Hemingway / True at First Light

...Several lesser known companies made Perry more money...

...Norton ~416pages /$30 True at First Light Ernest Hemingway Scribner / 359 pages / $~6 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas E rnest Hemingway (1899-1961) is as famous for what he did while he wasn't writing as for what he actually wrote...

...Although his work is full of men bent or broken by their fears and griefs, he refused to let on that he himself might have been similarly dented...

...eat good meat...

...In 1997 Perry joined the board of United Technologies Corp., whose Sikorsky Helicopter division is engaged in a joint venture to build a civilian version of its S 72 military troop transport in China with a company controlled by the People's Liberation Army...

...Ashton B. Carter, former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy...

...Perry's biggest windfall so far has been with Yurie Systems Inc., an earlier company set up by Kwok Li...

...Mary is intent on bagging herself a lion, and for Hemingway the sporting life is, well, as good as it gets: "Now we have what the old men believe they will have when they die...

...The two lives were joined at the hip, inseparably...

...One was that of a writer who got his reward after his death, and to hell with what he got now...

...A partnership in Splitrock Services, set up by Perry friend Kwok Li, netted Perry a $90,000 share when the stock went public recently...

...but he offers little in the way of wisdom for those who, having accepted the rule of death, want to live a good life and to die well...

...Killing is a high pleasure for those men who have not learned how to die...

...What Perry earned through his ties to Hambrecht & Quist is not reported, but could well be many times that amount...

...his father was a doctor and his mother a voice teacher, and they were expert in the various arts of marital unhappiness...

...John P. White, former deputy secretary of defense...

...his remarks: "war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn't they were a big sissy...

...Not long after Perry joined the board, CEO Phil Condit boasted that China's manufacturing share of each Boeing airliner had become so great that "every time a Boeing flies to China, it is going home...

...According to Michael Reynolds, whose Hemingway: The Final Years coneludes an indispensable five-volume biography, the young Hemingway was drilled in the virtues of "the strenuous life" as espoused by Teddy Roosevelt, which included braving mortal danger for a noble cause...

...Hambrecht & Quist founder William Hambrecht is the main financial backer of the pro-Clinton Internet magazine Salon...

...a young waiter in Madrid who dreams of being a matador, and who is stabbed to death in a preposterous accident while playing at bullfighting with a friend, "feeling his life go out of him as dirty water empties from a bathtub when the plug is drawn...

...To express approbation, Hemingway's word of choice is good, which sounds sometimes like a hearty grunt: good lion, good horseshoer, good trout, good liquor, good place to camp...

...One hopes that Hemingway had his sportsman's paradise then, because now and ever after this book is destined for literary perdition...

...and make the happy hunting grounds while we are alive...

...But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes...

...They both feel the earth move when they make love, and the deepest truth Robert Jordan learns is how much the proximity of death can enliven sexual intercourse...

...The largest of these on record, Condor Systems Inc., calls itself "one of the world's leading providers of technologically advanced signal collection and specialized electronic countermeasure products and systems in the electronic warfare (EW) industry...

...Mary says of the lion she is hunting, "He's wonderful and he is intelligent and I don't have to tell you why I have to kill him...

...Hemingway grew up in the irreproachably respectable Chicago suburb of Oak Park...

...In "Today Is Friday," a Roman soldier remarks admiringly of the crucified Christ, "But he looked pretty good to me in there today...

...In "Indian Camp," the opening short story in Hemingway's first collection, a young boy accompanies his doctor father as he delivers an Indian woman's baby by Caesarean section, using a jack-knife, fishing line, and no anesthetic...

...writer, the man would have been a mere sensualist and sporting gent, admirable in his boldness and vigor, but ultimatelya tritier...

...Physical horror and emotional bleakness are the mainstays of his art...

...Boisterous, ebullient, daring, magnetic, twice as alive as anybody else in town, whether the town was Paris or Key West or Havana, he blazed with energy and drew to himself men and women eager to bask in so vivid z a presence...

...If fear and violence are the hallmarks of the twentieth century, then physical courage and vitality are the essential virtues for a man living in such a blasted time...

...Given a little time, Hemingway would understand them perfectly...

...The recently published novel True at First Light, the fifth of Hemingway's books to be brought out posthumously, carved by editorial hands from an enormous mass of manuscript, chronicles the 1953 Kenya safari of a middle-aged couple whom one would be forgiven for identifying as Hemingway and his wife Mary...

...A Sport and a Pastime Hemingway: The Final Years Michael Reynolds W.W...

...From his youth, Hemingway sought out the shadow of death--and for most of his life it was probably just the shadow and not the thing itself he was after...

