Papa Hemingway (21 page)

"Use double
muletas
and a big sword," Ernest said. "That'll build up the arms." Dominguin sat down against the wall to rest. Ava asked Ernest how he thought Dominguin had worked. "Never worry about him," Ernest said. "He is a prince among matadors. He is like the great matador Maera, who never worried because he knew more about the bulls than the bulls themselves knew. There are bullfighters who do it just for the money—they are worthless. The only one who matters is the bullfighter who feels it, so that if he did it for nothing, he would do it as well. Same holds true for damn near everyone else."

I left Madrid for Paris toward the end of May, but Ernest and I spoke on the telephone before I returned to the States in June. Mary and he were in Naples, where they were about to board the
Morosiu
for a long, slow voyage back to Cuba.

Ernest said he had seen a new matador, Antonio Ordonez, whom he liked very much. This was the first time I heard Ordonez's name. He was married to Dominguin's sister Carmen —the beautiful one who as a teen-ager had been acclaimed for her bravura and style in the ring. Antonio was the son of the matador Cayetano Ordonez, who in the Twenties fought under the name Nina de la Palma; Cayetano and Ernest had been good friends and he had been the prototype for Pedro Romero, Lady Brett's matador-lover, in
The Sun Also Rises.

"I wish you had seen him," Ernest said, speaking of Antonio. "Classic. If he keeps on and doesn't get put out of action, he can be as good as his father. Maybe better. Rupert thought so too. The only thing worries me about young Ordonez, having known his father so well and so many other fine matadors, some of whom were killed, and some who lost out to fear and other such occupational afflictions—I long ago resolved never to be friends with a matador again because the agony for me was too great on those days when my friends could not handle the bull because of fear. On any given day, any matador, no matter how great or how young, can suffer an attack of fear and be virtually incapacitated. When it used to hit my friends I suffered right along with them, but it was an idiotic torture since I was not hired for the job and its agonies. So I swore off matadors as friends. But now, with young Antonio, I am tempted—I think I have learned some things that have helped me write off fear as a personal problem. That would make it easier to be friends with Antonio. He has such a great sense of
ale grid?

"What's
alegria.?"

"It's a deep-going happiness that nothing can kill. When you'll meet him you'll see why I'm tempted. Of course, any given afternoon my hold over fear can be broken. Then I'll be in the soup again. But maybe it's worth the risk. I thought about it quite a lot during the drive to Naples after we left Madrid."

"How was that trip?"

"Wonderful."

"How are you feeling?"

"Think will beat this rap okay if kidneys straighten out. The right one was hurt bad. Just beginning to find out how bad. But am following doctor's orders. Had only four drinks of whiskey and water in fifteen days in Spain. Then had a couple in Bayonne, a couple yesterday, six in all. No gin. It is a lousy bore for everybody else and for me. After you left, Mary and I skipped the fights one day and went up and picnicked at the bridge. Next time I'll take you there."

"You mean the
For Whom the Bell Tolls
bridge?"

"Nothing's changed. Just as it was. They put it back together after the war, reassembling all the stones that had fallen into the river bed after we blew it."

"Tell me, Papa—did you finish up the Capitaine Cook's? And what about the cases of champagne and the
foie gras
and pickled mushrooms and all the rest?"

"Just left it all in the closet in the room. Told the chambermaid to take it home to her kids."

Ernest had no sooner returned to Cuba in the summer of 1954 than the pressure of the Nobel Prize began to build. What should have been a quiet time to recuperate from his physical troubles became instead one of the most concentrated assaults he had ever been subjected to. And never in his life was he less able to cope with it.

When he had won the Pulitzer Prize the year before for
The Old Man and the Sea
, he had easily beaten off the publicity assaults. But now he was in no shape for this tougher Prize-combat and it took something out of him he never got back.

The assault started in September, when the newspapers began speculating that Ernest would get the Prize. He phoned me to say that he had received, among many magazine inquiries, a request from Doug Kennedy, the editor of
True
, for me to write an article about the sports he had played from boyhood on. I said I would if he wanted me to.

"No," he said. "What I'd like you to do is go see Kennedy and explain that I'm working and would like to put off such a piece until a later time. That all right with you?"

"Sure. How are you feeling? The back any better?"

"Well, for your own information, and yours only, I have not been without considerable pain ever since I saw you. My back still hurts so badly that when I move it too much it brings the sweat out. I try to be good about this and I ignore it to the limit of my abilities but I think it would get on almost anybody's nerves. It gets on mine anyway. I can make the back and head feel better by taking a drink. But if I took a drink every time I hurt or felt bad I could never write, and writing is the only thing that makes me feel that I'm not wasting my time sticking around."

