Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  In the midst of all our Ketchum pleasures, however, there was an ominous event that Ernest was brooding about when I arrived, and he continued to brood about it every day. There was a Catholic church in Hailey, twelve miles distant, presided over by one Father O'Connor, a man of persuasive charm. He had called upon Ernest soon after his arrival, and as a result of that visit Ernest had contributed the cost of a badly needed new church roof. Ernest felt, reasonably enough, that that should have discharged his eleemosynary obligations for the year, but Father O'Connor had returned a month later with a request that Ernest regarded as an infinitely bigger donation: would Ernest come to the parish house and talk to the forty high school teen-agers who met there every other week. Ernest was stunned, in fact horrified, and tried to resist, but Father O'Connor finally induced him to come on the basis of no speech, only answer questions.

  Ernest fumed about it every day. "Why does a man who gives a roof have to make a speech?"

  "You don't have to make a speech, lamb," Mary would remind him, "just answer questions."

  "When you stand up in front of people and talk, that's a speech."

  The only occasion I knew about when Ernest had appeared before an audience and made a speech occurred in 1937 when he spoke to the Second American Writers' Congress in Carnegie Hall on his return from the Spanish Civil War. Of course, reporters on ships occasionally got to him en masse, but he understood them and he could talk rough to them and, somehow, that was different. But this was a formal occasion, compounded by being in a parish house under the aegis of a priest, and Ernest fretted about it every day. He fretted about his throat, which he was sure was conking out, fretted about not being able to talk at the kids' level, and fretted that they probably knew more about his stuff than he did "since I have not read my collected works since they got collected—and don't intend to."

  When D-Day loomed, there was an ice storm raging and the roads were difficult. As I drove slowly over the ice-slick road, Ernest sat quietly, staring ahead, saying nothing. When we got to Hailey, we passed The Snug Bar, Ernest's favorite drinking place, and I asked him if he'd like a drink before he faced the parochial music, but he said no, he'd go it cold turkey.

  There was about an equal number of boys and girls, average age sixteen; they sat stiffly on folding chairs and looked as frightened and uncomfortable as Ernest did when he walked in. Father O'Connor suggested that Ernest sit and urged everyone to be informal; after a few minutes it was evident that Ernest and the kids were going to get along fine. Mary had asked me to take notes because she had a cold and had not been able to go with us. Ernest checked the notes the following day and made some additions and corrections; this is substantially how the evening with the teen-agers went.

  Q: Mr. Hemingway, how did you get started writing books?

  A: I always wanted to write. I worked on the school paper, and my first jobs were writing. After I finished high school I went to Kansas City and worked on the Star. It was regular newspaper work: Who shot whom? Who broke into what? Where? When? How? But never Why. Not really Why.

  Q: About that book For Whom the Bell Tolls—I know that you were in Spain, but what were you doing there?

  A: I had gone over to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. I took some ambulances over for the republican side.

  Q: Why the republican side?

  A. I had seen the republic start. I was there when King Alfonso left and I watched the people write their constitution. That was the last republic that had started in Europe and I believed in it. I believe the republican side could have won the war and there would have been an okay republic in Spain today. Everybody mixed into that war, but knowing Spaniards, I believe the republic would have gotten rid of all non-Spaniards when the war was over. They don't want any other people trying to run them.

  Q: How much formal education did you have?

  A: I finished Oak Park High School—that's in Illinois. I went to war instead of college. When I came back from the war it was too late to go to college. In those days there was no G.I. Bill.

  Q: When you start a book like The Old Man and the Sea, how do you get the idea?

  A: I knew about a man in that situation with a fish. I knew what happened in a boat, in a sea, fighting a fish. So I took a man I knew for twenty years and imagined him under those circumstances.

  Q: How did you develop your style of writing—did you do it to be commercial, to create a public demand?

  A: In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.

  Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

  A: That depends on the book and how it goes. A good book takes maybe a year and a half.

  Q: How many hours a day do you work?

  A: I get up at six and try not to work past twelve.

  Q: Twelve midnight?

  A: Twelve noon.

  Q: Have you ever had a failure?

  A: You fail every day if you're not going good. When you first start writing you never fail. You think it's wonderful and you have a fine time. You think it's easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you are thinking of yourself, not the reader. He does not enjoy it very much. Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it is no longer easy to write. In fact, what you ultimately remember about anything you've written is how difficult it was to write it.

  Q: When you were young and first writing, were you frightened of criticism?

  A: There was nothing to be afraid of. In the beginning I was not making any money at it and I just wrote as well as I could. I believed in what I wrote—if they didn't like it, it was their fault; they would learn to like it later. But I was really not concerned with criticism and not in close touch with it. When you first start writing you are not noticed—that is the blessing of starting.

  Q: Do you ever anticipate failure?

  A: If you anticipate failure you'll have it. Of course, you are aware of what will happen if you fail, and you plan your escape routes—you would be unintelligent if you didn't—but you don't anticipate failure in the thing you do. Now I don't want you to think I've never been spooked, but if you don't take command of your fears, no attack will ever go.

