Papa's Moveable Treats

By R.Z. Sheppard

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: SELECTED LETTERS, 1917-1961

Edited by Carlos Baker; Scribners; 948pages; $27.50

Hemingway molded his life in his own image before the image makers took over and gave us the Marlboro man of American letters. He played the game when it suited him. When it did not, he was apt to circulate statements like 'While Mr. H. appreciates the publicity attempt to build him into a glamorous personality like Floyd Gibbons or Tom Mix's horse Tony he deprecates it and asks the motion picture people to leave his private life alone."

His letters, which he never intended for publication, reveal just how rich that life was. They also indicate why his convictions about hunting, fishing, drinking, warring, fornicating, storymaking and dying were certain to become public property. Hemingway's code of conquest and survival was on the continent before the white man. His best stories focused a nostalgia for the New World's uncorrupted bounty. The letters, too, are full of firm trout tricked from pure streams, plump birds hosed out of clear skies, fleet beasts felled by one clean shot and blank slopes marked by the signature of a lone skier. There are also enemies worthy of bashing and friends to be gathered and embraced.

Because he traveled much and lived in remote places, Hemingway sustained his friendships and antagonisms through the mails. They enabled him to exchange the latest dope and "gen" (military jargon for intelligence). He also used the epistolary form to procrastinate: "Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." It is estimated that he wrote about 6,000 letters. Carlos Baker vetted 2,500 pieces of correspondence for his biography, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). As editor, he has selected nearly 600 moveable treats, from World War I until two weeks before Hemingway's suicide in 1961.

"Papa" holds forth on subjects ranging from his art to his bowels. But much of the collection reads like the scoreboard of a ferocious competitor. "The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn't hurt a bit at the time," he writes his parents in 1918. "We've killed 3 big bull elk--2 bucks--2 bear--an eagle and a coyote--Grouse all the time --Killed enough meat for the two guides to get married on--" The years pass the tallies mount. Noble critters are immortalized by his marksmanship in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Africa. Off Key West and Cuba, tons of tarpon, swordfish and sharks succumb to his brawn, will and, at one point his tommy gun. He boasts of bagging 122 enemies in combat, outboxing the biggest man on Bimini and having intercourse three times on his 50th birthday. He furnishes his editor and pubisher with exact counts of his word production.

That, too, was an adversary pursuit. Advice to William Faulkner, 1947: "Why do you want to fight Dostoevsky in your first fight? Beat Turgenieff . . . Then try and take Stendhal. . . But don't fight with the poor pathological characters of our time (we won't name)."

Perhaps one reason for this uncharacteristic reticence is that Faulkner was among the names Hemingway had in mind. Letter to Lillian Ross, 1953: "I cannot help but think that people who talk about God as though they knew him intimately and had received The Word etc. are frauds. Faulkner has always been fairly fraudulent but it is only recently that he has introduced God when he is conning people."

Critics came in for rougher treatment. Edmund Wilson boosted young Hemingway's career in the '20s. By the time of To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the critic was using phrases like "a growing antagonism to women" and "the all-too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream." Hemingway responded to his editor Maxwell Perkins. Wilson, he writes, "reads most interestingly on all the things one does not know about. On the things one knows about truly he is stupid, inaccurate, uninformative and pretentious. But because he is so pretentious his inaccuracies are accepted by all those with less knowledge of what he is writing about than he has."

Wilson later provided some basis for the charge when he argued proper Russian usage with Vladimir Nabokov. But he was right about Hemingway's sexual antagonism. It started with his mother. "I hate her guts and she hates mine. She forced my father to suicide," he writes Publisher Charles Scribner in 1949. Women, he suggests frequently, will trap and destroy a man. They can also be too competitive. After his divorce from Combat Correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway writes Scribner: "Have a new housemaid named Martha and certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty was a lovely girl though. I wish she hadn't been quite so ambitious and war crazy." The fourth and last Mrs. Hemingway, Mary Welsh, was Papa's sort of guy--a combination of femininity and intelligence, with a steady shooting hand and good sea legs.

The letters reveal how much time Hemingway was left alone with his writing. It was the one thing that he could not charm, intimidate, tame with fists, gun or gaff. Early comments on the subject jumble jazz-age slang with such gee whizzisms as "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers" and "Pound thinks I'm a swell poet." The mature craftsman finds that he has to write to be happy, that his art is his disease, his vice and obsession.

For all their gossip, rambling prejudice, loutish sentiments and sloppy spelling, these letters were written with an eagerness to communicate directly and forcefully. They still do, the old Hemingway magic now working on an audience the author never meant to include. Even the last letters, preoccupied with business details and high blood pressure, are full of information and curiosity. Getting the latest dope always meant human contact, not a pharmaceutical connection.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Lately we have had the curious juxtaposition of Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury in the sky. I have never seen Venus so wonderful in my life and no one will again for a long time. Then, now, all the migratory birds are coming through and there are ten pairs of mocking birds nested here on the place. I play Back on the phonograph to one and he learns it very well. We have a pure black lizard at the pool and I have learned to whistle to him soundlessly so that he comes to me any time I call him. . . . I learned it from someone else. You whistle without making any sound but the lizard hears it perfectly and it is evidently a password."

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