February
Article in the Times about new methods of treating post-traumatic stress disorder.
And there were other connections. Charlotte’s mother had been a nurse during the First World War and met her husband, Charlotte’s father, in a German army hospital. Hemingway fell in love with a nurse after he was wounded, and he fashioned his novel A Farewell to Arms around that experience. Charlotte created her work in a part of the world familiar to Hemingway. He vacationed and even wrote there.
February
Shell shock has this in common with rape and sexual abuse: it is not only the body that is wounded.
Both Charlotte and Hemingway mingled private and public worlds in their work. Still, for each the balance was different. Charlotte is centered in the private world and leans out. Hemingway leans inward, never reaching the center. He chases after an ineluctable female presence, but returns inevitably to the masculine provinces: warfare, hunting, fishing. He is known by his last name. She by her first.
February
The world as one has known it has collapsed. Nothing can be trusted any longer. Did my father do this to my sister?
Then there is the question of suicide. It haunted them both. But Charlotte confronted this fear directly. And she did not die by her own hand. Hemingway was often aware of suicide in the wings. As Charlotte’s mother had killed herself, so had his father. He himself was subject to fits of despair throughout his life. Finally he was given the same treatment suffered by German soldiers who had been victims of shell shock, electroshock therapy. It was after this, feeling that the fineness of his mind had been destroyed, that he took his own life.
February
It is as if the war narrows the scope of imagination.
Born in 1899, Ernest Hemingway was part of a generation whose lives were shaped by two World Wars. He was a contemporary of Himmler, Fermi and General Douglas MacArthur. He belonged to a prosperous middle-class family and grew up in comfortable circumstances in the safe but somewhat narrow environment of Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a doctor. His mother, who had inherited money of her own, was an educated woman who had been trained as an opera singer. She had a short career on the stage until, the story goes, she found the stage lights burned her sensitive eyes. She was a feminist, and took a strong interest in the cultural life of the city, to which she purposefully exposed all of her children.
February
I wanted so much to believe that the breakdown of the Cold War was also the beginning of a shift into a new way of thinking and being. Or perhaps an ancient one, still able to imagine peace.
Ernest was his mother’s favorite child. She doted on him, keeping him in a close, affectionate relationship, and even slept in the same bed with him until he was five years old. He returned her affection. But as he grew older he rebelled. She dominated the family, including his father, and later he would imply that this was the reason he grew to hate her.
February
Archaeologists express concern over the ancient sites in Iraq which could be bombed. Remains of Neanderthal culture. Evidence of the first agriculture. The first villages and towns.
Making fun of his mother’s zealous care for him, when he is a young man he will call her Mrs. Heminstein. Intertwined as this name is with his attempt to free himself from the influence of his mother, this is also an early sign of Hemingway’s anti-Semitism. Did he know, or just sense intuitively, that misogyny and anti-Semitism are similarly interwoven in history?
February
A report that Iraqi airplanes have been seen parked at the archaeological site of the ancient city of Ur. This was one of the oldest cities of Mesopotamia, dating from 3000 B.C.
Like many boys of this generation, including Heinrich Himmler and my grandfather, Ernest was dressed in ruffles and lace. As one of his biographers, Kenneth Lynn, perceptively observes, Grace was particularly keen on picturing her son as feminine. One photograph of him taken at the age of two in which he wears a flowered hat is labeled “Summer Girl,” in her handwriting. As he grew older, she would often dress Ernest and his older sister in identical clothing as if they were twins of the same sex, either as boys or as girls. I do not see this as a simple perversity. It seems possible that Grace might project her wishes for a wider range of being on her children, making them act out changes of gender she wanted for herself.
February
Among the structures of ancient Ur was a large ziggurat, a calendrical tower, built, according to its modern discoverers, to observe the heavens. Ziggurat means “hill of heaven.”
As much as Ernest tried to move away from the influence of his mother, he also wanted to get closer to his father. Of course, like many men, his father was not as present in the home as Grace, and he was more remote in his moods. He was also given to depression. Ernest loved to go with him when he went hunting or fishing. The family had a second home in the woods at Lake Walloon, and there Ernest would also accompany his father when he ministered care to a local Native American tribe. As a boy he witnessed emergency surgeries, bone settings, childbirth. Clarence was proud of his son because he was not squeamish when he looked at the preserved organs the doctor kept in glass jars in his study.
February
In a book on architecture I read that calendric structures reveal rhythmic patterns reflecting calendric changes: the waning and waxing of the moon, the rise and fall of tides, menstrual cycles.
As he moved into manhood, Hemingway began to hate what he saw as his father’s cowardice and submission to his mother. In an early story he depicts his father backing down in a fight, admonished by his mother to keep the peace.
February
A bunker in Baghdad bombed. Filled with civilians. A man weeping in front of the bunker. So many in his family dead. All his children. It is unimaginable. Yet I am implicated in these deaths.
