The other day I was passing one of my favourite used bookstores in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, when I saw AE Hotchner’s “Papa Hemingway” sitting in the cardboard boxes of the bargain bin.
It seemed an ignoble situation for such a famous book, but then who of us has never been in need of being plucked out of the bargain bin by some kindly and concerned hand? With that in mind, I picked it up and leafed through its yellowed pages, and it immediately drew me in.
It is perhaps the most personable — and also possibly the least reliable — biography of Hemingway, told in a rambling conversational style that draws you on, page after page, into the author’s relationship with, and memories of, Hemingway. Too often he repeats some of Papa’s anecdotes without verifying them, so the end result may be questionable, but you put it down feeling you’ve just spent weeks of your own life with the great man.
Hotchner was one of Hemingway’s closest friends, and he doesn’t shy away from his complicated legacy. He delights in Papa’s energy and sometimes oversized zest for life, but, as the book progresses, he also takes us into the sad, often unadmitted, psychological darkness that Hemingway carried with him from his earliest childhood, and which underlay his violent suicide in 1961 at the age of 61.
As I was standing at the edge of the bargain bin paging through this well-preserved old book (it was printed in 1968), I suddenly realised that I was now older than Hemingway was when he died — quite a bit older, in fact, as I am 64. But then, I remembered, I am distantly that same person who, at 15, was caught reading Pride and Prejudice shoved clandestinely in behind his Dreyer textbook in double maths class. I never could, and still never can, trust my own arithmetic.
Legacy
I was fated, both by temperament and circumstance, to be a writer and a storyteller, and Ernest Hemingway was one of my earliest mentors. Being older than he was made me think of his legacy in my life.
It hadn’t started too well. I read The Old Man and the Sea at high school at about the same time I was bust for my literary enthusiasm in maths class, but I have to admit, Jane Austen’s beautifully crafted irony won my heart hands down over Hemingway’s pared-down sentences in that somewhat over-obvious extended metaphor of the aging Santiago’s struggle with the forces of life as he encounters them fishing on the sea.
And then I left South Africa during the apartheid years. I had been part of a BBC crew who filmed seven young men shot dead in front of our camera in Crossroads in February 1985, and suddenly the war in our own country was now a deeply personal, traumatic part of my life in a way that I hadn’t expected it ever to become.
I left the country, refusing to find myself in a situation where I would be forced to serve in the army and defend this cruelty, or, worse, be forced, perhaps, to inflict it myself.
I struggled with the paradoxical guilt, shame and irrational recurring fears of PTSD for years without ever understanding that there was, in fact, a medical diagnosis for my anxiety and chronic restlessness as I travelled the world, seeking for what I did not really know.
Very few people understood the disorder in the 1980s. Even though it was officially a medically recognised condition, it was seldom talked about or admitted to. I never sought help — I never realised I needed help, or could benefit from professional medical intervention. I just thought I was weak, pushed my anxieties aside as best I could and tried to power through.
Early in these wanderings I went to Japan to teach English, and my cousin back in the States gave me a copy of The Sun Also Rises, one of the Scribner’s paperback editions published when they still had their store on 5th Avenue.
I read it that Japanese winter of early 1986 lying on my tatami mat floor with my fingers still freezing as I turned the pages. The story of war-damaged twenty-somethings Jake and Brett and Bill living in Paris in the 1920s and trying to make sense of what in their lives they had been forced to leave behind amid the destruction of World War 1 captivated me.
Pain of exile
I understood their story in a way that I had never expected a book to do for me. The pain of exile, their knowledge that they could never go back to the past, that their futures would always be tainted by their wounding, that loss is all too often irretrievable — it all made sense to me.
It was perhaps my first truly adult reading, an emotional transfiguration that reordered my consciousness. I didn’t draw hope from their stories — that wasn’t the point of the book, the characters weren’t an extended metaphor for anything specific, they simply lived, survived, tried to love, and Hemingway showed me how they did.
I drew hope instead, from Hemingway’s psychological insight, from his very writing itself, from his pain expressed through his talent. I was no longer reading what I thought I should read, but reading what I knew I had to because it helped me make sense of my own trauma and of the pain of my exile.
Shortly after that, I bought A Farewell to Arms at a bookshop in Hiroshima and read it in the Japanese summer that followed that bitter winter. It was another extraordinary reading experience. This time the pared-down sentences worked magic, each one tight and sparse, easy to read, but hiding more than the deceptively simple words revealed.
They led me into an understanding of war and of love that I found deeply satisfying. Then devastating sadness at the end when Catherine dies as the understated sentences carry the very emptiness they intend to express.
