The Books: Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker; edited by David Remnick; ‘How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?’, by Lillian Ross

Next up on the essays shelf:

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick

Life Stories is a collection of “profiles” from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick.

The following profile of Ernest Hemingway was written by Lillian Ross, and was published in 1950. Hemingway and Mary Welsh arrive in New York (Lillian picks them up at the Idlewild airport), and they are there for a few days, to talk to publishers, go to museums, and have a visit with “the Kraut” (as Hemingway refers to Marlene Dietrich, who makes an entertaining cameo in the profile).

So. It’s 1950. Where is Hemingway at this point in his life? It’s 5 years since the end of WWII. Hemingway, of course, was present at the liberation of Paris (and many other historic moments). He personally went to liberate his old pal Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. Most of his contemporaries had started dying off, Fitzgerald in 1940 (at a tragically young age), James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and all the rest. He had already had a full life of adventure and fame. He is only 51 years old at the time of this profile, but for a man who so prized physical activity and virility, you can sense here a bafflement/anger at his loss of physical power. This would just increase over the next decade which was rather brutal for him, despite brief bursts of his old intellectual power. He endured two plane crashes in the 50s, which left him debilitated by injuries, and his drinking had caught up to him. Although he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he hadn’t written a book the critics liked in years. He blusters about in this profile about how he doesn’t care about critics, but it seems like he had to have cared. That’s the impression I get. Of course he cared. If you’re a writer, and you had such fame as he had, and suddenly you are unable to write something that “hits” with the public/critical establishment … then where does that leave you? Who are you? Of course, he had a couple of brief bursts of creativity in the 50s, writing A Moveable Feast and Old Man and the Sea. But Old Man and the Sea is short, so short that you wonder if it is a final gasp from a man who used to churn out words unstoppably. He suffered from crushing depression, and would retreat for months on end, lying in bed, drinking to dull the pain. But all of that was in the future when this piece came out. I wonder what Hemingway thought of it.

Ernest Hemingway and Mary Welsh, Hemingway’s fourth wife

I haven’t done research on his reactions to the profile. But here is my impression, my guess, based on the end result. Hemingway felt comfortable with Lillian Ross. He spent a couple of days in her company, accompanied by his wife (the two come off as two peas in a pod), his son Patrick, and, occasionally, the “Kraut” – all people who loved him, gave him great leeway, and took care of him emotionally. My point here is that Hemingway clearly felt comfortable, to let his mouth run off, to just talk and talk and talk. Such moments often make great profiles, but often the profile reveals more than the subject may have realized. (We’ll get to Truman Capote’s famous profile of Brando, which was a similar situation.) What feels like a casual hanging-out conversation is actually being recorded by the writer in question, who is making observations, seeing things that the subject may not be aware of. Hemingway seems relaxed, in other words. This may seem like a good thing, but there’s a reason why people like George Clooney never “relax” in the presence of a journalist. People at press junkets or those who have interviewed him say that he is charming, personable, nice, and you get the impression that you are having an AWESOME interview with him, and then you go home and transcribe the tapes and realize that he said nothing of interest whatsoever, he revealed nothing. Clooney knows that his image is up to him, and he guards it carefully.

Again, I don’t know Hemingway’s reaction to Ross’ piece, and he might not have cared, but what I get here is a portrait of a man trying to work himself up to fighting weight, so to speak, trying to psych himself out, trying to talk himself up. The underlying feeling is one of, “Yeah, I’ve still got it, right? I’ve still got it.” The neverending refrain, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?”, which he says about 5 times in the piece, is a way to say, “Look at me. I’m Hemingway. I’m still the greatest of them all, right?” There’s something tragic about it.

At the same time, he is a fascinating raconteur, and his off-the-cuff comments are often brilliant. They all go to the Met to look at paintings, and Hemingway pontificates on why so-and-so is good, and what he learned from Picasso or whoever. He brags, quite a bit. He compares his own writing to the music of Bach, to a Picasso. He did in writing what those two did in music and paint. Meanwhile, his son points out a painting he likes, and his father tells him why he is wrong and why that painting is not good. Ross observes that the son, Patrick, stops pointing out the stuff he likes after that.

It’s small moments like that that end up adding up to a whole. Unfair, perhaps, because we all have such moments in our lives, when maybe we brag, or we’re not as kind/open/giving as we should be, whatever. This is a snapshot of a moment in time.

I actually ache for Hemingway here. It’s weird. There are all of these encounters, where he and an old friend punch each other in the stomach, playfully, but with an edge of violence, each one trying to prove what a tough guy he still is. Meanwhile, Hemingway is basically babied by his wife, Mary, who has to remind him to buy a new coat, get his glasses fixed, make sure you eat, etc. Again, nothing WRONG with any of this, it’s all human, but the cumulative effect leaves a reader (me) uneasy. I can feel Hemingway’s depression licking at his heels. Of course, I know “the end”. He would kill himself in 1961, after a terrible couple of years, when he was hospitalized, given shock treatment which deepened the depression. His ego was such that he could not be happy if he was not “the greatest”. The Old Man and the Sea is a wonderful book, but it’s quite thin, compared to his earlier successes … and you can feel that that is the best he can do. That is all he has left in him. (Although, seriously, if any of us who want to be writers “only” had Old Man and the Sea in us, we all should be very happy. But in Hemingway’s mind, it was a failure, representative of the death of his power.)

