In the library at Princeton sit two 8 1/2 by 11 spring binder notebooks which F. Scott Fitzgerald filled with scraps he wanted to save from short stories he knew he wouldn’t republish, along with lines, paragraphs, “Nonsense and Stray Phrases,” “Conversation and Things Overheard,” “Feelings & Emotion (without girls),” “Descriptions of Girls,” “Moments (What people do)” and other material. Editor Matthew Bruccoli numbered them and supervised the publication.
602 Cordell Hull – Donald Duck eyes?
1021 T. S. P A Romance and a Reading List
Sun also Rises. A Romance and a Guide Book
1029 I can never remember the times when I wrote anything – This Side of Paradise time or Beautiful and Damned and Gatsby time for instance. Lived in story
1043 When Whitman said “Oh Pioneers” he said all.
1312 Idea that in the higher levels of human achievement writing Thalberg etc. difference is so slight etc.
1313 Awful disillusion of arriving at center of supposed authority and finding need of flattery so as to be reinforced in that authority
1362 I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium
1372 About finding I am not a rational type, finding it in Hollywood, I mean, in script writing. How every director must be, for instance.
1846 The people of Hollywood are not very nice outwardly – there is too much unwelcome familiarity, too much casual snootiness. (the agent who picked up paper in the office).
1853 Malibu: A bunch of dressing cabins for people who can’t swim (look up and see if it’s mine or DeMille’s)
2058 The purpose of a fiction story is to create passionate curiosity and then to gratify it unexpectedly, orgasmically. Isn’t that what we expect from all contacts?
2041 Actresses have to be show offs and not look like show off.
2043 There is a time in the life of all great conquerors when they would gladly settle in for a safe colonelcy – but they can’t; for them it’s Victory or elimination.
warning: there’s some rough language in this post.
Is the barbecue sauce my first association with Kansas City?
KC Masterpiece is a barbecue sauce that is marketed by the HV Food Products Company, a subsidiary of the Clorox Company
It was invented by Rich Davis, a child psychologist and former Dean of the University of North Dakota Medical School, who also experimented with “mustchup,” a mustard ketchup combo.
Kansas City became famous in song as a party town. The Beatles sing about it:
“Kansas City” was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two nineteen-year-old rhythm and blues fans from Los Angeles. Neither had been to Kansas City, but were inspired by Big Joe Turner records.
from Big Joe Turner’s Wikipedia page:
At that time Kansas City nightclubs were subject to frequent raids by the police; Turner said, “The Boss man would have his bondsmen down at the police station before we got there. We’d walk in, sign our names and walk right out. Then we would cabaret until morning.”
Why Kansas City?:
In the 1930s, Kansas City was very much the crossroads of the United States, resulting in a mix of cultures. Transcontinental trips by plane or train often necessitated a stop in the city. The era marked the zenith of power of political boss Tom Pendergast. Kansas City was a wide open town with prohibition era liquor laws and hours totally ignored, and was called the new Storyville. Most of the jazz musicians associated with the style were born in other places but got caught up in the friendly musical competitions among performers that could keep a single song being performed in variations for an entire night.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Kansas City was a hotbed of jazz activity, Mr. McShann was in the thick of the action. Along with his fellow pianist and bandleader Count Basie, the singer Joe Turner and many others, he helped establish what came to be known as the Kansas City sound: a brand of jazz rooted in the blues, driven by riffs and marked by a powerful but relaxed rhythmic pulse.
“You’d hear some cat play,” he told The Associated Press in 2003, “and somebody would say, ‘This cat, he sounds like he’s from Kansas City.’ It was Kansas City style. They knew it on the East Coast. They knew it on the West Coast. They knew it up north, and they knew it down south.”
from a pretty interesting 1948 article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, “The Myth of hte Wide-Open City,” by Virgil W. Peterson:
In 1933 Tom Pendergast openly boasted that while gambling and slot machine complaints might be frequent, Kansas City afforded its citizens greater protection from violence and crime than any other American city. But that was only the usual prating of a machine boss. The die had been cast,-wide-open gambling, always a chief pillar of organized crime and political corruption, had resulted in powerful alliances between officialdom and the underworld. Kansas City had become the most wideopen town in the United States,-a haven for the toughest gangsters from every part of America. The officials who had utilized the underworld in maintaining political dominance had created a monster they could no longer control. The underworld was completely out of hand. In May, 1933, the daughter of the city manager, Henry F. McElroy, was kidnaped. John Lazia, the gangster, took over the task of raising the ransom money. She was released. On the morning of June 17, 1933, a brazen attempt was made to liberate the notorious bank robber and escaped federal prisoner, Frank Nash, who had been captured and was being returned to the federal penitentiary. As officers emerged with Nash from the Kansas City Union Station, machine guns blasted forth. Five persons were killed, including two members of the Kansas City Police Department, a special agent of the FBI, a chief of police from Oklahoma and, ironically, Frank Nash himself. Two other officers were wounded. The massacre had been engineered by the outlaw, Vern C. Miller, who had been placed in touch with the killers, Pretty Boy Floyd and Adam Richetti, by the gambling czar John Lazia. In July, 1933, the kidnaping of the wealthy Charles F. Urschel in Oklahoma attracted nationwide attention. Ransom money paid in the case was traced to a prominent Kansas City criminal gang. In the same year a lieutenant of John Lazia attempted to kill Sheriff Thomas B. Bash.
In the March, 1934, election, fraud was rampant and it was conducted in Hitler fashion. Four people were killed and eleven seriously injured in election violence. The attention of the entire United States was focused on Kansas City. The United States Senate announced its intention to conduct an official investigation. John Lazia was then recognized in Kansas City as one of its most influential and powerful political figures. A short time later, on July 10, 1934, John Lazia fell in a hail of gangland bullets. Tom Pendergast’s chief lieutenant and gambling overlord was dead. And, ironically, the gun which fired the fatal bullets had been used a year earlier in the Union Station massacre in which Lazia had figured. Kansas City still had to endure five years of the “rule of ruin” before Tom Pendergast was committed to the federal penitentiary May 29, 1939. Unfortunately, the story of the Pendergast machine is not the story of Kansas City alone. Disgracing the pages of American political history, comparable stories are recorded of many of our large municipalities.
Peterson argues that “wide open city” method – letting the gangsters get away with their vices in exchange for keeping murder outside of the cities – didn’t work. I don’t know if it was ever really intended to, seems like bullshit the likes of Pendergast invented so they could justify the profitable vices and criminal alliances.
While it may not have worked for keeping order, the wide open city did seem to lead to a raucous music scene. The greatest Kansas City jazzman has got to be Charlie Parker.
In 1940, he returned to Kansas City to perform with Jay McShann and to attend the funeral of his father, Charles Sr. The younger Parker then spent the summer in McShann’s band playing at Fairyland Park for all-white audiences; trumpet player Bernard Anderson introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie.
You won’t have a bad time if you go to Spotify or YouTube and put on Charlie Parker Radio as you read the rest of this post.
