Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (7 page)

“I did not know Ernest Hemingway,” I told a group of Hemingway scholars convening in Boise, Idaho, a couple of years ago. “He was twenty-three years my senior. He would now be ninety. We were born in the Middle West, we set out to be reporters, our fathers were gun nuts, we felt profoundly indebted to Mark Twain, and we were the children of suicides.

“I am not aware that he thought much about my own generation of American novelists. Norman Mailer, I know, sent him a copy of
The Naked and the Dead,
soon after it was published. The package was returned unopened. Hemingway chided Irwin Shaw for having, as he put it, dared to go into the ring with Tolstoy by writing a novel which viewed a war from both sides of the battle lines,
The Young Lions
. I know of only two members of my generation he praised: Nelson Algren, the Chicago tough guy and friend of boxers and gamblers, and Vance Bourjaily, the hunting enthusiast who was in World War II what Hemingway had been in the first one, a civilian ambulance driver attached to a combat unit.

“James Jones, author of
From Here to Eternity,
and a rifleman in peacetime and then in war, told me that he could not consider Hemingway a fellow soldier, since he had never submitted to training and discipline. In the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II, Hemingway took no orders and gave no orders. He came and went wherever and whenever he pleased. He actually hunted German submarines for a while in the Caribbean—in his own boat and of his own accord.

“He was a reporter of war, and one of the best the world has ever known. So was Tolstoy—who was in addition a real soldier.

“During World War I, the United States got into the fighting so late that an American with true war stories to tell, and a wound besides, was something of a rarity. Such was Heming way’s situation. He was an even rarer sort of American, again fresh from a battlefield, when he wrote about the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s.

“But then the coinage of true battle stories by Americans was utterly debased by World War II, when millions upon millions of us fought overseas and came home no longer needing a Hemingway to say what war was like. Joseph Heller told me he would have been in the dry-cleaning business now, if it weren’t for World War II.

“Heller is, of course, the author of
Catch-22,
a far more influential book nowadays than
A Farewell to Arms
or
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. The key word in this speech is ‘nowadays.’

“Hemingway was unquestionably an artist of the first rank, with an admirable soul, the size of Kilimanjaro. His choice of subject matter, though, bullfighting and nearly forgotten wars and shooting big animals for sport, often makes him a little hard to read nowadays. Conservation and humane treatment of animals and contempt for the so-called arts of war rank high on most of our agendas nowadays.

“How many of us can find pleasure nowadays in these words from Hemingway’s
Green Hills of Africa,
reportage, not fiction, describing a lion hunt fifty-three years ago: ‘I knew that if I could kill one alone … I would feel good about it for a long time. I had in my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him. I had killed three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from this one than the whole trip.’ Imagine boasting of killing three lions, and reporting delight at the prospect of killing a fourth one, nowadays.

“Vance Bourjaily, admired, as I’ve said, by Hemingway, gave me a rule of thumb about hunting. ‘The bigger the game,’ he said, ‘the more corrupted the soul of the hunter.’ As for the glamour of big game hunting nowadays: It is predicted that the last East African elephant will die of starvation or be killed for its ivory in about eight years.

“As for bullfighting: It is an enterprise so little admired in this country by most people that it is in fact against the law. I don’t have to say ‘nowadays.’ Bullfighting was against the law here long before the birth of Hemingway. Paradoxically, I find his bullfighting stories among my favorites still. That could be because they are so alien to my own passions and experiences that I can accept them as ethnography, as accounts by an explorer of a society for which I bear no responsibility.

“Let me hasten to say that no matter how much his choice of subject matter bothers me nowadays, I am always amazed and delighted by the power he discovered in the simplest language. A sample I choose at random from his short story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’: ‘Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

“ ‘As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black.’

“(The grasshoppers were black, of course, because the area had been burned over recently, making black the ideal protective coloration.)

“No fear of repeating words there. How many of you had teachers who told you never to use the same word twice in a paragraph, or even in adjacent paragraphs? Clearly, that was poor advice. The biggest word in that passage, by the way, is ‘grasshopper.’ Big enough! The strongest word is ‘black.’ Strong enough!

“I myself, when I teach writing, say that people will not read a story in which nothing much happens. But nothing much happens in two of Hemingway’s most thrilling stories, ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ and, again, ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ How is this possible? It is the brush work. If Hemingway had been a painter, I would say of him that while I often don’t like the subjects he celebrates, I sure as heck respect his brush work.

“Ah me! He is what we call ‘dated’ now. Yes, and we can all expect in this volatile century to find enthusiasms and passions of our years as young adults to become dated, too. What happened to Hemingway has happened or will happen to all of us, writers or not. It can’t be helped, so no person should be scorned when it happens to her or him. The sharks almost always get the big marlins, the big truths we reel in so proudly when we are young.

“I have named one of the sharks which took a bite out of Hemingway’s marlin: the conservation movement. Another one is feminism. I don’t think I need expand on that. It must be plain to everyone that the Ladies’ Auxiliary for Men Engaged in Blood Sports has been disbanded for quite some time.

“Ernest Hemingway is still quite famous, although he is not taught much anymore in colleges and universities. When all is said and done, it is teachers who keep literary reputations alive or let them fade away. For a while there, Hemingway was as imposing as General Motors or
The New York Times
. Think of that: One human being somehow becoming as majestic as major institutions. Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Such is the power sometimes of printed words.

“We have seen the power demonstrated again very recently and tragically. I refer to the case of Salman Rushdie, who unwittingly made himself with one book the world’s second most famous Moslem and caused an entire nation to declare war to the death on him.

