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LESLIE FIEDLER
over and over precisely how it was in Ketchum: that what is at stake
is an image by which we have all lived-surviving haters of Hearst,
middlebrow adulators of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Jews who have
managed somehow to feel closer to Jake Barnes than to Robert Cohn–
the lady from Seattle and
I.
That image 1 must do my best to shatter,
though on one level 1 cannot help wishing that it will survive my on–
slaught.
1 do not want ever to see the newspaper article that cued the wire.
1 am willing to accept responsibility for whatever the press in its in–
accuracy and confusion made of my own inaccuracy and confusion; but
1 want to accept it without having read it.
If
amends are to be made
for pieties offended, they must be made by setting down the best version
of what 1 am able to remember, by my writing this piece which perhaps
already is being misunderstood by those who have managed to get so far.
1 went to see Hemingway just after Hallowe'en last year along
with Seymour Betsky, a colleague from Montana State University, the
university attended briefly by one of Hemingway's sons; and, much more
importantly, the one from which Robert Jordan took off for the War
in Spain in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
From a place as much myth as
fact, from Hemingway'S mythical home (I am told that during his last
trip to Spain he signed tourist autographs, "E. Hemingway, Red Lodge,
Montana"), 1 set out across the three hundred miles to his last actual
home near Sun Valley, a winter resort out of season. We were charged
with persuading Hemingway to give a public lecture at our school, to
make the kind of appearance he has resolutely refused to make, to
permit-like a good American-a larger audience to look at him than
would ever read him, even in
Life.
Actually, we felt ourselves, though
we did not confess it aloud, neither professors nor promoters, but pilgrims
-seeking the shrine of a God in whom we were not quite sure be
believed.
1 had long since put on record my only slightly begrudged acknow–
ledgment of Hemingway's achievement: his invention of a major prose
style viable in the whole western world, his contrivance of the kind of
short story young writers are not yet done imitating, his evocation in
The Sun Also Rises
of a peculiar terror and a special way of coming
to terms with it that must seem to the future the very hallmark of our
age. But 1 had also registered my sense of his mindlessness, his senti–
mentality, his failure to develop or grow. And 1 could not help re–
calling as 1 hurtled half-asleep beside the driver through the lucid air
of not-yet winter, up and down the slopes of such mountains as haunted
Hemingway, a symposium in Naples just ten years before. 1 had been