Since then, I’ve read almost all of Hemingway’s books except, in particular, his bitchy, silly, ungenerous satire of Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring, and, especially now that I am so much older than him, I can say with certainty and without intellectual arrogance or posturing that not all of his books work as well as those first two books I read — which were, interestingly, some of his earliest writing.
Preposterously macho and needlessly cruel
Not everything he wrote is worth reading. I have no interest in bullfighting which I find preposterously macho and needlessly cruel, and his African books are almost ridiculous in their simplistic, often racist, depiction of African characters. And, as for the glorification of shooting animals, I find it somewhat sickening — especially the shooting of rhinos, which is just grotesque.
I know, I know… it was a different time, different mores, and some say hunting does bring in money for conservation. Still, the books are indeed minor works, as is the writing with the exception of one or two of the short stories. Despite writing a supremely beautiful phrase — “In Africa a thing is true at first light, and a lie by noon” — little he wrote about Africa is true in any light, even in the most golden of privileged bushveld dawns.
It was in his book about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that I found something so true about humanity that it helped me make sense of what I had witnessed in covering wars on our continent and beyond — war is a monstrosity. The potential to wage it exists in all of us, and, to be fully human, we must face the truth of our shared capacity for evil.
I read the book on what was then the Rwanda/Zaire border in the months after the genocide while I was covering the war in the DRC that broke out in the aftermath of the slaughter.
Hemingway describes a village in Spain where the men are forced to line up with clubs and flails and beat the accused fascists to death as they are in turn forced to try to run this deadly gauntlet to a cliff edge to die on the rocks below.
It is one of the most shocking, and yet powerful, scenes in literature, and, as Hemingway writes it, his talent is as its finest and most compassionately humane. There is no fragment of sentimentality or political comment in the passage. He makes it clear that many of the alleged fascists are simply townspeople, as are those forced to be their killers — they are ordinary people, all of whom know each other.
There are a few lines I have marked in my well-thumbed copy held together by Scotch tape: “Why is it done thus?” one of the characters asks of one of the ringleaders.
“To save bullets,” he replies. “And that each man should have his share in the responsibility.”
Those lines chill me, even now as I write them. We cannot escape this inescapable truth of who we can become if the leaders around us create the climate for such hate.
Darkness of the human condition
Hemingway here seethes with the deepest rage against the darkness of the human condition. The killing of the fascists: he knew what he was doing when he wrote that scene, and everything he had seen of war is contained in it. The scene is distressing, but it is genius at its most finely honed moment of moral clarity.
And yet, this gift of his art was not enough to stave off his personal despair. Early one morning in June he crept out of bed and went downstairs where he took a shotgun and put the barrels against his forehead…
His unrepentant alcoholism played its part in corroding his self-belief, as did the injuries he had sustained in his life of war and physical adventure. But we will never really know just what it finally was that made him pull that trigger.
I wonder if, as the springtime sun shone through the windows in the living room where he was sitting, he thought still of what he might yet have to do, what work might still lie ahead of him that he would now leave unfinished.
We can’t know. And that haunts us, as every suicide does. When I was young, and first reading Hemingway, his death at 61 seemed impossibly far away from my own psychological darkness of PTSD. I never did think of suicide, but I needed help to be a fuller, happier person than the one who carried the memory of bleeding young bodies thrown carelessly, so brutally, into the back of a Casspir.
I found something, even much of what I needed for healing, in those moments when Hemingway’s writing worked and revealed his genius for showing us the truth of our human fragility.
I am now older than he was. Becoming older than our youthful mentors is an inflection point for all of us in life, when we look at what was inspiring in them, and, at the same time, what weaknesses they held that we should avoid. It is a moment when it is worth considering our past and contemplating our futures.
I have seen as much war as Hemingway saw, and written and made films about it, perhaps close to as much as he created. I have lived in my own way as zestfully as he ever did. That all gives me some gravitas, and so much to look back on with satisfaction. But unlike him, I’m still fit, strong and raring to go.
My life is filled with love, and my greatest fear is only that I should die before I’ve finished the work I still have to do. But that’s not going to happen any time soon. I still have so many books to write, so many sentences that I cannot stop filling my mind and needing to come pouring out.
I know I will never reach the pinnacle of fame that he did, but I am grateful for being able to keep on writing, making some sense of the world, to keep on being, and doing, not without pain, but to live with creativity and joy.
Hemingway’s memories still, though, have the power to inspire. He told Hotchner what his credo was — if he could be said to have had one at all: “To write as well as I can about things that I know and feel deeply about.”
It seems to me the most reliable statement from the master in the pages of that old, yellowed book, and worth remembering at any age, as it is not only about writing, but about life itself. DM