0400
LESLIE ,FIEDLER
in character with the legend-limp ducks hanging from the rafters, a
gun against the wall-the home of the hunter; but to step into the
kitchen was to step out of the mythic world. There were the neatly
wrapped trick-or-treat packages left over from the week before, loot
unclaimed by kids;
The Readers Digest, The T.V. Guide
open on tables;
and beyond, the nondescript furniture of a furnished house, a random
selection of meaningless books on the half-empty shelves.
And the Hemingway who greeted us, framed by the huge blank
television screen that dominated the living room, was an old man with
spectacles slipping down his nose.
An
old man at sixty-one. For an
instant, I found myself thinking absurdly that this must be not the
Hemingway we sought but his father, the ghost of that long-dead father
-materialized at the age he would have been had he survived. Hem–
ingway's handclasp I could scarcely feel; and I stood there baffled, a
little ashamed of how I had braced myself involuntarily for a bone–
crushing grip, how I must have yearned for some wordless preliminary
test of strength. I had not known, I realized standing dumb before one
even dumber, how completely I had been victimized by the legend
Hemingway had worn himself out imagining, writing, living.
Why should he not, after all, inhabit a bourgeois house, sit before
T .V. with a drink in his hand, while his wife passed out Hallowe'en
packages to children? Why the hell not? But he dwindled so abruptly,
so touchingly from the great red and white head to his spindly legs,
accentuated by tapered pants, legs that seemed scarcely able to hold
him up. Fragile, I found myself thinking, breakable and broken-one
time too often broken, broken beyond repair. And I remembered the
wicked sentence reported by Gertrude Stein, "Ernest is very fragile,
whenever he does anything sporting something breaks, his arm, his leg,
or his head." The scar of one more recent break was particularly evi–
dent on his forehead as he stood before us, inarticulately courteous: a
scar just above the eyes that were the wrong color-not blue or grey
as they should have been, not a hunter's eyes at all, but the eyes of a
poet who dreamed of hunters, brown, soft, scared ...
These, at least, I knew could not have changed. Whatever had
recently travestied him, whatever illness had ravaged his flesh, relaxed
his handclasp, could not have changed his eyes. These must have been
the same always, must always have tried to confess the secret he had
perhaps more hoped than feared would be guessed. "But Jake Barnes
is in some sense then a self-portrait," I almost said aloud. "And that's
why
The Sun Also Rises
seems your truest book, the book of fear and
fact, not bravado and bullshit." I did not speak the words, of course,