Music and violence still seem to intersect in Kansas City. Mac Dre was shot and killed there:
After Hicks and other Thizz Entertainment members had performed a show in Kansas City, Missouri on October 31, 2004, an unidentified gunman shot at the group’s van as it traveled on U.S. Route 71 in the early morning hours of November 1. The van’s driver crashed and called 911, but Hicks was pronounced dead at the scene from a bullet wound to the neck.[13] Local rapper Anthony “Fat Tone” Watkins was alleged to have been responsible for the murder, but no evidence ever surfaced, and Watkins himself was shot dead the following year.
Although maybe there’s one of those in every city if you go digging.
Before Pendergast, Kansas City was already wild. From David McCullough’s Truman, describing Kansas City around 1900:
It. was a wide-open town still, more than living up to its reputation. Sporting houses and saloons far outnumbered churches. “When a bachelor or stale old codger was in sore need of easing himself [with a woman], he looked for a sign in the window which said: Transient Rooms or Light Housekeeping,” remembered the writer Edward Dahlberg, whose mother was proprietor of the Star Lady Barbershop on 8th Street. To Dahlberg, in memory, nearly everything about the Kansas City of 1905, the city of his boyhood, was redolent of sex and temptation. To him it was a “wild, concupiscent city.” Another contemporary, Virgil Thomson, who was to become a foremost composer, wrote of whole blocks where there were nothing but saloons, this in happy contrast, he said, to dry, “moralistic” Kansas across the line. “And just as Memphis and St. Louis had their Blues, we had our Twelfth Street Rag proclaiming joyous low life.” But with such joyous low life Harry appears to have had little or no experience. Years afterward, joking with friends about his music lessons, he would reflect that had things gone differently he might have wound up playing the piano in a whorehouse, but there is no evidence he ever set foot in such a place, or that he “carried on” in Kansas City in any fashion.
Young Ernest Hemingway was a reporter for The Kansas City Star in 1917-1918, when he was roughly 17-18. Hemingway biographers and documentarians like to point out the influence of The Kansas City Star style sheet, which begins:
but it also has a bunch of stranger rules:
I’m glad I printed it out, it used to be online at the Kansas City Star’s website but the link appears dead.
An interstitial section in in our time contains a Kansas City story fragment:
At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened when he found they were both dead.
Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.
—They’re crooks ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?
—That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?
Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.
15th and Grand? 15th is now Truman Road.
In Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway’s Colonel Cantwell tells his young Italian mistress about the Muehlebach Hotel. They’re fantasizing about an American road trip?
‘Do you mind being here out of season?’
‘Did you think I was a snob because I come from an old family? We’re the ones who are not snobs. The snobs are what you call jerks and the people with all the new money. Did you ever see so much new money?’
‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I saw it in Kansas City when I used to come in from Fort Riley to play polo at the Country Club.’
‘Was it as bad as here?’
‘No, it was quite pleasant. I liked it and that part of Kansas City is very beautiful.’
‘Is it really? I wish that we could go there. Do they have the camps there too? The ones that we are going to stay at?’
‘Surely. But we’ll stay at the Muehlebach hotel which has the biggest beds in the world and we’ll pretend that we are oil millionaires.’
‘Where will we leave the Cadillac?’
‘Is it a Cadillac now?’
‘Yes. Unless you want to take the big Buick Roadmaster, with the Dynaflow drive. I’ve driven it all over Europe. It was in that last Vogue you sent me.’
‘We’d probably better just use one at a time,’ the Colonel said. ‘Whichever one we decide to use we will park in the garage alongside the Muehlebach.’
‘Is the Muehlebach very splendid?’
‘Wonderful. You’ll love it. When we leave town we’ll drive north to St. Joe and have a drink in the bar at the Roubidoux, maybe two drinks and then we will cross the river and go west. You can drive and we can spell each other.’
‘What is that?’
‘Take turns driving.’
‘I’m driving now.’
‘Let’s skip the dull part and get to Chimney Rock and go on to Scott’s Bluff and Torrington and after that you will begin to see it.’
‘I have the road maps and the guides and that man who says where to eat and the A.A.A. guide to the camps and the hotels.’
‘Do you work on this much?’
‘I work at it in the evenings, with the things you sent me. What kind of a licence will we have?’
‘Missouri. We’ll buy the car in Kansas City. We fly to Kansas City, don’t you remember? Or we can go on a really good train.’
from Wikipedia. The windowless section is an addition. It’s now part of the downtown Marriott, and it sounds like you’d struggle to find anything of what the Colonel remembers.
They imploded the 1952 Muehlebach Tower annex building and in 1998 built a new, modern Muehlebach tower in its place. A “skybridge” was also built that connects both hotel buildings on their second floors. The original 1915 Muehlebach building’s lobby and ballrooms were restored and are now used as banquet and convention facilities by the Marriott. The original hotel guest room floors above have been gutted and remain unused.
In A Moveable Feast, published posthumously but written around 1960, a sickly fellow in Paris makes Hemingway reminsce:
Some RFK Jr. type thinking..
Back when we were learning about Savoy Special, we came across the Savoy Hotel of Kansas City:
It’s now the Hotel Savoy Kansas City, Tapestry Collection by Hilton. I’d at least check this place out on a next visit.
On my first trip to Kansas City, around 2009, stopping in for a night on a transcontinental train trip, I stayed at the Sheraton Crown Center, formerly the Hyatt Regency, which was famous for a disastrous walkway collapse that killed 114 people. Some grim photos there tell the story and also evoke the era, when hundreds of people would attend a “tea dance.”
Kansas City is famous for barbecue, specifically a style that’s just some meat with a sweet sauce.
Kansas City–style barbecue is a slowly smoked meat barbecue originating in Kansas City, Missouri in the early 20th century. It has a thick, sweet sauce derived from brown sugar, molasses, and tomatoes. Henry Perry is credited as its originator, as two of the oldest Kansas City–style barbecue restaurants still in operation trace their roots back to Perry’s pit.
Those would be Arthur Bryant’s (subject of a New Yorker piece by Calvin Trillin) and Gates B-B-Q. There’s also Jack Stack, Oklahoma Joe’s now Joe’s, and more.
Henry Perry himself was from Memphis:
He had a sign in his restaurant that said “my business is to serve you, not to entertain you,” and it was known for its far-reaching BBQ smells. He was known for his generosity, and would often give food to people for free.[1]
He later moved a few blocks away within the neighborhood of 19th and Highland, where he operated out of an old trolley barn throughout the 1920s and 1930s when the neighborhood became famed for its Kansas City Jazz during the Tom Pendergast era.
Customers paid 25 cents for hot meat smoked over oak and hickory and wrapped in newsprint. Perry’s sauce was described as “harsh, peppery” (rather than sweet). Perry’s menu included such barbecue standards of the day as beef and wild game such as possum, woodchuck, and raccoon.
According to Mr. Gates, the meats at a Kansas City barbecue joint historically all had one thing in common: They were cheap.
Cooking inexpensive cuts low and slow is the foundation of every American barbecue tradition, but Kansas City had an advantage — one of the largest stockyards in the country. “Brisket was practically a giveaway,” Mr. Gates said. Abundance inspired new ideas: Burnt ends, a signature of Kansas City barbecue, began as overcooked brisket edges that Arthur Bryant’s cooks chopped up and gave away to customers.
