BOOKS

Old Hem, the sea and a kid brother

Patrick Skene Catling

WITH HEMINGWAY: A YEAR IN KEY WEST AND CUBA by Arnold Samuelson

Severn House, .£16.95

THE DANGEROUS SUMMER by Ernest Hemingway

Hamish Hamilton, £9.95

islands used by drug-smugglers on the way from Colombia to the United States, there is a small, shabby hotel with a busy bar and no dining room where Ernest Hemingway lived while he was writing Islands in the Stream. The novel is part of his uncom- pleted fictional account of his experiences in the second world war, when he enthu- siastically, though not very effectively, cruised in his fishing boat off Cuba in search of German submarines. 'The Stream' is the Gulf Stream, which flows between Bimini and Florida. Fishing for marlin in that part of the Atlantic is good and true — better than the books about it.

The proprietor of the hotel set aside a sombrely masculine room, all dark wood and leather, to display photographs of Hemingway and blown-up fishy quotations from the novel. One of the photographs seemed to me to represent perfectly Hemingway's private and public literary images, which coincided quite early in his manhood in an embodiment of boyish brutality. The photograph shows Heming- way standing on a Bimini jetty, shooting a Tommy gun, the sort of sub-machine-gun that was favoured by Chicago gangsters. His target is a shark, which has been tempted with bait to jump out of the water. Hemingway, like the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, abominated sharks, because they sometimes chewed lumps out of fishes he had hooked for himself.

Machismo was Hemingway's stock-in- trade. He admired soldiers, big-game hun- ters, deep-sea fishermen, boxers and bull- fighters with far more tenderness than he ever accorded to his women. He was a two-fisted drinker and indefatigable bletherer with a muscular prose style. His written dialogue was as elliptical as Fir- bank's, but ostentatiously, stoically butch. Hemingway by his example and his fame exerted great influence on younger writers, especially American sports columnists of the hard-boiled school. His imitators, like would-be modern painters who tried to imitate Matisse, for example, without first learning how to draw, produced some embarrassingly had work. Hemingway was genuine. When he raised hell, it was real hell, from the heart.

Arnold Samuelson, a Norwegian immig- rant farmer's son who was born in North Dakota in 1912, read a Hemingway short

story called 'One Trip Across' in Cosmo- politan, a story eventually developed into

the novel To Have and Have Not, and became one of Hemingway's most devout acolytes. Uninvited, he hitchhiked 2,000 miles from Minneapolis to Key West, Florida, to pay homage to his hero at home. That pilgrimage was in 1934, when Arnold was 22 and jobs were scarce. It was also a year when Hemingway was doing so well that he was able to buy a 38-foot cabin cruiser, the Pilar. He liked his eager young fan and gave him a job, to stay aboard the boat as her night-watchman. Hemingway paid him a dollar a day and fed him and taught him about fishing and writing. The visited lasted for a whole year.

He wrote a grateful book about his experience with 'E. H.,' as he liked to be called. Samuelson's daughter found the manuscript after the unsuccessful author died in 1981. She edited it for publication. It was a fortunate discovery: the faithful student was a keen observer and an excel- lent reporter; he came close to achieving his master's style; the accounts of fishing from the Pilar off Florida and Cuba are as vivid as Hemingway's own, which were written many years later; he reveals more of Hemingway's character, manner and opinions than one learns from the academic analyses in some of the more substantial biographies and even from Hemingway himself.

With Hemingway is two books inter- twined in one. It is unlikely that many readers, except Hemingway fanatics, will find both parts equally interesting. The larger part is devoted to fishing. I found the descriptions exciting but repetitious, and the technical details bor- ing. The smaller part consists of Heming- way's comments and advice on the art and trade of writing. Perhaps someone one day may disentangle the two elements, which are not complementary so much as mutual- ly distracting. The writing part would make a very slender but fascinating and possibly useful volume.

On the second day of their acquaintance, Hemingway gave Arnold a signed, hand- written list of 'books any writer should read as a part of his education'. Here it is, as Hemingway wrote it:

Stephen Crane —

The Blue Hotel The Open Boat

Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert Dubliners — James Joyce The Red and the Black — By Stendhal — 2 (Of Human Bondage — Somerset

Maugham)

Anna Karenina — Tolstoy — 3 War and Peace — Tolstoy — 4 Budden brooks — Thomas Mann — 5.

