NOTES________________________________ from the
UNDERGROUND… #107
July 17, 2007

Norbert Blei
www.norbertblei.com
www.bleidoorcountytimes.com

OLD HEM REVISITED

Will we ever bury him? Doubtful. He keeps rising. (He’d like that.)

In the American grain, American in Paris, moveable feast, sun also rising, for whom the bell tolls—not for him, Old Hem—from the green hills of/over Africa to running down bulls of death any afternoon.

The old man …the sea…the river (big-hearted)…the lake…the gulf stream…

“And what beat you,” he thought. “Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”

What you have here, dear reader—unfinished business, carry-overs, musings from a recent online column “Notes from the Underground # 105 wherein I/we ‘celebrated’/made note of the anniversary of Old Hem’s suicide, July 2, l961, which generated considerable response worth further thought--past postmortems.

Let Old Hem (myth or style) occupy your head just once (the right time) and you never get him out of your head. So I thought I might sign-in too & again in light of what others had to say. Put it all down/up as a Blei’s Blog on this website for safe-keeping. In case I say something important (to myself) I may wish to sometime further review. Knowing how Old Hem always provokes another thought worthy of a writer’s questioning heart.

Whenever I talk about Hemingway (beginning writers) I always talk/‘teach’ the same old story: “A Clean Well Lighted Place.” Probably my favorite American short story--though it is set in Spain. I’ve written about it before, but am too lazy this moment to look up what I wrote, take the time to locate the piece, and probably wouldn’t be happy with it now anyway, since we are never now who we were then, in the same place at the initial time of telling and likely want to revise something or everything… You know where that road leads.

You can’t teach that story, deal with Hemingway on any level, without his compadre, Mr. Death, sitting quietly in a chair in the shadows of the same room. Hemingway loved this old character. Spent a lifetime writing about him, getting to know him better in all his guises, taking his measure down on paper in clean, hard, damn near perfect prose. Mr. D. lives and breathes in “A Clean Well Lighted Café.” I sense Old Hem came to love him there… “…in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”

“He,” after all, “…was in despair.”

This is not what I started out to write today (the last few days). But you know how writing always has its way with you. So now I’m stuck with this love affair between Old Hem and Mr. D. From early on---to the very tragic end. When they both knew each other so well it became impossible to separate the two.

In, what has become my ‘once-a-year class’ for beginning and seasoned writers, I always find myself trying to defend Old Hem’s inevitable, abrazo of his old friend. Some argue with me. Find the shotgun ending reprehensible. Desperate. Cowardly. While I sense that shot in the dark was pure Hemingway code. The undefeated…winner take nothing…now I lay me. An act of courage in the face of everything coming apart--body, mind, art. Santiago, left with the mere skeleton of the big fish that was once so alive.

I remember exactly where I was when the news of Old Hem’s death came over the radio on July 2, 1961. The middle of the Atlantic, aboard the S.S. Ryndam, tourist class, seated at a small desk in the ship’s library, no doubt living the myth, acting the role so obsessive in our youth: being ‘writerly.’ Notebook, pencil, some books at hand--probably smoking a pipe. Oh, where has it all gone? Whatever became of that notebook? Could I even bear to read it now? What could I have possibly recorded worth keeping? If I was not reading Old Hem in our time at that time…I was certainly aglow in the certainty of where this slow ship, plunging into the darkness, was taking me: toward that most time-honored writer’s rite-of-passage: Europe. Paris, of course. Buying paperback copies of Hemingway from bookstalls along the Seine. Books printed in England: Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises…Pan Books Ltd. 2’ 6); a Penguin Books edition of Men Without Women (2’ 6), and a flimsy, pirated copy of The Collected Poems of Ernest Hemingway--a very thin chapbook (Miscellaneous Poems & Ten Poems from Three Stories and Ten Poems). A total of 18 poems, all of them—satiric, critical, prophetic, profane (“Neo-Thomist Poem” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want him for long”), published in Paris. Where else?

Where you had to go, in my/our time, if you wanted to write, if you were ever to seriously consider yourself a writer. (Papa’s domain. com)

Chapter Heading

For we have thought the larger thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil’s tunes.
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
-Ernest Hemingway, Paris, 1923

And so it was death in the morning, afternoon, and night.

The ship all aglow in the night, plunging down, up and over the depths of a very dark, whirling ocean, from my deck-watch late each night, hovering over the abyss at the ship’s white rail —still three days out from some distant port. Lost & found at sea in a way I’ll never be again. The young writer’s own story barely begun and his Hero suddenly, unexplainably, self-destructs.

This is the end. The Beginning. Another one.

Last night I read a line by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “Art has two constant and unending preoccupations; it is always meditating upon death and it is thereby creating life.”
--nb

***

Thank you, good readers, for all that follows. A pleasure, as always,
know what you’re thinking, feeling.

Dear Norb,

I also vaguely remember that he supposedly had cancer, and that that was
why he killed himself--seemingly a cowardly act for such a macho man.
Whether it was cancer or memory loss/impaired writing ability, the
motive was understandable, but it’s interesting how he was condemned for
a choice it seems to me should be ours to make, barring mental illness
where choice is not necessarily a factor (though Virginia Woolf
certainly chose suicide rather than a bout of mental illness). Since he
won the prize around the time of those plane crashes (1954?), it had to
have had a positive effect on him--how he felt about his writing and his
reputation--but it would appear it didn’t hold through the depression, etc.

