I didn’t like it, and then I did like it. But a writer’s job is to tell the truth, as Papa said back in 1942. Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing — it takes away ‘whatever butterflies have on their wings’ — but he wrote non-stop about writing, as incisively as any writer ever did. Last week I finished my umpteenth book on Papa, and it depressed me no end. Really. And then, as I was reading the last three pages, I discovered that I did, after all, have a connection with the great Papa. My depression lifted like a fog.
Life is one long coincidence, and just as I picked up Autumn in Venice, about Papa’s last muse, Debbie Bismarck rang me from Key West because she and her husband had thought of me while visiting Hemingway’s house there. Actually, the house was bought for the couple by Pauline Hemingway’s uncle and inherited by their son Gregory who, although not gay, was a cross-dresser. Some older readers of this column may remember that I met Hemingway when I was a 15-year-old, had drinks with him in a New York bar and got loaded. But he turned out to be a phoney Papa, an older, heavy-set man with a white beard posing as the greatest writer in the world.
Bad modern writers and victimhood-culture opinion makers no longer have any time for the great Papa — although if they did, he’d go down in my estimation. Yet it’s hard to overestimate the effect that Hemingway had on prose style (you wouldn’t know it from the rubbish published today). Papa stripped sentences down to their essence, cleared away the lush density rooted in Victorian prose, and in the process became numero uno.
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