The Hemingway Files

by H. K. Bush

  Within days, I received a phone call from Miyamoto. He was tense, and his voice, too hard-edged for a polite Japanese colleague, betrayed his unhappiness. “The trip to Manila is scheduled, sensei.” His message was clipped, his tone altogether unpleasant. So what else is new? “Your tickets and other necessary instructions will be delivered later today,” he said before hanging up.

  So in the middle of February 1993, I made my first trip out of Japan since my arrival almost a year earlier. I flew first class and was picked up by a limousine service at the airport and delivered to one of the top hotels in the center of Makati. The streets surrounding my hotel were impressive, redolent with wealth both old and new. With a little extra time, I toured the palace where the Marcos regime reigned before they got the boot in 1986. The legends of Imelda’s thousands of shoes were true; her dictatorial excess still on full display. I remember thinking those shoes—shoes of every kind and color, all displayed on shelf after shelf, room after room—were evidence of a different kind of collector, one of an obsessive and even creepy nature. Shaking off thoughts of Imelda Marcos, I continued exploring and eventually stumbled on a club near the hotel where a New Orleans native played the piano like Jelly Roll Morton on Valium—frenzied, incisive, yet somehow just passive enough for the “cool” crowd. Drinks were twelve bucks a piece.

  The business side of the trip was straightforward and required only two hours out of the seven days I spent down there. An arrangement had been made for me to meet the middleman, by the name of Aguinaldo, at his tiny, disheveled antique shop not far from the hotel. He had been able to acquire the rights to peddle the object, whatever it was, for a healthy commission. I walked into the shop early one morning, and found him in the back room, with his feet up on a cluttered desk, smoking a foul-smelling cigar. He begrudgingly came out, leaving his cigar smoldering in a half-full ashtray. I introduced myself, clasped his sweaty hand, and immediately disliked him. After a few pleasantries, we got down to business.

  “The item is in my safe. Has the professor explained the procedures?”

  “Yes. I think it is all in order, yes?”

  Then he snapped at me. “Well, to tell the truth, not really. The payment is not yet received. I phoned the bank at the end of business yesterday, and it was nowhere to be seen!” His face was almost comically contorted in mock alarm.

  “Well … I know that Professor Goto wants the item very much. And I believe he is … able to raise the amount rather easily.”

  “Yes, Mr. Springs. You do not need to tell me this. Nevertheless, until we can confirm the transaction with the bank, I cannot turn over the property.”

  We returned to his back office and he seated himself, smoking away at the still-lit cigar, ill-mannered and grouchy. Eventually, he pointed me to a straight-back chair, then lifted his feet back onto his desk, leaned back, and glowered at me. The wallpaper was a sickly yellow from his persistent smoking, and I wondered about the tarry effects on whatever valuable objects he stored nearby.

  “Can you phone the bank again, please, Mr. Aguinaldo?”

  His face took on a reddish tint, and for a long moment he scowled at me as I sat in silence, waiting for him to blow like Melville’s mighty whale. The humidity was climbing, and I found his company tiresome and unpleasant and his office even more so. So I tried a new tactic.

  “Can you show me the item?”

  This question made him even more ridiculously outraged by my presence. “The professor has told me that under no circumstances should I do so! Once the money has been transferred, and I have confirmation, I can release the book—it is already wrapped in several layers of protective brown paper. The transfer must be confirmed, at which time I can allow you to take possession of the volume.”

  He was very insistent about these matters, and repetitive. But a tiny detail had slipped out in this last remark: it was a book of some sort. Meanwhile, a plump vein popped out on the side of his forehead. I imagined counting his pulse by its tiny palpitations. We continued fuming in silence, sweating and staring at each other in his sleazy office.

