LEONARD KRIEGEL
425
ality is not part of the story are taken seriously. He may not have
thought so, but as Young so correctly sensed, Nick knows better than
his creator. The child of the middle class can accept pain; he can even
be eager for it, since he, too, must measure his prowess. But he must
avoid humiliation-and homosexuality is a form of humiliation.
It
was a theme that was to haunt Hemingway, but perhaps nowhere did
he state it more succinctly or more analytically than in
Death in the
Afternoon,
the most bloated and even pompous of his books: "Courage
comes from such a short distance; from the heart to the head; but when
it goes no one knows how far away it goes. " Nick might not have
known , but he was smart enough not to want to take any chances of
finding out.
His creator was more complex. Even in those personal encounters
he orchestrated, Hemingway appears to have been an unusually
"dirty" fighter. He cast off the traditional Protestant virtue of "fair
play" in an attempt to adopt the ethics of a street fighter. As a fighter,
his lack of talent was transformed into a lack of integrity. The man's
style quickly became the writer's public substance. His famous fights
with Morley Callaghan and Max Eastman are reflections of this.
Perhaps even more revealing is an incident described by Donald Honig
in a recent book,
Baseball When The Grass Was Green.
Billy Herman,
a superb second baseman for the Chicago Cubs and Brooklyn Dodgers,
recalls that in the spring of 1942, when the Dodgers trained in Havana,
Hemingway invited four of the Dodgers, Herman, Augie Galan, Larry
French, and Hugh Casey to accompany him to a Havana gun club and
then
to
his house. He insisted that they drink with him, fed them, gave
each of them an autographed copy of
For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Quite
suddenly, he challenged Casey to a fight. "As Hugh was putting his
gloves on, Hemingway suddenly hauled off and belted him." Casey
then knocked Hemingway down repeatedly, until Hemingway "kicked
Casey in the balls. " He then insisted that Casey return the next day to
fight a duel. '''And he's dead serious about it," insists Herman. "He
wanted to kill Casey. Hughie'd got the better of him, and Hemingway
wanted to kill him."
IV
None of this is to suggest what Hemingway's personality was like,
or, for that matter, whether he can be said to have even possessed a
personality. Modern writers tend to create personas rather than to have
