The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

EARNEST HEMINGWAY sat talking to his friend A. E. Hotchner after a leisurely dinner in Aix-enProvence. Ernest, who was suffering from the injuries sustained in two plane crashes on his recent hunting trip, had consumed enough wine to leave him in a confiding humor. “I logged a lot of reading time on the S.S. Africa,” he said, “and reread Huckleberry Finn, which I have always touted as the best American book ever written and which I still think is. But I had not read it for a long time and this time reading it, there were at least forty paragraphs I wished I could fix. And a lot of the wonderful stuff you remember, you discover you put there yourself.”

Hotchner changed the subject by asking Hemingway if he intended to write another book about the last war, and Ernest replied, “No, I don’t think so. Across the River is my book. I only write once on any one theme; if I don’t write it all that one time, then it is not worth saying. You know that old Greek gent Heraclitus? ‘One cannot step twice in the same river, for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you.’ I never start out with a plot in mind, and I’ve never yet set out to write a novel — it’s always a short story that moves into being a novel. I always make it prove that it can’t be written short. There’s only one requirement to being a successful writer if you have talent — stay healthy.”

“Also to work every day, or damn near every day, don’t you think?”

“Yes. That’s why I like to start early before I can be distracted by peoples and events. I’ve seen every sunrise of my life. I rise at first light — the wars ruined my sleep, that and my thin eyelids — and I start by rereading and editing everything I have written to the point I left off. That way I go through a book I’m writing several hundred times.”

Parenthetically, I should guess that the priming of the mind by rereading yesterday’s work

is a device familiar to all writers. I don’t for a minute believe that Hemingway reread his entire script at dawn, simply enough of the chapter he was working on to catch the pulse and the mood. He wrote standing up at a desk, his descriptions in longhand — “because that’s hardest for me” — the dialogue on the typewriter, and Hotchner, who lived with him in Cuba when a book was in progress, tells us that from Monday through Thursday the regime was a strict one: no interruptions whatever from dawn until 1 P.M., when Ernest emerged to cool off with a cocktail; a siesta or fishing in the afternoon and no problems before supper; but even before the meal was over Ernest would be withdrawing into the rumination of tomorrow’s work.

“Why do you people love Hemingway so?” I asked the Russians who had gathered to meet us at the Ukrainian Writers Union in Kiev. There was a brief pause, and then the secretary spoke. “Because he has such love for men.” This rather surprised me, for the Russians enjoy anguish; they weep openly at the theater and the films, and they might have preferred Ernest’s long flirtation with death. But no, their admiration went out to him because he had such love for men and for what men hard-pressed could do.

One of the men whom Hemingway loved and in whom he confided at the close of his life was A. E. HOTCHNER, a journalist sent to Havana by Cosmopolitan to commission an article on The Future of Literature. Hotchner, who had been an Air Force officer in France, knew that the assignment was preposterous, and he made such an honest apology that Hemingway had him for drinks at the Floridita and took him fishing the next day on the Pilar, the forty-foot cabin cruiser. Their liking for each other deepened into friendship; Hotchner became a hero-worshiper and made it a habit no matter how deep the rum-mists to keep a journal of their talk, supplemented with a transistor tape when they traveled. This is the source material which he has skillfully elaborated in his memoir PAPA HEMINGWAY (Random House, $5.95). Ernest enjoyed such a credulous companion, and since Hotchner’s questions opened up many of the more stormy and sensitive periods of Hemingway’s early life, the chronicle covers far more than their fourteen years together.

At their first meeting here was Hotchner’s impression:

He stopped to talk to one of the musicians in fluent Spanish, and something about him hit me — enjoyment: God I thought, how he’s enjoying himself! I had never seen anyone with such an aura of fun and well-being.

This was the mood in which their adventures began, and it stayed with them through many happy times in New York, Paris, and Havana. Hemingway cared deeply for painting but not the theater, opera, or ballet; besides the bulls, he liked pro football and baseball and the circus almost as much as boxing. Circus animals, he felt, were not like other animals; they were more intelligent, and because of their constant working alliance with man, had much more highly developed personalities.

