In honor of Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday, this chapter from my novel Papa’s Trial. The idea is that Hemingway, finding himself in the afterlife, fully expects to be judged and condemned – so, that’s what he gets, up to a point. But while he is waiting for the jury to come in, he is enticed into a counter-factual exploration. What would his life have been like if he had made different choices?
Chapter 27: What if?
He and the defense attorney were alone. They were – where? Nowhere. Not only no courtroom, no hospital room, no room at all, nor any outdoors scene. They might as well have been standing in a pea-souper such as he had seen in London.
“So, now what? We stand around waiting?”
“Not exactly. But we are finished pretending to judge you. The whole charade was to help you to see your life more clearly.”
“And you aren’t my defense attorney any more, I take it.”
“Never was. You can call me Nick Adams.”
“Nick Adams, right.” He smiled. “All right, Nick. So, your current function is –?”
“You can think of me as a friend.”
“Okay.”
The man wanted him to ask; he waited him out. Nice to have the shoe on the other foot for once.
“You don’t want to know what to expect next?”
“What I expect is that you will get around to telling me, sooner or later.”
“Nick seemed to repress a small internal smile. “I must say, I like your attitude. All right. We just took a fast look at the life you lived, some of the highlights. The process isn’t over until you look at the life you didn’t live. The negative space in the picture, you might say.”
“Sure, `The path not taken.’ Thank you Robert Frost. How, exactly?”
“Instead of trying to explain it to you, let’s just do it. Think of any moment of your life that you’d like to relive. Imagine it vividly, the way you did in 3D life. Then, as things unfold, change them. If you turned left, turn right. Or go straight on, or stop, whatever you want. Change things; see what happens.”
“Okay.” He paused. “Start at birth, I suppose? Or, work backwards?”
“Start where you want to start. Beginning, end, anywhere in the middle, it doesn’t matter. Everything connects.”
“No particular guidelines?”
“You might begin with whatever wells up unbidden.”
“Huh. Okay.” He closed his non-3D eyes, and he instantly knew. When he reopened them, there he was, wounded, helpless, in pain, being carried on a stretcher in the middle of the night. He wasn’t looking at the scene; he was immersed in it. He had forgotten the noise of the shells, the concussions. He was being carried to the first-aid station, and a shell hit close enough to drop his stretcher-bearers, and him, to the ground. The men arranged him back on the stretcher and picked him up, apologizing in Italian and with their eyes.
He was both in the scene and observing it, an odd bifurcation. “July 8, 1918,” he said.
Nick was nowhere to be seen, but he heard him say, “Feel free to go back before the shell hit. Or have it miss you.”
“I can do that?”
“Of course you can. That’s the point of `what if’ scenarios. How does your life change if you never get wounded? Ask to see some consequences.”
“We’re going to be here quite a while, then!”
“No need for detail, just get the highlights.”
“Fine.”
.2.
He returned to wherever it was.
“So what happened?”
“What I expect you know happened. My life began to play out, a rapid sequence of things, like riffling a deck of cards. Is this supposed to be what would have happened, or just what might have happened?”
“We aren’t dealing in certainties, here, Mr. Hemingway. It isn’t like there was only one possible path. At any moment of your life, the rest of your life is more decisions, and every decision means another choice, opening up new paths and closing others. The more decision points you pass, the more indefinite is the path beyond. So what changed when you didn’t get wounded?”
“Everything changed! It wasn’t even my life anymore. I didn’t spend six months in the hospital listening to wounded veterans. Never met Chink. Never met Agnes. Didn’t have a first love in Italy. I didn’t go home on the Giuseppe Verdi, didn’t get interviewed by the New York paper or by Oak Leaves, never talked to any civic groups, Therefore, I never met Mrs. Connable, and never spent the winter in Toronto hanging around the Toronto Weekly Star offices, and so I never got to become one of their free-lance feature writers. Since I was never a wounded war veteran, I didn’t have a year’s worth of insurance payments to tide me over while I tried to learn to write, so in some versions I gave in and went to college, and in others I got my job back at the Kansas City Star, or I found some kind of job in the Oak Park area – that is, Chicago.”
“Did you meet Hadley?”
