Read Online Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: A. E. Hotchner
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is actually what he said. 'Okay,' I said, resuming my seat, 'then drink alone.' He left the restaurant and that was the end of that vendetta.
"Brett died in New Mexico. Call her Lady Duff Twysden, if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett. Tuberculosis. She was forty-three. Her pallbearers had all been her lovers. On leaving the church, where she had had a proper service, one of the grieving pallbearers slipped on the church steps and the casket dropped and split open.
"Those days with Lady Duff Twysden ruined poor Loeb for the rest of his life. That and one other thing: he was an authentic Guggenheim but he never got one of his recommendations approved. Not one. There's rejection for you, in spades."
"Besides Loeb and Lady Duff Twysden, were any of the other characters in the book based on people you knew who had gone to Pamplona with you?"
"Sure. The whole mob. Based on. Not exact. Pat Swazey was the closest—he was Mike Campbell in the book. Bill Smith, who was an awfully good guy I used to fish with, was pretty much Bill Gorton. Jake Barnes . . . well, hell, Jake . . . when I was in the Italian army I had been nicked in the scrotum by a piece of shrapnel and had spent some time in the genitourinary ward and saw all those poor bastards who had had everything blown off. Most of them from anti-personnel mines that were rigged to hit between the legs, on the irrefutable Hun theory that nothing takes a soldier out faster than to have his balls shot off."
"But Jake didn't have his balls shot off, did he?"
"No. And that was very important to the kind of man he was. His testicles were intact. That was all he had, but this made him capable of feeling everything a normal man feels but not able to do anything about it. That the wound was a physical wound, and not a psychological wound, was the vital thing."
"But you know, Papa, despite poor Jake and his tragic fate, I never really felt anything 'lost' about that group. Maybe it's just a reflection of my debauched state, but by the end of the book I felt a certain survival strength in those people, not at all the utter hopelessness of a 'lost generation.'"
"That was Gertrude Stein's pronouncement, not mine!" he snapped. "Gertrude repeating what some garage keeper in the Midi had told her about his apprentice mechanics: une generation perdue. Well, Gertrude ... a pronouncement was a pronouncement was a pronouncement. I only used it in the front of Sun Also Rises so I could counter it with what I thought. That passage from Ecclesiastes, that sound lost? 'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . .' Solid endorsement for Mother Earth, right? 'The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . .' Solid endorsement for sun. Also endorses wind. Then the rivers—playing it safe across the board: 'All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.' Never could say thither. Look, Gertrude was a com-plainer. So she labeled that generation with her complaint. But it was bullshit. There was no movement, no tight band of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for Mommy to lead them out of the dada wilderness. What there was, was a lot of people around the same age who had been through the war and now were writing or composing or whatever, and other people who had not been through the war and either wished they had been or wished they were writing or boasted about not being in the war. Nobody I knew at that time thought of himself as wearing the silks of the Lost Generation, or had even heard the label. We were a pretty solid mob. The characters in Sun Also Rises were tragic, but the real hero was the earth and you get the sense of its triumph in abiding forever."
On another day that the nags were resting at Auteuil, we walked across the Pont Royale to have lunch at the Closerie des Lilas, which was
"Brett died in New Mexico. Call her Lady Duff Twysden, if you like, but I can only think of her as Brett. Tuberculosis. She was forty-three. Her pallbearers had all been her lovers. On leaving the church, where she had had a proper service, one of the grieving pallbearers slipped on the church steps and the casket dropped and split open.
"Those days with Lady Duff Twysden ruined poor Loeb for the rest of his life. That and one other thing: he was an authentic Guggenheim but he never got one of his recommendations approved. Not one. There's rejection for you, in spades."
"Besides Loeb and Lady Duff Twysden, were any of the other characters in the book based on people you knew who had gone to Pamplona with you?"
"Sure. The whole mob. Based on. Not exact. Pat Swazey was the closest—he was Mike Campbell in the book. Bill Smith, who was an awfully good guy I used to fish with, was pretty much Bill Gorton. Jake Barnes . . . well, hell, Jake . . . when I was in the Italian army I had been nicked in the scrotum by a piece of shrapnel and had spent some time in the genitourinary ward and saw all those poor bastards who had had everything blown off. Most of them from anti-personnel mines that were rigged to hit between the legs, on the irrefutable Hun theory that nothing takes a soldier out faster than to have his balls shot off."
"But Jake didn't have his balls shot off, did he?"
"No. And that was very important to the kind of man he was. His testicles were intact. That was all he had, but this made him capable of feeling everything a normal man feels but not able to do anything about it. That the wound was a physical wound, and not a psychological wound, was the vital thing."
"But you know, Papa, despite poor Jake and his tragic fate, I never really felt anything 'lost' about that group. Maybe it's just a reflection of my debauched state, but by the end of the book I felt a certain survival strength in those people, not at all the utter hopelessness of a 'lost generation.'"
"That was Gertrude Stein's pronouncement, not mine!" he snapped. "Gertrude repeating what some garage keeper in the Midi had told her about his apprentice mechanics: une generation perdue. Well, Gertrude ... a pronouncement was a pronouncement was a pronouncement. I only used it in the front of Sun Also Rises so I could counter it with what I thought. That passage from Ecclesiastes, that sound lost? 'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . .' Solid endorsement for Mother Earth, right? 'The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . .' Solid endorsement for sun. Also endorses wind. Then the rivers—playing it safe across the board: 'All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.' Never could say thither. Look, Gertrude was a com-plainer. So she labeled that generation with her complaint. But it was bullshit. There was no movement, no tight band of pot-smoking nihilists wandering around looking for Mommy to lead them out of the dada wilderness. What there was, was a lot of people around the same age who had been through the war and now were writing or composing or whatever, and other people who had not been through the war and either wished they had been or wished they were writing or boasted about not being in the war. Nobody I knew at that time thought of himself as wearing the silks of the Lost Generation, or had even heard the label. We were a pretty solid mob. The characters in Sun Also Rises were tragic, but the real hero was the earth and you get the sense of its triumph in abiding forever."
On another day that the nags were resting at Auteuil, we walked across the Pont Royale to have lunch at the Closerie des Lilas, which was
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