  Finally, inexplicably, and without warning, he picked up the aging rotary phone, dialed it, spoke rapidly in a native Tagalog dialect. He was quiet a moment, presumably waiting for confirmation, then slammed the receiver down with gusto. A moment passed. He rubbed his ear. Then, abruptly he stood, his back to me, opened his safe, pulled out the package, then shut the heavy door quickly as if I might reach in and scoop up all his valuables. He turned, handed me the package, and waved me away like I was a noisome fly. I said a hurried goodbye and got the hell out of there.

  Two days later, I left Manila, never to return. At the Osaka Airport, I had to fill out a customs form. Technically, I knew I should report bringing into Japan something of great value, but, I had no idea what was in the package or how much it was worth. This lack of knowledge was strategically a very good thing, at least from Sensei’s point of view. As I looked down at the customs form, pen in hand, I thought of the instructions he had given me before I left Kobe. “Yu-san, when you hand carry the item back through customs, it should remain wrapped, and I advise you to report that it has negligible value. The customs people will not question you on this.” That was the first real hint that something was out of whack in all of this. The thing was, I just did not know the rules at that time. To be blunt, Sensei was simply asking me to obey orders and keep my big mouth shut—which is exactly what I did.

  At the airport, I had only an expensive-looking Cross briefcase—provided by Sensei, and containing the mysterious volume—and my carry-on bag, a very cheap looking canvas roll-around that I had scored at a discount store in Umeda. It was a contrast that suddenly seemed to me to be obvious and suspicious. The good news was that I was indeed an American citizen, still highly favored in the eyes of the Japanese bureaucracy, so I was basically waved through, no questions asked—except for one. “Do you have anything to declare?” I hesitated just momentarily, then shook my head. He seemed to find my response dubious, but waved me forward.

  There is a grainy and subdued image in my mind, as if I am looking down on myself from a security camera. I see a man who looks nervous, ill at ease, guilty. I remember being slightly relieved that the Japanese immigration agent was a scrawny kid who looked young enough to be one of my students and that he didn’t have the foggiest notion that my briefcase contained a book valued at tens of thousands of dollars, or more. Breathing more easily because of the agent’s youth or not, I was smuggling a valuable item into his country and was the sly and willing agent of an unseen powerful engine of deception. I was flush with both excitement and shame, and the image in my memory features a tiny drop of perspiration sliding down my forehead, ready to plop onto my passport as it is being stamped for reentry. At the time, the episode took on the shading of a sinister act involving illegal motivations and mysterious acquisitions, like a scene gone stale in an old spy novel.

  In retrospect, however, it was no big deal at all. Veteran travelers do it all the time; they neglect to report their acquisitions abroad to the glum agents that greet them accusingly at international airports. Still, this first instance of tacit deception made me very uncomfortable. I felt presumed upon by my sempai, my teacher, and, to be honest, slightly betrayed.

  The unwrapping of the mysterious volume, and the storm of confusion it unleashed in my own mind about things I had simply never thought much about, occurred on the first Sunday after my return to Kobe.

  I presented the book to Sensei, still safe in its brown paper wrappings. He hesitated a moment, handed me another pair of those fine white linen gloves that he preferred for the inspection of old relics, and began pulling on a pair himself. Properly gloved, he then slowly unwrapped his prize. Sensei removed the paper as tenderly as a nervous bridegroom would disrobe his virgin bride, eliminating each layer of clothing, quietly and deliberately, lingering in anticipation.

  It was a very old volume, and it took a moment before I realized it was another c
opy of Moby-Dick, evidently a first edition, meaning it would be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000—or more. Again Sensei picked up the moldering volume, hesitated, then carefully handed it across the table to me, with both hands. “Please look at the inscription.”

  I slowly opened the book and on the front page, I saw the following alien-looking inscription:

  Beneath four blood moons,

  A whale circles Nippon;

  April snow camellia

  —Ezra Pound, January 1916

  I handed the volume back to him. “What do you make of the writing, Sensei?” A gloved thumb stroked the cover, and for a moment, he ignored my question. Finally, he spoke.