“That seems to depend. If I went to college or went back to Kansas City, no. If I stayed in Chicago until Hash came up to visit Katy, maybe yes, depending on what I was doing. But even when I did meet her, I wasn’t the same person, and often enough we didn’t really click. Without July 8th, I wasn’t the same person. I came home safe and sound and boring and bored.”
“On the other hand, without it you didn’t spend years being afraid of the dark, or pulling scrap metal out of your leg.”
“True. Still, without it, I don’t see how I would ever have gotten to Paris.“
“Ready to try again? Leave July 8 as it was, and change something else.”
“Okay. That was almost fun. A hell of a lot better than listening to people attack me.”
“Is that your impression of what they were doing?”
“Let’s do some more.”
“A suggestion? You may want to go about your examination systematically. Perhaps begin at the beginning.”
“All right.” And off he went again, this time all the way back to his childhood.
.3.
“And what did you find?”
“I guess I was always going to be a writer. I wrote for the school paper, I was editor of the literary magazine. Maybe I could have decided to go off to college. It wouldn’t have been so bad. It would have been fun, because I would have made it fun. I would have put together a mob there, same as I did everywhere. By the time I was old enough to enlist, I would have had a year of college, and that would have made a difference, later. Even if I had gone into the ambulances, like plenty of other college guys, I would have had a better idea about college, what it had to offer.”
“You wouldn’t have been afraid of college men.”
He winced. “Since you put it that way, okay. But I would have been just as harsh on their shortcomings. It’s just, I would have seen them more clearly.”
“And you wouldn’t have come across the Kansas City Star’s style sheet.”
“That’s true. But even in what I wrote in high school, you can see my style emerging. You can’t tell, really, what would have happened.”
“Did you look to see what would have happened if you had stayed in school and missed the war entirely?”
A decisive shake of the head. “That was never going to happen.”
“Your defective eyesight guaranteed that the Army would never have taken you.”
“I would have found a way, one way or the other. I might have wound up in a different unit, and maybe wound up in France instead of Italy. All kinds of things might have been different, but I wouldn’t have stayed home.”
“All right, I think you have the idea. Look at your life as you didn’t live it. If you find things you want to talk about, we can do that – I’ll be here – or you can just keep exploring. It’s up to you.”
“And how long do we go about it?”
“Until you get tired of doing it.”
“Could go on forever.”
“It isn’t like we’re on the clock here. It’s really up to you. Just go until you’re finished.”
“Okay, I get it. I suppose I’ll see you whenever.” He turned his attention inward, waiting for a question to surface. It didn’t take long.
“What if you hadn’t become friends with Bill Smith?”
“Well,” he thought, What if?”
.4.
In the short term, nothing much changed. He was still spending his summers by the lake, still working the farm at his father’s long-distance direction, still enjoying the woods and the water and the town and the freedom from the schoolyear’s discipline. And there were other boys to pal around with: He always knew how to draw people to him, and he always liked having a mob to do things with. But – he realized – a little way down the road, without Bill, no Katy! Without Katy and Bill, no sharing an apartment with their brother Y.K. Without Y.K., no introduction to Sherwood Anderson, no meeting others of the Chicago Renaissance like Carl Sandberg, plus he probably would have gone to Italy as he planned, instead of Paris. And if he hadn’t been in Paris, could he have met Dos? Even if he had gotten to Paris, how could he have hoped to meet Pound, and yes, Gertrude, without Anderson’s letters of introduction?
In fact, without Bill, and therefore Katy, how would he have met Katy’s best friend Hadley Richardson? And if he hadn’t fallen in love with Hadley, would he ever have gotten to Europe at all?
He shook his head. It was like learning that he had spent all his life walking on the thinnest of ice, never realizing that it was only his forward movement that stopped it from cracking and breaking under his weight. “Hairbreadth Harry,” he said.
“You bet.” The thought came to him. “It’s a good thing we were good skaters.”
“We?”
“You think you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, over and over again?”
“Well, when you put it that way, maybe not.”
“You bet, maybe not. And the more you look, the more you’ll see. You thought, what if you’d never met Hadley, but what if you had met her, and on the same night you did meet her, but the two of you hadn’t clicked?”
.5.
