Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

Ernest reported that Mary was not interested in the pin but was being friendly toward him and cordial and hospitable to Antonio and Carmen. Also, in view of the fact that on Ernest's desk there were ninety-two letters awaiting answers, she had agreed that he should import Honor to be his secretary. Until this time he had never had full-time secretarial help.

  Ernest and I talked on the phone before he left for Ketchum. "Things at finca under control," he said. "Antonio and Carmen are having a grand time. I act cheerful as always but am not."

  "Why? I thought you said things . . ."

  "At the finca. But the Castro climate is something else. Not good. Not good at all. Can't tell what it will be when I come back to work in January, and what I want most is to get back to writing. I just hope to Christ the United States doesn't cut the sugar quota. That would really tear it. It will make Cuba a gift to the Russians. You'd be amazed at the changes. Good and bad. A hell of a lot of good. After Batista any change would almost have to be an improvement. But the anti-United States is building. All around. Spooks you. If they really turn it on, I'm sure they will put me out of business."

  "Well, not really. You could always set up in Ketchum."

  "Twelve months of the year? Summers without the boat?"

  "You could summer in Key West."

  "No, that belongs to the kids. And besides, there are too many ghosts. No, hell, I'll just get one of those 'Going Out of Business' signs and hang it around my neck: After 25 Tears at This Location Everything Must Be Sold at a Sacrifice.'''' There was a pause at the other end of the wire. "A hell of a sacrifice."

  From Ernest's account of it, the motor trip with Antonio and Carmen from Key West to Ketchum was not a success. Nor was the stay in Ketchum, where none of the 746 inhabitants spoke Spanish or, with the exception of the Lords, had ever seen a bullfight. Ernest tried valiantly to entertain him, but nevertheless Antonio returned to Spain much sooner than scheduled.

  The other negative event of that Ketchum sojourn was that while shooting ducks one afternoon, Mary fell and shattered her left elbow. Vernon Lord had to piece the bone together like a jigsaw puzzle and his prognosis was for a long haul in a cast and a longer haul in therapy. Ernest rallied, as he always did in physical emergencies, and devoted all his time to caring for Mary and running the house. When I came to Ketchum in early December, Ernest was so concerned with his chores that he only got out hunting once.

  By January, Ernest was back in Cuba hard at work on his Life account of the mano a mano, which he was calling The Dangerous Summer. From January until June we telephoned each other quite often about the television plays I was working on and about the summer in Spain he was writing about. In February he reported that he was over seventeen thousand words into the article.

  On one occasion he called because he was worried that the commentator's piece, just published in Esquire, might have made the Life editors think he had given away what was rightfully theirs. He said that in giving him a ten-thousand-dollar advance they had a right to expect him to protect them, and he asked me to call Ed Thompson, the editor of Life, and explain that the commentator was just the usual character who comes to lunch and stuffs his pocket with your ideas instead of your silver.

  In March, Ernest telephoned to say that the piece was running much longer than expected, that it would be about thirty thousand words, and that I should tell Life he was shooting for an April 7th deadline. He also told me that Gary Cooper had spoken to him about Across the River and was in the process of preparing contracts for its purchase.

  The next time I heard from Ernest he sounded tired and his voice was tense. The article for Life, which now stood at 63,562 words, had missed its April deadline with the end not in sight.

  "I wrote Ed Thompson today," Ernest said, "to explain why the piece is running so long, that what I'm attempting to do is to make a real story which would be valuable in itself and worth publishing after there had been no deaths or dramatic endings to the season. As you may remember, when I hired on to write the piece it looked like one or other of the men might be killed and Life wanted coverage of it. Instead, it turned out to be the gradual destruction of one person by another with all the things that led up to it and made it. I had to establish the personality and the art and the basic differences between the two great artists and then show what happened, and you can't do that in four thousand words.

