WAYS Of" WRITING ABOUT ONESELf"
8 7
demanding teacher named Morteza the Sprague, who was also an intel–
lectual mentor to Ralph Ellison and Jug Hamilton. Murray says:
Morreza Drexel Sprague expected you
to
proceed in terms of the
highest standards of formal scholarship, among other things, not
because he wanted you to become a carbon copy of any white man
who ever lived, not excepting Shakespeare and even Leonardo da
Vinci. But because to him you were the very special vehicle through
which contemporary man, and not just contemporary black man
even, could inherit the experience and insights of all recorded or deci–
pherable time. Because
to
him (as to everyone else on that all-black
faculty), your political commitment to specific social causes of your
own people went without saying. What after all were the immediate
political implications of
BcoLUlllfand
of all epic heroism? Nor was the
true commitment ever a matter of chauvinism or of xenophobia ...
commitment involves such epical exploits as penetrating frontiers and
thereby expanding your people's horizons of aspirations.
That's Albert Murray.
Now, everyone's favorite, Ernest Hemingway.
A Moveable Feast,
though a marvelous work, is often reviled as self-serving, as dishonest,
as an attempt
to
reduce his contemporaries and elevate himself. I don't
know if that's actually true. The reason I like
A Moveable Feast,
is that
it has an innocent quality
to
it that's not corny. Hemingway was capa–
ble, late in his life, of recapturing the feeling that he had as a young man
when he was in Paris. Hemingway, as we know, crashed and burned
much like his friend EScott ritzgerald, and it's very ironic when one
looks at the letters, because nearly the same thing got Hemingway-the
alcohol was one, but the others were all of those accidents, such as a
roof falling on his head, automobile accidents, a guy hitting him over
the head with a bottle,
etc.
I think that that in combination with the
alcohol began
to
have a very terrible effect on him as he went into his
forties. I believe this because I discovered, hanging around with some
boxers many years ago, that people who take a number of blows
to
the
head begin
to
have problems in middle age. And as we know, he didn't
really produce much between
for
Whom thc Bell Tolls
and his suicide
in
196
I.
I don't mean that he wasn't writing, but I'm saying he didn't
produce finished works on the order of what he had hoped
to
write.
After Hemingway died, and
A Mouea!J/c Feast
came out, some of
Hemingway's biographers said, this isn't really the book that Heming–
way wrote. But I would say it has many things in it that are extraordi–
narily beautiful, and I think that the Hemingway sense sings and rings