There they were in Y.K.’s apartment, and Katy was introducing her friend from St. Louis, but the evening didn’t work. Katy’s Chicago crowd didn’t warm to her friend and sweep her into their circle. Hadley, on her part, didn’t open up and show her sense of fun. She had played the piano, but formally, classically, not swinging into the wild jazz tunes that made them realize that they were young and alive. Even the liquor didn’t help; everyone remained polite, restrained. He had stood there admiring her long red hair, but wishing it wasn’t all so awkward. He got out as soon as he decently could, and kept his distance from her for the rest of her visit.
“But it never could have happened that way,” he said. “We were meant for each other. We hadn’t been talking for ten minutes before we were both feeling it.”
A half-heard voice: (“And if that first ten minutes hadn’t happened? If she had had a cold, or you had? If she had been too shy to let her real self show, or you were too boisterous and self-aggrandizing? Plenty of ships pass in the night. What if you had been two more such ships?”)
If he had still been in a body, he might have felt a shiver.
“If you can’t admit it here and now, when and where will you ever be able to do so?”
“Who says there’s anything to admit?”
“You know there is. If you don’t admit it, if you can’t, then God help you.”
“All right! I admit it! I would have been lost.”
“What would you have been missing?”
“Hadley’s warmth! Someone to love, someone to love me.”
“Someone to hold you in the darkness.”
Reluctantly: “That too.”
“At age 21, without Hadley, what were you, Mr. Hemingway?”
It was humiliating to admit it, even now.
“Oh come on! Who are you posing for?”
A sigh, or its non-3D equivalent. “Nobody, I guess. Myself, maybe.”
“Yes, and what’s the pose for, Mr. Afraid Of Nothing?”
He knew. “I needed her. I needed somebody, and thank God it was her.” Blurting it out: “I couldn’t be alone.”
Silence. After a moment he felt constrained to break it. “Well? Nothing to say? No snide comments?”
“I was letting you sit with the realization.”
“Like I didn’t know it!”
“Yes, but now you have admitted it. It makes a world of difference to admit something. It frees you. Why do you suppose that you were repressing that particular realization, Mr. Hemingway?”
“I don’t know that I did. Didn’t I say that a man alone hasn’t got a fucking chance?”
“Yes, you did. Is this what you meant by it?”
Reluctantly again: “No.”
“We know you think we’re beating you on the head with all this, and we know you think we enjoy it, but we aren’t, and we don’t.”
“Meaning we can move on?”
“Meaning exactly that. Suppose you hadn’t had those introductions Sherwood Anderson gave you.”
“My God,” he said. “Is it possible I could have lived in Paris and never met Sylvia?”
.6.
He wouldn’t have thought so, but the longer he looked, the more unsure he became. Without Anderson to steer him there, would he have even known that Shakespeare and Co. existed? Sylvia wasn’t famous in 1921. She wasn’t yet the den mother for the lost generation. Sylvia had introduced him to Joyce, and had helped him meet Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
Anderson himself had found her shop essentially by accident, and had introduced himself to her only because she had placed his book in the window. Suppose he hadn’t gone down that street. Suppose she hadn’t placed Winesburg, Ohio in the window? Suppose Anderson hadn’t come home to tell young Hemingway he had to go to Paris, and had to see the following people?
“No. I would have found her. As soon as Hash and I got ourselves set up, we would have been prowling the streets to see what we could see. We would have found her, sooner or later.” But the worm of doubt persisted. For one thing, who had helped the young Hemingways to find a place to live but Lewis Galantiere? And how did Galantiere know of them except via Anderson?
“Dammit!” But there was no blinking the fact: It was Anderson’s letters that had opened the way, time after time, putting him into touch not only with the established writers but the important ones, the coming ones. He couldn’t help counting them out like a litany: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and then Ford Madox Ford and the sub-editorship of “the transatlantic review,” by which he became known before ever getting a word published between boards.
“Surprised?”
“It didn’t all come from Anderson’s letters,” he said defensively. “Plenty came out of my work with the Toronto Star.”
“Nobody would suggest otherwise,” Nick said mildly. “It was your inquiry, after all.”
“All right,” he growled. “And if you wanted the point made, it’s made. I owed Anderson, and I repaid him badly.”
“That may be your point, it was not mine. Mine was merely that you see how much hung on what look like improbable coincidences. You know the Smith family, so you come to stay at Y.K.’s. Y. K. works with Anderson and so he brings him home and the older established writer and the younger would-be writer hit it off. The older writer goes to Paris, happens to see his book in a bookstore window, and so happens to meet Sylvia Beach and happens to meet important literary people she knows. Then he happens to return to Chicago mere days before the younger writers is to sail for Italy, and persuades him to try Paris instead, and offers letters of introduction. That’s a good deal of concatenating ifs.”
