Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Page 2

  “Toby, I’ll read ’im. I’ll read anything he writes. But he asked me a lot of dumb questions that hurt my feelings. I think it’s better if we stay away from each other.”

  Toby went back to the kitchen to deliver this message. I kept on leaning against the back wall of the patio, still seething and nursing the rum.

  A few minutes later Toby was back. “Look, mon, Papa really feels bad. He asked me to tell you again, he likes you. He wants to make it up to you. Like to take you fishing in the morning.”

  But I had heard about “Papa’s” fishing expeditions. If someone hooked the first fish, he was teed off. And God help you if you boated the biggest. I liked deep-sea fishing, loved to be out on the water. But it wasn’t life-and-death with me, as everything was with “ Papa.”

  “Tell him thanks but I’d just as soon get my own boat. I c’n take the family. More relaxing.”

  “All right, mon.” I had never heard Toby argue with anyone. It wasn’t subservience but instinctive respect for other people’s ways of seeing things. Unlike friend “Papa,” who was a highbrow with lowbrow affectations, Toby was a genuine lowbrow with unspoken and unspoiled sensitivity. As I got to know them both better, I began to feel that Toby was the man Ernest truly wanted to be. I could understand why “Papa” liked him so much. It wasn’t simply because Toby hero-worshiped him, although it seemed to me that the need for such worship had already begun to poison the Hemingway well.

  A few days later the Hemingways left town, and Key West settled down again. But Toby and Betty were still convinced that “Papa” and I were meant to be friends, and that in time they would bring us together. “You two guys would like one another,” they kept insisting, urging me to give him another chance. I began to feel that maybe I was being the difficult one, that he had apologized in his own proud way and that perhaps I should be a little more forgiving.

  The following winter I happened to be at the Bruces’ when a phone call came in from “Papa” in Cuba, and when they told him I was there he asked them to put me on the phone. He was warm and friendly. He asked me if I was writing and I said yes, working on another book, and he said he was working on a book, too, a new novel and he couldn’t tell yet whether it was any good. He didn’t ask me what mine was about and I didn’t ask him about his. He said Toby had told him we had been tarpon fishing and that I had caught one large enough to mount and he urged me to try the waters around Cay Sal, between Key West and Cuba, one of his favorite fishing grounds. He sounded the way the Bruces described him. Couldn’t have been nicer.

  A year later my book was finished—it was called The Disenchanted—and this time, for the winter respite, we decided to move on from Key West to Cuba. Toby steered us to “Papa’s Hotel,” the Ambos Mundos, and told us to be sure to call “Papa,” who (the Bruces assured me) would like to invite us out to the Finca Vigia for lunch.

  At the front desk of the old Spanish-Colonial hotel—the kind I took to immediately, with its faded tiles and worn mahogany—the clerk said there was a message from Don Ernesto. Frankly, I was pleased, in a good mood about the success of my book and more than ready for a truce. But the message from El Papa was: When I arrived, he wanted it clearly understood that I was not to call him. The clerk passed this on to me in a world-weary monotone. I had the feeling he was accustomed to handling these negative invitations from El Maestro.

  I made some phone calls to learn the nature of my sins. From Arthur Mizener, who had written the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald; from Harvey Breit of the New York Times Book Review, another friend of Ernest’s and mine who had made it his mission to bring us together; finally, from Toby himself, who got it straight from “Papa,” I discovered what it was I had done to him this time. The Disenchanted drew in good part on my ill-fated cross-country trip from Hollywood to Hanover, New Hampshire, with Scott Fitzgerald to write a movie with him about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. My central character—the tormented, fading novelist scrambling for movie money so he could shore up his literary reputation—had been based on all the “failed priests” (as Scott had called them) who had worked for my father, the producer B. P. Schulberg. I had known them well—Herman Mankiewicz, Vincent Lawrence, John V. A. Weaver, Edwin Justus Mayer—all of them desperate for that “second chance.” Still, I would not argue that Scott Fitzgerald and my Manley Halliday were brothers.