He has come to New York with his new manuscript, Across the River and Into the Trees, which would come out later that year, and nobody liked. Bad reviews. Here, though, that is still in the future. Hemingway blasts critics, and much of what he says is inspiring (the famous quote about “I know the ten-dollar words” is from this profile), but again, you feel like he doth protesteth too much. I see a man who DOES care, who IS hurt by his critical downfall, who IS anxious that he has “lost it”, that what he has lost he will never find again.

Also, there’s the drinking. He drinks throughout. He carries a flask to the museum. It’s an underlying uneasy detail.

This is not a hatchet job, I don’t want to make it seem like Ross crucifies Hemingway. She doesn’t. But I certainly get the sense that Hemingway was too relaxed in her presence, and not at the top of his game. I want to tell him to protect himself a little bit more. Then, of course, if he had protected himself, it wouldn’t have been as interesting a profile, now would it?

You can see here that Woody Allen’s impression of how Hemingway might have spoken in real life (in Midnight in Paris) is not so far-off the mark. It’s a parody, sure, but Hemingway actually did speak like that.

I love the snippet about how, when writing dialogue, it goes too fast for him to keep up with it. You can really hear that in his books, the dialogue feels so so real.

Here is an excerpt.

Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick; ‘How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?’, by Lillian Ross

I said that there was a tremendous amount of talk about him these days in literary circles – that the critics seemed to be talking and writing definitively not only about the work he had done but about the work he was going to do. He said that of all the people he did not wish to see in New York, the people he wished least to see were the critics. “They are like those people who go to ball games and can’t tell the players without a score card,” he said. “I am not worried about what anybody I do not like might do. What the hell! If they can do you harm, let them do it. It is like being a third baseman and protesting because they hit line dries to you. Line drives are regrettable, but to be expected.” The closest competitors of the critics among those he wished least to see, he said, were certain writers who wrote books about the war when they had not seen anything of war at first hand. “They are just like an outfielder who will drop a fly on you when you have pitched to have the batter hit a high fly to that outfielder, or when they’re pitching they try to strike everybody out.” When he pitched, he said, he never struck out anybody, except under extreme necessity. “I knew I had only so many fast balls in that arm,” he said. “Would make them pop to short instead, or fly out, or hit it on the ground, bouncing.”

A waiter arrived with the caviar and champagne, and Hemingway told him to open one of the bottles. Mrs. Hemingway came in from the bedroom and said she couldn’t find his toothbrush. He said that he didn’t know where it was but that he could easily buy another. Mrs. Hemingway said all right, and went back into the bedroom. Hemingway poured two glasses of champagne, gave one to me, and picked up the other one and took a sip. The waiter watched him anxiously. Hemingway hunched his shoulders and said something in Spanish to the waiter. They both laughed, and the waiter left. Hemingway took his glass over to the red couch and sat down, and I sat in the chair opposite him.

“I can remember feeling so awful about the first war that I couldn’t write about it for ten years,” he said, suddenly very angry. “The wound combat makes in you, as a writer, is a very slow-healing one. I wrote three stories about it in the old days – ‘In Another Country,’ ‘A Way You’ll Never Be,’ and ‘Now I Lay Me.'” He mentioned a war writer who, he said, was apparently thinking of himself as Tolstoy, but who’d be able to play Tolstoy only on the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. “He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him – bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendahl, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

He began his new book as a short story. “Then I couldn’t stop it. It went straight on as a novel,” he said. “That’s the way all my novels got started. When I was twenty-five, I read novels by Somersault Maugham and Stephen St. Vixen Benét.” He laughed hoarsely. “They had written novels, and I was ashamed because I had not written any novels. So I wrote ‘The Sun’ when I was twenty-seven, and I wrote it in six weeks, starting on my birthday, July 21st, in Valencia, and finishing it September 6th in Paris. But it was really lousy and the rewriting took nearly five months. Maybe that will encourage young writers so they won’t have to go get advice from their psychoanalysts. Analyst once wrote me, What did I learn from psychoanalysts? I answered, Very little but hope they had learned as much as they were able to understand from my published works. You never saw a counter-puncher who was punchy. Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own. Papa’s delivery of hark-learned facts of life.”

Hemingway poured himself another glass of champagne. He always wrote in longhand, he said, but he recently bought a tape recorder and was trying to get up the courage to use it. “I’d like to learn talk machine,” he said. “You just tell talk machine anything you want and get secretary to type it out.” He writes without facility, except for dialogue. “When the people are talking, I can hardly write it fast enough or keep up with it, but with an almost unbearable high manifold pleasure. I put more inches on than she will take, and then fly her as near as I know to how she should be flown, only flying as crazy as really good pilots fly crazy sometimes. Most of the time flying conservatively but with an awfully fast airplane that makes up for the conservatism. That way, you live longer. I mean your writing lives longer. How do you like it now, gentlemen?” The question seemed to have some special significance for him, but he did not bother to explain it.

I wanted to know whether, in his opinion, the new book was different from his others, and he gave me another long, reproachful look. “What do you think?” he said after a moment. “You don’t expect me to write ‘The Farewell to Arms Boys in Addis Ababa,’ do you? Or ‘The Farewell to Arms Boys Take a Gunboat’?” The book is about the command level in the Second World War. “I am not interested in the G.I. who wasn’t one,” he said, suddenly angry again. “Or the injustices done to me, with a capital ‘M.’ I am interested in the goddam sad science of war.” The new novel has a good deal of profanity in it. “That’s because in war they talk profane, although I always try to talk gently,” he said, sounding like a man who is trying to believe what he is saying. “I think I’ve got ‘Farewell’ beat on this one,” he went on. He touched his briefcase. “It hasn’t got the youth and the ignorance.” Then he asked wearily, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?”