“Yes it is. I was lucky.”
“Whatever luck is. Would you like a suggestion? Why don’t you see what your life would have been like if you had gone to Europe on your own, instead of working for the Star?”
“I don’t need to go anywhere to tell you that. It would have changed everything. I wouldn’t have come to the attention of Bob McAlmon, for one thing, which means Three Stories and Ten Poems almost certainly wouldn’t have been published, since it was his idea. But that wouldn’t have been the biggest change. When the Star started sending me to write features about the conferences, that’s when I met the foreign correspondents and became a member of that club. And without all that, I wouldn’t have learned cablese, which had an enormous effect on my writing, and wouldn’t have met Lincoln Steffens, for another, a good guy who taught me a lot. That all came from working for the Star.”
“Then where do you go from here?”
“Let me free-associate, see what surfaces.” Within seconds: “Gertrude and Spain. Never thought of that. She’s the one who got me interested in bullfights. That’s probably why I went to Spain in 1923 with McAlmon and Bill Bird.”
“But suppose you hadn’t liked bullfighting? Plenty of Americans didn’t.”
“Not like it?”
And he was off again.
.7.
Spain. Heat. Light. Dust. Color. Wine drunk from leather flasks. Tourists, yes, but tourists as drops in the sea of Spaniards. Medieval uniforms. Churches. Wooden carts older than could be counted.
And the tastes! Every day was a feast, and it didn’t matter how simple the fare was, or how quiet the meal.
And then, the corrida itself, another world, self-contained, outside of time, living in its pageantry and tradition. The horses and the picadors, a shock. The three acts, sensed but not yet understood. The moment of the killing, in all its intensity. Good killings and bad, good cape work and bad, brave matadors and cowardly, skillful or merely tricky. Or was he overlaying all that he had learned onto that first eye-opening summer?
“And behind the scenes, Mr. Hemingway? What was happening?”
“Happening with me, you mean? I had come home. I belonged there; I don’t know how I came to be born in the United States. How could I not have liked bullfighting? That’s like imagining I wouldn’t like Spain. I was born head over heels in love with Spain, only it took me 20 years to get there. If I hadn’t gone in 1923, I would have gotten there sometime. If Gertrude hadn’t pointed me toward bullfighting, somebody else would have, or I would have found it on my own. It was like writing, it was part of me, and it would have come out one way or another.”
He stayed with the feeling, not putting it into words but living it, feeling it as precious to him. And Nick let him stay with it.
.8.
At length he said, “This procedure of yours has its uses. Why didn’t we start off this way, instead of going through all that trial business?”
Nick laughed. “Whose idea was it, after all? Or, not your idea, exactly, but it came out of what you are. You were primed to be judged and condemned. We played along until you opened up to other possibilities.”
“It sure didn’t feel like it!”
“How could it? As soon as you started to see through it, we were free to do other things.”
“But I didn’t see through it.”
“If you’ll go back and look, you’ll see that you were changing what you believed, behind your own back.”
“If you say so. What’s next?”
“Before you go too far, you might want to look at a different kind of ‘what if?’ What if Agnes had never sent you that Dear John letter?”
He shook his head decisively. “That was always going to happen, it’s just I didn’t realize it. She wasn’t in love with me, she was more in love with being in love. She was having fun in Europe. She probably wouldn’t have come home even if I had found a good job right away. And how much chance was there of that happening? To get started on a career takes time. It always does. There was never a path that she wasn’t going to write that Dear John. Let’s look at something else.”
“Then what about your return to Canada in 1923?”
If he had had a body, it would have grimaced. “That goddamned Hindmarsh. But it wouldn’t have mattered if Hindmarsh had dropped dead. There is no way I was ever going to be able to write in Canada. Toronto was a damned dull town, and my youth was ticking away. Hash and I were going back to Paris, and the only question was how long would it take. But, you know, timing matters, sometimes. If we had waited too long, some doors might have closed, and then what? Getting back when we did was as important as getting there when we did in the first place.”
