Papa rises again

We were in a Béarnais restaurant in Montmartre and a young Canadian novelist and short story writer, Bill Prendiville, was speaking admiringly about Hemingway. This was pleasing, because you don’t often hear him being praised now. It was also appropriate, because most of the good early Hemingway was written in Paris, and the best of his later books is his memoir of Paris in the Twenties. Admittedly his Paris was the Left Bank — rue Cardinal Lemoine, Boulevard Saint-Germain, rue Mouffetard, Montparnasse — rather than up in the 18th, and some of the books Bill spoke warmly of are not among those I like. Still, it was good to hear him spoken of in this way.

As with Dylan Thomas, the legend gets in the way of the literature, and Hemingway the celebrity, boastful, brutal, dishonest and talking his Hollywood Indian language, is a fairly awful, even repulsive figure. Sadly, the more one learns the clearer it is that the private Hemingway was every bit as nasty.