Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  "I read about the movie version of 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' " I said, "and how there was only one minor alteration— the man lives instead of dying."

  "We must look on that as a very minor change, don't you think?" Ernest asked. "Now all we need is to have some Hollywood gag-writer take that poor bloody colonel of Across the River out of the back of that Buick and let him hike back to Venice and walk down the middle of the Grand Canal (this is a symbol, natch) and into Harry's Bar dry-shod. They will probably call it Across the Selznick and into the Zanuck."

  "Once they make a purchase," Ingrid said, "they don't care how they defile the thing they've purchased. They only care about box office but they don't know what creates that. They buy a book that has sold a huge number of copies and they don't have faith in its content. And the last person they value is the writer."

  "True. But sometimes you can peg them," Ernest said. "There was the time we were living in a remote ski cabin in Sun Valley. We had been out skiing all day and had just come back, very tired, feeling wonderful, taken off our clothes in front of a beauty fire, the drinks just being stirred, when there was a knock on the door. It was the man who ran the little general store, who had trudged up on snowshoes because there was a very important Hollywood call; been calling all day. So I shelved drink, got dressed and dragged my sagging ass over the drifts. It had started to snow like a son-of-a-bitch.

  "A very excited operator's voice told me that Darryl F. Zanuck himself of Twentieth Century-Fox was going to speak to me. And by golly he did! 'Hello, Ernest?' he said (you could tell it was Hollywood because here he was calling me Ernest and we only knew each other from having exchanged my story for his dough). 'Ernest, we are in executive session here in my conference room, and we've been wrestling all day with a crisis that only you can resolve. We have made a truly wonderful picture of your wonderful story "The Short Happy Live of Francis Macomber" and we're ready for distribution but we feel that the title is too long for the average movie marquee, so we would appreciate it very much if you could change it to something short with eye appeal—you know, a title that would create on-sight excitement—something that'll appeal to both sexes and make them feel they have to see the movie."

  "I told Zanuck to hold on while I gave the matter some thought. The storekeeper mixed me a drink and every once in a while I'd go back to the phone to tell the operator not to cut us off because I was engaged in emergency thinking. Finally, when I felt my A.T. and T. stock had gone up at least three points, I said that I thought I had just what the doctor ordered. Zanuck said he had his pencil at the ready. 'Now,' I said, 'you want something short and exciting that will catch the eye of both sexes, right? Well, then, here it is: F as in Fox, U as in Universal, C as in Culver City and K as in R.K.O. That should fit all the marquees, and you can't beat it as a sex symbol."

  Ingrid laughed.

  "How do things go?" Ernest asked, looking at her closely. "How do they really go?"

  "Oh, when I think how it was a few years ago and how it is now! If only in a crisis one could learn to have patience, everything would be fine. Look at my children ..." She took a picture from her handbag. "Robertino, four; the twins are now two. Did you ever see such beautiful children? Oh, how I love little children when there are a lot of them. To have only one, like my first child, is sad by comparison."

  "It's a good blood mixture," Ernest said, "Swedish and Italian."

  Rossellini came in from the bedroom. He was a short man, going to paunch and baldness; he had a small, reluctant smile on his face. Ernest told them how we had been joking about invading La Scala and rescuing Ingrid from the stake, and Ingrid laughed happily, but Rossellini halved his smile.

  "Perhaps Ernest would like a drink," Ingrid suggested.

  Rossellini opened a large antique sideboard which had been converted into a bar, and revealed, lurking in one corner, a partial pint of Black and White Scotch. He poured a drink for Ernest, but not wanting to put him out of business, I declined.

  "Have you been skiing much?" Ernest asked Ingrid. Then he said to me, "She's a beauty skier."

  "Haven't been skiing at all. I love it so, and I miss it but I've been pregnant ever since I came to Europe. I was going to go last winter during my one nonpregnant lull, but I figured up what it would cost to outfit the children and the nurse, and it didn't seem worth it."

  "It certainly didn't," Rossellini said with conviction.