“You returned to Paris in 1924 with nothing to live on but Hadley’s inheritance. That was taking a chance. Suppose you hadn’t taken that chance?”
“Suppose we had played it safe, you mean? Don’t know. Don’t even want to know. I didn’t go into that life to play it safe.”
“What’s that? I didn’t quite hear you.”
“Yeah, very funny. So you’re saying my life did have a plan after all.”
“I didn’t say it, you did.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know I was going to say it.”
“That’s how you know it’s real. And after all, you can’t say the facts contradict the statement. When did you ever play it safe?”
“Never.”
“So there’s your pattern. Where did the pattern come from? Was it chance, or was it your character? And if it was your character, how different is that from saying it was your destiny, like burning your candle at both ends?”
“All right, I get the point.”
“If your life hadn’t gotten you to Paris the first time, you wouldn’t have gotten Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our time into print. And if you hadn’t returned in 1924, how would you have met F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had come across them and become a believer in your star?”
“And without Scott, maybe no Scribner’s, I get it. I should look at what if Scott hadn’t liked my books?”
“Or if you hadn’t met, or if you hadn’t hit it off, yes.”
.9.
He would never forget the meeting at the bar. Okay, erase it. He was elsewhere, or Scott never showed up. For whatever reason, their paths never crossed, they never met.
“Except,” he muttered to himself, “we would have. Scott would have kept on until we did. He could be a persistent bastard. But, let’s say we never met.”
It wasn’t like his days were empty. He was writing, he was working well. He and Hadley and Bumby were a family, and a pretty contented family, at that. And for intellectual company he had Sylvia and Gertrude and Dos and Ford and Ezra – no, Ezra had moved to Italy by then. But still, there were letters between them, back and forth. He had had so many friends, so many activities and interests. Without Scott’s disruptive presence, life flowed as it had been flowing.
Only –
He returned. “I don’t know how to think about it,” he said. “I had a good life, and I would have thought you can’t miss what you never had, but – maybe you can. It was like soup without just the right spice to bring it to life.”
“Are you saying Fitzgerald lit up the scene?”
“Until he got to be too much of a drunk, yeah.”
“And as you know, you had the same effect on others. So is looking at your life without Fitzgerald like looking at other people’s lives without Hemingway?”
“What’s your point?”
“It’s just a comment.”
“Sure.”
“What about the career consequences?”
“If I hadn’t met Scott? Maybe none. It’s interesting. Scott was pushing Max to contact me even before he and I met, and if we had never met, he still would have been pushing him. It wasn’t a matter of him liking me as a person, it was about him wanting Scribner’s to have all the coming authors.”
Delicately: “Did you look at what would have happened if you had submitted The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald hadn’t been there to tell you to cut the first few pages?”
“Actually, he didn’t tell me to cut them: He showed me problems with them. Cutting them entirely was my idea. And all right, it was important. Without that fix, sometimes the book flopped, sometimes it did so-so, but it didn’t make the splash it did in real life. So, I owe him that, and that was one time he made a difference editorially. But after that, he never quite got what I was doing, so his advice wasn’t worth much.”
There was a silence, in which the sentence reverberated.
“Okay, I got it, that was ungracious.”
“It was worse than ungracious. It shows that you still haven’t looked closely enough at your relation to him. You admit that he made an important difference, then you feel obliged to devalue it, to say in effect, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why is that?”
“I thought we were done with psychoanalysis. We’re doing ‘what ifs,’ right?”
“Then, what about celebrity, Mr. Hemingway? You no sooner signed up with Scribner’s than you found yourself partying with people you had only read about. Suppose you hadn’t made that sudden leap into prominence?”
.10.
Away, and back.
“Signing with Scribner’s didn’t put me in the public eye, it just introduced me to the inner circle. Dorothy Thompson, say, Don Stewart. That didn’t make me a household word. And after The Sun Also Rises was published, and my name started getting out there, still that was people talking about the book, really. People had no idea what I looked like, or how I talked, or what I did for fun. You get the distinction?”
“Yes. But then, let me rephrase it. How did you manage the sudden leap into the inner world of published authors?”
“I soaked it up like a desert plant in the rain. I was still only in my twenties, but it seemed to me like I’d been a long time on the outside looking in.”
