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By Root 1059 0

Stein and Pound as celebrities—at least in the contemporary sense? In the ’twenties Stein and Pound were relatively obscure and actually it was Hemingway who was responsible for getting Stein’s first work published—The Making of Americans. He went to them to learn. One might say he cultivated the celebrated, but surely not that he ever cultivated celebrities. If that’s what amused him in life he would hardly have holed up in such out-of-the-way places as San Francisco de Paula, Key West, or Ketchum, Idaho, or devoted himself to the safaris and the ferias. Actually his range of friends was enormous—generals, prize fighters, baseball players, jockeys, matadors, actresses, revolutionaries, writers, hunters, tycoons, and others he described as living their lives “all the way up.” He liked these people and he sought out their experiences. But by no means were they all celebrities. A constant boarder in Cuba was a retired Spanish seaman. He was supposed to know an incredible number of sea chanties, but he drank and I never saw him in condition to get any of them out. The one friend Hemingway often talked about was Jean-Franco, the son of the family in whose home he convalesced following his wounding at Fossalta di Piave. Also Lanham, who commanded the Twenty-second Regiment of the Fourth Division. Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s was a friend whose death he never got over. Besides, what does this have to do with Hemingway’s ability as a writer?[4]

You suggest that Hemingway’s writing was going so badly that he took to the bottle. Absurd. He always drank and he liked it. You say he wrote “very little.” Not so. I believe the only completely slack period in his writing was during the war years, when he wrote just enough articles for Look to qualify as a war correspondent—six, I believe. In San Francisco de Paula he wrote almost every day (see interview in Paris Review #18). Recently boxes full of unpublished manuscripts have turned up from his Key West days. In the last years he was working on the vast book of which The Old Man and the Sea is a small section, completing a series of Paris sketches and reminiscences, and revising and up-dating an edition of Death in the Afternoon (some of the material for this appeared in a different form in “The Dangerous Summer” in Life). What has been published of this is bad, of course, and Leland Heyward tells me that much of the big novel is bad too—at least the volume which he read, which is about submarine hunting off the coast of Cuba with your Yale classmate Winston Guest on the Pilar. Some of it he says is wonderful, but much of it tedious and worked and dull. On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to read some of the Paris-in-the-’twenties reminiscences, and the sections I read (on Stein and Ford Madox Ford) were very funny and fresh, and curiously detached considering they are told in the first person, which so often, as Edmund Wilson points out, causes Hemingway to lose his bearings, not merely as a critic of life, but even as a craftsman. But even if the quality of these pieces should prove questionable, certainly Hemingway can’t be accused of neglecting his profession to wallow in praise and “good times,” which is the portrait you give.

You suggest that Hemingway’s lack of confidence, his inability to write, caused deep depressions which he tried to relieve with shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. I don’t think you or I can, or should, speculate on what caused those depressions. A whole complex of problems, physical and mental, may have been responsible. His closest friends believe the depressions were a natural consequence of his physical ills—which, I might add, were numerous and debilitating. He had kidney trouble. His liver was bad. You could see the bulge of it stand out from his body like a long, fat leech. His family had a history of high blood pressure and he, to his sorrow and considerable worry, was no exception. The bathroom wall at the finca was covered with penciled diastolic/systolic recordings. His letters invariably referred to his health, usually a postscript with