HEMINGWAY
403
posturing, a life-time of terror indissoluble in alcohol and action, a
life-time of fearing the leap out of the dark, never allayed no matter
how many beasts he brought down in bush or boondocks.
It was only 9:30 A.M. but, after a longer than customary lapse in
our talk, Hemingway broke out a bottle of wine to help ease us all.
"Tavel-a fine little wine from the Pyrenees," he said, without, ap–
parently, any defensive irony or even any sense of the comic overtones
of the cliche. Silence and platitude. Platitude and silence. This was the
pattern of what never became a conversation. And I felt, not for the
first time, how close Hemingway's prose style at its best was to both;
how it lived in the meagre area of speech between inarticulateness and
banality: a triumph wrung from the slenderest literary means ever em–
ployed to contrive a great style-that great decadent style in which a
debased American speech somehow survives itself.
"It's hard enough for me to wr-write much less-talk," he said
twice I think, obviously quoting a favorite platitude of his own inven–
tion; and, only once, but with equal satisfaction, "I don't want to talk
about literature or politics. Once I talked about literature and I got–
sick." One could hear in his tone how often he must, in similar cir–
cumstances, have used both; but he meant the first of them at least.
The word "articulate" became in his mouth an insult, an epithet. Of
Nonnan Mailer, for instance, he said between pauses, quietly, "He's
s-so-- articu- late-" and there was only a little envy to mitigate the
contempt. But he wanted to talk about literature really, or, more pre–
cisely, wanted to talk about authors, his colleagues and rivals. Yet his
comments on them boiled down to two only: the first for writers over
fifty, "Great guy, you should've known him!"; the second for those
under that critical age, "That boy has talent!" Vance Bourjaily, I recall,
seemed to him the "boy" with the most "talent." The one author he
did not mention ever was himself, and I abided by the taboo he tacitly
imposed, though, like him I fear, more out of cowardice than delicacy.
When I noticed in a particularly hard moment the
T. V. Guide
be–
side me open to the Saturday Night Fights, I welcomed the cue, tried to
abandon Bourjaily in favor of Tiger Jones, though I really admire the
style of the one not much more than that of the other. "Terrible what
they make those boys do on television," Hemingway responded, like the
joker next to you at the bar who baffles your last attempt at communi–
cation. And it didn't help a bit when Mrs. Hemingway entered to
apologize in an attractive cracked voice for the state of the house.
"If
I had only known that someone was coming . . ." But why was
everyone apologizing and to whom?
