High life | 30 May 2019

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.