  Q: Do you outline a book before you write it, or make a lot of notes?

  A: No, I just start it. Fiction is inventing out of what knowledge you have. If you invent successfully, it is more true than if you try to remember it. A big lie is more plausible than truth. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

  Q: How many books have you written?

  A: I think thirteen. That's not very many, but I take a long time to write a book and I like to have fun in between. Also there have been too many wars and I was out of the writing business a long time.

  Q: In your novels are you writing about yourself?

  A: Does a writer know anyone better?

  Q. That book A Farewell to Arms, how many years or months did it take you to write it?

  A: I started it in Paris in the winter and wrote on it in Cuba, and Key West, Florida, in the early spring, then in Piggott, Arkansas, where my wife's parents were; then came up to Kansas City, where one of my sons was born, and finished it in Big Horn, Wyoming, in the fall. The first draft took eight months, and another five months to rewrite, thirteen months in all.

  Q: Do you ever get discouraged—did you ever quit on a book?

  A: Been discouraged but can't quit—there's no place to go. Mr. Joe Louis said it very well—you can run but you can't hide.

  Q: Do you ever get your characters in a spot from which they can't escape?

  A: Well, you try to avoid that or else you'll put yourself out of business.

  Q: All these stories you write about Africa—why do you like Africa so much?

  A: Some countries you love, some you c
an't stand. I love that one. There are some places here in Idaho that are like Africa and Spain. That's why so many Basques came here.

  Q: Do you read a good deal?

  A: Yes, all the time. After I quit writing for the day, I don't want to keep thinking about it, so I read.

  Q: Do you study actual people for your books?

  A: I don't go where I go for that purpose; I just go where my life takes me. There are things you do because you like to do them, other things because you have to do them. In doing these things you find the people you write about.

  Q: We write essays and stories all the time in school. It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do. Is it?

  A: Not at all. All you need is a perfect ear, absolute pitch, the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his, the guts of a burglar, no conscience except to writing, and you're in. It's easy. Never give it a thought. Many people have a compulsion to write. There is no law against it and doing it makes them happy while they do it and presumably relieves them. But the compulsory writer should be advised not to. Should he make the attempt, he might well suffer the fate of the compulsive architect, which is as lonely an end as that of the compulsive bassoon player.

  Q: How did you learn so many languages?

  A: By living in those countries. The Latin I had in school made language-learning easier, especially Italian. I was in Italy for quite a while during the First World War, and I picked up the language quickly and thought I spoke it rather well. But after I'd been wounded, I had to spend some time on therapy machines, exercising my wounded leg, and I became friends with an Italian major who was also getting therapy on the machines. I told him I thought Italian was an easy language. He complimented me on how well I spoke. I said I hardly deserved compliments since it was so easy.

  "In that case," he said, "you might take up some grammar." So I began to study Italian grammar and I stopped talking for several months. I found that learning all the Romance languages was made easier by reading the newspapers—an English-language paper in the morning and then the foreign-language paper in the afternoon —it was the same news and the familiarity with the news events helped me understand the afternoon papers.

  Q: After you finish a book, do you reread it?

  A: Yes. Today I reread and rewrote four chapters. You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.

  Q: How long do you usually write?

  A: No more than six hours. After that you're too pooped and the quality goes. When I'm working on a book I try to write every day except Sunday. I don't work on Sunday. It's very bad luck to work on a Sunday. Sometimes I do but it's bad luck just the same.

  Gary Cooper and Ernest had been good friends from the time they first met in Idaho in the early Thirties. They respected each other's hunting skills and knowledge of the outdoors, and they were always completely honest with one another. Cooper was an unaffected, compassionate man; and neither of them played the role of author or actor, which also had a lot to do with it. They shared rough jokes, swapped philandering secrets and enjoyed their mutual disdain for the encroaching years.

  In the field Cooper was not quite as fast as Ernest in getting a duck in the gun sight, but he had just as pretty a move and was almost as accurate. We went out every day, regardless of weather, until a really fierce blizzard socked us in, and on that day Cooper came over in the afternoon with a whole smoked goose, Ernest brought in a half-gallon of Chablis that had been chilling in a snowbank, and we sat around the table in front of the fire all afternoon cutting off slices of the delicately smoked goose and drinking the Chablis.

  "Ain't this Mormon country wonderful!" Cooper said. "They know how to live."

  "I'm practically one myself," Ernest said. "Had four wives, didn't I?" He took a sip of wine. "To tell the truth, if I were reborn and I had a choice, I'd be a Mormon."

  A bit self-consciously, Cooper confided to Ernest that after all these years he had finally converted to Catholicism to please his wife, Rocky, and his daughter, Maria. But he said he felt uncomfortable about it and wondered whether he had done the right thing. Ernest said that since he himself was only a miserable, failed Catholic, he couldn't give him a reading on it but he thought it would work out all right.