...Army for secure frequency-hopping military radios...

...In the past two years alone, six companies were required to disclose an investment share owned by GTP, all of them in the defense and high-tech areas...

...The unpardonable transgression against this version of the good life is to fail to be amused by it: When one of the set says he is afraid he might find the bullfight boring, the others mock him with the utmost loathing...

...Army for its fleet of RC-12 November 1999 • The American Spectator...

...unable to stand the woman's screaming, her husband, who is lying in the bunk above her, slits his throat...

...More than any other twentieth-century writer, he defined manliness, and he did so not only by his words but by his actions: fishing for trout and tarpon and marlin, hunting bear and leopard and rhino, l watching bullfights and prizefights and horse races with a passionate and discerning eye, charming women, // punching out his enemies, going "-off to every available war...

...Every day brought a new challenge to his courage, The American Spectator • November z999 77 This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...

...The stock package is currently worth $156,600...

...For such men, sport aspires to the condition of war, and war is the best sport going...

...Air Force for special operations aircraft, to the U.S...

...As Reynolds writes, "It would be a century for a writer who understood fear and violence...

...Although Perry earns a scant $1,000 a year in director's fees, the company granted him stock options currently worth $392,964 for his services, according to SEC filings...

...a former boxer who has crossed the wrong people, and who sits in his room waiting for the men sent to kill him...

...Hemingway was a man of parts, an impressive piece of work, but for the work that he wanted to secure his immortality, the necessary parts were simply not there...

...Altogether, these sweetheart stock deals are worth more than $ 3 .6 million at current market rates, while Perry's directorships have netted him an additional $150,000 per year in cash...

...This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...

...B ut the biggest potential windfall is provided by Perry's own investment group, Global Technology Partners (GTP...

...In 1997 Perry also joined the board of Boeing Corp., where he earns S 36,000 in director's fees...

...227 pieces of shrapnel were driven into his leg, causing severe damage to his foot and knee...

...GTP's venture capital activities come to light only when one of its companies files initial public offering documents with the SEC...

...Hemingway's understanding of war does not seem so penetrating when one compares him with, of all people, Evelyn Waugh...

...Heroism as Hemingway found it did not fit the descriptions in Roosevelt's prospectus...

...A passage from Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway's study of the bullfight, serves as a guide for the perplexed: "Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment...

...But his art also proved the value of his life...

...Irving B. Yoskowitz, former executive vice-president and general counsel of United Technologies...

...The plot maunders, the dialogue is stilted (of course, it is quite possible that Hemingway and his wife actually spoke this way, having learned how from his books), and the sententiousness makes one giggle...

...Hemingway never does see that deeply into his passion for war, his need to brave death in pursuit of the most intense experience life has to offer...

...He almost didn't come back at all...

...Still, for a writer, he was a hell of a good shot...

...that of giving it...

...commonly associated with men of action rather than artists, they are the virtues that Hemingway swore by...

...She might not have to tell Hemingway, but how about the rest of us...

...The list of his six partners reads like a Who's Who of the Clinton administration's military and intelligence hierarchy: • John M. Deutch, former undersecretary of energy, deputy secretary of defense, and director of Central Intelligence...

...To be as great an artist as Hemingway hoped to be—and he spoke of himself as getting into the ring with Tolstoy and Shakespeare—one must be a more complete man than to be a man of action...

...Carlos Baker, whose Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969) sets a high standard for biographers, cites Hemingway's observation that he was "living not one life but two...

...Guy Crouchback, the hero of Waugh's World War II masterpiece, the Sword ofHonour trilogy, realizes at war's end that he had hoped for war to burn the moral flab off him and to put his manhood to the most exacting test...

...You've had as good a life as anyone because of these last days...

...He puts things as simply as possible so that no one will miss the point, as one might speak to somebody slow on the uptake...

...The war laid the basis for Hemingway's vocation...

...One is led to expect a revelation about the good, only to find that it is no more than the pleasure life, which Jake and his crowd pursue with abandon: eating well, getting drunk, watching the bullfights, sleeping around (though Jake is disqualified from this last pleasure, having had his penis sheared away during the war...

...The comedy of Powell's summation might be snide and overdone, but the lampoon nevertheless skewers deadcenter some of Hemingway's fundamental convictions: that war was a sublime form of sport, that life's finest pleasures were to be found where death is near, and that those unwilling to risk everything would never fully live...

...The active life--the sporting life, especially--and the artistic life rarely combine to such striking effect as they did in Hemingway...

...Now we hunt good...

...he invents a kind of pidgin dialect for schooling neophytes in brutality...