“And what if that hadn’t happened? Suppose you had signed your contracts, maybe gotten drunk alone, and then had sailed back to Europe? What then? Did you explore that?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“You’re talking about a different life, a different man. The young man that I was then was so tremendously attractive! He lit up a room, and he was able to entirely captivate people when he gave them his full attention. They loved me, couldn’t get enough of me.” A sheepish grin. “Either that, or they couldn’t stand me. But in those days mostly people loved me.”
“All that energy, all that enthusiasm.”
“Sure. It was just like with Ezra or Sylvia, people were delighted to welcome me into their crowd. And, like I say, I was damned glad to be allowed in.”
“So are you telling me no alternative scenario existed? That you were always going to be welcomed gladly into the tent?”
“It isn’t the kind of thing you could get away with saying in life, but yeah, it’s pretty much true. My life was always going to be lived on stage, whether I liked it or not.”
“Even if you hadn’t left Hadley for a rich wife?”
.11.
There was a pause.
“You know, in life, or on earth, or however you’d say it, that would have gotten you a punch in the mouth.”
“I told you before, consciousness here isn’t constricted in time and attention, so there isn’t the pressure that makes things explode. But what about the question? Why not go take a look?”
Away.
And back, not so quickly this time, not so smoothly.
“More complicated than you thought, Mr. Hemingway?”
“Shut up.”
“Does this interfere with the story you got used to telling, Mr. Hemingway?”
“It does.”
“And?”
“You know goddamn well. I’ve been thinking that Pauline broke up my marriage and broke my dream of succeeding as a writer accompanied by my true love and our son.”
“So how do you see it now?”
“Look, I wasn’t wrong. It’s just –.” Nick waited him out. “I never thought, really.”
“Probably worthwhile to spell it out, Mr. Hemingway. It will clarify.”
“Well, Hadley was eight years older than me, I wasn’t making allowances for how much of a strain it was for her to keep up with me. She started getting to be middle-aged after she became a mother. I never realized – Paul Mowrer did, I guess – that Hadley couldn’t keep up with the life I lived. I burned my candle at both ends, and at first, she did too, and thrived on it after all those years of being treated as an invalid. But it was getting to be too much for her. When Pauline didn’t break us up, we went one of two ways. Either Hadley stopped being my playmate, or her health broke down. Neither way were we really happy.”
“Your marriage bonds loosened, shall we say?”
“Having a good time, are you? I was still in love with her. But I was young, I lusted for younger women, they were available. Is it any big surprise we’d go our separate ways, married or not? But still, leaving Hadley for Pauline broke my life in two. I knew it was a mistake, and it led to so many more mistakes! If I hadn’t left Hadley, my career would have been sounder, better grounded, more human.”
“In what way, Mr. Hemingway?”
“Don’t you already know?”
“I know probabilities, yes. But do I need to keep telling you, it’s in your voicing it that you make it yours. The very talking of it leads to deeper insights. Think about your wives and money, for instance.”
“Well, what about money? The Sun Also Rises was going to bring plenty in royalties, certainly plenty next to what Hadley and I were used to, and it was going to come more predictably than the checks we used to get from the Star. Probably if we had stayed in France we would have moved to a better neighborhood, but we wouldn’t have been moving to the right bank to be with the rich people. But probably we went home in all the versions, sooner or later. France got too expensive, once the franc recovered, and by 1926 I was finished with Europe anyway. I was a long safe way from Oak Park.”
“Long enough that you could have gone back to visit?”
“If I was still married to Hadley? Yes. But in any case, we were coming back to the States.”
“So where did you move to?”
“That seems to depend.”
“New York? Chicago?”
“No, not a big city. Now I needed to live someplace wilder, not so settled, somewhere unspoiled, someplace open and free, where we could hunt and fish. Mostly we went out West – Wyoming, Idaho, Montana.”
“Not Key West?”
“I think Hadley and I could have been happy in Key West, but mostly we lived in the West. Sometimes Hadley and Bumby and I would winter in New Orleans, or Santa Fe, or we’d drop down to Mexico. And of course the life we lived was different from the life I lived with Pauline, because I had Bumby right there, a son to teach things to. That boy certainly did love to fish!”