  The talk then shifted to work projects, with Cooper wondering whether there was anything of Ernest's that might be good for him. "When you get my age," he said, "you get to scratching pretty hard for lead parts."

  Ernest asked me what I thought might suit Cooper and I suggested Across the River and into the Trees. "Good idea," Ernest said to Cooper. "You'd just be playing Robert Jordan ten years older." Cooper hadn't read the book but said he'd get a copy as soon as he got back to Hollywood the following day.

  In March of 1959, after completing the taping of the three-hour telecast of For Whom the Bell Tolls with Jason Robards, Maria Schell, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach heading the cast, I returned to Ketchum for a motor trek Ernest intended to make to Key West. I planned to drive him as far as New Orleans, where I had to catch a plane to Hollywood.

  During my absence Ernest had bought from Dan Topping a Ketchum house of his own—a modern concrete abode that Topping had built into the side of the mountain rise, with the clear trout waters of the Wood River bowing around it. The view from any of its windows took your breath away.

  Before we left Ketchum for Key West, Ernest released Owl, which was quite sad. We took him back to the very tree where Ernest had shot him and placed him on a bough, but when we returned to the car Owl returned too. "Maybe we've softened him up too much," Ernest said worriedly, "and he'll sit around here, waiting for someone to bring him his morning mouse, and starve to death."

  "You can't take him back, Papa," I said, sensing what was in his mind. "He's a one-man owl and I don't think any of your friends, all of whom he has nipped occasionally, will offer him room and board."

  "Well, what am I supposed to do? Tie him in the tree?"

  Once more Ernest tried to talk Owl into staying in the tree but Owl got back to the car before he did. So we all went back to Ernest's house, and later in the day, without Ernest, Duke MacMullen and I took Duke's car and drove Owl to the tree, and this time Owl stayed.

  The route Ernest had charted took us due south through Nevada and Texas to the Mexican border, following the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. Ernest's Ketchum car was too beat up for such a voyage so he rented the one and only Hertz vehicle in town, a four-door Chevrolet Impala. Mary cooked a quantity of game birds, which we packed in an insulated carry-bag, and Ernest laid a reserve supply of Sancerre in the trunk; the active supply was kept in the car in a waterproof leather bag that was filled with ice.

  The highway through Utah and Nevada had been drawn with a ruler; there were very few cars in March and we traveled eighty miles an hour through gray sage and desert, mountains to right and left, range upon range—you could have put the wheel on automatic pilot. Ernest enjoyed every foot of the way. He remembered early motoring trips, gambling exploits in surrounding towns, hunting expeditions over distant terrain, and trail rides along the faintly glimpsed mountains; at every town we hit he recalled how things were in the good days before neon.

  Lunches were roadside, Mary's partridges or teals with the crackling cold Sancerre, and afterward, as I gave the Chevy the whip and she settled into her eighty-mile-per-hour gallop, Ernest would siesta, his chin resting against his chest.

  The automobile was Ernest's favorite mode of travel because, he said, it was the best way to see the countryside, the most mobile, and it kept him safe from contact with his fellow travelers. The inside of the chosen auto—Lancia, Packard or Chevrolet—was always a morass of rain gear, vest gear, footgear, food, maps, binoculars, wine bottles, liquor bottles, medicine bottles, cameras, caps, magazines, newspapers, books, brief cases (containing work-in-progress), ice sacks, drinking glasses, limes, knives and spare socks.

  The first night, we stayed at the St
ockman's Hotel in Elko, Nevada, a small, neat wide-open gambling town. Ernest had a cheerful reunion with two old pals he hadn't seen since Ketchum gambling days, Frosty the Dealer and Pot-Right Purvis, who were working the wheel at the Stockman's.

  The next day's routing took us to Las Vegas, where Ernest had never been before. Jack Entratter, owner of the Sands, had invited Ernest and was expecting him, but when we pulled up and Ernest saw the flow of mink revolving in and out of the hallowed portal, he would have gone on if Entratter had not come out at that moment and taken him to his rooms, which were in a building far removed from the main citadel.

  We spent two days in Vegas and Ernest had a fine time playing a little roulette, seeing the entertainment and holding court in the Sands cocktail lounge, where he talked gambling with Entratter and some of his boys, talked prize fighting with a couple of fight managers, discussed the Battle of the Bulge with a waiter who had been in his outfit, and conversed about literature with a beautiful Sands chorus girl who had an English Master's from Texas University and had read all his books.

  Our journey across Texas from Eagle Pass to Laredo and over to Corpus Christi took us through countryside covered with a profusive variety of spring flowers. In Corpus Christi we checked into an attractive modern motel, the Sun and Sand, which is right on the Gulf. After the clerk had registered us, he asked whether Ernest would give him his autograph for his son, who was a great admirer of his books. Ernest said sure, just to leave a book in his box and he'd write a personal greeting in it. "What's your boy's name?" Ernest asked.