  “This is something I have wished to own for many years, Yu-san. It is far more valuable than you might imagine, and, in fact, it holds the key to a mystery I have attempted to solve for many years. Of course, it is written in a first edition of the novel, which must seem amazing to the untrained eye. As with the other crucial details of Moby-Dick, however, Americans would overlook the true value of the book.”

  He still gazed at the inscription, then reached for a pad of paper and a pen, and scribbled down what he saw written there. Then he showed me the copy. “Here is the real prize; not simply because it is a first edition, of which I have another. No, this one is much more marvelous. The inscription is the handwriting of the previous owner, twice removed. I attempted to purchase this volume in 1972, over twenty years ago. It was placed up for sale by the widow of another previous owner, a couple years after his death. My rival collector, Jun Escobar from Manila, a true Melville fanatic, swept in and cut me off. Now, finally, I have managed to take back this great prize!” He genuinely beamed at this sudden realization.

  I listened, captivated, as he continued his explanation. “You may be surprised to learn this, perhaps, but this edition of Moby-Dick was once owned by Ezra Pound. He was in fact nearly as obsessed with Melville’s sea monster as Captain Ahab was. Pound was a devotee of Melville’s symbolic fantasy, I believe, because it is the quintessential story of inscrutability. Such is the modern, existential dilemma. In any case, like Melville and Ahab, Pound wished to penetrate the veil and stand face to face before the sublime. And like Ahab, Pound had … imperial ambitions of his own!”

  And then Sensei did something that had not happened prior to this visit, and rarely happened afterwards. He slid around the table and sat beside me, his right thigh pressed against my left one. He reached for the book and held it open to the inscription, so that we could inspect it together.

  “It is a unique masterpiece in my collection,” he said, with an air of reverence. And again he closed the book, delicately.

  “The haiku unites the whale and the island; even before the American critics noted this duality, Pound understood Melville’s device. It is a splendid revelation, I must say.

  “Not long after he etched this inscription, Pound published some of his oddest and most memorable verse, some would say his masterpieces. He attempted to compress into the most succinct form in literature, the image, an account of sublime mystery. Japan, the whale, these were also, for Pound, metaphors of this mystery, symbols of whatever the modern sensibility has let die. Pound sought an emotional intensity in a highly compressed form, a sort of fusing force. And he came to believe that it was the same burden of Moby-Dick, that this ‘fusing force,’ was really the ultimate purpose of all art and literature!” He paused, reflecting. “It is the only volume of Pound’s library that is known to contain a haiku that he wrote himself.”

  Sensei now seemed satisfied with his oration, and leaned back on his left elbow, a boyish posture of relaxation that he had also never taken with me. He spied me coyly out of the corner of his eye. “And so what can you add to my analysis?”

  “It is an … unorthodox account of modern poetry, Sensei—as you know.” I rubbed my temple. “And what’s with the blood moons? From Joel?”

  “Joel?” he asked. I think, for one of the only times in our relationship, I may have known something Sensei did not already know.

  “Sure. The blood moons—from the Book of Joel in the Old Testament.” And I could have said more, about the last days and so on—but refrained, worried about sounding like a whack job.

  “Ahh! Joel, indeed!” But he actually seemed unacquainted with that section of the Bible, so I dropped it. Yet I could tell it piqued his interest. There was something behind Sensei’s obsession, for the thing for which the symbols stood, the something that remained unnamed and evasive, that was both uncanny and exhilarating. Still, I let his unfamiliarity with Joel hang fire, and never did answer it. And yet I lacked whatever self-control was needed to resist becoming possessed of its enchantments, potentially deadly or violent though they might be. In short, from that day on, I was hooked.

  After our study of Pound’s volume, Sensei placed it into one of his green library boxes and carried it safely into the adjoining room, where he evidently kept his valuables. I knew it was nearby, if not right next door, because he was able to leave and return so quickly with his treasures. I sometimes heard him shuffling around just beyond the wall to my right. In fact, it was rather pleasant, to sit there and know that untold treasures were carefully indexed and stored in the room thirty or so feet away from me. Perhaps this old house contained more valuables than any storeroom at the Beinecke Library at Yale, or even the Lilly Library back in Bloomington.

