Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Richard squeezed his wife’s hand, the two small diamonds in Hannah’s wedding band and ring — the fourth pair of bands he had bought in his life — digging into his palm in a freshly unfamiliar way. “I just can’t believe anybody before me hasn’t seen it the way it must have been,” Richard said. “I can’t believe it took me so long to see it truly.”

  “And how exactly was it, Richard? You’ve been cagey about all of this. What’s your scheme? Ready at last to share?”

  Richard fingered the vial in his pocket — the mysterious drug given him by that man. He hated to throw in with their lot. Every scrap of his spirit and intellect rebelled against it. Still, in the service of a righteous cause…

  This time, at least, Richard was on the side of the angels. He was sure of that. The ends, he comforted himself again, more than justified these dark means.

  He said, “The famous suicide is nothing but a myth, Hannah. I know it. I think the old bitch killed her husband. I think Mary murdered poor sick Papa. Blew the ailing son of a bitch away with his own shotgun.”

  Excerpt from the 4th Annual Sun Valley Hemingway Conference Program:

  Keynote Speaker: Hector Mason Lassiter (1900-?)

  Biography: Noted screenwriter and crime novelist Hector Lassiter, popularly regarded as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives,” is by most measures, also now recognized as “the last man standing of the Lost Generation.”

  As a novelist, Hector Lassiter represents a kind of vanishing breed of martial men skilled in American letters — an author of the sort typified by Ernest Hemingway. It is Mr. Lassiter’s long and storied association with Hemingway that uniquely qualifies him to keynote our fourth annual Hemingway conference here among the Sawtooth Mountains.

  Hector Lassiter and Hemingway met while serving as ambulance drivers along the Italian front. Hemingway soon followed Lassiter to Paris where the expatriate fiction writers honed their mutually iconic, distinctive, much lauded and laconic prose styles.

  Later, Papa followed Lassiter to Key West where they weathered the Great Depression, writing, fishing and allegedly rescuing Cuban refugees between novels, nonfiction books and screenplays.

  They also shared the early days of the Spanish Civil War and both men ran afoul of military authorities during the Second World War for allegedly stepping outside their proscribed roles as war correspondents and actually organizing their own guerilla units—

  “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.”

  — Christopher Hampton

  2

  HECTOR

  “Just five minutes, Mr. Lassiter. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “All of you want just five minutes,” Hector said.

  She frowned. “All of us?”

  “You’re not the first, sweetie.” Hector sipped his Glemorangie and ground out the stub of his cigarette. “How many of you ‘academics’ would you say are here in Sun Valley for this Hemingway conference?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe two hundred?”

  “And now I think I’ve been approached by every single one of you,” Hector said. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Rebecca. Rebecca Stewart.”

  Rebecca was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Her blond hair was piled high in a beehive that looked like it could stop a bullet. Her blue eyes didn’t quite track. “At first I thought maybe you were that actor. You know—William Holden? Then I looked again and checked against the photo in the conference booklet. That’s how I recognized you.” She smiled, flirting a little: “Hector Lassiter—the last of the great Black Mask writers. The ‘last man standing of the Lost Generation.’ The handsome novelist, screenwriter, and adventurer. The ‘man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.’ You’re almost as famous as Papa, Mr. Lassiter.”

  Hector managed a smile; that last dug at him in myriad ways. “Lucky me. You’re by far the prettiest Hemingway egghead to intrude on my writing, Becky. As it is, however, I’m not granting interviews. Not even to a pretty young woman like yourself.”

  A pout: “But you’re the only one left who really knew Papa, all the way back to the old days, to Paris and Italy. They say you’re the only one Mrs. Hemingway is seeing.” Her off-kilter eyes grew wide. “You’re the keynote speaker!”

  In the old days, Hector was indeed popularly called “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” That was a collar Anthony Boucher had hung on Hector in the early 1930s that stuck and chafed because it hit far too close to home.

