Spare Me

I have more to say about this guy Hemingway. On the advice of my internet friend Joan, who reads this blog faithfully, I searched all over for a copy of That Summer in Paris in which Morley Callaghan talks about knowing “Hem” as a young man, in Paris in 1926. A Canadian journalist at the time, Callahan very modestly described what he saw and understood about all those boozy 'expats', including the beautiful and damned Scott Fitzgerald and his spellbinding wife Zelda with the dark gold hair, Zelda on whom Fitzgerald based several of the characters in his fiction, from Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby to Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night.I've always felt a definite fondness for poor Fitzgerald, trying so hard to work in spite of worsening problems with alcohol, not to mention his efforts to help his wife manage her own faltering mental health.Hemingway, by contrast, I'm always mad at, maybe because of that macho swagger of his. And then of course he had to go and commit suicide, which brought my judgment down on him for years, at least until my friend Mary pointed out that his whole family of origin was plagued with depression and mental illness.The guy has always been hard for me to like or understand, even after reading the remarks of this Callaghan fellow, which seem very modest and therefore truthful..Apparently Hemingway was always insisting that Callaghan box with him, implying that he could teach him much in the ring. He knew Callaghan had boxed in college and that seemed to goad him on. He wanted to put the guy to the test and even tried to force him to box right in his own living room.One day at Hemingway’s gym, they went a few rounds. Callaghan says he was the better boxer only because he had gone up against so many fast boxers in his college years. He emerged the victor in any case and Hemingway came out of the fight bloody and bruised.Yet every chance he got he tried to box with somebody. “He had all the lingo, he hung around gyms, he had watched fighters at work. He wanted to be seen as the sage of the ring. Writes Callahan "something within him drove him to want to be expert in every occupation he touched."This is the point where I get off the Hemingway bus. I have known too many men like that in my life - and then too he was so uncharitable about poor Scott, who wanted his simple friendship.Callaghan writes about his own talks with Fitzgerald and how impressive he found the then-29-year-old:"I remember drawing back and looking in wonder at this slender, charming and secretly tormented man. This was the man who was supposed to be leaving a crazy disorderly life? Yes, he did get a little drunk, did crazy things, and people thought of him as the wild irresponsible playboy of the era. Yet what fantastic energies he had stored in him! What power of concentration while at the same time he watched over the wife who Hemingway called crazy! Here he was telling me of the production which could only come from an exacting rigid discipline, What haunted him I was sure was that he gave only his spare time to the work that was closest to his heart... He made him me feel lazy, as I was, and it seemed incredible that a man as knowing as Ernest would talk of him as if he were simply an alcoholic. He worked much harder than Ernest did. In fact he made me feel I didn't work at all…"Later, when he saw Hemingway, he told him that he and Scott had talked for hours."I had liked Scott's shrewd opinions, quick fine intelligence, extraordinary perception and tireless interest, and I remember that Ernest merely shrugged,, unimpressed. Ernest was simply unbudgeable. It was depressing. Was no one else to have an insight about Scott? Was Scott’s story written and no line ever to be changed? A drunk who knew he was wasting himself and his talent?.. He seemed to have some other feeling about him, some other hidden resentment."Hemingway was jealous of Fitzgerald, is how it sounds to me.Oh I guess I admire the guy a little. His style of writing certainly changed everything in 20th century American literature from the moment his work emerged. But he was vain and greedy for love it seems to me and well, I'll take a fallible man beset by self-doubt over a guy like that any day.I'll take Fitzgerald, who made pure magic with words and did his best with the tools he had to work with and died suddenly and young of heart attack and not a bullet in the brain.

Golly Houston

The sand is gone from my bathing suit, the sunburn from my nose. I guess it’s time to stop talking about that lovely cruise I went on. It’s just that I found Hemingway was right about one thing: you DO see a thing more clearly when you’re away from it. He could see his boyhood in northern Michigan in Paris much more clearly than he could ever see it when he was actually there. In fact it took going to Paris and drinking the many drinks with comrades good and true who had seen war and knew that a man must …. (Ha ha, sorry. It’s hard for me not to parody the guy, especially where I just finished reading The Paris Wife, a fictionalized account of what it was like for his first spouse living. It was like living with a cad of the first order.“Talk about a thing it and you’ll lose it,” he told somebody once. I was a new writer when I first came across this piece of advice I sensed the truth of it right away. I have always been sorry I didn’t come across it earlier in my life. I’m sorry I told even four people about the time I hunted down my father and sat with him for an hour in my 19^th year. Now I can only remember the words I used in the telling and not the reality of the meeting.If I had written about it maybe I would have described his hands and the way his hair went back in waves from his forehead which was high, like mine.Instead the thing I sealed inside the melodramatic words of that college sophomore and I can’t get to it. It’s like when you make a document into a PDF. Kind of a mistake, you think to yourself after in that you can’t mess with it anymore.I almost got to ride on the Shuttle years ago, meaning I was a National Semi-Finalist and one of the youngest and most idealistic of the thousands of journalists who entered that competition. It was cut short by the Challenger disaster though I’m aware that many young people out there don’t know what this disaster entailed.I entered the contest because I knew NASA needed to sell the idea of space travel to the American taxpayer if it wanted to put anything up there, and they themselves told the society of professional journalists that they needed a wordsmith; that the astronauts themselves, were hopeless at conveying what saw from low earth orbit. The best they could so was say “Golly Houston,” on seeing our little blue earth blinking in and out of sunlight...I can’t do much better when it comes to saying what this little boat ride was like.All is a few pictures.I look at them now: this one of Old Dave and me in the dining room.And the one at the top where the ship itself looks like a baby whale.And this super-short video of the surging deep. Ah, the briny deep, mother to us all.. Where are my fins? Why did we have to evolve?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1orVykWPi8&feature=g-upl]