  When he returned, the seminar began again in earnest. “Yu-san, my gracious thanks for your help with the old book.” Suddenly, after our initial rush, the precious antique was now just another “old book.” “You have shown yourself to be a most worthy assistant, for which I am very grateful. And now, let us talk about your contribution to the study of the great authors, shall we?”

  For this visit, Sensei had prepared by bringing out a number of library holding boxes and several reference volumes. These were already marked with Post-it notes. And there was my dissertation, squarely on the side table with the other materials. It looked like we were in for some serious work.

  He pulled out the copy of my dissertation, marked generously with the accusatory yellow notes. “You have been a loyal helper. In fact, your loyalties inspire me to take you even deeper into the … shall we say, hidden treasures of my collection?” He even laughed at this, even if just slightly. “I think it is time to discuss some matters of history regarding young Hemingway. You see, the biographers have been quite mistaken about certain historical accounts of several matters.

  “I’m afraid that you have also been tricked by these many false reports, Yu-san. This is a common occurrence in matters of biographical accounts. Surely you noticed this in your own work on Mark Twain, a well-known liar about his past adventures. Or should we say a teller of tall tales? In any case, a major difficulty with someone like Twain is learning to listen carefully enough to know when he is telling the truth, and when he is pulling your leg.” He paused for a long sip. “Yes, the great authors are often notorious liars in real life!”

  Another sip. “Hemingway, of course, has much in common with Mark Twain. He once famously had one of his characters say that all American literature began with Mark Twain’s little book on Huckleberry Finn, something like that. Both of them were great tricksters, and so, it is quite easy to be led astray by the likes of Twain or Hemingway. One unfortunate result is that many errors of historical fact have been repeated by biographers of these two writers, and so most accounts are at least partially unreliable. Both authors often made up stories about themselves, or else they remembered things quite differently thirty or forty years after the fact. This is true for all of us.” When he looked at me now, I think he discerned my disagreement, or my skepticism about the misleading content of the standard literary biographies.

  “Perhaps I need to illustrate this, yes?” He opened my dissertation to one of the marked passages, and read to me from my own writing:

  “The great disappointment of the Paris years involved the tragic l
oss of many manuscripts in winter of 1922. Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, was preparing to join him in Austria, where he was on holiday for snow skiing. And so she gathered up all of his writing and put it together in an old, small valise that was useful for such a purpose. The valise contained everything—manuscripts of all of Hemingway’s stories, various sketches of Paris in the 1920s, including the famous ‘Six True Sentences,’ several poems, and possibly the beginnings of a novel set in Chicago during World War I, along with their only carbon copies.

  “On December 2, 1922, Hadley took a cab to the Gare de Lyon in Paris, and had her luggage taken to the platform and placed within the train. She went off in search of some Evian water for the long trip, and when she returned, the valise with the manuscripts was gone, although the other luggage had been left behind. Hadley was left in tears and desolation, and had to report the theft to Hemingway the next morning. His response was almost cataclysmic; he immediately boarded a night train back to Paris, arriving there the next day. Hemingway searched in vain for the manuscripts in the apartment, went to the Lost and Found at the train station, put an ad in the newspapers for a reward for the return of the manuscripts, and then in near suicidal despair did something that was too horrible for him to describe in his autobiographical accounts of these events. Perhaps, as some surmise, he got drunk and visited a prostitute. Perhaps he even held a gun to his head and nearly committed suicide. In any event, the loss of the manuscripts has attained a level of mythology in the study of the Paris years of the young Hemingway.”

  Sensei now closed the book, sliding it across the table towards me again. I picked it up, held it in my hands for the first time in a while. Hearing my somewhat plodding graduate school prose being read to me aloud made me cringe. “It sounds a lot like a graduate student, yes, Sensei?” I asked.