The stockyards never fully recovered from a devastating flood in 1951 and closed permanently in 1991.
I ate all the barbecue, went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum, walked the Power & Light District when I went there alone. When I went there with my wife, again a brief stop before a train trip, we looked at the Christmas lights on Country Club Plaza, and we had a KC strip steaks in the West Bottoms.
The Kansas City of reality didn’t quite match the myth. That might be my fault, who knows. If I ever get back, I’d like to visit the Nelson- Atkins Museum, and see Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony:
The other day on my plane back from New Jersey I looked out the window and saw Kansas City below me. There was Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman Stadium, and the surrounding car-consumed wasteland:
it’s too bad there wasn’t a game on. I could’ve seen a tiny Travis Kelce and a tiny Patrick Mahomes.
from Archibald MacLeish’s tribute poem after he died:
Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:
Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master –
Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick
In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April city.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. Thus it’s easy to match his life against the century. Whatever year it is, he’s roughly that age.
At 17 he’s a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, covering police stuff, murders, the morgue:
The clichés in Hemingway’s news stories-under “the glare of the surgeon’s light, he dangles on a little thread of life, while the physicians struggle grimly”-were redeemed by a passage on the forms of violence in a big city: “It’s razor wounds in the African belt and slugging in the wet block. In Little Italy they prefer the sawed-off shotgun. We can almost tell what part of the city a man is from just by seeing how they did him up”
At 18 he’s close up to the Great War:
Hemingway’s experience at Fossalta led him to divide men into those who had been wounded and those who had not. … Though he was never a soldier (Proust spent more time in the army than Hemingway), he had the combatant’s hatred of the safe staff officer and believed you could not judge a man until you had seen him in action
(didn’t Proust spend infinitely more time in the army? Hemingway wasn’t in the army, he was a volunteer with the American Red Cross)
Giovanni Cecchin speculates that despite Gamble’s favorable report of 1918, Hemingway’s heroism was not mentioned in Charles Bakewell’s Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (1920) because the authorities felt he had unnecessarily exposed himself to danger.
He grew up fast:
As Charles Fenton has pointed out, Hemingway was exceptionally precocious in his personal and professional life. He was a reporter and a wounded war hero at nineteen; had an unhappy love affair at twenty; married at twenty-two; became a European correspondent at twentythree; was a father at twenty-four. His first, thin book, Three Stories and Ten Poems-which included the “unprintable” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man” and “Out of Season” (all of which had been sent out to editors when Hadley lost the manuscripts)-was dedicated to Hadley and published in August 1923, when he was twenty-four. When he left.Toronto his apprenticeship was over, and he was now a professional if not a widely recognized author.
At 25, a nightmare group trip:
But when Duff told Hemingway that his sexual magnetism tested her self-control, he could scarcely control himself in the wild atmosphere of Pamplona. Hadley stopped talking to Duff, and wept with jealousy and humiliation when Hemingway courted her rival. But Duff, despite her notorious promiscuity and her strong attraction to Hemingway, had her own standards of morality. “We can’t do it,” she told him. “You can’t hurt people.” She would not run off with him, even if she wanted to, because of Hadley and the baby
Here’s Edmund Wilson in The Wound and The Bow:
At 26-27 he set the style in New York and Paris. Around then he became a father and got a divorce.
Hemingway’s adult life was characterized by emotional turmoil, constant travel, frequent illness and accidents. The timid and nearsighted Dos Passos, who often accompanied Hemingway on skiing and fishing trips, observed: “I never knew an athletic vigorous man who spent so much time in bed as Ernest did.” There were both physical and psychological reasons for Hemingway’s numerous accidents. He was a huge, clumsy man with defective vision in one eye and very slow reflexes. He had a bad temper, behaved recklessly and irrationally, drank heavily and was frequently out of control. He deliberately placed himself in risky situations in driving, boxing, skiing, fishing, hunting and war.
By his early 30s he’s moving to Key West, where he could write half the day and fish and hang out the other half. The money from his first hit book went to his ex, but his new wife was very rich. The $8,000 house a wedding gift from her Uncle Gus:
His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humor that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them.
He felt he could write only about what he had actually experienced and his literary credo was to tell it as it was. But he combined scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life
At 34:
after Hemingway completed Winner Take Nothing he fulfilled his ambition, expressed in The Sun Also Rises, of “going to British East Africa to shoot.” In 1933 Uncle Gus gave him $25,000 to pay for the African safari, and Hemingway asked MacLeish and Strater to be his guests. Both refused the invitation, fearing that Hemingway’s fierce competitiveness would turn the holiday into a daily struggle for superiority. They agreed with Damon Runyon’s remark about Hemingway:
“Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.”
During the Depression, Jeffrey Meyers tells us, 80% of the people in Key West were on relief and the county itself went bankrupt.
At 35 Hemingway boated a bunch of supplies up to help after the Labor Day Hurricane, which killed maybe 400 plus people, many of them laborers. The dead bodies were a health hazard.
Late 30s, early 40s:
Leicester said that during the late 1930s in Key West, his brother was drinking about seventeen Scotch and sodas a day. Hemingway always made the adolescent association between heavy drinking and masculinity, and boasted in February 1940: “Started out on absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town before the pelota game and then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3 a.m.” While fishing in Cuba, he would take a bottle of champagne to bed and empty it by morning. During World War Two, according to Buck Lanham, he was a “massive drinker. Bottle at bedside, drank all day.
In his late 30s he’s a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, having an affair with the woman that would become wife #3. From his Spanish experience by age 40 he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, a book that sold like gangbusters. Before this time, I don’t think he could’ve afforded his lifestyle on his writing alone. Hadley (wife #1) had a trust fund and Pauline (wife #2) was very rich.
He seemed to mature in reverse. Early 40s:
Yet even Durán could not tolerate the boorish behavior that tested the limits of their friendship. … At Durán’s birthday party in Havana, he behaved as Fitzgerald had done at the Murphys’ party in 1926. He got drunk, pushed salad down the back of an embassy nonentity and threw steak across the table (which inspired friends to follow his example).
At 42 he’s avoiding going to the war in Europe, instead he has this plan for his fishing boat:
Hemingway’s idea was that the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed, but disguised as a fishing boat, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside (as they frequently did in 1942) in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a jai alai player threw a small bomb into the conning tower. The Marine colonel John Thomason, who had advised Hemingway on his Men at War anthology and was Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America, realistically objected: “‘Suppose he stands off and blows you and the Pilar out of the water?’
… ‘If he does that,’ replied Ernest, ‘then we’ve had it. But there’s a good chance he won’t shoot. Why should a submarine risk attracting attention when the skipper can send sailors aboard and scuttle us by opening the seacocks? He’ll be curious about fishermen in wartime. He’ll want to know what kind of profiteers are trying to tag a marlin in the Gulf Stream with a war on.”
