Ernest Hemingway with a Knife

...Scott Fitzgerald...

...If you brought up Joyce twice," he adds flatly, "you would not be invited back...

...Elsewhere he talks of the danger of becoming "impotent" in his writing...

...she spent her days "making him jealous with other women...

...But there is always a chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact...

...There is no pretence that Wyndham Lewis is a friend...

...Or snide: Fitzgerald was excited by the adventure of drinking wine from a bottle "as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit...

...The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more...

...With his waxy color and his perfect features...

...Figures of speech are sometimes terribly arch: "a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin...

...Hemingway may have meant "portable" or even "immoveable...

...The gossip interest centers in Hemingway's portraits of four writers, all dead: Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...There are effective descriptions and images...

...The first impression is of weepy selfidealization...

...Fitzgerald had "a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty...

...If Hemingway spent the last years of his life inventing malicious lies about former friends and acquaintances no longer alive to defend themselves, one can only see him as contemptible...

...Beyond that, I do not doubt that there is some gossipy malice in me, too, to motivate the reviewing of this largely worthless book...

...In an impressive bit of two-at-a-blow, Hemingway recalls Ezra Pound's assuring him that Ford "only lied when he was very tired," but he finds this reassurance difficult to keep in mind because of "the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself...

...I cannot even figure out what he was trying to say...

...She was jealous of Fitzgerald's writing and tried to keep him too drunk to write...

...Sketches sometimes end all portentous-pretentious: "But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight...

...It is with a certain shame that I reprint these reminiscences, since I believe them to be distorted and invented at least in part...

...When you were a boy and moved in the company of men," he writes melodramatically, "you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with...

...The constant and rather tasteless assurances of historic doings in the marital bed after a while come to seem protesting too much...

...Thinking about Lewis' appearance, Hemingway is reminded of "toejam," and he identifies Lewis' eyes as "those of an unsuccessful rapist...

...In another poem in this cycle a painter announces, "Authority, I shall paint as I see . . .," and proceeds to paint a portrait with a dirty spot on the subject's face...

...Underlying the mockery of Fitzgerald's good looks there is envy, and underneath the envy there is something curiously like desire...

...A fragile depravity would be one easily broken, perhaps that of a half-hearted sinner eager to be saved...

...The first posthumous publication from the 50 pounds of manuscript that Ernest Hemingway left, A Moveable Feast (Scribners, 211 pp., $4.95), consists of sketches about his life in Paris in the early 1920s, written between 1957 and 1960...

...Her response is a pathetic pleading and begging, and Hemingway has made his ironic point...

...They have the dignity of a hard chancre...

...The official wrath which the Autobiography brought down not only on Evtushenko himself but on the whole group of modernist-oriented poets and artists that emerged after the Soviet "thaw" seems to form the principal preoccupation of these poems, one of which is here published in English for the first time...

...Yet on the whole this is Hemingway's worst piece of writing...

...Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding...

...I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it," he continues, "but it still tasted good...

...Although the artistic merit of the poems is modest, they represent the boldest statements Evtushenko has yet made...

...I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could," Hemingway writes, "and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room...

...2, 1964...

...Or they are labored: "I showed the story to him as a curiosity, as you might show, stupidly, the binnacle of a ship you had lost in some incredible way...

...These accounts are cutting and malicious, and if they are true, Hemingway was indiscreet and cruel to write them...

...she told him, in order to destroy him, that he could never satisfy a woman (this leads to an extremely unconvincing scene in which Hemingway inspects Fitzgerald's equipment in a restaurant washroom and is able to reassure him...

...Some of the prose exaggerates Hemingway's mannerisms until it reads like self-parody: "the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked...

...It is Hemingway's most insignificant book, worse than Green Hills of Africa...

...In addition, he shows Miss Stein as desperately vain about her writing and pathologically jealous of other writers...

...I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man," Hemingway writes...

...It comes from a remark Hemingway made about Paris, that the experience "stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast...

...What sort of man was this overhear-andtell, peek-and-tell, sniff-and-tell, invent-and-tell friend...

...Hemingway writes, "he looked like a little dead crusader...