...Serving as a Red Cross volunteer ambulance driver in Italy in 1918, he was handing out chocolate and cigarettes to frontline soldiers when an Austrian mortar shell exploded nearby...

...Just what that effect amounts to is the question...

...There is something pedantic and condescending about his simplicity...

...It has been said that if Hemingway had been a chubby little stub of a man rather than a virile bruiser, people would simply have laughed at his ,~ books...

...Without the man who wanted to feel every thrilling sensation he could, the writer who sought immortalitywould have been utterly at a loss, for Hemingway was by no means an artist of ideas...

...women war refugees who cling ferociously to babies dead for days...

...Perry was given a nominal $ 5 ,000 per year in director's fees, and 75,000 stock options at a weighted exercise price of $1.25 per share...

...The narrator of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Henry, calls his own wounding under similar circumstances "an industrial accident," and has no use for such words as glory, honor, courage...

...And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life...

...The author's life cer-qtiffed the value of his art...

...Hellhole Spectator/ Timmerman (Continued from page 57) director's position at H&Q...

...The other was that of a man who got his everything now, and to hell with what came to him after death...

...Robert J. Hermann, former head of the National Reconnaissance Office (the agency that operates all of our spy satellites) and former vice president of United Technologies...

...A fter his wounding in the Great War, Hemingway considered himself, rightly enough, an initiate into the world's cruelty...

...Hemingway himself, a brother, and a sister would all end up taking their own lives...

...Hemingway went off to the Great War hoping to acquire some manly seasoning and to come home a hero...

...Hemingway's style, which Reynolds considers the perfect vehicle for the themes of fear and violence, is in part the expression of the small regard, even the contempt, he has for his readership, 44 Heroism as Hemingway found it did not fit the descriptions in Teddy Roosevelt's prospectus...

...You've had just as good a life as grandfather's though not as long...

...So simple a word as good can be made to resonate with the significance of the philosophical tradition that examines what a good life is, as in the reflections of Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls (194.0), who knows he is about to die fighting the Fascists in Spain: "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it...

...and he is aghast to see how frivolous his desire was...

...77 most of whom are frightened or distressed by the things he writes of...

...Most of the time he succeeded in being what he made himself out to be...

...The rest of his life, Hemingway was prone to night sweats and terrors, and he had a particular fear of sleeping alone...

...close observation of the stages of decomposition that corpses undergo...

...Adornment lies, and the truths he has to convey are stark and basic...

...In April 1997, Perry joined the board of Cylink Corp., a Sunnyvale, California manufacturer of network security products and spread spectrum radio products, a technology initially developed by the U.S...

...When Lucent Technologies bought out Yurie in May-1998, the directors included a provision in the buyout contract that protected their options and converted them into cash or Lucent stock at the equivalent buy-out price of $35 a share...

...This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing...

...Hemingway was himself such a man, and he demonstrates in action and in writing what it means for someone like that to live and die...

...The father would kill himself in 1928, and Hemingway would speak of his mother as an "all-American bitch," whom he blamed for his father's despair...

...a coward who suddenly finds his nerve hunting big game on safari, and whose wife shoots him in the back of the head, perhaps not entirely by accident...

...Paul G. Kaminski, former undersecretary of defense for acquisitions...

...I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time...

...In a scant 18 months, Perry's stock was suddenly worth more than $z.6 million...

...Considering the good, Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises (1926), divulges the moral emptiness at the heart of his "fine philosophy": "You paid some way for everything that was any good...

...His writings constitute a moral primer, introducing the innocent to the unpleasantness they have so far been spared...

...I n the absence of a war to go to, hunting dangerous animals and watching bullfights are the next best thing for Hemingway and his heroes...

...If excitement and diversion are The American Spectator • November 1999 the goods most highly prized, then wishing you were doing something else in the midst of the action is a sure sign of moral debility...

...Hemingway is straining for significance here...

...Perry is paid S6o,000 per year in director's fees from UTC, and has been granted 2,000 shares of stock and 2,217 options, worth a total of $2 36,152 at current market prices...

...Later short stories feature a youth who cuts his penis off in order to subdue his impure thoughts...

...Given a little time, he would find the style to match his subject matter...

...without the AEGISVALIUNASis a writerliving in Florida...

...The joys of killing are not apparent to all...

...Danger allured him...

...Condor supplies highlyclassified "black" products to the U.S...

...These last days have given Robert Jordan the pleasures of comradeship with his brothers-in-arms, but most of all they have given him the love of his life with the beautiful young girl Maria...

...He was given 1,000 shares of stock as a bonus, with an additional 2,480 shares as deferred compensation...

...drink well once Memsahib kills her lion...