One might be tempted to look at Hemingway’s childhood as the sole explanation for the obsession with masculine heroism that became the subject of much of his work. But psychoanalysis itself employs too narrow a lens to explain any life. When the perspective is widened one sees that his childhood was not so much unique as it was a variation on a theme. No wonder the legend Hemingway made of himself became so popular: both his real story and the mythology he created mirrored the world to which he belonged.
February
Day by day the stories issuing from the Pentagon about the bombing of the bunker change. First they say there were no civilians there. Then that the military officials were hiding among the civilians. Then that they were misinformed.
My grandparents were both born in the state where Hemingway was raised. They were at the southern end of the state, in an area more rural than the suburbs of Chicago. But even in 1949, after my parents divorced, when I visited Chicago with my grandparents, the city still seemed to smell of the slaughterhouses.
February
Sacrament of language, binding thread of words. One wants to trust others. Yet when a lie is told the body is cast into a state of profound disturbance. One must choose then between oneself and society.
Like Grace, my grandmother dreamed of becoming an artist. She wanted to be an actress. Extraordinary as it was for a woman of her generation, she studied drama for two years at the University of Illinois. The story goes that a traveling theatre asked her to join. But her father would not allow this. She shared Grace Hemingway’s hunger for culture and the finer things of life. In the early days of television we watched plays by Thornton Wilder, ballet, and Liberace playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff was one of her favorites. During breakfast she read to us from the Reader’s Digest. My grandfather was hardly interested. He liked to read mysteries or westerns. In the early days of television, we watched Wild Bill Hickok together as he rode into the scrub brush of the Southern California hills. My grandfather’s fishing tackle in its khaki case sat in a privileged position in our basement. Though their easy chairs rested just a few yards apart in our living room, my gra
ndparents lived as if in separate worlds. But when Hemingway’s late story “The Old Man and the Sea” arrived at our house under the covers of the Saturday Evening Post both my grandparents read it.
February
In the back of the house the plum tree blossoming again.
I have a strong feeling of familiarity for Grace and Clarence Hemingway. A marriage conventional and proper on the surface concealing gaping holes of dissatisfaction. My grandfather the wage earner respectably dressed in his three-piece suits. My grandmother his wife keeping house, putting up preserves, baking cakes on holidays, roast beef every Sunday for a meal eaten early on the Limoges spread over a linen cloth.
February
Sunday. Time out from the war. Nan and I go to the park. Photographs of the space program in the Science Museum. Huge machines making it possible to view stars as they never have been viewed before.
But this was just the surface. The appearance everyone worked so hard to create. Just beneath that appearance was something else. I can remember my grandmother standing beside the washing machine that in those days had a hand-fed wringer. This was a task she hated more than all her other domestic tasks, most of which she performed with only an unspoken resentment, one that had settled permanently into the features of her face. As she handed the wash to my grandfather so that he could hang it on the line in the backyard, she was openly complaining.
February
But now, in many places on the planet, without sophisticated machinery, we can hardly see the stars at all any more.
As I helped my grandfather with his tasks, I thought of him not so much as a parent but as an older sibling, who, like me, might easily incur my grandmother’s wrath. It was she who ruled our household. Every family has its own explanation for its patterns. Charlotte’s grandmother believed Charlotte and her father had failed Franziska and that is why she committed suicide. In my family my grandmother’s resentful rule over my grandfather was explained by his behavior earlier in their marriage, when he was a womanizer and drank too much. Now she was getting back at him.
February
Don calls. We haven’t spoken in weeks. So good to hear his voice, sounding as shaken as I am.
There was an incipient bitterness between them, however, that smelled of old scores unsettled. It stretched way back to before their marriage when my grandmother, shunted off to the family in Virginia, bore him an illegitimate and stillborn child.
February
Now it comes out that forty percent of the “smart” laser-guided bombs are missing their targets by thousands of feet.
But this historical argument missed a reality which existed daily before our eyes, though we never spoke of it, and that was the deterioration of my grandfather. He had collapsed. He was like some star whose flame, moving out toward the periphery, had left nothing at the center.
February
Slowly, year after year, decade by decade, we grow used to the unspeakable.
At the end of a story Hemingway wrote about a son’s disillusionment with his father, the young hero says of him, Seems like when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing. It is a theme that will repeat itself throughout his work. A man shorn of all that has meaning for him, losing even his self-respect, left with nothing.
February
One cries out, but it is as if in a dream where the voice is silent. It is a terrible feeling to witness this destruction, which is also on the most fundamental level a self-destruction.
I can remember my grandfather sitting in his chair staring into space. This was not the meditative mood of reflection. His silence made me uneasy. I sensed in his stillness a fundamental failure of being.
February
It is no wonder this war evokes childhood memories. What I felt as I witnessed my mother’s drinking; what she must have felt witnessing her father’s alcoholism.
