Read Online Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner - Free Book Online Page B

another of Ernest's fondly remembered haunts. On the way there Ernest pointed out a tall, narrow building where he had once lived with Pauline on the top floor. "It was a pleasant flat up there," Ernest said, "with a big skylight that kept the place light. A Bohemian named Jerry Kelley was visiting us one day—actually he was a reject dadaist—and he went in to use the can before departing. Instead of pulling the chain for the toilet, he grabbed hold of the skylight cord, gave it a heavy yank, and down came the skylight in a shower of glass. I was standing directly under it and the falling glass gashed my head open. When I saw the blood gushing out, my first thought was to keep it off my one and only suit. I ran into the bathroom and bent over and bled into the bathtub so as to save the suit. At the same time I put my thumb on the pressure point in my temple to slow down the blood, which was pouring out like a son-of-a-bitch. Pauline called Archie MacLeish, who got hold of a doctor pal of his from the American Hospital, Dr. Carl Weiss—same guy who years later shot Huey Long. He did a really terrible job on my head, leaving me with this patch of raised skin which enlarges when I get angry. Afterward we measured the blood in the bathtub and it came to more than a pint. Doctor did better job on Huey Long than he did on me.
    "The next day I went to the bike races and that evening, feeling absolutely wonderful from the loss of all that blood, I finally began to write A Farewell to Arms. I had been ducking and dodging for almost two months, but that cut on the head, plus roughing up that lion, finally sprung me. Pauline had fixed up a fancy workroom for me with a Mexican desk, where I had been avoiding the start of Farewell by writing a long account of life in Michigan. I guess it would have been a novel about Nick Adams—but one day after I read through all that I had written over a two-month period, I wrote across the cover page, 'Too misty to be real'; then I destroyed it all.
    "Besides trouble with that book, was also having hell of a tough time with Pauline. Don't know if it was autosuggestion from Sun Also Rises or maybe reaction to having just divorced Hadley, but I was in a hell of a jam—I couldn't make love. Had had very good bed with Pauline during all the time we were having our affair, and after Hadley left me, but after our marriage, suddenly I could no more make love than Jake Barnes. Pauline was very patient and understanding and we tried everything, but nothing worked. I became terribly discouraged. I had been to see several doctors. I even put myself in the hands of a mystic who fastened electrodes to my head and feet—hardly the seat of my trouble—and had me drink a glass of calves' liver blood every day. It was all hopeless. Then one day Pauline said, 'Listen, Ernest, why don't you go pray?' Pauline was a very religious Catholic and I wasn't a religious anything, but she had been so damn good that I thought it was the least I could do for her. There was a small church two blocks from us and I went there and said a short prayer. Then I went back to our room. Pauline was in bed, waiting. I undressed and got in bed and we made love like we invented it. We never had any trouble again. That's when I became a Catholic."
    Ernest stopped to listen respectfully to an old man who was playing a rasping violin with fingers barely moveable in the cold; Ernest thanked him and put a thousand-franc note in his cap. We then resumed walking.
    "Once I started on Farewell it ran like a Duesenberg. Of course, much of it was projected from my own experiences, but a lot of it, like the Caporetto retreat, wasn't. I was never in the Caporetto retreat—despite what you may read in the lurid professorial studies of my wicked past—and someone will someday write a book to prove it; I got it from a friend and from all the talk I heard when I was hospitalized. I had discovered in writing The Sun Also Rises that it was easier to