Sunrise with Seamonsters (13 page)

He spoke about the importance of grammar; it was a long lecture in the course of which he mentioned that some months previous he was shown a typescript of a textbook with no English grammar in it. "Some people in Malawi," he said, were "masquerading as teachers" and "trying to fool my people!" McGuffey the grammarian might have applauded this speech, though there was little applause from the members of the diplomatic corps, the first-year students or the civil servants, who listened in great bewilderment. Toward the end of the speech Dr Banda said, "I am sure you all know Mendel. Mendel's example is one to follow. He had to work very hard to compose his
Messiah
and you will have to work like Mendel to learn English grammar."

This was my first indication that Dr Banda had a reasonably good memory; he had forgotten Handel's name, but I guessed he knew mine. He remembered the textbook, and I wondered if there would be any repercussions. I found little consolation in his closing remarks, which were to the effect that he planned to make personal visits to the English classes of all large schools to appraise the teaching of parsing and grammar. The psychology of dictators is unique in that in their determination to make people obey them they see treason in variation. It is an attitude they are trying to eliminate, rather than a single act. The man who refuses to teach English grammar is disaffected; his decision is political, he is traitorous.

It was a few days later that I saw the German Ambassador again. I went to his house with my friend Fred, who was engaged to his daughter.

The Ambassador was having dinner when I arrived. He rose from the table and beamed. "Ah, Paul! Come right in! Shall I call you brother?" He shook my hand. And he explained: for a year I had been working for the German equivalent of the CIA.

I was in suspense, but the suspense was not to last. On the 20th of October I was deported. Expelled is a better word, since it suggests speed. The only
inconvenience I recall is of being unable to cram my traveler's checks into my pocket. I had several thousand dollars in fives and tens, and I couldn't fold the plastic wallet in half.

Because of the speed of the deportation, onward plane reservations were impossible. We would have to stay in Rhodesia a few days.

And it was in a Chinese restaurant in Salisbury that I learned why I had been deported from Malawi. Wes Leach, my escort—but he was also a friend—had been silent on the plane. There were times when I saw him eyeing me furtively, as if he believed I would make a desperate bid for freedom by leaping from the Dakota into Mozambique. I suppose I looked rather desperate, for I had been going over all the possible reasons for my deportation: was it the German secret service? Or had Sam P. Gilstrap prevailed? Or was it the textbook? Or, perhaps—but this was so complicated!—Mr M was really working for Dr Banda ... or perhaps the Greek?

Wes was reluctant at first to tell me. He said he did not know much. He urged me not to ask. I nagged him. He gave in. The American Embassy, he said, had received a call from Dr Banda's office saying that Dr Banda wanted to speak to the chargé d'affaires.

"What if I told you," said Dr Banda to the chargé, "that one of your Peace Corps chaps tried to kill me?"

The chargé winced, but said he didn't think it was likely.

"It is likely, and it is true," said Dr Banda. He showed the chargé a file.

In the file (it may have been marked
Hastings Banda!Assassination Attempt)
there were a number of letters: half were from Ali Abdullah in Dar es Salaam, and the rest were from me. The letters described the plot to kill Hastings Banda.

The Greek, in order to clear himself for having helped the rebel ministers initially, informed the Criminal Investigation Department after I delivered the message about the bread van. Using my name, a correspondence was struck up with Mr Chisiza who was assured that it would all be smooth sailing. A dozen gunmen were dispatched from Tanzania; the bread van they expected to take them to Zomba was waiting on the road, in the appointed place. But behind the bread van were a score of soldiers from the Malawi army. The gunmen were ambushed and all were killed.

Dr Banda said to the chargé, "If you don't remove this chap I will have him imprisoned."

In Washington, I had long talks with the Peace Corps ("How could you do this to us?") and with the State Department ("When," they asked expectantly, "is the lid going to blow off Malawi?"). I thought my passport might be taken away, but my brother, who is a lawyer, said, "Let them try." The Peace Corps fined me for "six months' unsatisfactory
service" and made me pay my air fare from Blantyre to Washington; the State Department men simply raised their eyes to the ceiling and whistled at the end of my tale—my
abridged
tale: I didn't mention grammar or Germans—and one said, "You can consider yourself a very lucky fellow."

Others were not so lucky. Mr McCone was sent to Sarawak, Mr Chisiza was shot and killed trying to enter Malawi a year later, Mr Rubadiri is still in Uganda. Some of the former ministers got scholarships from the CIA to study in American universities; the rebel soldiers still live in Dar es Salaam, and from time to time they save enough money to make a raid in Malawi. Mr M disappeared, and the Greek was eventually deported.

Hastings Banda is alive and well. They say his facial tic worsened after 1965. Last year I read in a Singapore newspaper that Banda gave a speech in which he said that after this year he wants no more Peace Corps volunteers in his country. That piece of news didn't surprise me in the least.

This is a little lesson in restraint. I didn't have very much then, but I might have learned some since. For example, I've waited half a dozen years to explain this complicated story. Sometimes it seems as if it happened longer ago than that, and to another person.

Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavy-weight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male (and the Karamojong warrior) value. His biographer shares the attitude and the metaphor: "He ... dealt, almost singlehanded, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby..." He took enormous pleasure in flooring a muscular Negro with his bare fists, and delivering a manuscript he could say, "I'll defend the title again against all the good young new ones." He spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing; he was proud of his good health, doing exercises, running, swimming and rising early while he was engaged on a book; and he saw his writing career in terms of the ring: "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal." He had the humility to add, "But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr Tolstoy..." His line was that he could lick practically any man in the house.