“But if you never lived in Key West –”
“Then I never wrote To have and Have Not. I never saw Sloppy Joe’s, was never found there by Marty, and so I was never influenced by her urgent politics. I didn’t throw myself into the Loyalist cause, never went to China in ’41, which means I never did any undercover work for the Treasury Department during the war. And so on. My whole life was different, like I said. I wrote A Farewell to Arms, but it wasn’t exactly the same book. I still had to kill off Katherine, but not by childbirth. I wrote two novels set in the West.”
“So you and Hadley staying married is one decision that did affect everything. I take it you never declared yourself a Catholic.”
“No, and I didn’t spend 20 years in a Catholic Spanish-speaking country. Different life entirely, just like not being wounded in 1918. Not only no Pauline, but no Marty, no Mary, and no going off to the wars, no deep-sea fishing, no Q-Boat.”
“But also no For Whom the Bell Tolls, no Old Man and the Sea.”
“I never said it was all gain, just it was a different life. And this doesn’t even talk about the good sound work I did in that life, or our trips to Spain and France, or the new friends we made and the friends we kept.”
”So let’s stay with what did happen when you broke up with Hadley and married Pauline. Let’s say you moved to Key West. What if your father hadn’t killed himself?”
.12.
It was like a blow to the face. Odd, that.
Nick was watching him closely. “You never did get over it.”
“No, not even now, and it’s strange, you know? You would think it would be different, now I’ve talked to him and seen he’s alive, or as alive as I am, anyway. You’d think it would change how I feel.”
“You might think that, until you realize that once you’re out of the three-dimensional world, we aren’t constricted in the same ways. Instead of thinking of ourselves as one version that changes as we go along, here it’s more like there is a different version of us for every part of our life: There’s a young Hemingway, a teenage Hemingway, and a 60-year-old Hemingway, and all the rest. In 3D, we don’t sort out like that, because we’re in one body that holds it all together. But here, you could meet yourself at different stages, in different years.”
“You make it sound like being dead is going to be fun.”
“It can be, among other things, yes. But you see, you just experienced your feelings around your father’s suicide, and you can see they are as alive as you are. You will find that they are sharper than they were in life. Most things are.”
“And the needle is stuck in the same groove forever?”
“Not quite forever. But you will find it not so easy to change what you feel, what you are, now that you’re out of the crucible that 3D restrictions create. That’s what 3D life is for, changing by choosing. This life is about other things.” He saw that Hemingway had no words ready. He said, “So go. Suppose your father lived to see 1929, and maybe many years thereafter.”
When he returned, Nick said: “Well?”
“I guess Dad killing himself was one of those things that were meant to be, like my getting wounded in 1918. Even when he didn’t kill himself in December, it usually wasn’t much later. He just ran out of road.”
“Like his son?”
“Yeah, like me. Sometimes the Florida real estate mess cleared up, so he wasn’t going broke, but how was he going to get back his health?”
“Again like his son.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps in ways you still haven’t realized.”
Puzzled: “Such as?”
“In the months before you shot yourself, what was the biggest thing obsessing you, other than your declining health and your inability to write?”
“I’ll be damned! You’re right, I never thought about it. Is that why I was sure I was going broke?”
“You tell me.”
“I will be damned.”
.13.
For a moment, Nick honored Hemingway’s mood. Then: “It’s hard to watch someone you love and be unable to help in any way. But what about the times when he chose to live instead of die? How did that affect your life?”
“It isn’t so much what it did as what it didn’t do. It didn’t convince me that he was a coward, or that my mother was not only bossy but deadly. It didn’t convince me that that I was going to kill myself.”
“Say all that,” Nick said calmly. “What were the longer-term effects?”
“I didn’t follow it that far,” he said shortly.
“Because –?”
Restlessly: “I don’t know, maybe it didn’t seem worthwhile. I mean, it’s just the path not taken.”
Nick waited him out.
“It made me uncomfortable somehow.” A moment’s brooding. “Somehow it was making me feel guilty, I don’t know why.”
“One more indictment, in a life that had given you plenty of experience with guilt.”
“I guess so.”
“And do you have any real reason to be feeling guilty that your father ran out of road, as you put it?”
“No!” A long hesitation. “Or maybe yes, a little. I could have been a better son. I could have kept in touch. Could at least have let him see his grandson.”
“And would that have saved him, Mr. Hemingway?”
“Everybody’s on his own in life. You can help others only so much.”
“Then is it possible that this is the lesson to be drawn here? That your father killed himself but it wasn’t your fault?”
