Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [170]
... You certainly remember the boys at the Turney Boys Home Orphanage. You remember how much fighting they did at J. E. B. Stuart? Well, my team played them in baseball and we beat them. I hit a single and a double and stole two bases. Afterward we visited them at the home. I learned that they fight so much out of fear. They’re really scared as I am of things. I wrote a play for them, which was loosely based on The Front Page, and it was a riot and went over very well. I’m just like one of them now... .
Getafe Air Base
Madrid
July 7, 1937
My Dearest Friend Gideon,
... It is with terrible sadness that I must tell you my beloved brother, Jeremy, was shot down... .
... Every night since his death I have dreamed not only of him, but of the boys I have shot down, strafed on the ground and bombed. I realize they are Nazis and Fascists but I cannot get out of my mind the sorrow in their homes now, because I realize the sorrow in my home. What might these young men have become? Have I killed a writer, an artist? How many beautiful boys lie under the Spanish soil... .
Oh, Gideon, my dear Gideon, I want to come home, but I continue to be enraged by what they have done to this beautiful land. ... If only I knew that you wouldn’t have to fight a war, it could all be worth it.
Norfolk
August 10, 1937
Dear Miss Abigail,
... I see your mom and dad every chance I get. They are holding up very well, but they wish you’d come home. So do I. You’ve done enough, really enough... .
Getafe Air Base
Madrid
October 20, 1937
Gideon! I HAVE MET ERNEST HEMINGWAY! You know, I’m sort of a curiosity, being a woman flier, and I went into Madrid for him to do a story about me and we’ve fast become drinking pals.
He has a room in the Florida Hotel, as do most of the journalists. The whole Republican territory has been half starved. No one has seen fresh meat for months. Well, Hemingway was on the fifth floor of the hotel (the two top stories have been blown away by artillery). He ushered me in, and there, hanging near the window, was a side of beef.
He covers the war with special maps, binoculars, pistols, compass, hobnail boots, and canteens filled with Scotch. The front lines are only a twenty-minute taxi drive from Madrid, so he showed me what the war looked like from the ground... . “Papa” started off as a neutral, but has gone heavily to the Loyalists. For such a great writer, he’s really strange in his fears about becoming politically involved... .
Remember how we discussed his personality? He does have a terrible masculinity problem. He has a lady friend on call and his escapades are notorious. He tried to collect my scalp but I told him I was desperately in love with a young man of thirteen and intended to be faithful to him.
The problem with “Papa,” as I see it, is that as soon as another person is in his presence, he has to put on a show of his bravado. He has created an image that sometimes makes him, as a person, larger than his writings. Everyone around him caters to him, even up to speaking “Hemingwayese.” I think that deep down inside, he is a very insecure man and had to create a public version of himself to deliberately mask his many fears.
One day “Papa” is going to have to take a long look in the mirror and realize he is not nearly as huge as he has inflated himself. When he realizes he can’t live up to the image he created, he’s going to be in serious trouble.
But he is a thing of beauty to watch at his work. He lets no one or nothing stand in his way when he’s after his story. He sloughs off bureaucrats and red tape and is powerfully arrogant and he is always right (in his own mind). I tell you these things because you might have to do the same in order to become a great novelist.
When I told him about the story you had written using the plot of A Farewell to Arms and setting it in Mexico, he roared with delight and penned to you the enclosed note... .
Dear Gideon Zadok,
Abigail Winters tells me you are going to become a great writer. Well, you’re off to