  Hector couldn’t deny he viewed the stuff of his life as grist for his fiction—a tendency that had only deepened and grown more complex with time. That made covering old ground and recalling memories not just tedious for Hector, but potentially damaging to his work—exposing too much of the skeletal structure underpinning his fictional output.

  And Hector liked to stay fresh: Vapid and harebrained as much of their talk was, he was much more interested in listening to these so-called scholars and young intellectuals. He was more interested in tapping them for his fiction than mining his own memories to support their ephemeral scholarship.

  Hector shook loose another Pall Mall. He hesitated, his Zippo spitting blue flame. “That’s right, honey,” he said. “I agreed to talk at all of you at once, not with each of you, one-on-one. ’Though you’d certainly be the one if I inclined that way. But I don’t. Sorry, honey.”

  “But Mr. Lassiter, you were there.”

  “Tell you what, Becky: Come to my ‘keynote speech.’ I’ll try my best to make it feel like you were there, too. All of you.”

  Hector gathered up the papers set before him and put them back in their file folder. He stared at the folder: this sleeve of paper that had come to dominate his thoughts these past several days, plowing down everything in its path like a rolling boulder.

  The manuscript inside was the real reason he’d come to Idaho.

  A few weeks ago, a rather breathless rare bookseller had contacted Hector. He said he’d come across an old manuscript of Hector’s dating back to the early 1920s. The bookseller was eager for more information on his amazing find—hungry for more “about the holograph’s antecedents” so he could stick some damned collector for those extra precious dollars.

  As the bookseller described the short story, Hector had gone cold all over. He remembered the piece well enough.

  He had also long ago reconciled himself to its loss.

  Hector had given the hand-written draft, along with several other precious writings, to Hemingway to read ages ago, in Paris. The folder had gotten mixed up with Hem’s own manuscripts—packed by Hem’s first wife Hadley—and then lost forever when the suitcase with Hem’s writings inside was left briefly unattended by Hadley in the Gare de Lyon rail station in 1922.

  The loss of Ernest’s manuscripts had driven a wedge between Hem and Hadley that had doomed their marriage. Years later, Hadley was still apologizing to Hector for the theft of his works along with her husband’s.

  When the short story that couldn’t possibly exist suddenly turned up a few weeks ago—passing from one greasy hand to another on the underground market—Hector was left reeling.

  At first he wondered if Hem had lied about the suitcase’s loss so long ago. Hem always had a tendency to embellish, embroider…to tell outrageous stories on himself and others. In the old days, Hector had forgiven these tendencies in Hem where he might not have in another. After all, Hem was a fellow fiction writer, and that often made the lines between the world and the page…blurry. Hector had also read much of Ernest’s allegedly stolen output: it wasn’t top-shelf Hemingway by any stretch. But the myth of having all that prose stolen? Well, it was a nice, tragic element in a young author’s biography. Something sexy for the publicists and eventual biographers. A thing to bolster an author’s long game.

  Still, in the end, Hector couldn’t believe Hem would go that far.

  Then Hector began
to wonder if Hadley Hemingway was the liar.

  He tracked Hadley down to her wooded, mountainous home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, where she now lived with her second husband—a retired-journalist-turned poet. Hector spent half-an-hour on the phone with “Hash” as he affectionately called her during the old days in Paris. The ex-first Mrs. Hemingway had convinced Hector the suitcase had been stolen from her, just as she’d said so many decades before. She even cried again, the hurt now every bit as lacerating to her as it had been back then.

  Hadley apologized to Hector, over and over, for losing his works forty-three years earlier. Hector hung up after repeatedly forgiving her; hating himself for opening the wounds.

  If Hem and Hadley hadn’t lied, then some third party was involved, and the prospect existed Hector’s other lost works—and Hem’s—were maybe yet recoverable.

  Hector’s attempts to trace the manuscript through the rare bookseller had stalled out—the transaction had been handled through cutouts. That, too, was strange.

  Still, there had to be a way…

  Shaking his head, Hector looked at Becky, the Hemingway professor. Here was a so-called Hemingway expert, yet she could bring nothing useful to the table in terms of helping him with his current Papa-centered problem.