He said the constant assault of visitors was brutal. He had finished a short story and was thirty-seven pages into another one when Bill Lowe showed up with a proposal to make an African documentary film in the fall. This seemed like a good idea until Lowe put out a press release to the effect that Ernest had agreed to write, act in and co-produce an original full-length feature. End of film project. Then right after Lowe left, Ava Gardner appeared, and she had no sooner left than Winston Guest arrived, and then Dave Shilling, the flyer. Next, the U.S. Air Force brought out some enlisted personnel who had won an award as Aircraftsmen-of-the-Month, which included visiting the Hemingways as part of their award. Then Luis Miguel Dominguin showed up and had been there for nine days; Sinsky turned up at the same time and was drunk for four days.

"I go into my bedroom and work no matter what," Ernest said, "but it is murder. Roberto, who as you know is my right arm, gets sick. He is now convalescing on a voyage on Sinsky's ship. Sinsky never drinks at sea. Only at our house. And I am a son-of-a-bitch who needs to be let alone to write.

"It is about as restful and favorable to the production of literature as Hiirtgen Forest. But have started the counterattack. Won't take any phone calls from anyone. Long distance neither. If we had any brains we should have been killed in Africa at Murchison Falls and come back under some other names and I could have continued to write posthumously. Will begin to write you sensible letters, soon as I get the joint cleaned out. Hope they don't clean me out of it first."

On October 28th the award was formally announced by the Swedish Academy: "For his powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evinced in
The 
Old Man and the Sea .
. . Hemingway's earlier writings displayed brutal, cynical and callous signs which may be considered at variance with the Nobel Prize requirements for a work of ideal tendencies. But on the other hand he also possesses a heroic pathos which forms the basic element of his awareness of life, a manly love of danger and adventure, with a natural admiration of every individual who fights the good fight in a world of reality overshadowed by violence and death."

Ernest excused himself from attending the ceremonies in Stockholm, giving as the reason his unhealed crash injuries, but even if he had been in the best of health I seriously doubt that he would have gone. Ernest had made very few public appearances in his lifetime, attributable to his intense shyness and his smoldering hatred of The Tuxedo. "Wearing underwear is as formal as I ever hope to get," he once told me—and to my knowledge he never wore any.

But he did send an acceptance message, which was read for him at the ceremonies in Stockholm by the United States Ambassador, John M. Cabot: "Members of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen. Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory, nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this prize. No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience. It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes and in this, sometimes, he is fortunate, but eventually they are quite clear and by these, and a degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten. Writing at its best is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone, and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity or the lack of it each day. For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you."

At this time I was at the Pentagon researching an article I was writing on the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I had been following the chaotic course of events in Cuba, and sympathizing with Ernest about the inroads I knew it was making on his work and disposition. When I got back to my Washington hotel late one afternoon—in fact it was New Year's Day, 1955— there was a message to call the overseas operator in Havana for an urgent call. It took four hours to get through. Ernest's voice was thick and he spoke faster than usual, sometimes almost running his words together. There was a steady hum of background noise similar to what you hear when someone calls you from a corner telephone booth. I couldn't imagine why he was calling.

"Hotch, I called to apologize about all the damn confusion," he said.

"What confusion?"

"You can't know what it's been like. But I wanted to lay it out in detail for you. We're too good friends to let a thing like this cause any trouble."

"What trouble, Papa? I'm not aware—"

"It wasn't till September that I could crank myself up; then I started writing maybe better than I ever have and had thirty-five thousand words done, after two months of trying and failing every day, and was truly going wonderfully. Then the Prize thing began to build up and I still kept working until the day they sprung. Had no chance to enjoy it, if any of it is supposed to be enjoyable; just photographers, people misquoting you and yammer, yammer, yack, yack—and my book, all I gave a damn about, and which I had been living in day and night, being knocked out of my head like clubbing a fish.

"Well, for two to three days there are these photographers and all the rest and then I say there won't be any more and I get back into the book. Then characters come down anyway, no matter what you say. That you are writing a book means nothing. Bob Manning of
Time
phoned Mary and said he had to write a cover story and that he would write it whether I saw him or not. He said he wanted to make it good instead of bad and would I call back. Of course, when they pull that on you, it's nothing but blackmail, but effective. I talked to him on the phone and said I would give anything if
Time
would not write a cover story on me, but he said they were going to do it anyway. So I agreed to see him if he did not bring a researcher nor a tape-recorder and if all questions on wars, religion, personal life, wives and so forth were barred. I said that I was working hard and it was murder to interrupt and that to interrupt a man while he was writing a book and going well was as bad as to interrupt a man when he was in bed making love. He agreed on this but said the thing had to be done and they were going to do it anyway and he wanted it to be a good piece rather than a bad one."

"Papa, why are you telling me—"

"Because I wanted you to get the background on the
True
thing."

"What
True
thing?"

"So I said I'd give him two days, and he came down and stayed in the Little House and that's all he got, two days. We talked about writing, which after all is the trade a writer is supposed to know something about. I do not regard all this as disloyalty to
True,
which is not, after all, my alma mater. I would rather say 'For God, For Country and For Keeps' than 'For Yale and For
True: "

"Papa, listen, let me get this straight about
True—''