HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
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writer, one of the first things he did in a book called
Les Testaments
trahis
was to come up with a list of benign villains of the Western tra–
dition, of whom I can recall three: Adorno, Max Brod, and you. My
question is: would you care to review for us his case against you, and
respond to it?
Jeffrey Meyers:
Yes. In a way it was an honor to have a whole chapter
in a book by Kundera, who is an important writer, though not one of
my favorites-even less so now that he's attacked me. But still, I remem–
ber I was in Boston then, by chance, and the friend I was staying with
said, "Oh, there's an attack on you." And I thought, "Oh, good fun,"
because I like attacks, and I like responding in print.
By the way, if somebody attacks you in a review, most of the time it's
better not to answer, because they always get the last word, and you get
the worst of it, unless they really have distorted the facts in a way that
you can pin them down. What annoyed me about Kundera is that he
thought he knew more about Hemingway than 1 did. I've written three
books on Hemingway, and I am American, and I know most of the peo–
ple in the Hemingway family. I've been teaching his works my whole
life, and I've been to all the places where Hemingway was.
The disagreement had to do with the interpretation of a short story,
and I'm not absolutely sure what it was, but it might have been "Indian
Camp." Kundera sort of made fun of my interpretation. Fair enough.
But he annoyed me by never coming up with an interpretation of his
own. "Indian Camp" is a very tricky Hemingway story, and it has to do
with an Indian woman in childbirth in the woods. In the story, Hem–
ingway's doctor-father delivers the child, using fishing equipment as his
surgical instruments: the knife, the thread, and the hook. The experience
of the birth and the surgery afterwards in this crude but essential way
makes the husband, who was there the whole time, commit suicide. So
the question is, why, if the husband couldn't bear it, did he stay there
and experience the whole thing, instead of just saying "I can't take this,
I'm leaving, I'll come back when it's allover"? Because as a result, the
child is born healthy and survives, and the father dies. I wrote a kind of
satirical article about this, showing all the different interpretations of
the story, all of which I thought were foolish. In fact Phillip Young, a
very clever Hemingway scholar, said the reason he killed himself is
because the uncle in the story hands out cigars to everybody, but he for–
got to give one to the husband, and that's why he kills himself. That
interpretation wasn't any more ridiculous than a lot of the others. Well,
I remembered from anthropological reading a concept called
couvade,
