Leslie Fiedler
AN ALMOST IMAGINARY INTE ·RVIEW:
HEMINGWAY IN KETCHUM
But what a book they both agreed, would be
the real story of Hemingway, not those he
writes but the confessions of the real
Ernest Hemingway ...
The Autobiography 01 Alice B. Toklas
I am writing now the article which I have known for
months I must someday write, not merely because he is dead but be–
cause there sits on the desk before me a telegram from a disturbed
lady whom I can not quite remember or despise. "Your confiding rem–
iniscences of Papa Hemingway," it reads, "reminiscent of Louella
(Hearst)." The cliches of "Papa" and "Hearst" date but do not identify
the sender; and the fact that she has wired her malice from Seattle only
confuses me. Why Seattle? Surely the few cagey remarks I have made
to a reporter about my experiences in Ketchum, Idaho do not constitute
"confiding reminiscences"-dictated as they were as much by a desire
to conceal as to reveal, and concerned as they as with my own dismay
rather than the details of Hemingway's life. How did they get to Seattle?
And in what form?
I am aware, of course, of having told over the past six months
in
at least as many states the story of my inconclusive encounter with
Hemingway last November. I have never been able to tell it until after
the third drink or the fourth, and then always to those who, I was
convinced, would understand that I was talking about a kind of terror
which rather joined me to than separated me from a stranger whose
voice I have known all my adult life-a stranger obviously flirting with
despair, a stranger whose destruction I could not help feeling my own
calamity, too. Mter all, I was only talking the way everyone talks all
the time about American letters, the plight of the American writer.
What could be more banal or harmless?
But I can tell from the poor conventional ironies of the telegram
before me what I have come to suspect already from my need to say
