April
It is always so astonishing to hear a story in which, under threat of death, a woman or a man responds unexpectedly, and imaginatively.
If there is an atmosphere of debauchery in Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises—nights spent in bars, days drinking in cafés, in and out of bed, lovers exchanged like dance partners—this is also an accurate reflection of the times. Of what is now called the Lost Generation. The old manly virtues have lost their élan. In place of rectitude and diligence there is decadence.
April
That other story Shirley told me on her last trip. The young Israeli soldier, a friend’s son, sent to the Gaza Strip, who picked up the stones thrown at him by Arab children and began to juggle them. After that, instead of throwing stones, every day the children gathered to watch him juggle.
At the same time the demarcation between the genders has become unclear. The line is crossed, recrossed, crossed over again. Like the surrealists who search for a phantom feminine self, Hemingway’s hero Jake Barnes, who has been castrated by the war, seeks after a woman who has a man’s name, short hair and a masculine manner of independence. One of Hemingway’s best friends, Gertrude Stein, is a lesbian. And there are gay men too among his friends all over Paris.
April
And then of course there was Charlotte. Her grace in that moment, faced with imprisonment, death.
Still, this is not a rebellion Hemingway embraces without reservation. The moment is more complicated. To speak of glory is obscene. Yet at the end of more than one story he tells there is that man who is left with nothing.
April
It is about seeing. Different ways to tell a story.
The war had disappointed him. If the pieces of what he came to know as manhood did not coalesce for him before the war, warfare and especially a wounding battle were supposed to draw the scattered fragments into one whole. But war failed him. The fragments never came together, and what happened to him in the war was transformed into a distaste for everything. This cynicism was inseparable from his style. It was there in the tone of voice. The turn of phrase. The cadence of his speech. He captured it elegantly.
April
A tragedy occurs along the plot lines of the old story, with its predictable ending. And yet if the story is told differently, perhaps another ending can be imagined.
This is a voice I know well. My mother, who was born in 1914 and became as hard a drinker as Hemingway ever was, knew this voice too. It became hers too. Especially when she was drinking. Everything became funny to her but the humor was not light. What was thought admirable was deflated, and as the night wore on, all that she ridiculed included herself too, her own past and her future, which she raged against and then wept over in the enveloping depths of her morosity.
April
Ramsey Clark in the high school auditorium here, speaking about what he saw inside Iraq during the bombing. Whole neighborhoods destroyed, a mosque, buildings perilously near a hospital.
The voice of a world-weary cynicism was one Charlotte must have encountered in Berlin. Her own work is filled with the ironic tone of cabaret humor with its sexual innuendo, its stripping away of layers of fakery, pretension, fraudulence, sentimentality.
April
The worst story he told was about entering a hospital just after a young girl had her leg amputated. There was no anesthetic. She was in shock. Laughing hysterically, grinning, shaking.
As I write this I realize that, despite the fear I had of my mother’s drunken moods, nevertheless a certain electricity sprang from the harsh honesty of her voice that I was drawn toward.
April
This story haunts me, makes me shudder, disturbs my sleep, and yet still I would rather know than not know.
Yet the honesty which made my mother at times the most vibrant member of our family lacked a dimension. It was not that brand of truth-telling which forges a bond between souls. Was the courage to speak out bought with a severance from others? What she said was not connected to any larger circle of meaning. Except insofar as this was part of a shared style of those times. The hard-bitten detective believing in nothing but holding on to a shred of dignity through biting one-line revelations. The reporter, winking at human foolishness, drunk at night, never shocked by anything, objective.
April
I wake from a dream. I am a city. My body, the streets, buildings. A missile enters. The city is shattered. My clothes torn off and scattered, as in a rape.
In his first formative years as a writer of fiction Hemingway was also a reporter and, like a good reporter, he was detached from what he witnessed, except when events fascinated him as a potential source of plot. In 1922 he covered the international Economic Conference of Genoa, among the most important meetings of the decade. Did he grasp the significance of what he saw? The Treaty of Versailles was in effect. Europe was recovering from war. Russia had just had a revolution. The Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgi V. Chicherin, proposed that both the Soviet Union and the Western countries disarm. The proposal was rejected. In place of more pertinent news, he filed a story about the difficulty of gaining access to the Russian compound. His language was terse, cynical.
April
Long article in the Sunday Times about the troubled reunification of Germany. The East Germans are now “the other,” rejected, dispossessed, hated self of the nation.
Thinking of the idea of “objectivity,” I remember that satellite the Pentagon plans to use to record the process of conflagration in the event of a nuclear war. Computers will gather accurate information. It is designed in the belief that the side with the most data will have won the war. It is a bizarre fantasy. Perhaps a handful of human beings and animals linger on earth, slowly dying of radiation poisoning, exposure, starvation, while overhead a satellite circles the earth, producing, with delicate computers, a three-dimensional depiction of the destruction. What a sad but intriguing metaphor, a metal object moving through space, filled with inaccessible knowledge, carrying a self-portrait which simultaneously depicts a massive and suicidal outbreak of violence and, through its sheer technical brilliance, the greater boundaries of human intelligence.