...On first acquaintance, Hemingway reports, Fitzgerald asked an intimate question about Hemingway's sex life (it was tactfully evaded...

...A moveable feast is a festival that does not come on the same day each year...

...These three are just a warm-up for Fitzgerald, who as a good friend and as the successful writer who had recommended the unknown Hemingway to Scribners, deserves the full treatment...

...If the reader prefers," he writes, "this book may be regarded as fiction...

...it is not to Hemingway's credit to have stirred it up...

...Later, Fitzgerald confessed to Hemingway that as a short-story writer he was a whore...

...The emphasis both in Nefertiti and in the cycle as a whole is on the power of beauty—and hence of poetry and art—to transcend the temporary might of the sovereign power...

...Lewis did not show evil...

...There is some very impotent writing in A Moveable Feast...

...at its worst it has the interest of a bitchy remark overheard at a party...

...The second-person style maddens...

...Hemingway observes: "In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later...

...never, anywhere, ever...

...the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run...

...It is nevertheless interesting reading: At its best it has the interest of the minor work of an important writer...

...There is a malicious (and, I am sorry to say, terribly funny) account of Fitzgerald off on a trip with Hemingway, drunk and convinced that he is dying...

...soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill...

...Unfortunately, the reviewer cannot attack offensive material without giving it a little more currency, and there may even be some people who would not encounter these defacings of the illustrious dead except for my review...

...Ford is presented without explanation as an image of vileness...

...As for sublimation, it takes a classic form in Hemingway's statement: "After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love...

...After the many months of silence that followed the appearance of his Precocious Autobiography in the West, Russia's young poet engagé, Evgeny Evtushenko, has now published a cycle of 10 new poems in the Soviet journal Moskva (No...

...Some of the prose is simply inept...

...a falsely fragile depravity must then mean an iron sinfulness that appears deceptively brittle—but what nonsense...

...Or collapsible: "trying to read her [Katherine Mansfield] after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer...

...The other interest the book has is the look it gives us at Hemingway in his last years (I do not think that we get much sense of the real Hemingway in his 20s...

...If Scott Fitzgerald is presented as ludicrous, Zelda is simply vicious...

...As I pointed out in these pages [August 14, 1961] at the time of his death, at his best Hemingway left us, "in The Sun Also Rises and a handful of short stories, authentic masterpieces, smallscale but immortal...

...The book includes the worst sentence Hemingway ever wrote (it is too long to quote here, but, for collectors, it occupies most of p. 65...

...The publication of A Moveable Feast perceptibly diminishes Hemingway's reputation, and two more such will destroy it...

...They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together...

...I urge his widow and her advisers to temper their publication plans with mercy...

...Certainly a strongly defended-against homosexual impulse shows through the account of Hemingway in his teens carrying a knife to defend his virtue against "wolves...

...Hemingway sees himself then as a "very poor and very happy" young husband, an intrepid writer who at work had "the air of a man alone in the jungle," a sensitive young heavyweight called "the Black Christ" by admiring peasants...

...he is a vision of repulsiveness encountered once at Pound's studio...

...Hemingway later reports an overhead quarrel in which "I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another...

...he just looked nasty...

...The unfortunate title is an example...

...It is the Book-of-the-Month Club Selection for June...

...There is some good writing in the book, particularly a moving account of a sad professional fire-eater met in a café, and a marvelously funny conversation with an aspiring writer whom Hemingway tries to convert to literary criticism...

...The main thing," she says, "is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves...

...Another example is his description of an attractive young artist's model "with a falsely fragile depravity...

...while still another poem celebrates the fact that the singer Edith Piaf continued to perform as death drew nearer, thus suggesting Evtushenko's determination to do likewise in the face of official pressures...

...In Nefertiti, Evtushenko appears to be addressing Khrushchev directly, and in effect declaring that the poet is no longer content to be a court rebel...

...Furthermore, Fitzgerald wrote letters like those of an illiterate, and Hemingway testifies: "I knew him for two years before he could spell my name...

...In women it is the opposite...

...His preface, however, raises the interesting possibility that they are not true...

...Gertrude Stein is quoted in a childish defense of lesbianism...