  He smiled to himself: If he granted her access to even a fraction of his current thoughts he’d probably send poor Becky into a Hemingway professor’s version of an apoplexy. He drained his drink. Hector closed his notebook and capped his pen. He patted the back of the young academic’s hand. “You should forget this stuff about studying and writing about dead writers’ writing, Becky. I know Hem looms large—largest of us all, I reckon—but stop chasing ghosts. Stop fretting over the writings of others. Go and write your own novel.”

  “Becky” looked aghast: “Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

  Hector smiled, his brow furrowed. “Why the hell not?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Lassiter? The novel is dead.”

  “A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.”

  — George Moore

  CREEDY:

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1922

  Donovan Creedy sat in his chair with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, his gaunt face shadowed by the brim of his homburg. He ground his teeth, watching the boisterous American writers at the table next to the flickering brazier. All them had supposedly come to Paris to write and experience life in ways that America was too rigid to let them attempt back home. Yet, for their kind, it was really just a long drunken party…time wasted laughing and drinking too much. Dissolute dilettantes, all of them.

  Across the table, the girl was saying something to Creedy. He had realized early in life that if one had ambitions in a situation, there were few things better than to control the attention of an attractive woman. The all-purpose prop. So he turned, awarding her the eye contact that would serve to indicate he was listening attentively to the latter half of whatever thought she was struggling to frame in her heavily accented, sometimes uncertain English.

  “The 19th-Century version of the novel is dead.”

  Wanting to keep studying the men at the table, Creedy felt his anger rise and he turned fully toward the woman.

  “More Hemingway crap.” Under his breath, he said again, “Hemingway.” Watching the men at the table out of the corner of his eye, wanting to direct his comments at them—and the more so because it scared him to do it—he said to the woman, “ I’m so sick of hearing about how he’s going to be the one to reinvent our language. I’m sick of all this tripe about Hemingway being an undiscovered genius and Paris’s best-kept secret.” Creedy lifted his hat and ran his palm back across his slicked-back, blue-black hair and pulled the brim low again.

  Simone, a struggling poet with a pretty, kind face—a young woman who in the relative poverty of post-World War I Paris had been trailing puppyishly after Creedy since Thanksgiving, drawn to him by his nice clothes, slender, tall body, aristocratic, aquiline features and penetrating dark eyes—shrugged and said, “Everyone says it is so, Don—that Hem’s a genius. They say it’s only a matter of time for him. I’ve read a few of Ernest’s small pieces and poems in the little magazines. There is something there, I think. He’s a modernist. Hem’s ideas about writing, and particularly about concision, are…interesting. Perhaps valid.”

  Creedy shook his head. He had selected this girl because of her affinity and propensity for just such sentiments, but he was beginning to think it was too much—the price too damned high. Should he cut her off completely, get rid of her somehow without running the risk that she would still be around, talking him down to the others of this perverse social set? He said, “And look at Pound there with that crazy hair of his and cheap suit. The so-called great poet. Actually giving time to these fools. When do they find the time to write between drinking and hanging around cafés? And Christ’s sake—Hem’s shabby suit jackets worn over old sweatshirts… Fucking Hemingway looks like some kind of anarchist. He needs a haircut.” Creedy chewed his lip and said, “At least Pound has the right notion about the damned Jew menace.”

  Simone thought then that Donovan Creedy must have forgotten her last name. Maybe he thought it was German. She sipped her brandy and rested her head on her hand. “Have you ever talked to Hem?”

  Creedy had. Once.

  Hemingway had been with more of the Left Bank’s alleged up-and-comers that night last summer. Among them was the rather well-dressed, good-looking and tall man sitting between Hemingway and Ezra Pound. They had all rebuffed him that sultry night—Hemingway making harsh jokes at Creedy’s expense in just the two or three minutes he’d stood in their scornful presence.

  They’d all been drunk of course. The good-looking man had been with some pretty tart. Drunken degenerates, that’s what they were, these modernist American writers.