Hemingway managed to convince Thomason and Braden that this was a serious project and they gave him what he wanted: a radio, a collapsible rubber boat, machine guns, grenades, bombs and Don Saxon, a volunteer Marine master sergeant
finally he did get over to Europe, possibly because wife #3 Martha Gellhorn was outshining him. There the war was like a frolic to him:
Hemingway claimed to have killed a great many Germans and certainly killed a few of them. On August 3, 1944, at Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, he threw grenades down a cellar where Nazi troops were supposed to be hiding, but did not check to see if they were actually there. He may have wanted to take credit for this doubtful enterprise without confronting the fragmented remains of his victims. On November 22, armed with a machine gun, he definitely killed some Germans who attacked Lanham’s headquarters in the Hürtgenwald.
In 1950 he’s bragging to Lillian Ross:
He mentioned a war writer who, he said, was apparently thinking of himself as Tolstoy, but who’d be able to play Tolstoy only on the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. “He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him—bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. 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, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
Reviewers did not agree:
Across the River was condemned by all serious critics when it first appeared, in September 1950, and is still considered Hemingway’s worst novel. A few writers, like John O’Hara, praised the book out of loyalty to Hemingway or his past reputation; but Cyril Connolly, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Northrop Frye, Joseph Warren Beach, Alfred Kazin, Evelyn Waugh and Isaac Rosenfeld all agreed with Maxwell Geismar’s critique of Hemingway’s ideas and his negative evaluation in the Saturday Review of Literature:
This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future
At 52 he has another success, but is it even good?:
In the highly acclaimed Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art or expressed his contempt for Life, Scribner’s, the reading public, the critics and religion by writing an ironic and mock-serious fable that gave them exactly what they wanted and expected. The story offered moral uplift, provided a pretense of culture, was admired by everyone-and earned him a fortune. In May 1952
The last really good thing he wrote was a memoir of his youth in Paris that would only be published after his death. It’s full of lies, brags, and gossip about famous writers and artists of the time. This is where he claims Scott Fitzgerald had him check his penis for size. The best parts of it are so good.
He might’ve lived to 1968, seen the moon landing, hippies, LSD. He could’ve made further, into the 70s, even the 80s, he might’ve heard disco music. Seen Ronald Reagan get inaugurated. But that’s not what happened.
Meyers has an appendix that’s a list of Hemingway’s injuries that’s almost comic?
The most chilling part of the excellent Ken Burns documentary might be this clip of Hemingway giving an interview for NBC after he won the Nobel Prize. This is after he used his head to batter open the stuck door of a burning plane in Butiaba in 1954. The second of his two plane crashes that week.
What an artist. After Meyers I read Mary Dearborn’s which is also great.
Like most people who were drawn by Hemingway’s magnetic personality and valued him more as a companion than as a writer, Lanham found it amusing and exciting to be with him and to be known to have been with him. (The general is remembered today not for his military career but for his friendship with Hem-ingway.) While Hemingway was at the Ritz during the first week of September with Mary, Lanham, echoing Henry IV’s taunt to the Duke of Crillon after a victory at Arques, sent him a provocative message. “Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.”
This was (as Lanham knew) an irresistible challenge, and Hemingway immediately hastened northeast from Paris to Landrecies and Le Cateau (where Dorman-Smith and the British army had retreated after the bad show at Mons in the Great War). “The countryside through which Hemingway travelled in order to reach my command post,” wrote Lanham, who had summoned him there, “was alive with Germans who had been by-passed. All of these people were trying frantically to get back to Germany proper and the Siegfried Line. He was very lucky indeed to have made this trip without being killed.”
Boys will be boys (Hemingway was 44).
Had to look up Henry IV’s taunt to Crillon:
Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there
According to Oxford Essential Quotations (4th Ed.) that’s the “traditional form given by Voltaire to [the original] in a letter from Henri to Crillon, 20 September 1597; Henri’s actual words, as given in Lettres missives de Henri IV, Collection des documents inédits de l’histoire de Francevol. 4 (1847) were
My good man, Crillon, hang yourself for not having been at my side last Monday at the greatest event that’s ever been seen and perhaps ever will be seen’
Boldface mine. You can feel the bro-ness, it’s giving Ben Affleck and Adam Driver in The Last Duel.
How did Hemingway and Lanham both know this?
(source). Maybe it was in the boys’ books of the day.
(Frequent readers of this site will recall that Pendu/Pender/PennDu language games&names in French reveal the origin of Cezanne’s House of the Hanged Man.)
On 25 July 1593, with the encouragement of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henry permanently renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism to secure his hold on the French crown, thereby earning the resentment of the Huguenots and his ally Elizabeth I of England. He was said to have declared that Paris vaut bien une messe (“Paris is well worth a Mass”), although the attribution is doubtful.
That’s apparently Gabrielle on the left, some interpretation.
John Henry Twachtman painted the river there in 1885:
That’s in the Met.
Henri’s greatest event that had ever been wasn’t the only battle in the are
Just outside the town is the World War I Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, designed by J R Truelove, the final resting place of 377 men of the Chinese, West Indies, and South African Native Labour Corps.
As for Landrecies, it’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention the Second World War, but notes:
It was the site of a skirmish between the British I Corps under Douglas Haig and the German First Army on 25 August 1914, that resulted in the death of Archer Windsor-Clive, the first first-class cricketer to fall in World War I.
Some day I’d like to do a little road trip through here:
Almost every town here has a famous siege or battle. Finish in Bruges. Or maybe Brussels, see The Royal Museum for Central Africa (they don’t know what to do with that inheritance). Or maybe Ghent. I’d like to see the altarpiece:
Think this is pretty much the spot. Does seem like he truncated/compressed the view. That’s the art!
The site is now the wonderful-seeming hotel Auberge du Père Bise (it’ll run you $500 something a night). The two Michelin starred – “worth a detour” – Jean Sulpice restaurant attached.
Across the lake there is the Chateau de Duignt.
Shit even as I was taking this I was like I can’t even take the photo even close to as good as Cezanne painted it!
[Cezanne] struggled with what he considered an overly charming setting, which contrasted with the rugged landscape of his native Provence.
Cézanne described this mountain lake near the French border with Switzerland as a scene one might expect to find in ‘the albums of young lady travellers’
“That’s Torcello directly opposite us,” the Colonel pointed. “That’s where the people lived that were driven off the mainland by the Visigoths. They built that church you see there with the square tower. There were thirty thousand people lived there once and they built that church to honor their Lord and to worship him. Then, after they built it, the mouth of the Sile River silted up or a big flood changed it, and all that land we came through just now got flooded and started to breed mosquitoes and malaria hit them. They all started to die, so the elders got together and decided they should pull out to a healthy place that would be defensible with boats, and where the Visigoths and the Lombards and the other bandits couldn’t get at them, because these bandits had no sea-power. The Torcello boys were all great boatmen.
So they took the stones of all their houses in barges, like that one we just saw, and they built Venice.” He stopped. “Am I boring you, Jackson?”
“No, sir. I had no idea who pioneered Venice.”
“It was the boys from Torcello. They were very tough and they had very good taste in building. They came from a little place up the coast called Caorle. But they drew on all the people from the towns and the farms behind when the Visigoths over-ran them. It was a Torcello boy who was running arms into Alexandria, who located the body of St.
Mark and smuggled it out under a load of fresh pork so the infidel customs guards wouldn’t check him. This boy brought the remains of St. Mark to Venice, and he’s their patron saint and they have a cathedral there to him. But by that time, they were trading so far to the east that the architecture is pretty Byzantine for my taste. They never built any better than at the start there in Torcello. That’s Torcello there.”
