobarde
who nearly brings the whole band down with his fear. ‘Of all men the drunkard is the foulest,' his wife Pilar says to him in disgust: ‘the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.' Later, Robert describes Pablo's state of mind as being ‘a deadly wheel . . . it is the thing that drunkards and those who are truly mean or cruel ride until they die.'

There was something sickening about that last image. I imagined what it might be like to ride such a wheel: the confusion, the gathering sense of entrapment. I thought of it and then I thought of Hemingway in Africa, early in the morning, gripping his gun and looking down the sights at the Grant's gazelle. I thought of what Pauline had said, about how sad he looked, and how she took to staying behind to avoid his vicious swings in temper. I thought of how things are handed down in families, and how hard one can try to dislodge them, or bury them, or drown them, or palm them off on someone else. And then I went down the rickety stairs and into the garden, where Hemingway once joked about planting a gin tree. By
the pool, I ran into a tour. The guide must have been winding up, because the first words I heard were ‘manic depression'. ‘Well, that ran in the Hemingway family,' he said, in a purposeful drawl. ‘Papa checked himself into the Mayo Clinic. They gave him ECT and he lost his memory and never wrote again. Castro had taken over Cuba. He lost his house and his fishing boat. He lost his work, his manuscripts. He said it was as if he'd lost his life. He shot himself in Idaho, nineteen days before his sixty-second birthday.' There was a scattering of applause, and then as I stood there gaping the crowd began to hand him dollar bills.

There are so many currents of exchange, some benign, some toxic, some exalted. Berryman, hearing on the radio the fact but not the manner of Hemingway's death, thought of both their fathers and announced to a friend with complete certainty: ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch blew his fucking head off.' As for Cheever, he'd been reading Hemingway since boyhood, as his early writing couldn't help but show. After learning of his death he noted tenderly: ‘He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain.' Almost a decade later, he was still thinking it over, writing in his journal: ‘I remain mystified by his suicide.'

Tennessee Williams was also an admirer. His notebooks are full of late-night observations about Hemingway's novels, which he read with pleasure in hotel rooms across the world. And then there was the Key West connection. He first visited the town in February 1941, three months after Hemingway divorced Pauline. In a letter from ‘the most
fantastic place that I have been yet', he observed that Hemingway's signature was still on a bar stool in Sloppy Joe's, where a dungaree-clad Tennessee was now consorting with B-girls, transients and sailors. Later, he made friends with Pauline herself, who'd stayed on in town after her husband left her for Martha Gellhorn and the Cuban sun.

He only met Hemingway once, in a Havana bar called the Floridita. The encounter took place late one April morning in 1959. They were accompanied by mutual friends: the critic Kenneth Tynan and George Plimpton, the legendary editor of the
Paris Review
. Afterwards, both men recorded catty versions of the day's events. Tynan claimed Tennessee was wearing a yachting jacket, in an attempt to convince Hemingway that ‘although he might be decadent he was decadent in an outdoor way'. Plimpton added a yachting cap to the ensemble, and had Hemingway ask in a puzzled voice: ‘Is he the commodore of something . . . that yachting cap?' before concluding firmly: ‘Goddam good playwright.'

Williams's own account is softer, less aggrandising, less mannered. He said they talked about bullfighting. In Spain he'd become friends with Antonio Ordóñez, one of the bullfighters Hemingway most admired. They spoke of him, and later Williams remembered simply: ‘He was exactly the opposite of what I'd expected. I had expected a very manly, super-macho sort of guy, very bullying and coarse spoken. On the contrary, Hemingway struck me as a gentleman who seemed to have a very touchingly shy quality about him.'