LESLI'E
,FIEDLER
It was the
politeness
of the whole affair which seemed somehow
the final affront to the legend. Hemingway was like a well-behaved
small boy, a little unsure about the rules, but resolved to be courteous
all the same. His very act of asking us to come and talk during his
usual working hours and at a moment of evident distress was a gesture
of genuine courtesy. And he fussed over the wine as if set on redeeming
our difficult encounter with a show of formality. At one point, he
started to pour some Tavel into my glass before his own, then stopped
himself, put a little into his glass, apologized for having troubled to
remember protocol, apologized for apologizing-finally insisted on drink–
ing to my next book, when I lifted my glass to his.
But what were we doing talking of next books when I could not
stop the screaming inside of my head, "How will anyone ever know?
How will I ever know unless the critics, foolish, biased, bored, tell me,
tell us?" I could foresee the pain of reading the reviews of my first
novel, just as I could feel Hemingway's pain reading the reviews of
his later work. And I wanted to protest in the name of the pain itself
that not separated but joined us: The critic is obliged only to the truth
though he knows that truth is never completely in his grasp. Certainly
he cannot afford to reckon with private anguish and despair in which
he is forbidden to believe, like the novelist, inventing out of his friends
and his own shame Lady Brett or Robert Cohn.
And I looked up into Hemingway's smile-the teeth yellowish and
widely spaced, but bared in all the ceremonious innocence of a boy's
grin. He was suddenly, beautifully, twelve years old. A tough, cocky,
gentle boy still, but also a fragile, too-often-repaired old man, about
(how could I help knowing it?) to die. It puzzled me a little to dis–
cover him, who had never been able to invent a tragic protagonist, so
much a tragic figure himself-with meanings for all of us, meanings
utterly different from those of his myth, meanings I would have to
figure out later ... Yet he seemed, too, as we had always suspected,
one who had been
only
a boy and an old man, never what the rest
of us for too wearily long must endure being-all that lies between. I
could not help recalling the passage where Gertrude Stein tells of Hem–
ingway at twenty-three crying out that he was too young to be a
father. And I could hear him now in my inner ear crying out that he
was too young to be an old man. Too young to
be
an ancestor.
But he was not too young to be my ancestor, not too young for
me to resent as one resents what is terribly there when he is born.
I would not
be
able to say the expected kind things about him ever,
I knew, not even after he was dead. And who would understand or