  And that, it seemed, was my problem, or was it Ernest’s? Scott Fitzgerald was “Papa’s” friend. Scott and Zelda belonged to “Papa.” “Papa” was outraged that I would dare invade his territory. In his not so humble opinion, both Mizener and I were “gravediggers,” disturbing the bones of his old friend, who should be allowed to rest in dignity and peace. “Papa” had already fired off furious letters to Mizener and Breit protesting my invasion of Scott’s privacy. Oh yes, I could hear the voice of our literary god bellowing down from his finca: “What the hell do you know about Scott Fitzgerald, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

  And I could see him pushing his hard belly against me and trying to bull me up against the wall. And hear myself trying to hold my temper as I recited my own knowledge of Scott—no, maybe not so deep as Ernest’s—but that ordeal at Winter Carnival had brought us together, and when we got back to California we had visited back and forth and had remained friends.

  In the autumn of what was to be his last year on this earth, he had volunteered to write what turned out to be a rave notice of Sammy for the book jacket and, just a few weeks before the end, in his modest flat off Sunset Boulevard, he had written a touching inscription in my first edition of his Tender Is the Night and had shown me the opening chapters of The Last Tycoon.

  No, “Papa,” maybe I didn’t know your Scott Fitzgerald from the opening bell, but I had seen him go a couple of rounds, a name fighter from the East who had blown his title, like Pinkey Mitchell. Actually, I had been struck by Scott’s generosity, his interest in and sympathy for young writers. Even with his back against the wall, practically pushed through the wall, he had gone out of his way for “Pep” (Nathanael) West, as he had for me and, some twenty years earlier, for Ernest himself. Gratitude was not an easy emotion for “Papa,” and so, when I’d had an opportunity to look through Scott’s papers at Princeton, I had been surprised to find canceled checks from Scott to Ernest for $100 each, quite a lot of them from the young, hot author of This Side of Paradise to the young, still undiscovered Hemingway. Not only that, but an appeal from Ernest to Scott to help him leave his “Jew publishers” (Covici-Friede) for Scott’s far more prestigious Scribner’s. As the record shows, Scott did intercede for Ernest with Scribner’s, which would publish him to the end of his career. “Gratitude” would be expressed only in the reverse English of “Papa’s” mean-spirited postmortem on Scott in A Moveable Feast.

  But that was years later, and this was now at the Ambos Mundos. I was beginning to feel like Charlie Chaplin in City Lights with its classic running gag: Whenever the big, rich heavy is drunk, he loves Charlie and insists he come home with him as his guest. But when his fat host wakes up in the morning, now sober, and sees Charlie, he says, “Who is this bum?” and throws him out. It happens all through the picture, and gets funnier every time. But this thing with “Papa” didn’t strike me as all that funny.

  Toby took it so seriously that he actually flew over from Key West to see if he could patch things up. “Papa’s kinda in a bad way right now,” he tried to explain. “The new book [Across the River and Into the Trees] is taking a beating. The worst of it is critics are trying to tell Papa he’s washed up, that this book is gonna finish him. They think he’s run out of gas and beginning to repeat himself. So it’s a tough time for him. And then, when he saw your book doing so well and on a subject he feels belongs to him—well, I still think he should be big about it and ask you up, but that’s the way he gets sometimes. He’s feelin’ lower’n the belly of a rattlesnake that just slipped off the sidewalk into the gutter. But I still think, if you really got to know him, and he got to k
now you …”

  “Toby, thanks, but look, Cuba is a big island. And ‘Papa’ doesn’t own it.” Then, half-kidding, I added, “Why doesn’t he take everything from Havana up? And I’ll take from Havana down, like Veradero. And he doesn’t have to ask me up, and I don’t have to ask him down.”

  Toby felt bad, but loyally went up to the finca to see “Papa” and then drove down to the house on the beach I had taken for the winter.

  “Papa says he’s peed off at you about this Fitzgerald thing, but he’s having a lot of other trouble. That little Italian princess is there [the one who had sat for her portrait as the aging colonel’s inamorata in Across the River], and Miss Mary ain’t too happy about that, even if the girl came over with her Mama as chaperone. It’s just Papa worried about his age and needing to feel young again. I still think when things get better for Papa he’ll get over his mad on you.”

  I thought of the Charlie Chaplin running gag. I didn’t want to be at the whim of a man who asked me in when he felt good and threw me out when the light turned red. But Toby was still determined to keep working on “Papa.”