April
It was on the last trip I made to Germany, three years ago, that I could feel so powerfully the angst of that nation. The heavy burden of that past. Anyone born there must confront it.
The detached posture of the reporter became part of Hemingway’s fictional style. The voice that captured the attitude of a generation. Ridiculing glory, but still masculine, it is this voice that can at one and the same time express disillusionment and yet allow a civilization to continue on in the direction of still another war.
April
Are we creating the same burden for our grandchildren now?
Later in life, after a second war, Hemingway will begin to lose his magic as a writer. He becomes the object of his own creation. What he writes about his own life is in an odd way less true than his fictional accounts. Edmund Wilson will call it “fatuous, maudlin.”
April
Slowly indications arise here and there in the back pages of the news that the Patriots were not as effective in stopping missiles as the Pentagon claimed.
The story goes that he sensed his own failure. I can imagine him as he sits writing once more. He is searching for that electric edge he felt so often in the past. That indefinable substance that would make the words crack. He is a fine imitator of his own style. But he knows the difference. In those earlier works there was a sharpness, like the sharpness of air let into a closed room. Perhaps he knows that in order to find what he wants he must sink into himself. It is there in the memory and the more real he makes it, the more alive it is, the more something real comes out of him and to the surface.
April
I am thinking again of Inanna and what she saw. The power from this, the underworld, the shadow land not beautiful at first sight but redemptive in the redeeming.
Yet the
descent frightens him. If he is sinking with a long line of his vision into his own depths, as watery and lacking a foothold as they are, what might he find? There at the heart, in the place that defines him as a man, is he perhaps insubstantial? Not who he should be, the line hopelessly tangled, a creature undefined, between one state and another, monstrously unknowable. It is better not to look in that direction too long.
April
Telling Hemingway’s story, I become fond of him. It is in the nature of the process. My thoughts centered on him. The attempt to see as he sees.
Does he recognize what is there in the shadows, spongy and swallowing, does he know this to be part of himself? If he can gain mastery. If he can possess it and kill it at once. Bring in the biggest fish. Shoot the animal there in the thicket. Jump into the ring, his cape flaring, his sword sunk into the neck of the bull breathing its breath close to his cheek.
April
The irony of Hemingway’s obsession with bulls. The bull, according to Marija Gimbutas, an old matriarchal icon.
And is he then, with that scent, that brush, reminded of a different body? Watery itself and sinking. A surface without clear beginning or end. The soft of his skin the same as the smooth of the sheet. When he cups his hand over a woman’s breast does this feeling return? Neither male nor female but of the inside coming and going, fluid, pliable, then active, suffused, tingling, hot and moving, then cold, wet, a sharpness, waves of it, a medium, chimerical, himself alive.
April
I read this account from a young man traveling in the Sudan. At the center of a circle of starving refugees women singing the songs they had once sung to their bulls and cows at home.
But this is a self he will not own. Is this why over and over again he tells two stories? A man left with nothing. A man losing a woman. The hero castrated in war who cannot join with his beloved. The hero escaping death in war, whose child dies, whose dying lover never awakens?
April
And that story Abigail’s friend told me, whose mother was in Dresden when it was bombed. Taking refuge by a river, she found herself facing a lion escaped from the burning zoo, shivering and terrified like herself.
It was for the desire of a mythically beautiful woman that the city of Troy was besieged, its houses plundered, its walls destroyed, its women and children assaulted, raped, killed.
April
All official history accompanied by another history. That history which is told by word of mouth. The stories we pass between us.
And so begins a different descent. If at first there was an opening, a chink in the barricaded pose, the aperture does not open but closes. Perhaps if he could read again what he had written. Surmise the characters he so deftly drew of men who blamed others for their own failings, so that finally, unable to come to terms with or even see themselves, they were left with nothing, not even themselves.
April
The story I was told during the war by the daughter of a career military officer. How he raped her repeatedly when she was a child.
It is there so clearly in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The hero hating a friend because he is Jewish. Hating him for all the qualities he hates in himself. Yet not knowing this, ignorant of himself in his projection. Castrated by the war, miserable because he cannot make love to the woman he wants, he dogs his friend with a steady stream of invective. But it is as if Hemingway never read his own story. Outside the pages of his fiction, he remained an anti-Semite.
April
The second story from a Lebanese scholar just returned from an international women’s conference where she heard from Philippine women about the countless U.S. servicemen who, stopping in the Philippines on their way home from the gulf, eagerly sought out child prostitutes.