  "A few seasons ago when we were skiing in Cortina," Ernest said, "Miss Mary broke her leg when she was running beautifully but hit some heavy wet snow she didn't understand. Skiing now, with the lifts and all, is about like roller-skating. Nobody has any strength in his legs because nobody ever climbs any more, and the best concession around a ski joint is the x-ray and plaster-cast booth."

  I asked Ingrid whether she had a picture lined up. "No," she said, "but I really don't care. S. Hurok wants to tour the St. Joan opera—Paris, London, New York, South America—but the way things are now I could just concentrate on being a housewife and be perfectly happy because I have a husband who is in the theater and talks movies, and artists are around all the time and that would be enough for me. I could not be happy being a housewife married to a merchant, but to Roberto, yes."

  "Where would you live?" Ernest asked.

  "There is only one place to live forever, Paris, but it is so expensive now. I loved Naples; the people there were so loving and friendly, but for full-time living, Rome, I suppose. People are always calling who are friends of friends and I like that. I try to see everyone, not out of duty, but because I love people. I love to talk to them, and be with them ..."

  Ingrid made a date to have dinner with us that evening— there was no performance and Rossellini was making a speech before some civic group. Ernest was delighted to hear that and went to his room to rest—his kidney and his back were giving him trouble. An hour or so later, however, Ingrid phoned to say that Rossellini had decided she should hear his speech, and we all understood what that meant. But Ingrid did manage to come to Ernest's room to have a drink before going off to listen to Rossellini.

  We got an early start the next morning but the signboards on the way out of Milan made Ernest just as unhappy as those on the way in. A few kilometers outside Milan, however, they began to thin out and Ernest's cheerful interest in the countryside was restored.

  When we passed through Torino, he said, "I almost married a girl here. Red Cross nurse. I was laid up here in the base hospital because of the leg. I used to keep a bowl by the side of my bed, full of the metal fragments they took from my leg, and people used to come and take them as good-luck souvenirs.

  They had a good track here and I got tips from a jock and from a certain Mr. Siegel of Chicago, who was permanently on the lam. I went to the races as an outpatient but I always left by the end of the fifth race."

  "Is it true they took two hundred pieces of steel from your leg?"

  "Two twenty-seven. Right leg. True count. Got hit with a Minenwerfer that had been lobbed in by an Austrian trench mortar. They would fill these Minenwerfers with the goddamned-est collection of crap you ever saw—nuts, bolts, screws, nails, spikes, metal scrap—and when they blew, you caught whatever you were in the way of. Three Italians with me had their legs blown off. I was lucky. The kneecap was down on my shin and the leg had caught all that metal but the kneecap was still attached. They say I was hit with a machine gun afterward and that's when the kneecap went, but I think the Minenwerfer did the whole job."

  "How did you ever carry one of the Italians back to the trench in that condition?"

  "Christ, I don't know, Hotch. When I think of that leg—I doubt that I did. But you shock out and what they tell you, you think you remember. The big fight was to keep them from sawing off the leg. They awarded me the Croce al Merito di Guerra, with three citations, and the Medaglia d'Argento al Valore Mili-tare—I threw them in the bowl with the other scrap metal."

  "This Torino girl you almost married, did she go into A
Farewell to Arms?"

  "Sure. Everything that happened to me in Italy went into it, one way or another. The Torino girl was Catherine Barkley, and so were some others. You invent fiction, but what you invent it out of is what counts. True fiction must come from everything you've ever known, ever seen, ever felt, ever learned. The way Lieutenant Henry felt when Catherine Barkley let down her hair and slipped into his hospital bed was invented from that girl in Torino—not copied, invented. The real Torino girl was a Red Cross nurse. She was beautiful and we had a wonderful love affair while I was hospitalized during the summer and fall of 1918. But she never had a Caesarean nor was pregnant. What happened between the Red Cross nurse and me is pretty much as I wrote it in 'A Very Short Story.' Who really had the Caesarean was Pauline. Happened while I was writing on Farewell in Kansas City. So that's part of Catherine; and Hadley is part of Catherine. But the Red Cross nurse was most of Catherine, plus some things that were of no woman I had ever known."