On their trip to Paris in 1949, where Hotchner was told to stay with the author until the last installment of his Cosmopolitan serial was revised and in the mail, Ernest indulged in a flood of reminiscences about his early loves and marriages, his first writing, and his rivalries. Papa was fond of boasting of his prowess — for example, the great evening he spent with Mata Hari (actually he never reached Europe until the year after her execution); and Hotchner was sometimes on his guard against these “practical-joke fantasies.” But when Hemingway paid off some old scores against his one-time friends Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, or John Dos Passos, it is not clear from the text whether Hotchner believed the stories or mistrusted them as much as I do. “Unquestioning loyalty was what Ernest prized most highly,” writes Hotchner, and it seems to me deplorable that Hemingway had so little of it for those whose writing he once admired. The pages on Fitzgerald might have been carved with a stiletto.

His friendship for Marlene Dietrich, on the other hand, was reciprocated to the very end, and the things he said to her are succinct and memorable. His words to Hotch about divorce and retirement are bitter truths, as is this self-portrait: “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion

against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes, that of giving it.”

Hemingway’s disorganization begins after the plane crash and the burning in Africa. He was constantly in pain, and his chemistry was out of whack. After a glorious reprieve in Spain for his sixtieth birthday, he was driven and distracted by the hullabaloo over the Nobel Prize. His writing came in spurts and then dried up; the treatments which he underwent at the Mayo Clinic gave only a short relief from the delusions and the death wish which he could not shake. The last months were a nightmare for Mary and deeply tragic.

Hemingway, who sought legal protection against such academic biographers as Charles Fenton, must have suspected that this book was coming and wished it to be of the best vintage. One is captivated by his enormous zest, his wonderful talk, his quick friendships, his spells of generosity, and his hatred of cant. Exaggeration was as deep in him as in Mark Twain, and he made it boastful and brutal; Hotchner occasionally sees through it as in the identification of Ernest’s heroines, but the greater part he records uncritically, leaving later biographers the task of separating truth from blague.

GWYN GRIFFIN, with his Welsh heritage, was born in Egypt, educated in England, served as an officer in the colonial army in Africa, and now makes his home in Italy. His early novels and his short stories are remarkable for their cosmopolitan character and the driving force of the narrative. Now, in A LAST LAMP BURNING (Putnam, $6.95), he has produced his best book, a story laid in the quarter of San Lorenzo in Naples so alive with the smells and sounds and heat of the old city, so full of the passion, the laughter, and kinship of the Neapolitans that one can hardly believe that it was not written by a native son.

With the death of the wealthy old fascist Ercole Sanbrenedetto, the people who have been dwelling in his half-bombed slum tenement in Porta Caprana — the shopkeeper, the cabdriver, the Chinese undertaker and his half-caste grandson, the tobacconist, and the Communist workers — all realize that they are soon to be evicted, and the anxiety is added to their daily burden of poverty. Like Jane Jacobs, Mr. Griffin has an instinctive sympathy for the protective loyalties which bind together the dwellers on a busy street. There is plenty of healthy sweat and strain but little that is sordid.

The heirs of old Ercole are the Colavolpes, pretentious aristocrats. They are as eccentric as they are laughable, “a bestially poor, neurosisridden family engaged in killing each other off in psychological warfare.” The palazzo they live in is a rococo monstrosity in which they scrimp along on a tiny pension. The only good one in the lot is Galo, the young cadet, who will inherit the title when he is eighteen and to whom the estate has been willed by the old pirate — though none of the infuriating elders are yet aware of this. Galo’s self-defense, his awakening to what life and the bequest offer, is one of the main strands, and it parallels in striking detail the story of Gennaro, the illegitimate grandson of the undertaker, a black-haired youngster of Galo’s age, of greater resourcefulness and inexhaustible hope. The destiny of these two provides the tension.

Not for a long time have I read a novel — and this is a big one — which deals so vitally yet so uncompromisingly with a mean quarter of a great city; these Neapolitans really live, and although Mr. Griffin is by trade a master satirist, his characters have in them the odd, irrepressible, and often endearing qualities we remember in Dickens. This is the Putnam Award Novel for 1966, and the editors and the author are to be congratulated on its publication.

As a result of these limitations, My Turn only occasionally rises above the level of vague disgruntlement. When he gets off politics and fails to reminiscing about Hollywood or denouncing fashionable authors, or damning television, or considering rich men as public servants, or dismissing prizefighting as a subject for adult discussion, he is knowledgeable, tart, and amusing. Mr. O’Hara is such an effective butcher of minor sacred cows that it seems to me a pity that he ever had to mess around with politics.