HEMINGWAY
399
of Robert Jordan. But it was also-hopefully-a raid: an expedition
intended to bring Hemingway home to Montana, where he might
perhaps succeed in saying what he had never been able to say to out–
landers, speak the meanings of the place in which we had been born
or had improbably chosen to live. It was, I suppose,
my
Western I
hoped Hemingway would play out (becoming for me what Cooper had
been for him); and there would have been something appropriately
comic, after all, in casting the boy from Oak Park, Illinois in a script
composed by the boy from Newark, New Jersey, both of them on location
in the Great West. But, of course, the first words we exchanged with
Hemingway made it clear that
if
he had ever been able to speak in
public, he was unable to do so now; that
if
he did, indeed, possess a
secret, he was not about
to
reveal it from the platform. And how insolent,
how absurd the quest seems in retrospect-excused only by a retrospec–
tive sense that what impelled us was a need to identify with an image
we thought we despised.
If
it was not an act of love we intended, it was
a more typical American effort magically to establish something worthy
of love.
Here
01"
Nowhere is America.
Surely the phrase rang someplace
in
the back of my head as we approached Ketchum; but Here turned
out to be Nowhere and Hemingway in the middle of it.
At first, however, we were elated, for we were ,able to reach
quickly the young doctor we had been told was Hemingway's friend and
hunting companion; and we were as much delighted as embarrassed
(everything seemed to be composing itself more like a poem than a mere
event) by the fact that he was called, symbolically, Dr. Saviers. They
hunted together during the afternoons, Dr. Saviers told us, though
Hemingway could no longer crouch in a blind, only walk in search of
birds, his last game. Hemingway worked mornings, but perhaps he
would adjust
his
routine, find some time for us the next day before
noon . . . after all, we had driven three hundred miles . . . and even
though he never made public appearances, still ...
We sat that night in a half-deserted bar, where the tourists had
not yet come and the help waited on each other, making little ingroup
jokes. No one noticed us nursing over our drinks the elation about
which we scarcely dared speak. God knows what unworthy elements fed
our joy: a desire for scraps of gossip or occasions for articles, a secret
yearning to be disappointed, to find the world figure fatuous or comic
or-No, surely there were motives less ignoble at its root: a genuine
hope that emanating from greatness (the word came unbidden to our
minds) there would be a
mana
we could share, a need somehow to
verify the myth. We entered Hemingway's house through a back porch