  This was a curious and exciting revelation—laying bare, as it did, the process Ernest used for romanticizing his heroine, filtering out the nonromantic, as sludge is refined from oil. The romance with the Red Cross .nurse had ended sordidly if, as Ernest said, "A Very Short Story" was its chronicle. In that story, which is exactly two pages long but manages to compress the essence of what was to be A Farewell to Arms, the young American returns to the States after recovery, having exchanged vows with Luz (the nurse) that he will bring her over shortly and they will be married. However, Luz falls into an affair with an Italian major and writes the American that she had never known an Italian before, so would he forgive her, but it was obvious that theirs was just a boy and girl affair and she was going to marry the major in the spring. Then Ernest ends the account with: "The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after, he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a Loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park."

  This was the realistic sludge of his relationship with the Red Cross nurse that was refined out of the romantic concept of Catherine. After their hospital affair the nurse was replaced with the romantic times he had had with Hadley during their trips to Switzerland, and it was Hadley who then became Catherine, only to give way to Pauline to provide the Caesarean that brought on the dramatic end of Catherine's life.

  "I have always found being in a hospital rather romantic," Ernest was saying. "I was in a London hospital one time after a severe auto accident and when I came out of the ether the first person I saw was a nurse standing by the bed. She was a very plain, old-maidish nurse, but I was so glad to be back among the conscious, I pulled her arm to my lips and kissed her on the elbow. 'Oh, Mr. Hemingway,' she exclaimed, 'that's the only romantic thing that's ever happened to me!' Couple of weeks later, on the day I was being discharged, she came to my room, shy and embarrassed, and asked me whether I'd do it again. I did. Same elbow."

  "Did you get to Italy during the Second World War?"

  "No, just England and France. Of course I had the antisub operation going in Cuba, but Miss Martha did not think that qualified since it was not in a theater of operations, and she wasn't happy until I became a fully gazetted and uniformed war correspondent for Collier's magazine. I wrote them some good straight pieces from the inside, since I had thrown in with the troops and did not do my stuff from P.R. handouts in the Officers' Club; but Collier's was chickenshit from the word go. During the whole time I was abroad for them I had not received any mail and I cabled them quite often about it, since they were my mail drop, but they said there wasn't any; then when I got back I found an entire desk drawer crammed full of letters addressed to me.

  "Also, there was the expense account. I lived good and I spent a lot of my own dough to get the kind of stuff I used in my pieces, but I figured I should only charge them one-third of my actual expenses. They dismissed the one-third as exorbitant and paid nothing. So that's what we had as our wartime alma mater. Well, after the war there were a lot of changes in the editorial staff so that by the time Collier's built its new building on Fifth Avenue the editor I had had my troubles with was gone. The new Collier's editor came to me and said they were asking a selected list of the 'world's most important living people' to contribute messages which would be buried in a time capsule in the cornerstone of their new structure. This capsule has an atomic ejector that will automatically spring it in the year 1975 or thereabouts and there will be a big ceremony at which all the messages would be read. So I wrote them a message. I said that I hoped that Mary and my three sons were all well, that my friends had prospered and that the world was at peace. I also said that I hoped that by then the guy who had been my editor, whom I named, would have gone out and hanged himself by the neck to save everyone else the trouble. Hope I'm around in 1975 when they read it."

  "I remember one piece you did for them about the three G.I.'s in a cafe and one of them, who had sung with a band before the war, was worried about his wife."

  Ernest began to laugh. "That character! He sat there getting drunk on cider and complaining that his wife was unfaithful to him and wanted a divorce but he would not give it to her and that's why he wasn't a bombardier. She wouldn't sign his papers for bombardier school because he would not sign her divorce papers, and every day she wrote him who she had been unfaithful with the night before."

  "Collier's got its money's worth."

  "They were the first ones to use tape-recorders for interviews. All my life I had been struggling to perfect my ear to record exactly what I heard and I was a sad son-of-a-bitch when I discovered they had invented a machine that put all my training out of business. But I'm glad we have our machine now."