“A couple of decades ago a lonely novelist embarrassed the Soviet Union as profoundly as would have a great military defeat. I speak of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But I digress. Stowe’s and Solzhenitsyn’s and poor Salman Rushdie’s importance in the eyes of the world rests in large part on their willingness to oppose certain easily identifiable factions in society. Hemingway seemed just as important for a while without arousing any enemies, without calling for any sort of reforms. His antifascism, on paper anyway, was of an unanalytical, rosy-cheeked-school-boy variety.

“So whence came the power which made him for a little while as respected as Stowe or Solzhenitsyn or poor Rushdie—or General Motors or
The New York Times
? I suggest to you that it inhered in his celebration of male bonding at a time when there was a widespread dread here and in Europe of seeming homosexual.

“The great anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked one time, and she had studied men, women, and children in every sort of society, when it was that men were happiest. She thought awhile, and then she said, ‘When they’re starting out on a hunt with no women or children along.’ I think she was right. Don’t you? Back when war was another sort of hunt, going on the warpath must have induced the same sort of happiness. I will guess further that permission for males to bond with one another, which was given to such an expedition by the women and children, was a principal ingredient of that happiness.

“I am not talking about clinical homosexuality. I am perfectly willing to do so, but at another time. When I assert that male bonding, one man’s feeling love for another one in the neighborhood of danger, is often the greatest reward for a character in a story by Ernest Hemingway, I am not saying that Ernest Hemingway was gay. He was not gay, and you don’t have to take my word for it. You can ask Marlene Dietrich, who is still alive and as beautiful as ever. What legs!

“The last time I was in Boise, also as a lecturer, I met a nice woman with a wry sense of humor about men. Her husband was then out hunting with heavy-duty equipment and pals. She laughed about that. She said men had to get out of doors and drink and kill things before they could show how much they loved each other. She thought it was ridiculous that they had to go to so much trouble and expense before they could express something as simple and natural as love. Which reminds me of what Vance Bourjaily said to me about duck hunting. He said it was like standing in a cold shower with all your clothes on and tearing up twenty-dollar bills.

“May I say parenthetically that I myself was once a rifleman in time of war and experienced on occasion that kind of love Hemingway so enjoyed. It can be terrific.

“And enough of that. I’m embarrassed.

“Few writers in midlife have as clear an idea as Hemingway did of what, God willing, they have yet to accomplish. I sure didn’t. I sure don’t. When he was thirty-nine years old, with, as it turned out, twenty-three more years to go, he said that he hoped to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. He had by then published all of the forty-nine superb stories which nowadays appear to be his most durable contributions to literature. He would not give us twenty-five more. He wouldn’t give us even one more.

“He had by then published four novels:
The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises,
which made him a world figure,
A Farewell to Arms,
which confirmed his planetary importance, and To
Have and Have Not
, a much weaker book. He would honor the contract he made with himself in 1938 by actually delivering three more novels:
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees
, and the short book which won him a deserved Nobel Prize,
The Old Man and the Sea.

“That last one, of course, is about what sharks did to an old man’s marlin. In terms of ordinary life expectancy Hemingway wasn’t an old man when he wrote it, but he obviously felt like one.

“Seven years of literary silence followed his acceptance of the 1954 Nobel Prize. And then, not far from here, he created what he may have considered yet another work of art, although a most horrible one, his self-inflicted death by gunshot. It seems likely to me that he believed his life to be the most memorable of all his stories, in which case that gunshot was a form of typography, a period. ‘The end.’

“I am reminded of the suicide of another American genius, George Eastman, inventor of the Kodak camera and roll film, and founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. He shot himself in 1932. Eastman, who was not ill and was not suffering from grief, said in his suicide note what Ernest Hemingway must have felt when he was close to the end: ‘My work is done.’

“I thank you for your attention.”

(After that speech, a bunch of us were loaded onto a yellow school bus and taken to a Spanish restaurant.)

Hemingway was a member of what is now called the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Founded in 1898, it presently has an upper and a lower house, the much smaller Academy being the commissioned officers, so to speak, and the Institute being enlisted personnel. (I myself am a PFC, and it may be that my dossier from ROTC at Cornell still follows me.) Truman Capote made it into the upper house. So did Erskine Caldwell. Nelson Algren made it into the lower house by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin. James Jones and Irwin Shaw died outsiders, somehow lacking that certain something our organization was looking for.

(I said of Jones, in a blurb for
The James Jones Reader
[Birch Lane Press, 1991], that he was the Tolstoy of American foot soldiers in the last just war, in the now vanished Age of the Common Man. He was that common man, but also a genius. I meant it.)

It is a random matter who gets in and who doesn’t, since it is loonies who do the nominating and then the voting, which is to say the artists and writers and musicians who already belong. They are no good at what is primarily office work, are notoriously absentminded, are commonly either ignorant or envious of good work others may be doing, and so on. There is also a lot of logrolling, with writers saying to painters and musicians in effect, “I’ll vote for somebody I never heard of in your field, if you’ll vote for somebody you never heard of in mine.” And so on.

Sometimes I think the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters shouldn’t exist, since it has the power not only to honor but to insult. Look what it did to James Jones and Irwin Shaw. They couldn’t help feeling like something the cat drug in whenever the Academy and Institute was mentioned. There are surely more than one hundred living American creative people of the highest excellence who feel that way this very day.

The great Hoosier humorist Kin Hubbard (never considered for membership) said that it was no disgrace to be poor, but that it might as well be. It is also no disgrace to be excluded by the Academy and Institute. But it might as well be.