Hail and Farewell — George Moore Brothers Karamazoff — Doestoevsky — 6

Oxford Book of English Verse

The Enormous Room — E. E. Cummings Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte Far Away and Long Ago -- W. H. Hudson The American — Henry James

'If you haven't read these, you just aren't educated,' Hemingway said. 'They represent different types of writing. Some may bore you, others might inspire you and others are so beautifully written they'll make you feel it's hopeless for you to try to write.'

Although it is not difficult to understand Hemingway's special respect for the author of The Red Badge of Courage, a great novel about men at war, which Hemingway said he believed to be the best experience to inspire fiction, one can only guess at the significance of the somewhat derogatory brackets around poor old Maugham; and those few marginal numbers also are unex- plained. It may seem strange that Heming- way, one of the most American of Amer- lean writers, apparently admired more writers who were foreign to him than his fellow countrymen; it is less suprising that the classics are unrepresented and that he lists only one woman. The ascent of women novelists in the United States has occurred since Hemingway's death.

Having handed over the list, Hemingway asked Arnold whether he had read A Farewell to Arms. He hadn't. 'I felt good when I finished that,' Hemingway said. 'I knew I'd left them something to shoot at.'

That challenging remark may be inter- preted as an early hint of Hemingway's fatal paranoia. One recognises where Nor- man Mailer got his pugnacious competi- tiveness.

In one of their many shop-talk conversa- tions at sea, Arnold said: 'Bernard Shaw says if a man wants to be a writer he ought to write at least a thousand words a day.' Hemingway disagreed.

'That's too much,' he said. 'A thousand words is a hell of a good day's work. If you kept that up, you'd pump yourself dry and just write shit. If you wrote five hundred words a day, there's no publisher who could publish all your stuff.'

Hemingway's young brother, Leicester, appraised Ernest's friendship with Arnold and commented on it with cool shrewd- ness: 'Ernest was never very content with life unless he had a spiritual kid brother near by. He needed someone he could show off to as well as teach. He needed uncritical admiration. If the kid brother could show a little worshipful awe, that was a distinct aid in the relationship.'

Arnold's questions were ingenuous and Hemingway's answers were dogmatic. The basic simplicity of their exchanges makes them much more enlightening than any literary-festival symposium. Sometimes Hemingway stated what he believed to be general principles, such as, 'Big-time writ- ing never changes. Pick your vocabulary from the words you hear people speak in conversation. They've stood the test of centuries. The simple words are always the best.' In 'the world's toughest racket,' as he called professional creative writing, 'the best stories are invented . . . . If you write about yourself, you die one time and you're through. If you write about others, you can die a thousand deaths and keep on writing . . . . Anybody's got a chance if he sets out to be the greatest writer that ever lived.'

Sometimes Hemingway gave Arnold more specific, practical advice. 'Your para- graphs are too short,' the guru pro- nounced, though a typical page of Heming- way dialogue is largely air. 'They'd look choppy on a printed page, and your sent- ences are too short. There are times when you can use short sentences, but you've got to learn when, because if you use them too much you get a monotonous trip-hammer action that tires the reader.'

Samuelson's reverent book could teach an unwary disciple how to write like Hemingway and even how to think like Hemingway. 'Never be an intellectual,' he told Arnold. 'That's the worst thing that can happen to you. Be a man!' There seems in that passage to be an echo of Kipling.

Because Hemingway apparently feared cowardice as a kind of impotence, he repeatedly stuck his neck out, and he exulted when he observed other men and other creatures locked in conflict which they could not all survive. He flirted with death all his life. He seemed to value courage for its own sake, even when it was unnecessarily hazardous and entirely un- productive.

The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway's last book, is a detailed chronicle of the damaging rivalry in 1959 between two Spanish matadors, Antonio OrdOliez and Luis Miguel Domingufn. Hemingway's machismo is exhibited vicariously in this exhausting glorification of death in the afternoon. He seems to identify himself sentimentally with both the endangered bullfighters and the doomed bulls — 'the brave bulls,' which were unlikely to appreciate that they were participating in symbolic heroic pageantry. I was unable to attach my sense of vicariousness to Hemingway's which can be examined now, in the clear light of hindsight, as a symptom of his final dementia. In one of his rational moments that summer, Hemingway noted that 'people who make a cult of bullfight- ing are only barely sane . . .'. Two years later, perhaps by then unbearably afraid of fear, he confronted the biggest game of all. He shot himself.