…
That’s my town. There’s plenty more I could show you, but I think we probably ought to roll now. But take one good look at it. This is where you can see how it all happened.
But nobody ever looks at it from here.”
“It’s a beautiful view. Thank you, sir.”
“O.K.,” the Colonel said. “Let’s roll,”
This book takes place over three days. On day one, this is what the Colonel drinks (with page numbers):
So that’s five or six double martinis, three additional cocktails, and maybe two bottles of wine for the Colonel before bedtime.
This is not one of Hemingway’s more popular books. In Farewell To Arms, Sun Also Rises, and For Whom The Bell Tolls, the main character is young, cool, brave, competent, about as awesome a guy as you can think up. The Colonel, when we meet him, is calling his boatman a jerk. And he’s old (50) and busted up. He used to be a general but lost that rank. His mind is on pain, the past.
The Austrian attacks were ill-coordinated, but they were constant and exasperated and you first had the heavy bombardment which was supposed to put you out of business, and then, when it lifted, you checked your positions and counted the people. But you had no time to care for wounded, since you knew that the attack was coming immediately, and then you killed the men who came wading across the marshes, holding their rifles above the water and coming as slow as men wade, waist deep.
If they did not lift the shelling when it started, the Colonel, then a lieutenant, often thought, I do not know what we would be able to do. But they always lifted it and moved it back ahead of the attack. They went by the book.
If we had lost the old Piave and were on the Sile they would move it back to the second and third lines; although such lines were quite untenable, and they should have brought all their guns up very close and whammed it in all the time they attacked and until they breached us. But thank God, some high fool always controls it, the Colonel thought, and they did it piecemeal.
All that winter, with a bad sore throat, he had killed men who came, wearing the stick bombs hooked up on a harness under their shoulders with the heavy, calf hide packs and the bucket helmets. They were the enemy.
But he never hated them; nor could have any feeling about them. He commanded with an old sock around his throat, which had been dipped in turpentine, and they broke down the attacks with rifle fire and with the machine guns which still existed, or were usable, after the bombardment. He taught his people to shoot, really, which is a rare ability in continental troops, and to be able to look at the enemy when they came, and, because there was always a dead moment when the shooting was free, they became very good at it.
But you always had to count and count fast after the bombardment to know how many shooters you would have. He was hit three times that winter, but they were all gift wounds; small wounds in the flesh of the body without breaking bone, and he had become quite confident of his personal immortality since he knew he should have been killed in the heavy artillery bombardment that always preceded the attacks. Finally he did get hit properly and for good. No one of his other wounds had ever done to him what the first big one did. I suppose it is just the loss of the immortality, he thought. Well, in a way, that is quite a lot to lose.
The Colonel visits a place where he wounded fighting with the Italian army in the first World War – Fossalta. It’s the same place Hemingway himself was wounded while serving as a Red Cross volunteer. You could read The Colonel as being how Frederick Henry from Farewell to Arms turned out. This is almost a sequel.
The Colonel has a nineteen year old countess who loves him, but it’s accepted they can have no future together. This book is gloomy. We’re in a postwar Italy with bomb craters and ex-Fascists. In Hemingway’s other books lots of people die, but they weren’t Americans. The romance and European sexiness of Hemingway’s early books is gone. The Colonel recounts military ugliness, death, ordering men to die on orders:
The first day there, we lost the three battalion commanders.
One killed in the first twenty minutes and the other two hit later. This is only a statistic to a journalist. But good battalion commanders have never yet grown on trees; not even Christmas trees which was the basic tree of that woods. I do not know how many times we lost company commanders how many times over. But I could look it up.
They aren’t made, nor grown, as fast as a crop of potatoes is either. We got a certain amount of replacements but I can remember thinking that it would be simpler, and more effective, to shoot them in the area where they detrucked, than to have to try to bring them back from where they would be killed and bury them. It takes men to bring them back, and gasoline, and men to bury them. These men might just as well be fighting and get killed too.
Does it seem plausible that a beautiful nineteen year old Venetian countess would want to spend her time prodding a 51 year old US Army Colonel to tell her war stories? Bear in mind he’s an alcoholic grouch. It COULD be that’s more of a middle-aged guy’s fantasy? The countess doesn’t seem like a fully realized character to me. But so what? We’re still dealing with one of the best to ever do it here, there are amazing scenes and passages and moments that come to life.
Hemingway spoke about this book, as yet unpublished, in The New Yorkerprofile by Lillian Ross from 1950. That profile, you’ll recall, opens with Ross meeting Hemingway at Idlewild airport after a flight from Havana. When she arrives he’s got a fellow passenger in a headlock:
[Hemingway] crooked the arm around the briefcase into a tight hug and said that it contained the unfinished manuscript of his new book, “Across the River and into the Trees.” He crooked the arm around the wiry little man into a tight hug and said he had been his seat companion on the flight. The man’s name, as I got it in a mumbled introduction, was Myers, and he was returning from a business trip to Cuba. Myers made a slight attempt to dislodge himself from the embrace, but Hemingway held on to him affectionately.
“He read book all way up on plane,” Hemingway said. He spoke with a perceptible Midwestern accent, despite the Indian talk. “He like book, I think,” he added, giving Myers a little shake and beaming down at him.
“Whew!” said Myers.
“Book too much for him,” Hemingway said. “Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.”
“Whew!” said Myers.
Hemingway released him. “Not trying for no-hit game in book,” he said. “Going to win maybe twelve to nothing or maybe twelve to eleven.”
Myers looked puzzled.
“She’s better book than ‘Farewell,’ ” Hemingway said. “I think this is best one, but you are always prejudiced, I guess. Especially if you want to be champion.” He shook Myers’ hand. “Much thanks for reading book,” he said.
Ross asks him his own opinion on the book:
“What do you think?” he said after a moment. “You don’t expect me to write ‘The Farewell to Arms Boys in Addis Ababa,’ do you? Or ‘The Farewell to Arms Boys Take a Gunboat’?” The book is about the command level in the Second World War. “I am not interested in the G.I. who wasn’t one,” he said, suddenly angry again. “Or the injustices done to me, with a capital ‘M.’ I am interested in the goddam sad science of war.” The new novel has a good deal of profanity in it. “That’s because in war they talk profane, although I always try to talk gently,” he said, sounding like a man who is trying to believe what he is saying. “I think I’ve got ‘Farewell’ beat in this one,” he went on. He touched his briefcase. “It hasn’t got the youth and the ignorance.” Then he asked wearily, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?”
The parts about the command level in the Second World War are most interesting. Here’s a small section:
“Tell me about when you were a General.”
“Oh, that,” he said and motioned to the Gran Maestro to bring champagne. It was Roederer Brut ’42 and he loved it.
“When you are a general you live in a trailer and your Chief of Staff lives in a trailer, and you have bourbon whisky when other people do not have it. Your G’s live in the C.P. I’d tell you what G’s are, but it would bore you. I’d tell you about GI, G2, G3, G4, Gs and on the other side there is always Kraut-6. But it would bore you. On the other hand, you have a map covered with plastic material, and on this you have three regiments composed of three battalions each. It is all marked in colored pencil.