  We were climbing through the Alps, going due south on our way to the French border. Ernest had been sipping wine from a bottle of Valpolicella, but when we came to Cuneo, an Alpine town of about twenty-five thousand, he decided to get a bottle of Scotch. A girl in the liquor store asked Ernest for his autograph, and by the time we left the store, news of his presence had raced around the little town; before he could reach the car, Ernest was surrounded by a large group of townspeople, which quickly grew into a mob. They stormed the local bookstore, which was right next to the liquor store, and quickly bought out all the Hemingway books in stock, and then all other books in English. Ernest autographed everything from Of Human Bondage to Casserole Cookery. The pressing crowd was closing in on him completely, and he had to strain to keep them from crushing him. I tried to reach him but the crowd was too solid and unyielding. It was suddenly a very serious situation, and I do not know what would have happened to Ernest, beat up as he was, if a small detachment of soldiers from the local army post had not appeared at that moment to make a path for him to the car.

  Ernest was very shaken; Adamo got away fast and Ernest took a large drink of the Scotch to steady down. "A thing like that spooks you," he said. "Must be this goddamn beard; while being crushed, was also aware was patsy for having my pocket picked, so every time I was jostled I checked myself. Only compensation, I pinched one of their ball-point pens."

  As the Lancia continued on its way toward the border, Ernest's relief at having been rescued from a fate that had begun to shape up as pretty miserable, turned to anger. "All that goddamn publicity! Not just the crash, but before that. Malcolm Cowley's thing in Life and Lillian's in The New Yorker. They made me sick. Not the phrase. Truly sick! Lillian's thing was my fault. I should never have allowed her to do it. Shouldn't have let Cowley either. Did you read his piece? Sure is a lot of difference between Life and life. Not to mention liberty and the pursuit of a modicum of happiness. I try to be a good character and keep all promises, good or bad, keep deadlines, not abort on missions, hit it on the hour you say you will, be where you say you will even if you have to move other people out of it. But I don't think Cowley or Lillian know anything about whatever material people like me are made of. All the time I was reading Cowley's piece I fe
lt like I was being formed into his image. He has me in World War II a martini addict with a canteen of gin on one hip and a canteen of vermouth on the other—mixed fifty-fifty, I presume. Can you imagine me wasting a whole canteen on vermouth? The piece is riddled with other interesting items, like calling my son Jack 'Bumpy' instead of 'Bumby' —I suppose because Cowley thinks he's had a rough life.

  "As for Lillian, Christ, she didn't understand anything, did she? She's a good girl who should have been practicing 'dead-man's float' in the shallow water and had no business on the high dive. After you finish a book, you're wiped out. As a writer herself I thought she'd know that. I had just finished Across the River and New York was a release. But all she saw was the irresponsibility that comes after the terrible responsibility of writing. So she put down dialogue in her shorthand without understanding that I get so bloody tired of sounding like me that I invent ways of not sounding like me. Sometimes I leave out the nouns. Sometimes the verbs. Sometimes the whole goddamn sentence. As a writer I put them all in, but when I've just finished a book and come to New York for a few days to see friends and have fun and be irresponsible, I can do what I want and say what I want, but Lillian doesn't know any of that, so cartoons you into a gin-crazed Indian."

  "Did you read John O'Hara's reaction to her profile?" I asked. "Appeared in The New York Times"

  "No."

  I found the clipping in my wallet—I had been meaning to send it to Ernest. I gave it to him and he read it aloud:

  "The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway's private life was made by a publication that reported on Hemingway's drinking habits somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer. It also included some direct quotes, in tin-ear fashion, of what were passed off as Hemingway's speech, but sounded more like the dialogue written for the Indian chief in Annie, Get Tour Gun.

  The inability to write the way people talk is a common affliction among writers. But for Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody's drinking is one for the go-climb-a-lamp-post department. The magazine had printed numerous little attacks on Hemingway by a semianonymous staffman who has gone to his heavenly reward, just as it printed attacks on Faulkner by a critic who has returned to his proper chore on the radio. With the long piece on Hemingway the magazine achieved a new low in something."