Last night I finally watched the third and last installment of Ken Burns’s Hemingway film, which aired on PBS several weeks ago. Pretty pathetic. Not the film, its subject. Behold, a Nobel laureate out to dinner in Ketchum, Idaho, worried that lights on at the bank across the street could only mean that the FBI was going through his financials. The film makes a point of quoting his wife, Mary, about her decision not to lock away his guns when he returned to Idaho from his last sojourn at the Mayo Clinic: “A man has a right to his possessions,” she said. He had recently tried to walk into a whirring propeller on a tarmac. If she wanted to be free of him without involving attorneys, leaving his guns lying about would be just the thing. The thought crossed my mind that Burns might be trying to raise this possibility, indirectly in deference to sensibilities, but I would not have blamed her.
I own The Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway, and read through them once, but I’d forgotten what he wrote to Charles Scribner when Scribner had solicited a blurb from the firm’s brightest star to help publicize James Jones’s From Here to Eternity:
About the James [Jones] book. . . . Probably I should reread it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs; or suck a boil to know it’s a boil; nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot. I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not damage his or your sales.
Charming. This was in 1951. Ten years to go. My theory about why I forgot about this letter is that so many are about as bad.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a good friend who improved The Sun Also Rises by suggesting that the opening chapters of Hemingway’s draft be cut. Probably should have cut even more—the book’s excellence starts about chapter 3. Here is the opening of the novel as published:
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose.
&c. The compulsion to sneer got out of hand but was always present. Anyway, here is how he repaid Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his time in Paris in the 20s and, according to the film, his “last masterpiece.” (It’s not a masterpiece.) Fitzgerald had invited Hemingway to lunch in order to discuss something important.
Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, “You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I thought I had told you.”
“No. You told me a lot of things but not that.”
“That is what I have to ask you about.”
“Good. Go on.”
“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”
“Come out to the office,” I said.
“Where is the office?”
“Le water,” I said.
We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
“You’re perfectly fine I said. You are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”
“Those statues may not be accurate.”
“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.”
Zelda, of course, was Fitzgerald’s wife, by all accounts a real piece of work. It’s possible there is a germ of truth to this story. I’ve stopped quoting at the high point. Two of the greatest 20th-century American authors proceed to the Louvre, where they study the dimensions of the statuary art. It’s mildly amusing but wildly implausible, the implausibilities as usual functioning to advance the thesis concerning Hemingway’s masculine superiority to the men who consulted his oracular wisdom regarding their insecurities. Of course his own would not have fit in a bull-fighting stadium.
If like me you are inclined to regard Hemingway with sympathy, on account of loving his stories and the first two novels, the film sketches in a line of defense without being particularly explicit. He was a psychologically damaged person. Some combination of genetics and the family of origin—besides himself, his father and two of his siblings committed suicide, and his mother was perhaps the most disturbed of them all—together with his war experience as a very young man, scarred him terribly. His writing was for him therapeutic, and he disintegrated when he could no longer do it. Despite a lot of macho posturing, it’s not hard to see that the chief subject of his best fiction is wounded men struggling to hold things together.
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