“You have boundary lines so that when the battalions cross their boundaries they will not then fight each other.
Each battalion is composed of five companies. All should be good, but some are good, and some are not so good.
Also you have divisional artillery and a battalion of tanks and many spare parts. You live by co-ordinates.”
He paused while the Gran Maestro poured the Roederer Brut ’42.
“From Corps,” he translated, unlovingly, cuerpo d’Ar-mata, “they tell you what you must do, and then you decide how to do it. You dictate the orders or, most often, you give them by telephone. You ream out people you respect, to make them do what you know is fairly impossi-ble, but is ordered. Also, you have to think hard, stay awake late and get up early.”
“And you won’t write about this? Not even to please me?”
[The Colonel, once a general, goes on at some length about why he couldn’t possibly write any of this down.]
I can’t say the book is about the command level of WW2. The book is about Venice, being wounded, hurt, pain, wine, hotels, memory, impending death, regret, doomed love, being fifty-one. The Colonel keeps telling himself not to be morbid.
How Hemingway wrote it, from the Ross profile:
Hemingway poured himself another glass of champagne. He always wrote in longhand, he said, but he recently bought a tape recorder and was trying to get up the courage to use it. “I’d like to learn talk machine,” he said. “You just tell talk machine anything you want and get secretary to type it out.” He writes without facility, except for dialogue. “When the people are talking, I can hardly write it fast enough or keep up with it, but with an almost unbearable high manifold pleasure.
In his New York Times review of Across The River and Into the Trees, John O’Hara scolded The New Yorker for the profile’s emphasis on Hemingway’s drinking. O’Hara’s review boils down to “this may not be his best but it’s Hemingway.” I agree!
The title of the book comes from the dying words of Stonewall Jackson, recounted in the book. Here is the version reported by Stonewall Jackson’s medical officer, Hunter McGuire:
A few moments before he died he cried out in his delirium, “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action ! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks ,” then stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished. Presently a smile of ineffable sweetness spread itself over his pale face, and he cried quietly and with an expression as if of relief, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees “; and then, without pain or the least struggle, his spirit passed from earth to the God who gave it.
The best parts of ATRAITT were a tribute to Venice:
I ought to live here. On retirement pay I could make it all right. No Gritti Palace. A room in a house like that and the tides and the boats going by. I could read in the mornings and walk around town before lunch and go every day to see the Tintorettos at the Accademia and to the Scuola San Rocco and eat in good cheap joints behind the market, on, maybe, the woman that ran the house would cook in the evenings.
I think it would be better to have lunch out and get some exercise walking. It’s a good town to walk in. I guess the best, probably. I never walked in it that it wasn’t fun. I could learn it really well, he thought, and then I’d have that.
It’s a strange, tricky town and to walk from any part to any other given part of it is better than working cross-word puzzles. It’s one of the few things to our credit that we never smacked it, and to their credit that they respected it.
I liked too the part where they eat a lobster:
Just then the lobster was served.
It was tender, with the peculiar slippery grace of that kicking muscle which is the tail, and the claws were excel-lent; neither too thin, nor too fat.
“A lobster fills with the moon,” the Colonel told the girl.
“When the moon is dark he is not worth eating.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I think it may be because, with the full moon, he feeds all night. Or maybe it is that the full moon brings him feed.”
“They come from the Dalmatian coast do they not?”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “That’s your rich coast in fish.”
Another good part is when the Colonel eats a thin slice of sausage and then some clams at the market.
They made this book into a film in 2022. It seems challenging to me, most of the story takes place in the Colonel’s head, not much happens, except some conversations, and like we said, gloomy. There are two duck hunts, a car ride, a long dinner, and a wandering in Venice, but that’s about it for action in the present time. Still, from the trailer it looks like Lieb Schreiber found something in the role:
Some sources on the last words of Stonewall Jackson:
says a quote (NY Times) on the cover of my Hemingway Library copy. I believe that’s referring to this specific edition which includes a lot of Hemingway’s revisions and alternate drafts, but can we escape the idea that maybe the novel itself is a bygone craft?
I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.
A Farewell To Arms was made into two different movies. I haven’t seen either of them but I’ve watched the trailers on YouTube and they both appear kinda lame, missing the essence, which comes from the point of view and the style.
This might be the most famous passage from AFTA:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Concrete names are a big feature of the book: Udine, Campoformio, Tagliamento, Cividale, Caporetto. I read the book with a map of Italy at hand but doesn’t it work without it? Near the climax when Frederick Henry must row with Catherine to Switzerland to escape the war he’s given this instruction:
Past Luino, Cannero, Cannobio, Tranzano. You aren’t in Switzerland until you come to Brissago. You have to pass Monte Tamara.
More:
“If you row all the time you ought to be there by seven o’clock in the morning.”
“Is it that far?”
“It’s thirty-five kilometres.”
“How should we go? In this rain we need a compass.”
“No. Row to Isola Bella. Then on the other side of Isola Madre with the wind. The wind will take you to Pallanza. You will see the lights. Then go up the shore.’
“Maybe the wind will change.”
“No,” he said. “This wind will blow like this for three days. It comes straight down from the Mattarone. There is a can to bail with.”
“Let me pay you something for the boat now.”
“No, I’d rather take a chance. If you get through you pay me all you can.”
“All right.”
“I don’t think you’ll get drowned.”
“That’s good.”
“Go with the wind up the lake.”
“All right.” I stepped in the boat.
“Did you leave the money for the hotel?”
“Yes. In an envelope in the room.”
“All right. Good luck, Tenente.”
“Good luck. We thank you many times.”
“You won’t thank me if you get drowned.”
On this read I considered the advice Hemingway gave to Maestro:
MICE: How can a writer train himself?
Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had. Thatʼs a five finger exercise.
Plug that into the scene where Henry gets wounded:
“This isn’t a deep dugout,” Passini said.
“That was a big trench mortar.”
“Yes, sir.”
I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine.
Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuhchuh-chuh-then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood.
In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying “Mama Mia! Oh, mama Mia!” I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed.
Much of the book mirrors Hemingway’s own experience, but in kind of a juiced up way. Hemingway was wounded in the war, but he was an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. Henry is a lieutenant in the Italian army. (Why? “I was in Italy.”) Hemingway has promoted himself. Hemingway in real life had an affair with a nurse, who then broke things off while Hemingway was back in Chicago. (An apparently close to biographical facts version of this story is told by Hemingway in “A Very Short Story.”) In the AFTA version, the nurse falls in love with Henry, escapes with him, is going to have his baby.
The most vivid part of the book is the retreat from Caporetto. Hemingway wasn’t at the retreat from Caporetto, but he’d heard about it.
In Italy when I was at the war there, for one thing that I had seen or that had happened to me, I knew many hundreds of things that had happened to other people who had been in the war in all of its phases. My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password.
I’m reminded of Mike White telling Marc Maron that he tried to make a version of himself that exaggerated his flaws, leaning into his awkward, uncomfortable self, to make Chuck & Buck. Then he saw Good Will Hunting and saw that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had made versions of themselves that were cooler, better, good with kids, getting in fights, exaggeratedly great.
