Courting Death
MATHEWSON, RUTH
Writers & Writing COURTING DEATH BY RUTH MATHEWSON THERE WAS no reason to expect Mary Hemingway to write like her husband, but surely cause to have hoped that in her memoir of their 17 years...
...Hemingway's fondest term of endearment for her was "brother kitten...
...and it was shipped to him soon afterward...
...Yet these melodramatic notions do not throw much light on the deep motives for his own suicide in July 1961...
...Wolff further points out that what his subject lost in the war was innocence, not life...
...His talk of his childhood, she informs us, "was in such precise detail that I could never detect when he skidded off fact into fiction...
...he wanted-after he had conquered fear-to concentrate on death, worshipping it in an elaborate cult of the sun...
...It flew all around and then came back...
...Hemingway, a former Time correspondent, occasionally commands a clean, strong prose-notably in describing a visit to Africa and the airplane crashes there that led to false reports of her and Ernest's deaths...
...But he felt the same terrible disclocation in his brief postwar career at Harvard, where initiation into his father's social club called for measuring Franklin Street with a mackerel and shaving in the Copley Plaza ballroom...
...I wasn't dead anymore...
...Crosby, in the Ambulance Corps too, miraculously survived a direct artillery hit...
...One small but telling instance concerns the gun used in his father's suicide in 1928...
...And Crosby, like Hemingway again, went back to a family that refused to acknowledge that loss...
...The son's bitterness is not much elaborated in How It Was, but its shadow falls over the record as early as Ernest and Mary's second meeting, when he says his mother had never forgiven him for surviving World War I: "She wanted to be a Gold Star Mother...
...Leslie Fiedler...
...XT HARRY CROSBY, whose life Geoffrey Wolff traces in Black Sun (Random House, 377 pp., $12.95), rehearsed his death for a decade before he shot himself and another man's wife in New York in 1929...
...Edmund Wilson, and others...
...Similarities in their childhoods served as a bond, too...
...He wrote that he would never forget "the metamorphose from boy to man...
...But A.E...
...He that dies this year is quit for the next...
...Mary's moving record of his last years-when his health had failed, he could no longer write, and he was obsessed by the conviction that he was being investigated for tax delinquencies-lets his immediate reasons speak for themselves...
...Mary at times offers her own critical insights as well: As first reader, she had the sense to know that Across the River and into the Trees was "a lapse in judgement...
...In Exile's Return, Malcom Cowley's recollection of the '20s, Crosby is cast as a symbol of the "Lost Generation...
...I felt my soul coming right out of my body like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket...
...It is logical to assume that finally death sought him, and he wanted to choose the time and place of their meeting...
...Hotchner, the writer's friend, recalls his angry charges that years later his mother sent it in a Christmas package, with a card saying she thought he might like to have it...
...The two resolved early that Mary would not be a "Simone de Pouvoir (sic),' recording the writer's thoughts for posterity, and the incidental glimpses we are given of the literary life are interesting and practical-Ernest's working habits, Sartre talking royalty percentages at dinner, the difficulties of cutting The Dangerous Summer for Life...
...Nick Adams' mother in Hemingway's story "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is also a Christian Scientist-a brilliant stroke underlining her estrangement from her husband and refusal to understand evil and violence as men do...
...That other sun-worshipper wrote a cagey essay, finding the symbols confusing but admiring the energy of their chaos...
...Wolff's skillful treatment of this material gives us a story of Boston with something of Marquand's or O'Hara's feeling for social texture, and presents in its central figure "an entire laboratory for studying the terminal consequences of the religion of art...
...Likewise, her "gooscflcsh" test for The Old Man and the Sea is a better measure of any Hemingway work than the scholarly cucsscs about "the fish syndrome" or "the Dante influence...
...Wolff finds the second-death theory far-fetched...
...He notes that along with eventual suicide, a love of France and a "religion based on literary principles," Crosby shared with Hemingway a fondness for the lines in Henry IV: "A man can die but once...
