The Last Days

PAPA HEMINGWAY by A. E. Hotchner, 304 pages, Random House. $5.95.

In an acerbic legal dustup, Ernest Hemingway's widow Mary tried in vain to enjoin publication of this book, contended that A. E. Hotchner had appropriated literary material that rightfully belonged to her as Hemingway's beneficiary, and accused Hotchner of "shameless penetration into my private life and the usurpation of it for money" (TIME, Feb. 11). Hotchner certainly will make money from this book: serialization rights were sold to the Saturday Evening Post for about $50,000, it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and, with 60,000 copies in print, it is clearly destined for the bestseller lists.

It deserves to be there, for Hotchner, who has had only so-so success in adapting some of Hemingway's works for movies and TV, has now produced a rousing good book. This is no definitive biography, and Hotchner's prose is often second-rate Hemingway, but he still has succeeded in giving an affectionate yet perceptive picture of an old friend.

Unsynchronized Passion. Hemingway himself was, of course, his own greatest creation--the archetype of all Hemingway heroes. A big, burly man with heavy shoulders and hugely muscled arms, he was 48 and still radiating an aura of fun and well-being when he and Hotchner first met in Cuba in 1948. For the next 13 years they were inseparable friends. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, they were not Hemingway's most creative years. Yet he was busy and active. He and Hotch went fishing off Cuba, journeyed to Paris and Spain, toured the bullfight circuit and ran with the bulls in Pamplona, hunted together in Ketchum, Idaho. All the time, Hotch was taking copious notes on his unique, complicated and often buffoonish friend.

He noted that Hemingway never wore underwear and seldom bathed in water; he preferred sponge baths with rubbing alcohol. Hotch listened patiently when Papa told tales about his sex life, some of them fanciful. Hemingway claimed, for example, that he had once shacked up with Mata Hari (obviously untrue, since 41-year-old Mata Hari was executed in 1917, a year before Ernest, then 18, got to Europe as an ambulance driver on the Italian front). On one occasion, Papa boasted drunkenly that he had sired a child by an African bride whom he had acquired on a safari (possibly true). What does ring completely true is Hemingway's comment in 1948 about Marlene Dietrich: "The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934 . . . but we've never been to bed. Victims of unsynchronized passion."

Papa had a bad temper, says Hotch. When he drank, he sometimes grew quarrelsome and querulous with his fourth wife, "Miss Mary," whom he adored and once described as "my pocket Rubens." He slyly made sport of pestering strangers by extravagantly praising something they wore. He was also a hypochondriac, forever lugging around samples of his urine. He was convinced that he had skin cancer (his own diagnosis), and grew his beard to cover the white scaling on his face.

Unreasonable Delusions. The most perfect Hemingway hero, unhappily, did not decline as a Hemingway hero should have. Papa grew increasingly gaunt and anxious in his last months. He got upset over trifles, worried that an airline would not accept him with excess baggage, despaired because he was sure he could not pick up his guns at Abercrombie & Fitch after his lawyer had neglected to pay a bill. Gradually, he began to believe that he was being followed by Government agents and that his family and friends had somehow betrayed him.

Most of the details of Papa's eventual hospitalization at the Mayo Clinic, where he received electroshock treatment, have been told before. But Hotchner gives them a special poignancy. There is, for example, an account of Hotchner's last visit, in June 1961, when Hemingway, suffering from delusions and high blood pressure, complained bitterly: "What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven't any of them. Do you understand, goddamn it? None of them!" And so, less than a month later, Papa Hemingway, 61, took his life with his favorite shotgun--the same gun he had used in giving so many creatures what he called the gift of death.

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