There’s a part of A Farewell to Arms where Tenente Henry rates his own courage:
“They won’t get us,” I said. “Because you’re too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave.”
“They die of course.”
“But only once.”
“I don’t know. Who said that?”
“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?”
“He was probably a coward,” she said. “He knew a great deal of them perhaps.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to see inside the head of the brave”
“Yes. That’s how they keep that way.”
“You’re an authority.”
“You’re right, darling. That was deserved.”
“You’re brave.
“No,” she said. “But I would like to be.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I stand. I’ve been out long enough to know. I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better.”
“What is a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty? It’s awfully impressive.”
“It’s not. It means a mediocre hitter in baseball.”
“But still a hitter,” she prodded me.
“I guess we’re both conceited,” I said. “But you are brave.”
“No. But I hope to be.”
“We’re both brave,” I said. “And I’m very brave when I’ve had a drink.”
A funny part is how many liquor bottles Miss Van Campen finds in Henry’s hospital room:
“Miss Gage looked. They had me look in a glass. The whites of the eyes were yellow and it was the jaundice. I was sick for two weeks with it. For that reason we did not spend a convalescent leave together. We had planned to go to Pallanza on Lago Maggiore. It is nice there in the fall when the leaves turn. There are walks you can take and you can troll for trout in the lake. It would have been better than Stresa because there are fewer people at Pallanza. Stresa is so easy to get to from Milan that there are always people you know. There is a nice village at Pallanza and you can row out to the islands where the fishermen live and there is a restaurant on the biggest island. But we did not go.
One day while I was in bed with jaundice Miss Van Campen came in the room, opened the door into the armoire and saw the empty bottles there. I had sent a load of them down by the porter and I believe she must have seen them going out and come up to find some more. They were mostly vermouth bottles, marsala bottles, capri bottles, empty chianti flasks and a few cognac bottles.
The porter had carried out the large bottles, those that had held vermouth, and the straw-covered chianti flasks, and left the brandy bottles for the last. It was the brandy bottles and a bottle shaped like a bear, which had held kümmel, that Miss Van Campen found.
The bear-shaped bottle enraged her particularly. She held it up, bear was sitting up on his haunches with his paws up, there was a cork in his glass head and a few sticky crystals at the bottom. I laughed.
“It is kümmel,” I said. “The best kümmel comes in those bearshaped bottles. It comes from Russia.”
“Those are all brandy bottles, aren’t they?” Miss Van Campen asked.
“I can’t see them all,” I said. “But they probably are.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“I bought them and brought them in myself,” I said. “I have had Italian officers visit me frequently and I have kept brandy to offer them.’
“You haven’t been drinking it yourself?” she said.
“I have also drunk it myself.”
“Brandy,” she said. “Eleven empty bottles of brandy and that bear liquid.”
“Kümmel.”
“I will send for some one to take them away. Those are all the have?”
“For the moment.”
“And I was pitying you having jaundice. Pity is something that is wasted on you.”
“Thank you.”
(On this reading of the book it was clear that part of why Miss Van Campen is such a priss is she was horny for Henry and upset that he already had a girlfriend.)
Good times in Milan:
Afterward when I could get around on crutches we went to dinner at Biffi’s or the Gran Italia and sat at the tables outside on the floor of the galleria. The waiters came in and out and there were people going by and candles with shades on the tablecloths and after we decided that we liked the Gran Italia best, George, the head-waiter, saved us a table. He was a fine waiter and we let him order the meal while we looked at the people, and the great galleria in the dusk, and each other. We drank dry white capri iced in a bucket; although we tried many of the other wines, fresa, barbera and the sweet white wines. They had no wine waiter because of the war and George would smile ashamedly when I asked about wines like fresa.
“If you imagine a country that makes a wine because it tastes like strawberries,” he said.
It was dark in the room and the orderly, who had sat by the foot of the bed, got up and went out with him. I liked him very much and I hoped he would get back to the Abruzzi some time. He had a rotten life in the mess and he was fine about it but I thought how he would be in his own country. At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, I had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasants all called you “Don” and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted every day and stopped to eat at the houses of peasants. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D’Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses.”
At one point in the book the narrator is literally side-tracked: his train is diverted to a side track and stopped. The term “sidetracked” I have often heard in writers’ rooms to mean “going off in a side direction,” negative connotation. In the original usage it seems to have meant going nowhere, stopped.
The reason why I reread this book, which I hadn’t looked at since high school: towards the end Henry and Catherine take refuge in Montreux, Switzerland. We were going to Montreux and I wanted to hear what Hemingway had to say about it:
Sometimes we walked down the mountain into Montreux.
There was a path went down the mountain but it was steep and so usually we took the road and walked down on the wide hard road between fields and then below between the stone walls of the vineyards and on down between the houses of the villages along the There were three villages; Chernex, Fontanivent, and the other I forget. Then along the road we passed an old square-built stone château on a ledge on the side of the mountain-side with the terraced fields of vines, each vine tied to a stick to hold it up, the vines dry and brown and the earth ready for the snow and the lake down below flat and gray as steel. The road went down a long grade below the château and then turned to the right and went down very steeply and paved with cobbles, into Montreux.
We did not know any one in Montreux. We walked along beside the lake and saw the swans and the many gulls and terns that flew you came close and screamed while they looked down at when the water. Out on the lake there were flocks of grebes, small and dark, and leaving trails in the water when they swam.
In the town we walked along the main street and looked in the windows of the shops. There were many big hotels that were closed but most of the shops were open and the people were very glad to see us. There was a fine coiffeur’s place where Catherine went to have her hair done. The woman who ran it was very cheerful and the only person we knew in Montreux. While Catherine was there I went up to a beer place and drank dark Munich beer and read the papers. I read the Corriere della Sera and the English and American papers from Paris. All the advertisements were blacked out, supposedly to prevent communication in that way with the enemy. The papers were bad reading. Everything was going very badly everywhere.
How much would Hemingway recognize today’s Montreux, the jazz festival Montreux, Deep Purple/Freddie Mercury/Russian emigre Montreux?
Maybe parts of the old town:
Here is a discussion question (contains a spoiler):
The end of the book is often presented as tragic. Catherine has died giving childbirth. Henry walks alone into the rain. But, is there a very cynical reading that this is actually a relief for Henry? From when he first met Catherine he suspected she might be “crazy.” Now the encumbrance of this woman and a baby he didn’t really want is lifted. Not only that he’s granted a pleasing tragedy to be sentimental about. Is this a male fantasy ending? All the credit, none of the work?
Recall the title of James Mellow’s biography of Hemingway: “A Life Without Consequences.” Is that the fantasy here? The only consequence is valuable experience, worldliness.
As usual with Hemingway the line between sentimental, romantic, and hardboiled, cynical is quite thin.
once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
Went looking for the origin of that quote, because it seemed relevant to the current WGA strike.
The “internet of quotes” is a candy-colored jungle, where no one ever bothers to give the source or the context and half the time it’s wrong or on an inappropriate sunset backdrop.
