216
PARTISAN REVIEW
In April went to Cuba for 10 days and stayed 65 - caught 32
swordfish -learned a lot about Cuba.
Last month caught 18 good dolphin, 5 good wahoos, 6 kingfish
(one 54 lbs), a 48-pound snapper, and 7 marlin.
Hemingway's famed precision was never more punctilious than
in tabulating the day's slaughter, and there is scarcely anything more
repellent in these letters than his repeated self-congratulation over
his
122
"sures," which, presumably, were bagged during a brief few
months of active combat in 1944. During the Second World War,
while attached as a correspondent to Colonel "Buck" Lanham's
regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, Hemingway was usually
armed to the teeth, for which the Army once nearly sent him packing
for violating the Geneva Convention. His correspondent's quarters
resembled a munitions dump, and he himself was often to be found
in the thick of battle. At one point he even took command of a ragtag
band of French resistance fighters, with whom he liberated a num–
ber of Paris bistros on August
25.
Colonel Lanham held him in high
esteem as a fighting man and paid him the compliment (or so
Hemingway took it) of calling him the most ruthless man he had
ever known.
It
was some time around the liberation of Paris in 1944
that Hemingway killed his
122
"Krauts," among them, he boasted to
Charles Scribner several years later, an SS officer who had been
taken captive.
One time I killed a very snotty SS kraut who, when I told
him I would kill him unless he revealed what his escape route
signs were said: You will not kill me, the kraut stated. Because
you are afraid to and because you are a race of mongrel
degenerates . Besides it is against the Geneva Convention.
What a mistake you made, brother, I told him and shot him
three times in the belly fast and then, when he went down on his
knees, shot him on the topside so his brain came out of his mouth
or I guess it was his nose .
The next SS I interrogated talked wonderfully.
The story is told with alarming violence. Hemingway was not
just relating a grisly wartime experience; he was issuing a warning
that Scribner was expected to pass on to others: don't fuck with
Papa. The racial note here is unmistakable; his contempt for the
snotty SS Kraut was one with his omnibus contempt for all lesser
