MARK SHECHNER
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breeds without the law. The story may be fictitious- Hemingway
was a notorious fabricator of exploits- but the rage was authentic,
and the entire letter to which the murder story belongs is thick with
fury . Goaded to anger by a reporter from
McCall's
who was seeking
to interview members of his family , Hemingway threatened to cut
off his mother's allowance should she consent to talk. "I hate her guts
and she hates mine ," he added, and as for the reporter, "Please give
that woman such a throw out that she will think twice before she
comes down to the whore's end of our bar again." Strong stuff.
One is constantly brought up short by Hemingway's anger and
the callow social attitudes in which it commonly found expression.
"Boid," he wrote to his old boyhood chum William Smith, in the
goony frathouse lingo he affected with his hunting and fishing
buddies, "the number of genuwind all Caucasian white guys in the
world is limited. I should say that maybe there were 5 or 6 at the
most. ... Ther'd probably be a number more if they didn't marry
foecal matter in various forms." "You heard of course," he wrote to
Pound, who could be counted upon to sympathize, "of Steffens .
marriage to a 19 year old Bloomsbury kike intellectual." Elsewhere,
"Mason has kiked me so on money that I can't afford taxis." Michael
Arlen, whose writing had been likened to Hemingway's , was "some
little Armenian sucker after London names"; Samuel Roth's pirating
of Joyce's
Ulysses
"does not make one love the Jews any better ." In
one letter, he elaborated for the benefit ofJohn Dos Passos a fantasy
of seizing Key West for a private plantation to be called South–
western Island Republic . "Am at work on a project to re-enslave the
jigs overnight and am fixing up accomodations in the carferries to
run chinamen."
On the first night we massacre the catholics and the jews . The
second the protestants who have been lulled into a false sense of
security by the events of the first evening. The third night we
butcher the free thinkers, the athiests, communists and members
of the lighthouse service . The fourth day we fish the gulf and
capture another ship to feed our faithful jigs.
To Maxwell Perkins, who complained of the portrait of Robert
Cohn in
The Sun Also Rises,
he snorted, "And why not make aJew a
bounder in literature as well as in life? Do jews always have to be so
splendid in writing?"
All this sounds depressingly familiar. So many of Hemingway's
