“It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” – Norman Mailer
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Most of the talk was in Stein’s suite at the Algonquin Hotel, although some of it took place while they were out marching on Madison Avenue. The “conversation” as the piece was titled when it appeared in print several months later, was about the terrible thing that happens to American writers: how they feel they must create a new literature; how they get to be thirty-five or forty and the juices dry up, and then what happens? They stop writing altogether or they begin to repeat themselves formulaically. It was all so sad and tragic.
You could almost hear what was coming next. “What about Hemingway?” the interviewer asks, venturing his own opinion that Hemingway was good merely until after A Farewell to Arms – say, into the first years of the 1930s.
Oh no, Stein says, he wasn’t really any good after 1925. In the early short stories, he had it, but then he betrayed himself. You see, she said,
When I first met Hemingway he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion, and that was the stuff of his first stories; but he was shy of himself and began to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City – boy brutality about it, and so he was “tough” because he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was. Then it happened. I saw it happening and tried to save what was fine there, but it was too late. He went the way so many other Americans have gone before, they way they are still going. He became obsessed by sex and violent death.
She elaborated, testing a stubby finger in Manhattan hotel-room air.
It wasn’t just to find out what these things were; it was the disguise for the thing that was really gentle and fine in him, and then his agonizing shyness escaped into brutality. No, now wait – not real brutality, because the truly brutal man wants something more than bullfighting and deep-sea fishing and elephant killing or whatever it is now, and perhaps if Hemingway were truly brutal he could make a real literature out of those things; but he is not, and I doubt if he will ever again write truly about anything. He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other half is the man.
Obsessed by violence and sex. Developing a shield, your big Kansas City-boy brutality, because your sensitivity to life deeply shames you. A mask for the thing in you that’s really gentle and fine.
I’ve always wondered if at least part of the reason that Ernest Hemingway so grew to revile Gertrude Stein was because he understood how close to the bone he could scrape. A writer and Hemingway friend named Prudencio de Pereda once used a baseball analogy to describe some of the better psychological tries by Hemingway’s detractors: the ball looks beautiful from the instant it leaves the bat, seemingly headed straight for the upper deck, clear homer, only to veer off in the last seconds to just this side of the foul pole. It ends up another strike on the batter, but, damn, wasn’t it fine watching that thing fly?
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Appreciating the uncelebrated life of Walter Houk has helped me to appreciate all over again and in new ways the myth-swallowing life of Ernest Hemingway. It’s as if he’s single-handedly brought him back around – the goodness, in and amid all the squalor. In astronomy there’s a technique known as “averted vision.” The idea is that sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you’re not looking at it directly. It’s as if what you’re really after is sitting at the periphery rather than at the center of your gaze. Something of this same hope and principle was at work in telling Arnold Samuelson’s story. But the “Maestro’s” life was a mirror opposite.
Walter Houk is in his mid-eighties, as I write. He is a small, trim, learned, meticulous, and sometimes fussy and nitpicky man, a widower, an accomplished former journalist, a failed painter, an ex-outdoorsman and naturalist, an ex-Foreign Service officer, a once-long-ago midshipman, who lives alone, has long lived alone, quietly, unobtrusively, a little sadly, in a comfortable house, on an ordinary street, in a tucked-away corner of greater Los Angeles. That house, which is kept as tidy as the officers’ quarters on a submarine, is full of old Hemingway photographs, nautical charts, unpublished book-lengthy Houk manuscripts, Esso highway maps of Cuba in the 1950s, Havana bar menus, Christmas cards with Hemingway’s greetings on them – and a lot more. Entering his house is like walking into a hidden Hemingway museum.
Walter Houk, who keeps insisting he won’t be around too much longer, has set down his pencil. His own words have tripped something in him. He is growing weary and needs to nap. At dinner tonight, stoked with a vodka martini and a glass of wine, he’ll say:
You see, for a long time in my life, I avoided a consideration of all the negatives about Hemingway. It was just so politically correct to dislike the man. I didn’t know what to argue against, or where to start arguing. I didn’t want to be bothered. It wasn’t going to change anything I knew. My whole experience with Ernest Hemingway is the conventional diswisdom. He didn’t wreck my life. It was a hugely positive experience to be around him, for those several years in the fifties, getting to go out on the boat and all the rest. I was half his age. He treated me kindly. He treated my wife, Nita, kindly. It was as if we were sort of kids around the place, and I think he liked that, because his own kids so often weren’t there, and he missed them. He wanted to help us with our lives. The vultures have long ago gathered around the Hemingway corpse and rendered their judgment. But their judgment’s wrong; at least its incomplete. I don’t think the terrible vile side defines him. It was a facet of his character. He was a great man with great faults. We should not allow the faults to overshadow the accomplishments. He said in a letter once – I think it was to one of his children – that ‘a happy country has no history.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that was his point. You could say a happy man has no biography – who’d want to read it? I think of him as a Beethoven, for the way he changed the language. He’s a Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians. He threatens all the little academics sitting at their computers. Somehow or other you’ve got to try to help rescue him from all that.”
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In all his fiction Hemingway made up things from what he knew, telling terrific lies about real people; conflating, rearranging, conjoining and transposing different characters and events from his life so what he made up was somehow truer than if it had actually happened. Lies built on deeper truths.
The great literary historian Malcolm Crowley once wrote that cable-ese for Hemingway “was an exercise in omitting everything that can be taken for granted,” another way to understand how he arrived at his literary method, an attempt to relay as much information as possible in as few words as possible.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Emily Dickinson) is another approach to understanding Hemingway’s (symbolist) method.
In all of Hemingway’s work, you end up feeling more than you necessarily understand: another core Hemingway writing value.
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If Walloon doesn’t often appear by name, lakes are nonetheless present in some of Hemingway’s finest Michigan stories. Sometimes their presence is ghostly, and at other times you can smell the dried fish guts and smeared nightcrawlers wedged down into the floorboards of a rowboat- oars creaking and groaning in their locks – making its way across the unnamed water.
Sunny arrived in the summer of 1910, when Hemingway turned eleven. She was an eighteen-footer in a dory style, meaning that she had a flat bottom and fairly high sides and a sharp bow. She was powered by a sputtery Gray Marine inboard motor that was perpetually hard to start and leaked rainbows of oil on the surface of the lake, which made the head of the family sputter mild oaths like “Oh rats.”
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