  "If I could have done it shorter I certainly would have, but it was necessary to make the people come alive and to show the extraordinary circumstances of what we both saw last summer and to make something which would have some unity and be worth publishing. Certainly the price that Life was paying was worth more than the simple account of the mano a manos, which were no longer news and had been picked over by various vultures and large-bellied crows. What I was writing was worth much more than thirty thousand dollars but I thought the hell with that since I only know how to write one way: the best that I can."

  'But now that it's longer, don't you intend to up the price?" "Well, actually what I did was to give them an out on both deadline and price. I told Thompson that I could jam through and finish by the April deadline as said I would, but thought that was unfair to Life, Literature and the Pursuit of Happiness. I explained it needs a month more solid work and then typing, correcting and retyping to be what I want it to be. So I gave them an out and offered to return the advance, but I said that if they still wanted it with a May deadline, then they would have to renegotiate the contract. I offered them forty thousand words for ten thousand dollars more than the five thousand words they contracted for. This is the minimum price I have been paid per word for any writing since before the Spanish Civil War. But offered to let them off the hook if they preferred."

  "They'll take it. It's a bargain."

  "I wrote young Scribner and told him to scratch the Paris book from the fall list due to this overextension on The Dangerous Summer."

  "You sound tired."

  "I'm dead-house. Try to slow it down but can't. Has been building up too long. Do you think I am charging Life enough? It should divide into three parts."

  "I'd say it should be at least three times the original price."

  "And a limit of forty thousand words."

  "When do you think you'll be finished?"

  "By the end of May, if my eyes hold. I haven't wanted to worry you, but old eyes started getting bad in February and the doctors here say it's a rap called keratitis sicca. Cornea is drying up. Tear ducts dried up already. Only book in the joint with type big enough for me to read is Tom Sawyer."

  "But what are they doing for you?"

  "Medication, but doctors say if it doesn't arrest I'll be blind in a year."

  "What! Oh, I can't believe-"

  "So haven't been running as a cheerful these days."

  "But that's Cuban medicine. When you come to New York I'll get you to the best man—"

  "So I'm down to one glass of booze, two glasses of wine and Tom Sawyer, which is a great book but begins to pale on the ninth reading."

  On the fourth of May I was awakened in the early hours of the morning by the overseas operator. Ernest had just heard on the radio that Cooper had had a prostate operation in a Boston hospital and there was speculation that it was malignant. I assured him that from what I had heard it was not malignant and that Cooper was scheduled to make a picture in Naples that summer. Ernest asked question after question about Cooper, most of which I couldn't answer. He was very upset; Cooper was one of his oldest friends, and although they did not see each other very often, their bond was strong.

  Ernest was also perturbed over The Dangerous Summer. It had reached 92,453 words and he figured it would finish out around 110,000. What bothered him was how it could be brought down to 40,000 for Life. I advised him not to think about cutting until he had completely finished it, but he said he had nightmares over its emasculation of 70,000 words.

  I clearly recall my reaction to that phone call: For the first time since I've known him, I thoug
ht, Ernest is unsure of himself. He had always been completely the master of what he wrote and how he wrote and where and when it would be published. But on the phone that morning that sense of control was missing. Perhaps the news about Cooper had undone him for the moment, or the worry over his eyes. Actually, I did not doubt that by the time The Dangerous Summer was finished he would be in command again.

  Ernest finished The Dangerous Summer on May 28th and it came to 108,746 words. He said he had to go back to Spain to get what he needed for a coda that would bring it up to date, and to check certain things nobody would risk putting in a letter. The main thing he had to find out about was whether the practice of shaving the bull's horns, which he alleged was being done to bulls fought by Dominguin, was still going on. He also wanted to search out additional pictures.

