Hem III

Hemingway | The Blank Page | 1944-1961 a film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick.  Streaming on PBS ****

The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway.  Library of America.  850 pp. *****

There’s nothing about the writing or production values that makes this third episode of Hemingway not as good as the others, but watching it is a downer.  He pursues and then marries Mary Walsh as the episode opens, and she was perhaps the one real match for him, the woman who stood up to the mature writer; he was nevertheless abusive and neglectful of her as well.  His alcoholism got worse, and his body continued to take a battering because of his reckless lifestyle.  He’d been calling himself Papa for years, but in this last episode he looked more like Grand Papa.  He was only in his fifties.

I made light of his involvement in World War II in my last piece, but he apparently didn’t spend the whole war cruising the Gulf Stream with his buddies, looking for German submarines (?).  He was still married to Martha Gellhorn, and her daring as a war correspondent seemed to shame him, so he finally went to Europe and put himself in harm’s way.  Correspondents weren’t allowed to engage in combat, but Hemingway did so anyway; the movie reports his throwing grenades into a basement and killing some Germans (in one letter he claims, falsely, to have killed 150 people in his life).  It was in London that he met Mary—she was hanging out with Irwin Shaw—and decided almost immediately to divorce Gellhorn and marry her.  They moved to Cuba, where they primarily lived, though they also had a house in Idaho.

I have always thought that Hemingway’s eventual depression and mental problems were a result of excessive drinking, but as I watched this series began to think that head injuries played a part too; he had as many concussions as an NFL linebacker.  Even in the first episode, when he was a young man, he managed to pull a skylight down on his head (an image that always makes me cringe), but he and Mary did an African safari and managed to be in not one, but two airplane crashes; after the first one, he was reported dead, so obituaries appeared all over the world.  He injured his head in the first crash, and in the second freed himself from the plane by smashing his head through a window.  The expression accident prone is a massive understatement when applied to Hemingway.  He courted death in the way he lived and came close to it many times.

This episode also includes the dreadful incident in which his son Gregory was picked up for entering a woman’s restroom while wearing women’s clothing (he would eventually transition and become a woman).  Hemingway and Gregory’s mother, Pauline Pfeiffer, had a huge shouting match over the phone, after which she had an internal hemorrhage and actually died.  Gregory’s subsequent letter to his father accused him of ruining the lives of five people in the family.  The ironic thing is that Hemingway himself was obsessed with gender fluidity, and wrote a book which included it; one might have thought he’d be more understanding.  Apparently he couldn’t stand the public humiliation.

This episode also includes the famous letter Hemingway wrote when he was asked to do a blurb for James Jones’ From Here to Eternity.  He could have just said he didn’t like the book but instead wrote a vicious attack on Jones that is Hemingway at his absolute (and one suspects drunken) worst.  “To me he is an enormously skillful fuck-up and his book will do great damage to our country.  Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer.  But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs; nor suck a boil to know it is a boil; nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot.  I hope he kills himself as soon as (sic) it does not damage your sales. . . . He has the psycho’s urge to kill himself and he will do it.”  Jones’ father, like Hemingway’s, had taken his own life, often a predictor for a son’s suicide, but Jones—whom I regard as a braver man than Hemingway—died of congestive heart failure, which he courageously faced to the end.  Hemingway was obviously feeling threatened by a writer who wrote an honest war novel (as honest as A Farewell to Arms was romantic) and didn’t like the comparison.[1]

Despite his old-man persona, Hemingway still had a thing for young women, including Adriana Ivancich, whom he met in Venice.  The result was his most embarrassingly bad novel, Across the River and Into the Trees.  That’s the one book in which Hemingway seems to parody his own style, and shows that, while the Hemingway style was good at describing physical actions, and expressing cynicism, there were deep emotions it couldn’t handle.  The quotes narrator from the novel just a little; I didn’t remember how dreadful it was.  It seemed to mark the end of his career.

But it didn’t.  He actually wrote The Old Man and the Sea after that novel, seeming to return to his old form.  He worked on the manuscripts published posthumously as Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, both of which are not quite vintage Hemingway, but they’re interesting novels.  He also worked on the memoir A Moveable Feast, which I do think is Hemingway at his best.  I’m amazed that, in the chaos his life had become, he was able to write so well.

His final days were those of a mentally ill man, deeply paranoid and depressed, who apparently talked about—and actually rehearsed—suicide with his drunken friends and was in and out of treatment facilities.  He did electroshock therapy and spent time at the Mayo Clinic.  He tried to take his life on more than one occasion, and finally, after returning to Idaho from the Mayo Clinic, succeeded.

So what happened, one wonders.  What happened to the man who, with all his flaws, loved fishing and hunting and sports and writing and reading, was a wonderful companion to many friends, was often a good and loving father to his sons, spending whole long afternoons with them in Key West and Cuba?  What he said was that, when he could no longer do the things he loved, he no longer wanted to live, but most of us adjust to an old age where we can’t do everything we used to.  That’s part of life.

Inspired by this series, I bought the Library of America Hemingway volume, the early stories and novels that made me to want to be a writer in the first place, and they seem just as fresh and new as when I read them almost sixty years ago; they’ve lost none of their power.  My brother recently asked what I thought Hemingway’s best book is, and I said, the Collected Stories.  He was good as a novelist, but great as a short story writer.  His style was more suited to the shorter form.

Despite the bitterness of his last years, and the difficult ending of this series, which is enough to make one renounce Hemingway forever, I’ve always been haunted by the last letter in the Selected Letters, which he wrote to a boy he met in the Mayo Clinic who was battling viral heart disease.  Both of these human beings were battling fatal illnesses—Hemingway’s was mental—and both would die of them, but there is a tenderness to Hemingway’s letter that doesn’t erase everything he did, even other letters he wrote, but it sounds like the old Hemingway, and lets us know that that man was still inside him somewhere.  He would kill himself seventeen days after writing it.

“Dear Fritz,

I was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you were laid up in Denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much I hope you’ll be feeling better.

It has been very hot and muggy here in Rochester but the last two days it has turned cool and lovely with the nights wonderful for sleeping.  The country is beautiful around here and I’ve had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north.  Saw some good bass jump in the river.  I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall.

But not as many as in Idaho and I hope we’ll both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together.

Best always to you, old timer from your good friend who misses you very much.

(Mister) Papa”

[1] Hemingway was the greater writer.  But Jones was a more honest one, and had an understanding of true masculinity that was far beyond that of Hemingway (see Go to the Widow Maker).  He was also faithful to his wife throughout his marriage.  “I don’t run around on Gloria.”