He was a destroyer and so are many of his characters: even the gentle Santiago recalls a triumphant arm-wrestling match (with a muscular Negro); others of his characters are fighters, inclined towards pugilism. One sees the glamor: his destroyers come in pairs and all eyes are on them; it is one big man against another, and implies competition, ultimately a winner and a loser. We are to admire the winner (Hemingway, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's behaviour was often that of a bully." Professor Carlos Baker is referring to Hemingway ruining his friend's catch of a large marlin by firing a tommy-gun at some circling sharks which, maddened by the taste of their own spilt blood, devour most of the marlin. Later in that same month Hemingway beats up Joseph Knapp, a New York publisher. Both of these incidents, tidied up to make the gunner heroic and the fight with the rich intruder a justly-deserved victory, are retold in
Islands in the Stream,
with the
envoi,
black calypso singers immortalising the fist-fight
with a song as in 1935, they "celebrated Ernest's victory with an extemporaneous song about the 'big slob' from Key West."

The boxer recalls his famous matches, the novelist his novels; a boxer is bigger than any of his fights and though writing is hardly a competitive art, much less a sport, the novelist postured deliberately to be bigger than any of his novels. The question of "style", a favourite boxing word, is fundamental to a discussion of Hemingway's work; not style as a literary value but style as a posture, emphasising the face, the voice, the stance. Hemingway blamed the bad reviews of
Across the River and into the Trees
on his photograph that appeared on the dust jacket ("Makes me look like a cat-eating Zombie"); the voice is familiar ("You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris ..."); and the stance? Always the boxer's: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

The reputation is all, and counts for more than the writing. Asked who is the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union, the Russian journalist says, "Papa." The note of friendly intimacy is common: it is the man that matters. The American writer produces a good book and acquires a reputation. The reputation displaces the idea of literary quality: the idea of the author is much more important than the ideas in the work. Interesting, the number of academics who care so deeply about the man's adventures and leave the work unread, or see blasphemy in a low evaluation of it. Hemingway claimed to dislike academics, but those who flattered him were welcomed at his haunts and in his house; he yarned them, feeding them lines, took them on his boat, and wrote them candid letters. In the letter refusing Carlos Baker permission to write a biography, Hemingway mentions ("with almost bewildering frankness") how he practised
coitus interruptus
with his second wife. (The fact appears in Professor Baker's recent biography,
Ernest Hemingway—A Life Story.)

Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in a jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer level, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway's reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways. Now a "new" novel has been found; it was written twenty years ago and apparently abandoned by the author. It is technically his last novel and its publication is a triumph for those obsessed with the man.

The novel has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: "This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it..." The satisfactions are finding out how Hemingway drank and handled a boat, and spoke, and made love, and treated his friends. These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, "This novel is bad." The novels were aspects of the man, and the man's heroism was never questioned.

Islands in the Stream
is divided into three parts. In 1951 Hemingway said that parts 2 and 3 were "in shape to publish", but he did not publish them. The novel (to use the publisher's term; it is really nothing of the kind) is set in the Caribbean and seems originally to have been intended as a study of the sea. Previous titles of the sections were
The Sea When Young, The Sea when Absent,
and
The Sea in Being,
retitled in the present edition as "Bimini", "Cuba" and "At Sea." The sections are loosely linked by the common subject of the sea and by the main character, Thomas Hudson, who is "in appearance, manner, and personal history... clearly based on Ernest himself" (according to Professor Baker). There was a fourth section, and Thomas Hudson was not the hero of it. This was the story of an old man, Santiago, who caught a marlin and battled to save it; it was published (Hemingway had some reservations about its length) as
The Old Man and the Sea.
Professor Baker reports that Hemingway was very enthusiastic about the unpublished parts of the book he was calling
The Island and the Stream,
but rather than publish it he turned from it and wrote
A Moveable Feast,
his last book, parts of which are prefigured in the reminiscences of Thomas Hudson. Hudson, in his youth, also lived with his wife and small child over a sawmill in Paris in the 1920s, and had a cat named F Puss and liked the bicycle races and drank in cafés with James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Here, perhaps, is the reason Hemingway never published
Islands in the Stream.
It was autobiography—this is clear from the duplicated recollections in
A Moveable Feast—
but he wanted it to read as fiction. He wrote it at an age when most novelists turn to autobiography, but rather than reveal the novel as that, he published the story of Santiago and spent the last three years of his life writing a straightforward reminiscence, to which he added ambiguously in the Preface, "If the reader prefers, this
book may be regarded as fiction ..." It is hard to say whether he would have published the present novel, had he allowed himself to live a few years longer. This is crucial because a writer can only be held responsible for what he publishes himself and stands by; he can't be blamed for writing a bad book that he chose to leave in a bottom drawer.

Thomas Hudson is a painter. He has been divorced and he lives in different places in the Caribbean. He seems to have a separate personality for each place. In the first section of the book, on the island of Bimini, he is a reticent friend, a quiet drunk and a devoted father; he wishes with his three boys and does a little painting of the Winslow Homer variety. The second section is set largely in a bar in Havana; here Hudson is a bar-fly, drinking and betting, and talking at some length to an elderly prostitute; he does no painting. A sea chase occupies the whole of the third section; Hudson is a bullying, Bogartesque ship's captain pursuing Germans along the coast of Cuba. Three episodes, hardly stories, and except for Hudson, who alters but does not grow, the episodes bear no relation to one another. The three boys, Hudson's children, are all dead by the time the second section opens, possibly to give Hudson nothing to live for, though more likely because Hemingway couldn't think of any way of working them into the conversation with the elderly prostitute or the pursuit of the Germans. The artless novelist has his reasons for disposing of characters, usually no more complicated than the eldest boy's in
Jude the Obscure,
when he hanged himself and his siblings: "Done because we are too menny."