  But his immediate problem was excising seventy thousand words. Between June 1st and June 25th he telephoned me twelve times, with mounting anxiety at his inability to cut the manuscript. Life had offered to cut it for him, but he did not trust their judgment. After twenty-one days, working from early morning all through each day, Ernest had cut a total of two hundred and seventy-eight words. When he phoned on the twenty-fifth his voice was husky with fatigue. "I have been over every page a dozen times," he said, "and all I have is five hundred and thirty words to show for it. I can't see another word I can cut. I can't cancel out on Life because they've already advertised the piece. But I just can't go over it again, Hotch; it all seems locked-in to me and I can't use my eyes any more; I can't see the damn words—in the morning I can but by ten o'clock I can't see the goddamn words any more. So I was thinking this morning—I know it's a hell of an imposition— but could you possibly come down and work on it with me? You'll have your sharp head and your good eyes and it won't take more than a few days and we'll get the piece off to Life and then we can go out on Pilar and relax and catch some fish and it will be like old times."

  I flew down to Havana on the morning of June 27th. Ernest was waiting at the airport and Juan drove us directly to the finca. It was very hot and humid; as we drove through the streets of Havana I noticed anti-United States slogans scrawled everywhere on the walls, and there were cuba si! yankee no! banners stretched across the street tops. A big anti-Yankee demonstration was in the works for July 4th, and for its climax Castro was scheduled to harangue a giant rally in the heart of the city.

  Ernest sat in the front seat, as he always did, looking straight ahead, keeping his eyes off the signs. "You can see," he said, "this is the last summer."

  The villagers waved to him as we passed through San Francisco de Paula and he smiled and waved back. We ate lunch with Mary quietly and pleasantly in the high-ceilinged dining room, with its horned beauties watching us from the walls, and Ernest complimented Mary on the cold-fruit soup and the bonito. But he ate very little and filled half his wine glass with water. He closed his eyes frequently and often pressed his fingers against them. His beard had not been trimmed for months; the forward part of his head had become bald but he covered it successfully by combing forward the long hair at the back of his head, giving himself the mien of a Roman emperor.

  After lunch he gave me the 688-page typed manuscript of The Dangerous Summer and I took it up to the study at the top of the tower and started to read. It was so hot I had to hold my handkerchief in my hand to keep the perspiration out of my eyes. (There were no fans or air conditioners in any part of the finca.) I read and made notes all that afternoon and evening. At night it seemed to get even hotter and it was difficult to sleep.

  By the following afternoon I submitted to Ernest a list of eight suggested cuts in the first hundred pages; he went into his bedroom to look them over while I resumed working in the tower. The shimmering, unyielding heat gave me the sensation of operating in slow motion. It occurred to me that despite my many visits to Cuba, this was the first time I had been there in the summer.

  Ernest and I conferred on cuts the following morning in his bedroom. He had in front of him seven different-colored pills, which he swallowed one by one with siphon water, and a lined pad of paper on which he had neatly written his reasons for rejecting each of the cuts. He handed me the list.

  It was a startling document: in the first place, some of it didn't make any sense; for example, in rejecting one five-page cut, Ernest listed four reasons why those pages should be retained and then concluded by stating: "But has effect of making things happen no-where"; secondly, the whole thing had an uncharacteristically disorganized, badly phrased, petulant ring; and in the third place, I could not figure out why Ernest painstakingly wrote all this out and sat there watching me read it. We had many times in the past conferred about his manuscripts for Across the River and into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, the Paris sketches, and short stories, but this was the only time he had gone through the process of writing notes, and strangely incomprehensible notes at that.

  But I accepted them without discussion, and for the next three days I continued to work on the manuscript, suggesting cuts that Ernest would consider and then carefully reject with written notations on his pad. I explained my reasons for each suggested cut but did not press them, for I realized that Ernest was being severely harassed by conflicting desires to save every word of what he had written and to deliver a properly cut version to Life. "What I've written is Proustian in its cumulative effect," Ernest explained, "and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect."

  In the late afternoons we went down to the big, cloudy pool to swim. The water was as bracing as a hot bath. I watched Ernest slowly enter the pool. He looked thin. His chest and shoulders had lost their thrust and his upper arms were macilent and formless, as if his huge biceps had been pared down by an unskilled whittler.

