HEMINGWAY
401
and anyhow he was saying in a hesitant voice, after having listened
politely to our names, "Fiedler? Leslie Fiedler. Do you still believe that
st- st- stuff about Huck Finn?"
He did not stammer precisely but hesitated over the first sounds
of certain words as if unsure he could handle them, or perhaps only
a little doubtful that they were the ones he really wanted. And when
I had confessed that yes, I did, did still think that most American
writers, not only Twain but Hemingway, too (naturally, we did not
either of us mention his name in this context ), could imagine an en–
nobling or redemptive love only between males in flight from women
and civilization, Hemingway tried to respond with an appropriate
quotation. "I don't believe what you say," he tried to repeat, "but I
will defend
to
the death your right to say it." He could not quite
negotiate this platitude, however, breaking down somewhere in the
neighborhood of "defend." Then- silence.
I knew the motives of my own silence though I could only speculate
about his. I had been cast, I could see, in the role of The Critic,
hopelessly typed; and I would be obliged to play out for the rest of
our conversation not the Western I had imagined, but quite another
fantasy : the tragi-comic encounter of the writer and the mistrusted
professional reader upon whom his reputation and his survival depend.
That Hemingway was aware at all of what I had written about him
somehow disconcerted me. He was, I wanted to protest, a character in
my
Love and Death in the American Novel;
and how could a character
have read the book in which he lived? One does not imagine Hamlet
reading the play that bears his name. But I was also, I soon gathered,
a semi-fictional character-generically, to be sure, rather than par–
ticularly-a Hemingway character, an actor in his imaginary world.
So that finding me before him made flesh, he felt obliged to play out
with me a private drama, for which he would, alas, never be able to
frame quite appropriate sentences, an allegorical quarrel with posterity.
At least, for an hour he could get the dialogue out of his haunted head.
He had read or glanced at, I could soon see, not only my essays but
practically everything anyone had written on the modem novel in the
United States. I fancied him flipping the pages, checking the indexes
(or maybe he got it all out of book reviews in
Time) ,
searching out the
most obscure references to himself, trying to find the final word that
would allay his fears about how he stood; and discovering instead,
imbedded in the praise that could never quite appease his anguish,
qualifications, slights, downright condemnations. "T-tell Norman –
Mailer," he said at one point, "I never got his book. The mails in