A second world war is just over the horizon. This is not difficult to see. But what may be more difficult, perhaps even impossible at this moment, is to notice a certain resemblance between the enemies. Anti-Semitism can be found on both sides. And just as Hemingway with increasing bravado hurls himself into one more test of his manhood, a new movement celebrating masculine strength and courage is born just over the borders to the east.
April
That other quite wonderful side of my mother’s honesty. I am so grateful for that time after she stopped drinking, when she was able to acknowledge what had happened between us.
The war will come and go, many will be dead afterward, among them Charlotte Salomon; arrested a second time and sent to Auschwitz, she perishes with the others. The carnage is shocking. And then the shock fades with memory. Now legends emerge. Stories with heroes.
April
Now it is my own life I must acknowledge.
Hemingway will continue to watch prizefights and bullfights. Guided by the same man who led Teddy Roosevelt through the veldt, he will go to Africa to shoot lions and tigers. But despite all his heroics, like his father he will continue to succumb to a terrible, inexplicable depression. Drinking no longer relieves his despair. He thinks of suicide.
April
Reading the autobiography of Fadwa Tuqan, the Palestinian poet: “Feelings of freedom, of breaking right away from the atmosphere of the ancient house choked with its prohibitions, endless commands and restraints, exhilarated me.”
Finally he enters a hospital. And there the doctors treating him prescribe the same therapy that was administered to battle-fatigued soldiers who had lost their nerve during the First World War. He is given electroshock treatments. Once released, he does not feel like himself any longer. Something is missing. His mind does not work as well. He cannot use language with the same grace. A certain sharpness of focus has vanished. The brain perhaps irrevocably damaged. This is what pushes him finally to do it. He takes a loaded pistol and fires it into his own mouth.
April
The truth is, I must learn to listen to myself. I must learn not to abandon myself. “To stand by the truth,” as Gandhi said.
I remember the story of his death. We spoke of it among ourselves. Did he die before or after Marilyn Monroe died? I cannot remember. Only that no one liked the manner of these deaths. Perhaps her death was more predictable, but then, one might have seen in him too a certain tendency in the same direction, except one did not like to think about it. He was a fixture of our time. An icon whose passing signaled a shifting of ground. Things change. They do not remain the same.
April
What is so astonishing about putting one’s life into words, about telling a story, is that certain aspects of being are not only revealed but come to exist fully for the first time.
Of course this was a time of change. We were seeking transformation. Women wanted to remake the world and ourselves after another image. Equality. Justice. Peace. In the year of his death the word feminism was nearly but not yet pronounced. We were different than our parents, facing a future that we hoped would not repeat the old story.
April
I know now that beneath the old story of who I am a larger self exists, a self I am eager to explore.
Looking back on what has gone before, one cannot help but think that each event, each moment, could not have happened any other way. But this confuses an honest accounting of the past with another kind of denial. Each moment of life is filled with choices. Should I keep my hand moving over this page? Should I continue the narration as planned? As it has been written before?
Or am I free to imagine?
May
The necessity for patience, especially now. At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.
I am thinking of Hemingway the day he rode in the cockpit of an RAF bomber during the Second World War. He was reporting the progress of the bombardment of launch sites for the V-1 rocket on the coast of France. His biographers tell us that for several days before this flight he had the feeling he did not want to go on living. Now, I am imagini
ng him as he watches this strange metallic birth, the falling slow, yet the movement of the plane so fast, as if inconsequential, the flak of fire missing the plane, the pilot quickly steering them back toward Dunsford, all over in a flash, exploding sites behind him, he and the pilot, the crew, even the higher command, become somewhat like missiles themselves, robots guided at a distance, going into space, headed toward their targets, which they find or do not find, blind, wounded or not wounded, surviving with little to tell (unless one makes up a story), with only the rush of blood, the fear, the heart beating fast, and then the return, automatic and dull, explosion mirroring explosion, but what after that is there? No answer comes to him.
May
How much time do we have? Joanna returned from Chernobyl. White face from all she has seen. Children unable to run, sick with radiation.
But now he will make no attempt to fill this silence. So as he climbs out of the cockpit the nothingness is all around him. He thinks of the battlefields of Piave. When he returned there were no signs of all that had transpired there. Except perhaps the gravestones in some cemeteries, lined up in straight lines, all alike, and with the same silence, the same nothingness around them.
May
A child in the affected regions is told by his mother, “You are not supposed to touch the grass, you are not supposed to touch the soil, you are not supposed to touch the flowers, the vegetables,” and so this child learns to hold back his hands, to ask, “Is this safe? Is this? Is this?”
It is no good continuing on as he has before. It has all gone flat for him. It being all he thought he had. It being what promised to rescue him from his fall. But in the stillness that he allows himself to hear now there is a hint of some possibility. Some other possibility. He knows the feeling when the words wring out of emptiness what has not been said before. If he sticks to it this time, riding it all the way, riding it to wherever it will go, he has the feeling it will take him back to something, something he can almost feel, almost grasp with his hands.
A Chorus of Stones Page 34