One thing’s for sure, you can’t trust the ’Net for information. Look it
up, then double-check. Although, I don’t know where the Writer’s
Almanac comes from. Garrison Kiellor uses it for his little NPR
program. Wonder if he got a slew of responses as well.

Yours,
Gwen

***

Dear Norbie,

I enjoyed this piece on Hemingway as it brought back some piquant memories of that placid decade of the 1950’s and our Hemingway experience. That was such a different time; common decency still existed and things were so much simpler! I am grateful that I was old enough to remember it and considering what the world is like now, I appreciate it even more!

Dad had taken a lovely little white frame house on a side street in Key West for the winter of 1956; I was 13 and it was a wonderful adventure and probably the best “family vacation” we ever had. How exciting to be alive in Key West in those days! Fort Taylor was in full operation with a destroyer docked there and lots of sailors! The shrimp fleet was bringing in enormous shrimp as big as “Pieds de Cheval” in France and we were deep sea fishing at least twice a week. I remember asking about why there were “colored” fountains and bathrooms; segregation was still in full effect then.

Oh the key lime pies and the grouper dinners at Sammy’s Cafe, a place that claimed to be the inventor of that famous pie, and they had seafood that was as good if not better than anything I’d ever had in France!
,
It was the last winter we could go to Cuba and we had New Year’s with old college friends of Dad’s. They had a white marble house in Havana and a “cabana” on the beach at Pinar del Rio. Their son was a year older than I and we were instant friends! Dad hired a cab driver for the day and we crossed the island through the lush countryside and the vast sugar plantations! I remember La Floridita on the quay downtown as the longest breakfast buffet I’d ever seen! Everything was so beautiful and the brilliant colors assaulted the eye at every glance!

One quiet afternoon, back in Key West, we went for a hike down Main Street and stopped in the Woolworth Five and Dime. I was having a chocolate phosphate and Dad his usual black coffee. As he read a newspaper, an older man with a white beard came and sat between us; it was the only seat available and it was Ernest Hemingway!

My Dad’s heavy French accent always attracted attention and soon they were in a deep conversation about the bull fight. My parents had seen all the major matadores in Spain and Mexico City and I remember they were comparing Manolete’s techniques with other lesser known stars. As Ernest left, Dad got up and shook hands with him and said how much he had enjoyed meeting him. A little touch of history at the Woolworth lunch counter I always remembered.

Dad’s favorite book was “Death in the Afternoon” and being able to discuss it with the author was a real thrill for him. He talked about that encounter at Key West for the rest of his life; it had meant a lot to him. The morning we heard the news that Mr.Hemingway had blown his head off with a shotgun, Dad wept! Frenchmen always hide their emotions; showing them is a sign of weakness and “bad form”. I only saw him weep two other times: when my grandfather died and when Tony Bettenhausen was killed in the Indy 500. I forget the year, but he had gone to a presentation on race car driving that Tony had given at Carl Sandberg High School in Orland Park and really loved the guy!

I’m glad you mentioned this date and the sad event; it brought back this memory to me and I hadn’t thought about it in years. As gruesome as his death was, the genius in his work has made him immortal and he will never be forgotten!

Your friend and fan,

G.S.de Fore

***

He deserved a better end. They say that like Scott Fitzgerald he could be rotten to his friends. But most people who drink a lot fall into that. He still deserved better.

He peaked early and so high, it was hard to sustain. So many great writers have crash-burned. No one can save us from ourselves, our private dragons, huh?

But what they left behind....ah, I think they would all drink to that.


Barbara Fitz Vroman
www.barbarafitzvroman.com
pearlwin@uniontel.net

***

Athens 2.7.2007

Dear Norb,

What a way to die, or rather to go: mind blank, no certainty anymore about
writing. Like Pavese. The moment he could no longer write, he died.
Flesh and blood crept up the shore, flesh and blood left the jar empty,
what can be such riddles when man’s skulls are found in mass graves
and still the boots go marching on to loud sounds of not music, but guns.

There are many things which can be said after receiving such a glimpse in a
man’s life. Thanks for making possible such a glimpse.

ciao
hatto

***

Hem and Hah:

Never electrocute your brain, no matter what they promise you.

I think The Old Man and The Sea is a book. How many words do you have to write, how many pages for it to be a book? Did he refine brevity to such a fine point that the writing began to disappear? I’m curious to know what the four lines about JFK were. Maybe they were enough. –Kirstin Thacher

***

Norb,

Interesting note. Thanks.

Obviously, The Writer’s Handbook wasn’t aware of the humor in the line “...and shot himself in the foyer.” Boy, that must have really hurt.

Marty

***

Norb,

In 1961 a paper boy on a bike delivered the Chicago Daily News to our
suburban Glenview home. In warm weather my shameless father, still in his
Jockeys, would slip down to the end of the driveway and retrieve it. Even at
10 years old I was fascinated by newspapers and deciphering their abstract
headlines (what did “Daley Rips Into GOP” mean?). When Hemingway died on
July 3, it was major, front page news. Reading about it at the kitchen table
that morning, I didn’t understand exactly who he was, but the fact of “Own
Gun Kills Hemingway” or some-such was perhaps the first time I thought of
writers as existing in the world, and here one had just killed himself! Very
exotic...

John