It isn’t my fault. What could I do? These three men had a conversation in a bar in the middle of World War II, and one thing led to another.
See, in December, 1943, Jack Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest son, was a young officer in the military police spending the night in New York City, a few days before his unit was to leave for Europe. Late at night, after dinner and a show, he dropped in to the small bar of the Algonquin Hotel, where he was staying. Other than Jack and the barman, the bar was empty except for two men engaged in a heated argument over which was a better writer, Fitzgerald or Hemingway. He injected himself into the conversation, getting away with it on the strength of his uniform in wartime. As he reconstructed the conversation in 1986 (in Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman):
“I think you’re both wrong. I know of a writer I think is better than either Hemingway or Faulkner. At least he’s a hell of a lot better storyteller.”
I had their attention, all right. The near man snapped, “And who the devil might that be?”
“Maurice Walsh,” I said, and then I started to detail his books I had read and that my father had told me he was a truly fine storyteller.
I stopped myself in mid-sentence as I noticed that the near man had blanched. I asked him what was the matter.
He answered, “I’m Maurice Walsh.”
A shiver went down my spine and the back of my neck crawled. “I’m pleased to meet you, sir. My name is Jack Hemingway and my father is the writer you favored.”
The drinks we had before us, needless to say, were not the last we had that night.
Well, I can take a hint. I can’t remember when I bought Jack’s book – a dozen years ago, I suppose, more or less – but I remembered the reference, and after a while I began accumulating Walsh’s novels, which by the way, are indeed wonderfully appealing story-telling. A few titles, in case you’re interested: The Key Above the Door, The Small Dark Man, The Quiet Man, Castle Gillian, While Rivers Run, The Hill Is Mine. They are wonderfully evocative of an Ireland and a rural Scotland now long gone.
But of course chains of references have no end. After a while I noticed that Walsh every so often plugs an American writer, a writer of Westerns that he says is a master. At the time, apparently Eugene Manlove Rhodes was very well known. Today, I guess, not so much. But the other day I bought just one, to see if he was to my taste. At first, he wasn’t. But by the time I finished the little book, Paso por Aqui, which more or less means “he passed this way,” I decided I liked it. This morning, finding that the story stayed in my mind, I re-read it, and I can see that I will have to look out for another, to see if this was an unrepeatable fluke or a sign of genius. My guess is, the latter, or Walsh wouldn’t have gone out of his way to praise his works.
With my luck, Rhodes will praise some other writer’s work, and I’ll be swept along into yet another channel. Seems to me, I owe Jack Hemingway a drink.