  A few years later—after the opening of On the Waterfront—I was back at the Bruces’ in Key West when another phone call came in from “Papa.” He was back on top again: After striking out with Across the River, he had hit one out of the ballpark with The Old Man and the Sea. Finally he had come to the perfect story for his knowledge and feeling and enthusiasm. Here was a Hemingway redeemed, at the top of his form, pleasing the critics as much as he had displeased them his last time out, raking in, along with the praise, a lot of money, which was important to him, too, and setting himself up for the Nobel he already felt he deserved.

  Once again the Bruces insisted I get on the phone to say hello to “Papa.” This time he was in the happy euphoria of Charlie’s tormentor in City Lights. He had not yet seen Waterfront, he said, but he had heard from Harvey Breit that it was “great.” Harvey had also told him I was finishing the Waterfront novel I had started when it looked as if Hollywood resistance would keep the movie from ever getting made. “You’ve really done a lot of good work,” the benign “Papa” kept pouring it on. Aside from the City Lights image, I couldn’t help thinking of the cliché or truism about the Germans “who were either at your feet or at your throat.”

  But I managed to thank Ernest and to congratulate him. “The Old Man is really something,” I told him. He deserved a lot of points for trying so hard and being so true to the best that was in him when he was good. When the artist in him won the Indian-wrestling match with the bullshit artist, I was tempted to add, but restrained myself.

  “Maybe when Toby comes over next time you’ll come over with him,” “Papa” said. He was back to inviting me in again. Next time. How many fallings-in and fallings-out would there be between now and next time? Anyway, I didn’t tell him in this friendly chat that now I had my own chip on the shoulder. Another mutual friend, reporter Sam Boal, had told me the story. He had crossed to Europe with the Hemingways and the Peter Viertels. Mrs. Viertel was my first love, Jigee, and my first wife. When our daughter was only two, Jigee and Peter, a young Hollywood friend of mine, had seduced each other and I had lost her. Probably because I was jealous, I resented Peter’s hero-worshiping friendship with “Papa.” They all (including Jigee) made a fetish of shooting well and what I call “the Pamplona syndrome,” a kind of self-conscious stylish rowdyism that irritated me. On the trip over—according to Sam—“Papa” had made it uncomfortably obvious to everybody that he was drawn to Jigee, and vice versa. He would invite her down to his stateroom and read aloud to her from the work-in-progress, the flawed Across the River. Jigee, usually a tough critic, had been awed, flattered, and taken in. On deck, Mary Hemingway had leaned on the railing with Sam Boal and said, “You think he’s going to marry her? I don’t think the son of a bitch can afford it.”

  At the Gritti Palace in Venice—so the “in people” gossiped—Jigee had practically moved in with “Papa” for a month. Later, from Ketchum, Idaho, my daughter, then almost twelve, had written me that she had met a very nice man who liked to ski and shoot with Mommy and who read aloud to her and liked cats a lot.

  I didn’t wish Peter Viertel much good luck, but he was my daughter’s stepfather now and, according to her, an attentive and helpful one. I resented “Papa” butting in on them, a law unto himself, his own morality. I wished the literary life weren’t so ingrown and incestuous. First Peter, my young novelist-friend; then “Papa,” and then Irwin Shaw, Peter’s best friend, cornered by “Papa,” not in Sloppy Joe’s but in “21.” Ticked off by the success of Shaw’s The Young Lions, “Papa” had asked him what was apparently the standard Hemingway question, “What do you know about war, for Christ’s sweet sake?” As Irwin described it to me later, “I told the son of a bitch that I’d be waiting at the bar if he wanted to go outside with me.” “Papa” never came back to the bar. I would have bought a ticket for that one.

  Anyway, as to incestuous: It seemed that sooner or later every writer messed around with every other writer’s wife. In the literary world, everybody knew everybody else, too well. It was what most people thought life in Hollywood was like.

  There were a lot of galloping egos in Hollywood, but they would have had to run like John Henry to keep up with an ego like “Papa’s.” Gary Cooper and Cary Grant and Freddie March and other movie stars I knew would never crowd me with, “What-do-you-know-about …?”

