LESLIE flEDLER
Cuba
are- are-
terrible." But who would have guessed that Heming–
way had noticed the complaint in
Advertisements for Myself
about his
never having acknowledged a presentation copy of
The Naked and the
Dead.
And yet the comment was not out of character; for at another
point he had said, really troubled, "These d-damn students. Call me up
in the middle of the night to get something they can h-hang me with.
So they can get a Ph.D." And most plaintively of all, "Sometimes when
a man's in-when he can stand it least, they write just the things that-"
Between such observations, we would regard each other in the
silence which seemed less painful than talk until Seymour Betsky would
rescue us. I did not really want to
be
rescued, it seems to me now, finding
silence the best, the only way of indicating that I knew what was rack–
ing the man I faced, knew his doubt and torment,
his
fear that he had
done nothing of lasting worth, his conviction that he must die without
adequate reassurance. It was not for Hemingway that I felt pity; I was
not capable of such condescension. It was for myself, for all American
writers. Who,
who,
I kept thinking, would ever know in these poor
United States whether or not he had made it, if Hemingway did not. I
may even have grown a little angry at his obtuseness and uncertainty.
"A whole life-time of achievement," I wanted to shout at
him,
"a whole life-time of praise, a whole life-time of revelling in both.
What do you want?" But I said nothing aloud, of course, only went on
to myself. "Okay, so you've written those absurd and trivial pieces on
Spain and published them in
Life.
Okay, you've turned into the original
old dog returning to his vomit. But your weaknesses have never been a
secret either from us, or, we've hoped at least, from you. We've had to
come to terms with those weaknesses as well as with your even more dis–
concerting strengths--to know where we are and who, where we go from
here and who we'll be when we get there. Don't we have the right to ex–
pect the same from you? Don't we have the right to--" But all the
while he kept watching me warily, a little accusingly, like some young–
ster waiting for the reviews of his first book and trying desperately
not to talk about it to one he suspects may be a reviewer.
And what could I have told
him,
I ask myself now, that might have
helped, and what right did I really have anyhow, brought there by whim
and chance? What could anyone have said to him that had not already
been repeated endlessly and without avail by other critics or by sodden
adulators at bars. The uncertainty that Hemingway betrayed was a
function surely of the depression that was about to destroy him; but,
in a deeper sense, that depression must have been the product of the
uncertainty-of a life-time of uncertainty behind the bluster and the
