• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1109 0

a kind of inspired baby talk when he was going good.[1] When he was not going good, it was just baby talk.[2] Or so the critics said and the hell with them. Most of the tricks were good tricks and they worked fine for a while especially in the short stories. Ernest was stylish in the hundred-yard dash but he didn’t have the wind for the long stuff. Later on the tricks did not look so good. They were the same tricks but they were not fresh any more and nothing is worse than a trick that has gone stale. He knew this but he couldn’t invent any new tricks. It was a great pity and one of the many things in life that you can’t do anything about. Maybe that was why his smile was not a good smile.

After 1930, he just didn’t have it any more. His legs began to go and his syntax became boring and the critics began to ask why he didn’t put in a few subordinate clauses just to make it look good. But the bartenders still liked him and the tourists liked him too. He got more and more famous and the big picture magazines photographed him shooting a lion and catching a tuna and interviewing a Spanish Republican militiaman and fraternizing with bullfighters and helping liberate Paris and always smiling bushily and his stuff got worse and worse. Mr. Hemingway the writer was running out of gas but no one noticed it because Mr. Hemingway the celebrity was such good copy. It was all very American and in 1954 they gave him the Nobel Prize and it wasn’t just American any more. The judges were impressed by “the style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration” he had shown in The Old Man and the Sea, which he had published in Life two years earlier. Life is the very biggest of the big picture magazines and Life is exactly where The Old Man and the Sea belonged. Literary-prize judges are not always clever. This is something you know and if you don’t know it you should know it. They gave him the prize and the King of Sweden wrote to him. Mr. Hemingway meet Mr. Bernadotte.

After 1930 his friends were not named Anderson or Pound or Stein. They were named Charles Ritz and Toots Shor and Leonard Lyons and Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper. He almost had a fight with Max Eastman because he thought Max Eastman had questioned his virility and he almost fought a duel with someone he thought might have insulted the honor of Ava Gardner but he didn’t have the fight and he decided that Ava Gardner’s honor had not been insulted after all. It is often difficult to tell about honor. It is something you feel in your cojones. Or somewhere. He liked Marlene Dietrich very much. They had good times together. He called her “The Kraut” and she called him “Papa.” His wife called him “Papa” too. Many other people called him “Papa.” He liked being called “Papa.”

He wrote a novel called Across the River and Into the Trees. It was not a good novel. It was a bad novel. It was so bad that all the critics were against it. Even the ones who had liked everything else. The trouble with critics is that you can’t depend on them in a tight place and this was a very tight place indeed. They scare easy because their brains are where their cojones should be and because they have no loyalty and because they have never stopped a charging lion with a Mannlicher double-action .34 or done any of the other important things. The hell with them. Jack Dempsey thought Across the River was OK. So did Joe Di Maggio. The Kraut thought it was terrific. So did Toots Shor. But it was not OK and he knew it and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He was a big man and he was famous and he drank a great deal now and wrote very little. He lived in Havana and often went game fishing and Life photographed him doing it. Sometimes he went to Spain for the bullfights and he made friends with the famous bullfighters and wrote it up in three installments for Life. He had good times with his friends and his admirers and his wife and the tourists and the bartenders and everybody talked and drank and laughed and was gay but it all went away when he was alone. It was bad when he