Hemingway Alone

...So is that side of Hemingway which enjoyed recounting his conquests with women (which he seems especially to have enjoyed doing in front of his wife) and which on occasion liked to have a young admirer before whom he could preen a bit...

...The public image of Hemingway is a mixture of Frank Buck and Errol Flynn with a touch of Santa Claus— exuberant expatriate, sportsman, high liver...

...Hotchner met Hemingway • in 1948, when Hotchner, on the staff of Cosmopolitan magazine, had been sent to Cuba to ask Hemingway to write an article on "The Future of Literature...

...He was slurring his words and repeating stories he had already told...

...There is no doubt that everything Hemingway knew, he knew in some profound way, had learned by the conscious and deliberate efforts of his own intelligence, and had made a part of his life...

...What you should know," Hemingway recounted, "is what my mother said that time I went back for my inheritance...

...But the virtue of Hotch-ner's portrait is to make all this part of an outlook and a style that are much richer than mere swaggering braggadocio...

...During the period that Hemingway gradually slid into the bottomless depression which began, outwardly at least, with the serious physical injuries he had received in two plane accidents in 1954 and which ended with his death by suicide when he shot himself on July 2, 1961 (after several previous attempts), Hotchner, it seems clear, did everything that a true and loving friend could do...

...The two men became lasting friends who, in Hemingway's words, could stick "together when things were really impossible...

...His gusto and such braggadocio as he had were among the ways he had of standing against the world, of signifying that he was still in form, still running...

...So it must have been with the good times he loved...

...When Hotchner and Hemingway got back to their hotel, Hemingway turned to explain one last thing because, as he said, "we level with each other...

...What stands out most from Papa Hemingway is Hemingway's wit and intelligence, his honest and sensitive concern for the people about him, and above all his consciousness, the desire to crack open all his experience to make it reveal to him the kernel of its truth...

...Late one night in 1954, after his plane accidents, Hemingway for the first time in Hotchner's experience began to show signs of how much he had been drinking...

...Why he may have needed such reassurance is another matter, but that he took life to be a kind of contest between the individual in an unholy and malevolent universe is clear from all his writing —most poignantly so perhaps in his book about Paris, A Moveable Feast...

...Hemingway never wrote the article, but he did promise the magazine two short stories, one of which ultimately developed into the novel, Across the River and Into the Trees...

...Don't disobey me,' she said, 'or you'll regret it all your life as your father did.'" The man who said these words was fifty-six years old...

...What personal terrors Hemingway lived with we do not know...

...Among other things, he spoke that night of the fact that his father had shot himself and that his mother had robbed him (Hemingway) of the inheritance his father had left him...

...It is not surprising that once his physical prowess began to leave him, the delicate balance that he had established between himself and the world should begin to go awry...

...His defense against this malevolence consisted of his gusto, his craft, his consciousness...

...But there is one heartbreaking glimpse of them in Hotchner's book...

...All these elements are in Hotch-ner's reminiscence of the last thirteen years of Hemingway's life...

...But there are limits to what friendship (or love, in the case of Hemingway's wife, Mary) can accomplish...

...Hemingway was always talking in rules and summary statements, in lists of the things he knew and had learned...