  Not that I could fault Ernest that last time on the phone: He couldn’t have been nicer. He was actor-nice when he wanted to be and, even when dispensing patronizing crap, still fun to talk to.

  I didn’t take Ernest up on his invitation. I never did go to the finca. The next time I saw him was about two years later in Havana, just after Fidel and his barbudos took the city. I was covering the story for a magazine. I was in a dark, narrow restaurant Toby had recommended, and it was fun because a young Fidelista captain and a bunch of his young guerrillas were there drinking and singing revolutionary songs. All of a sudden, “Papa” was there, towering over me at the table.

  “Did you go to Jigee’s funeral?” he asked me. She had died a terrible death, lingering in agony for weeks after her nightgown caught on fire from a cigarette. When I said no—I had been in Mexico and had not heard about it until it was over—“Papa” said, “I hear Peter wasn’t there, either. That isn’t right. One thing we do, we bury our dead.” He didn’t exactly salute, but made a small gesture as if about to. I was seething again. I got very quiet, like that time about fifteen years earlier in Key West when he first came at me. Damn it, Jigee had been my girl, not “Papa’s.” We’d had six years together, and a daughter we were both very proud of, and we had managed to stay close through the years. All “Papa” had done was brush against her for a little while. “Bury our dead.” The posturing. Why was the beau geste so important to him? There was something so … literary about it. How much was he actually feeling for Jigee? I was tempted to ask, “What in hell do you know about Jigee, for Christ’s sweet sake?” Instead, I just put my head down.

  After a few moments, he asked me how long I planned to be in town, and I said until I got the story and had a chance to interview Fidel. To my relief, he didn’t say anything about coming out to the finca. I’d had it with Hemingway and his goddam finca. I had the feeling he wasn’t too crazy about my being over here covering the Fidelista victory. I knew he was thinking that, like prizefighting and deep-sea fishing and war, Fidel now belonged to him. I had been in Veradero when Batista took over in 1952, and now I had seen him fall. But Cuba unquestionably belonged to “Papa” until he decided to let it go back into the public domain.

  Just the same, there are those marvelous stories and that clean language and the Nobel he deserved. He was true to himself when he was standing there throwing away hours and days of longhand, starting over, and over again, never giving up the quest for good, better, best. He deserved to be admired, as I admired him, from afar.


  He wrote “The Battler” and “Fifty Grand,” high on my own list of favorite fight stories. “The Undefeated” is a beauty on bullfighting. Death in the Afternoon, for all its excesses, has a lot to say about the dangers any artist faces, about the need to be brave in the face of danger and adversity. Green Hills of Africa is cruel but full of natural wonder. His stock will go up and go down and up and down. He had a curl in the middle of his forehead—or was it his brain?—but when he was good, good and dedicated, he was very, very good. And so, in the end, I had to forgive him all the personal stuff that got in the way.

  When Toby Bruce drove out to recover at my place after the funeral in Ketchum, where “Papa” had put a shotgun to his head and put an end to the agony—just like his Papa—we talked about all he had done, the books, the long journey and the friends. Toby was badly shaken. “He was really good people. He had a lot of hangups. Hating his Mama and ashamed for his Daddy. Trouble with his brother Leicester, who was always jealous of Papa. It was a pretty good life until it went bad. He got a lot of fun out of life. When he was on vacation, there was nobody more fun to be around. I was always hoping you two would finally hit it off. Until this last year, at the Mayo Clinic, when they told him he couldn’t drink, couldn’t do this ‘’n’ that, all the things he loved, well, life just wasn’t worth going on with anymore.”

  For Toby’s sake, I tried to say only the best things about Ernest. Things that were true, and leaving out the bad, the way he had to puff out his chest like a pouter pigeon, and bait me with bully questions about Lee Houck and Pinkey Mitchell and Pete Latzo.

  For through all those years I had been unable to forget the first encounter, when he was bellying me up against the rear wall of the Bruces’ patio and asking me what was essentially a literary question: “What do you know about prizefighting, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

  But if we were to turn the question around—if we were to put it to him, “What do you know about writing, for Christ’s sweet sake?”—we’d have to give him the round and raise his hand at the end of the contest.