...Writers & Writing COURTING DEATH BY RUTH MATHEWSON THERE WAS no reason to expect Mary Hemingway to write like her husband, but surely cause to have hoped that in her memoir of their 17 years together, How It Was (Knopf, 576 pp., $12.50), she would not describe a publisher as "an alluring, venerable gentleman," report that she "dined on an embarrassing plethora of local delicacies," or come up with her own plethora of inelegant variations-as she "horses around" and people "zip" up mountains, "whiz" into rooms, "buzz" out from Chicago...
...He told her, for example, that his happiest time was the fall his mother was hospitalized with typhoid fever...
...She rightly dismissed such theories when she decided she was capable of being the sole administrator of her husband's literary estate...
...Cowley may have gotten the latter idea from Hemingway's description of his wounding on the Italian Front: "I died then...
...Significantly, it is in matters relating to his mother that we find many of the numerous discrepancies between Hemingway's recollections and those of others...
...Mary left the church forever when she overheard her in a petty quarrel with another "proper matron just before they were to interpret the words of God and Mary Baker Eddy...
...Crosby did not want to be quit, however...
...It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek ??er...
...Hemingway's brother...
...Cowley concluded that Crosby also experienced death in that moment...
...After scandalizing Boston by his marriage, Crosby left for Paris, where he began to read Baudelaire and create strange visionary chants ("Worship the Mad Queen, Goddess of the Sun," and the like...
...he was a Boston patrician...
...Reading his premature obituaries after the plane crashes in Africa, Hemingway scoffed at the claims that he had always "courted death...
...Crosby's background was very different...
...Leicester, wrote that Ernest wanted it urgentlv...
...Mary learned about the lakes and woods of her native Minnesota from a father she adored (as Ernest did his...
...In any event, one senses Mary was not altogether unprepared for Ernest's most unjust insult-that Mary was like her mother, "or his who had driven his father to suicide...
...Hemingway drew on the experience in the story "Soldier's Home...
...Wolff's scrupulous attention to these circumstances makes for an absorbing book...
...Suspicious, like Ernest, of the scholarly mythologizing ("of no other man,' said Dorothy Parker, "has so much tripe been penned or spoken"), she is also gently skeptical of the legends he himself created about his past...
...Wolff agrees, if not exactly in those terms, but fortunately for the reader, he disagrees with Pound's opinion that the suicide was understandable "if you separated [its] five minutes from all conditioning circumstances...
...The charge was true to form: The Hemingway code often held women responsible for the loss of a man's talent or pride, and it spoke of death itself as female...
...Crosby's life, Pound wrote, "was a religious manifestation his death a vote of confidence in the cosmos...
...At the same time, with its drama of "Society Man and Woman Die in Love Nest," it satisfies the tabloid reader in us all...
...Indeed, if his marriage to Mary worked (and it seems, under the circumstances, to have been remarkablv sturdvl, it was in large part because of Mary's ability to share hunting, fishing and other traditionally masculine pursuits...
...but she did not hate her prim mother, whom she tendered a rather patronizing affection...
...He paid D. H. Lawrence in gold pieces for his introduction to a book of these poems...
...Far too often her material is obscured by her style or buried in tedious statistics of domestic stewardship...
...He spent most of that period in Paris, where he founded the Black Sun Press, publisher of Joyce, Pound, Hart Crane, and others...
...Although both parents were Christian Scientists, her mother's beliefs spelled hypocrisy as her father's did not...
...Can you imagine," he wrote then, "that if a man sought death all his life he could not have found her before the age of 54...
...Nevertheless, Mrs...
...Hemingway's hatred of his mother was more than incidentally related to the deficiencies in his fictional treatment of women-observed by Malcom Cowley...
...I didn't know whether it was an omen or a prophecy," Ernest said...
...Yet Cowley's argument, Wolff believes, depended on the dubious assumption that "there was such an odd creature as a literary generation," and on an explanation of the suicide as a "second death...
Vol. 59 • November 1976 • No. 23