This quote can be found in the Introduction to Men At War, by Ernest Hemingway. Men At War was a literary anthology first published in 1942. Hemingway edited his introduction for the 1955 edition. We find the whole essay reproduced here, and it’s worth a read.
The writers who were established before the war had nearly all sold out to write propaganda during it and most of them never recovered their honesty afterwards. All of their reputations steadily slumped because a writer should be of as great probity and honest as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chase or note, and after on piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
on some pitiful bravado compared to some solid magnificence:
it was like comparing the Brooklyn Dodger fan who jumps on the field and slugs an umpire with the beautiful professional austerity of Arky Vaughan, the Brooklyn third baseman.
on Tolstoy’s War And Peace:
his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible.
On cavalry:
A man with a horse is never as alone as a man on foot, for a horse will take you where you cannot make your own legs go. Just as a mechanized force, not by virtue of their armor, but by the fact that they move mechanically, will advance into situations where you could put neither men nor animals; neither get them up there nor hold them there.
on fights:
At that moment it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight them.
When that moment arrives, whether it is in a barroom fight or in a war, the thing to do is to hit your opponent the first punch and hit him as hard as possible.
A couple recommendations I’ve got to check out: a story called “The Wrong Road” by Marquis James and “The Stars in Their Courses” by Lt. Col. John W. Thomason, a chapter in a book called Lone StarPreacher (did Shelby Foote crib that title title for his book on Gettysburg?)
To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have. That is what makes good writing by good soldiers such a rare thing and why it is so prized when we have it.
(is that what DFW was trying to say, re athletes not soldiers, in his Tracy Austin review?)
I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war: and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again.
As for Arky:
After leaving the Seals, Vaughan bought a ranch in Eagleville, California, where he retired to fish, hunt and tend cattle. On August 30, 1952, Vaughan was fishing in nearby Lost Lake, with his friend Bill Wimer. According to a witness, Wimer stood up in the boat, causing it to capsize, and both men drowned.
This is a book about a scene, and the scene was Key West in the late ’60s-’70s, centered on Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, and some lesser known but memorable characters. I tried to think of other books about scenes, and came up with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, and maybe Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh, about Van Morrison’s Boston. Then of course there’s Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, referenced here in the subtitle, a mean-spirited but often beautiful book about 1920s Paris.
I was drawn to this book after I heard Walter Kirn talking about it on Bret Easton Ellis podcast (McGuane is Kirn’s ex-father-in-law, which must be one of life’s more interesting relationships). I’ve been drawn lately to books about the actual practicalities of the writing life. How do other writers do it? How do they organize their day? What time do they get to work? What do they eat and drink? How do they avoid distraction?
From this book we learn that Jim Harrison worked until 5pm, not 4:59 but 5pm, after which he cut loose. McGuane was more disciplined, even hermitish for a time (while still getting plenty of fishing done) but eventually temptation took over, he started partying with the boys, eventually was given the chance to direct the movie from his novel 92 In The Shade. That’s when things got really crazy. The movie was not a big success.
“The Sixties” (the craziest excesses bled well into the ’70s) musta really been something.
On page one of this book I felt there was an error:
but maybe I’m being a hopeless stickler and we can translate Burns from Scots into English whenever we feel like it.
After that small bump, I got swept up in the rhythm and the fun of this book and enjoyed it very much. A vacation in book form. From this book I learned that it was Jerry Jeff Walker who introduced then-failing country singer Jimmy Buffett to Key West, when Buffett went to Miami for what he thought was a gig, found out he wouldn’t be playing for two weeks, so the two of them took an impromptu road trip.
Part of what these writers found special about Key West, beyond the Hemingway and Tennessee Williams legends, was it just wasn’t a regular, straight and narrow place. Being a writer is a queer job, someone’s liable to wonder what it is you do all day. In Key West, that wasn’t a problem.
Key West was so irregular and libertine that you could get away with the apparent layaboutism of the writer’s life.
Some years ago I was writing a TV pilot I’d pitched called Florida Courthouse. I went down to Florida to do some research, and people kept telling me about Key West, making it sound like Florida’s Florida. Down I went on that fantastic drive where you feel like you’re flying, over Pigeon Key, surely one of the cooler drives in the USA if not the world.
The town I found at the end of the road was truly different. Louche, kind of disgusting, and there was an element of tourists chasing a Buffett fantasy. Some of the people I encountered seemed like untrustworthy semi-pirates, and some put themselves way out to help a stranger. You’re literally and figuratively way out there, halfway to Havana. The old houses, the chickens wandering, the cemetery, the heat and the shore and the breeze and the old fort and the general sense of license and liberty has an intoxicating quality. There was a slight element of forced fun, and trying to capture some spirit that may have existed mostly in legend. McKeen captures that aspect in his book:
Like McGuane, I found the mornings in Key West to be the best attraction. Quiet, promising, unbothered, potentially productive. Then in the afternoon you could go out and see what trouble was to be found. Somebody introduced me to a former sheriff of Key West, who helped me understand his philosophy of law enforcement: “look, you can’t put that much law on people if it’s not in their hearts.”
I enjoyed my time there in this salty beachside min-New Orleans and hope to return some day, although I don’t really think I’m a Key West person in my heart. I went looking for photos from that trip, and one I found was of the Audubon House.
After finishing this book I was recounting some of the stories to my wife and we put on Jimmy Buffett radio, and that led of course to drinking a bunch of margaritas and I woke up hungover.
There were no ski lifts from Schruns and no funiculars; but there were logging trails and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on foot carrying your skis and higher up, where the snow was too deep, you climbed on seal skins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leave payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hütte, the Madlener-Hause and the Wiesbadener-Hütte.
So says Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, “Winters in Schruns”
Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up to first, and you could run down only as often as you could climb up. That made you have legs that were fit to run down with.
And what did you eat, Hemingway?
We were always hungry and every meal time was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best. For other drinks there was wonderful kirsch made in the valley and Enzian Schnapps distilled from mountain gentian. Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best cost twenty cents a liter. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in kegs to the Madlener-Haus.
What was the worst thing you remember?
The worst thing I remember of that avalanche winter was one man who was dug out. He had squatted down and made a box with his arms in front of his head, as we had been taught to do, so that there would be air to breathe as the snow rose up over you. It was a huge avalanche and it took a long time to dig everyone out, and this man was the last to be found. He had not been dead long and his neck was worn through so that the tendons and the bones were visible. He had been turning his head from side to side against the pressure of the snow. In this avalanche there must have been some old, packed snow mixed in with the new light snow that had slipped. We could not decide whether he had done it on purpose or if he had been out of his head. But there was no problem because he was refused burial in consecrated ground by the local priest anyway; since there was no proof he was a Catholic.
What else do you remember?
I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his forefoot raised and then go on carefully to sop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.
And, did you, btw, sleep with your wife’s best friend?
The last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to that winter and the murderous summer that was to follow. Hadley and I had become too confident in each other and careless in our confidence and pride. In the mechanics of how this was penetrated I have never tried to apportion the blame, except my own part, and that was clearer all my life. The bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out. It is a complicated, valuable, instructive story. How it all ended, finally, has nothing to do with this either. Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came well out of it finally and married a much finer man that I ever was or could hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came out of that year.
Helytimes 
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