Though I sympathized with my grandfather in his submission, in my heart I was glad my grandmother held the seat of power in our family. She was present, in this world, aware, despite her resentment, of the needs of a child to eat regularly and sleep between clean sheets. And though my grandfather often seemed more lenient, his anger was volatile like a child’s rage, and in some strange way it partook of the emptiness that had settled so deeply in him.
February
What one sees as a child. My grandmother’s reigning unhappiness colored the atmosphere; it was the air we breathed. But we never spoke of it.
Clarence Hemingway suffered from serious bouts of depression. He was alternately vacant to his family and autocratic, finding fault with everything, impossible to please. Growing up, Ernest fell under the shadow of his moods, and this angered him. When was it he began to blame his mother for his father’s transgressions?
February
A chain reaction of silences. The lack of intimacy between my grandmother and grandfather. Did any secrets pass between them?
Tracing the complicated circuitry of gender in our lives, there is also this. My grandmother’s manner of authority, the qualities which made her able to dominate other people’s lives, were said to have come from her father. Was the same true for Grace Hemingway? Her father, Ernest, after whom Hemingway was named, was the head of the Hemingway household until his death, when Ernest was five years old. Then Grace took over the helm from her father.
February
Those tender stories lovers tell each other at night before sleep, mingling histories, dreams; another way of making love.
Both of Hemingway’s grandfathers had fought in the Civil War. Anson Hemingway, his father’s father, commanded black troops in the infantry. It was this grandfather who took Ernest at the age of eleven to join the crowds greeting Theodore Roosevelt as he rode into the Oak Park railroad station. Teddy Roosevelt was the young Hemingway’s hero. He read Roosevelt’s African Game Trails. And he wore his khaki uniform, fashioned after Roosevelt’s safari clothes, whenever his father took him to the Hall of African Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
February
How isolated we were then, my family. All of us! My loneliness not just from that divorce, but from the greater separation which preceded it. Secrets dividing us.
Ernest was not alone in his worship. Teddy Roosevelt, or T.R. as he was affectionately known, became a symbol at the turn of the century for the revival of certain rough and ready masculine virtues, now nearly vestigial. He was the big game hunter, the cowboy, the statesman who spoke softly and carried a big stick. He openly celebrated war. No triumph of peace could be quite so great, he said. Peace, or the absence of war, brought its own problems, among them, he warned, the greatest danger being effeminate tendencies in young men.
February
We hope against hope for a peace settlement.
As a child Ernest boasted to his parents that he was afraid of nothing. But there were two sides to his fantasy life. At one moment he would sidle up to his mother, asking her to play Kitty with him and stroke him and purr. Then, switching to a different mode, he would swagger his way through stories he made up in which he was the brave and vanquishing hero.
February
Bush has rejected the Soviet peace proposal. He makes the startling demand that Iraqi troops withdraw before a cease-fire.
I can remember myself at the age often staring into the mirror as I buttoned my collar, tried on one of my grandfather’s ties and combed my hair back in the style of a man. I liked to imagine myself as Kit Carson, dressed in buckskin, forging through the wilderness. To swing to the other side of the divide between the sexes was a way for me to escape the confining world of domesticity so filled with my grandmother’s resentments.
February
Sense of foreboding all day. Difficult to work. Nan calls. Iraqi troops are in retreat, and they are being bombed and fired on while they withdraw!
Could it be that part of the sting for a man who is called effeminate is the implicit threat of being reduced to the small world assigned to
women? By 1917, leaving his mother and sister behind, Hemingway had moved into the wider world of men. He was nineteen and just graduated from high school when he went to work as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. Three weeks after he arrived, he joined the National Guard. Congress had declared war on Germany that spring. He wrote his family that he planned to enlist later in an active unit. His longing to go to war grew more intense that fall when he went to hear Billy Sunday, the famous Chicago evangelist, urging young men to do their patriotic duty.
February
Allied troops in Iraq. And still the war doesn’t end. The rumor is that the coalition wants Saddam Hussein dead. He has become like the Antichrist, the symbol of all evil.
On the surface one might find a contradiction here: a religious man exhorting men to war. But this is a traditional transposition of values, part of a shared history that goes back at least until 1096, when joining the First Crusade became a way not only of testing manly virtue but of expiating sin.
February
Finally a cease-fire. Papers, television proclaiming a great victory. It is as if no one died. The suffering of “the enemy” still invisible.
One thinks then of King Richard in battle with the Turks, his body, according to Bulfinch, as if it were made of brass impenetrable to any weapon. As the legend goes, surrounded by Turkish warriors, he cut down men and horses alike, cleaving them to the middle. One of the strongest Turkish warriors, an officer of distinction, lost his head, his shoulder and his right arm to a single blow of Richard’s sword. The king emerged safely from battle stuck all over with javelins like a deer pierced by the hunters.
March
I remember that sculpture of St. Sebastian I saw three years ago hanging on the wall of a church in the Black Forest. He was wounded from the arrows. His golden loincloth looked like a skirt. I noticed this because of the sway of his hip, and his face, so feminine.
A Chorus of Stones Page 32