  One night when it was too hot to sleep, I found in my room an old volume that contained issues of a magazine called This Quarter which had been published in Paris in the Twenties. Thumbing through it, I came upon "Big Two-Hearted River" and "The Undefeated" in what was obviously their first publication. I also found an article by the poet Ernest Walsh, the magazine's editor, in which he prophesied: "Hemingway selected his audience. His rewards will be rich. But thank God he will never be satisfied. He is of the elect. He belongs. It will take time to wear him out. And before that he will be dead."

  On the fourth day Ernest finally approved a cut of three pages, and from then on he slowly, grudgingly, painfully began to accept cuts until finally at the end of nine days he had a total of 54,916 excised words. The following day Ernest said he could not use his eyes any more. "I can see the words on the page for only ten or twelve minutes," he said, "before my eyes cut out, and then I can't use them again for an hour or two." We decided that I should bring the manuscript back to New York and give it to Life to make additional cuts from the 53,830 words it now contained. "I'll tell you, Hotch, although I move about as cheerfully as possible," Ernest said, "it is like living in a Kafka nightmare. I act cheerful like always but am not. I'm bone-tired and very beat up emotionally."

  "What bothers you most—the Castro business?"

  "That's part of it. He doesn't bother me personally. I'm good publicity for them, so maybe they'd never bother me and let me live on here as always, but I am an American above everything else and I cannot stay here when other Americans are being kicked out and my country is being villified. I guess I knew it was all over for me here the night they killed Black Dog. A Bastista search party, looking for guns, came barreling in here in the middle of the night and poor Black Dog, old and half blind, tried to stand guard at the door of the finca, but a soldier clubbed him to death with the butt of his rifle. Poor old Black Dog. I miss him. In the early morning when I work, he's not there on the kudu skin beside the typewriter; and in the afternoon when I swim, he's not hunting lizards beside the pool; and in the evenings when I sit in my chair to read, his chin isn't resting on my foot. I miss Black Dog as much as I miss any friend I ever lost. And now I lose the finca— there's no sense kidding myself�
�I know I must leave it all and go. But how can you measure that loss? Everything I have is here. My pictures, my books, my good work place and good memories."

  "Can't you do something about the pictures?"

  "I'd settle for the Miro and the two Juan Gris."

  "Maybe I could get them out in my luggage if we took them out of their frames and rolled them."

  "No, I wouldn't let you risk that."

  "What about a request from The Museum of Modern Art to exhibit them? You told me Alfred Barr had asked you several times for a loan of the Miro."

  "I guess it's worth a try. I'll write him."

  "I read the new chapters of the Paris book last night—they're wonderful, Papa. They make me feel I was living there and that those times were mine, and the next time I go to Paris I will expect it to be just that way."

  "Will I be boiled in Congressional oil for being kind to poor Ezra?"

  "No, that's all over. I don't think this Congress knows who Ezra Pound is."

  Ernest was in a quandary as to which book should be published first— The Dangerous Summer or the Paris book. He even wondered whether The Dangerous Summer should be published as a book at all. After a long, vacillating discussion I suggested we both think about it and discuss it again when he came to New York. 1 asked him to give me advance notice of his arrival date so I could try to arrange an appointment with the eye specialist, a very difficult man to reach.

  "Well, don't worry if you can't get the appointment," Ernest said. "There isn't much anyone can do for keratitus sicca . . . or for anything else, I guess."

  We were going to go out on the boat with Mary and Honor the following day, but Gregorio reported that the sea was worthless and no one had taken anything for four days. Ernest and I drove into Havana and had one daiquiri each at the Floridita and then Ernest went to the bank to get a manuscript out of the vault. It was a short novel called The Sea Chase, which Mary thought could be made into a good motion picture, and Ernest wanted to know what I thought. Across the top of the first page, and above the title, he had written in longhand, "The Sea (Main Book Three)," which indicated that this was the sea section of what he had always referred to as his "big book," or "blockbuster," a work that was to have had three parts to it: the land, the sea and the air.