  Creedy sipped his wine and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’ve never tried to talk to Hemingway. I don’t need to do that to recognize him for the poseur and braggart he is.”

  He held some wine in his mouth, letting it numb his tongue and front teeth. Creedy said finally, “The man with Hemingway—the one with the dark hair and blue eyes…the leather jacket and brown fedora. Who is he, exactly?”

  “Hector Lassiter,” Simone said. “Another star-in-the-making to hear Gertrude tell it. Texan. He’s often in her salon and one of her darlings.” She looked around the café, then, sotto voce, Simone said, “Despite their pledge to work only to elevate and invigorate American letters, they say Hector secretly writes crime stories for the pulp magazines back in the States. That’s where he gets his money for the clothes and fine restaurants. He supposedly writes for something called Black Mask. Isn’t that wild?”

  Thinking to perhaps make Donovan jealous, Simone said, “Hector’s actually quite charming and a fine writer. The women of the Quarter all love him.”

  Creedy ground his teeth, staring at Hemingway and this other one called Lassiter.

  ***

  Days later, Creedy sat in the back of the café, dressed in a crisply pressed black suit and tie, writing furiously in his notebook while other expatriate writers and poets—slovenly, sloppy drunk—danced and joked and frittered away precious time while abusing their livers.

  Rummy rubbish—that’s what Creedy thought of them. And so many Jews from back home crowding the Left Bank; dominating the little magazines that wouldn’t accept his work. It lately seemed the whole Paris literary scene was run by the Jews. Creedy thought of Gertrude Stein and the single night she’d allowed him to stand in her vaunted presence. Squatting in her throne, leaning forward so her fat arms rested on her thick thighs, Stein had looked at him with her dark Jew eyes and said, “We’ve read your story you left for us, Mr. Creedy.”

  Eager, eyes shining: The moment seemed to drag on for an eternity.

  He briefly faltered, unable to meet Stein’s penetrating, unblinking gaze. Glancing
away, he wondered whether she could see something inside him—something about himself he’d not have this crowd know about him. Creedy didn’t really love their work—hell, Stein’s stuff was nonsensical and childlike—but he’d heard positive attention from them, from her, would almost certainly get him published. In preparation for meeting Stein, he’d read an essay on the moderns by Edmund Wilson and he struggled to remember some of the piece’s points to parrot back at Stein.

  Creedy figured if he was already in their presence, he might as well espouse their beliefs…talk to them in the sorry shibboleths of their own literary language. But the article had bored him, and Creedy had begun to skim. Now, when he needed the stuff to drawn on, his memory failed him and he drew a blank. He felt his own sweat at his armpits and collar. As Stein stared at him, the voluminous sentence he’d hoped to dazzle them with reduced itself to a single choked word. Creedy said, “And?”

  Stein had raised a hand, annoyed he had interrupted her in mid-pronouncement. She said, “People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. So, I will say nothing, Mr. Creedy, and you may take that any way you choose.” As he stood there, trying to think of something to say that would cut deeply into Stein and her crowd of sycophants she turned her attention to that other, Lassiter.

  Many weeks had passed since that confrontation. Many pages of his notebooks had been filled with new prose, yet Stein’s few words haunted him.

  Now a shadow fell across Creedy’s notebook, shaking him free of his bitter memory of Gertrude Stein’s slight. Creedy looked up: it was a tallish man, dressed in black and about fifty. An American, judging by the cut of his suit.

  Not waiting to be asked to sit down, the stranger pulled out a chair and threw his black overcoat across its back. He settled in and lit a cigarette with a match he struck off a polished thumbnail. He said, “Donovan Creedy: I have an opportunity for you. A rare privilege.”

  The man didn’t look like a writer. He also didn’t look like any of the publishers of little magazines crowding the Left Bank. Another writer had recently told Creedy of some “publisher” who was charging authors fees to publish their work in low-run “vanity press” formats. Maybe this man was one of those. Creedy turned his head on side, said, “Who the hell are you?”