Stiffly: “I never thought it was.” He faltered. “At least, if I did, I wasn’t aware of it.”
“Of course you weren’t aware of it. That’s the whole point of all this, as I keep telling you. So if you are satisfied, let’s move on.”
“All right. It’s funny, it feels like a knot just got loosened.”
“That’s the hope. Tell me, what if you and Pauline had never settled in Key West?”
.14.
That took a while! Or seemed to, in a realm without any way to measure time. He returned thinking about consequences.
“Surprised, Mr. Hemingway?”
“Yeah, I was. As far as I can tell, moving to Key West was maybe the third most important thing to happen to me, after July 8, 1918 and leaving Hadley for Pauline. So many things hinged on it.”
“And you hadn’t ever suspected?”
“It’s like you say, the farther out you go, the more thoroughly everything changes.”
“What surprised you the most?”
“Well, you know, the first half of my life was so full, I had forgotten that it didn’t include deep-sea fishing. Until Charley Thompson and Joe Russell took me out, all I knew was stream fishing. Now all of a sudden there was this whole new world to learn.”
“And without it?”
“No learning the Gulf Stream. No trips to Cuba with Mister Josie. No Pilar. No articles for Esquire on the great blue river, and I guess no images of Hemingway as deep-sea sports-fisherman, that sold a lot of books. Plus, I wouldn’t have learned about the Keys and the conchs, the real life of a part of America that no one had ever written about.”
“No article for New Masses about the 1935 hurricane.”
“No, and no close-up study of the politics of revolution in Cuba, and no moving to Cuba. So many consequences. I lived in that town a dozen years. It was like looking at my life if I didn’t get wounded in 1918, all those possibilities, but no main pattern I could see.”
“Surely, there must have been something.”
“I don’t know where we would have wound up, but it sure wasn’t going to be Piggott, Arkansas. It wouldn’t have been a big city, either. So maybe, like with Hadley, Pauline and I would have wound up living in the West somewhere. Denver, maybe, who knows? But there just wasn’t a main alternative pattern. Key West was way more important than I had realized, even, because it was a place I could assemble my mob for fishing trips. Can you imagine if I had tried to get Max to visit me in Havana?”
“And even Havana wouldn’t have been in the cards without Key West, would it?”
“No, probably not. I’ll tell you, this one was a surprise. I guess even after the fact, it can be hard to see your life in the right proportions. I hate to admit it, but I’m liking this. Now where?”
“You mentioned Esquire. What if you and Arnold Gingrich hadn’t come to your agreement to write for his new magazine?”
He grinned. “I had to. That’s how I financed the Pilar.”
“Yes, but suppose you hadn’t.”
“We went over this ground in the trial, remember? I said without Pilar, Key West would have become too small for me, and without the safari and without the Esquire articles, my pubic image might not have gotten so out-of-control. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Fine. Then let’s talk about your ‘Panic’ article and its effects, looking at it as the first link in a long chain of events. What might have happened without that first link?”
He considered the question thoughtfully. “Interesting. I never thought to look at it that way. Okay, let’s find out.”
.15.
In a body, he might have been frowning.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just I was realizing how little I understood of what was going on, what my life was moving toward. You think you’re doing a thing for one reason, and it turns out that you’re doing it for many reasons. And the train you thought was taking you one place was really taking you someplace else entirely. I write an article about what I saw on Matacumbe, and how unnecessary it was, and I send it to New Masses because they want it and they’re the only ones likely to print it. I call it ‘Panic,’ but they, for their own reasons, title it ‘Who killed the vets?’ and of course most people think that’s my title, because most people don’t realize that journalists don’t usually get to write their own headlines.”
“New Masses was using you.”
“I never expected anything else. But what I didn’t think about was the FBI noticing, and even the NKVD. All the political lemmings noticed, of course, all the lefty bandwagon-jumpers. Suddenly they’re all assuming I am something that I am not. So on the one hand I am this pleasure-seeking hard drinking playboy, and now I am also this Johnny-come-lately sympathizer to the leftist cause, finally becoming aware of class warfare. Quite a straddle.”
“So how did your life change if you didn’t write that article?”
“No, you can’t draw straight lines in life the way you’re wanting to. Without the article, the other links in the chain still exist. I was still going to meet Marty and drift leftward. I was still going to cover the Spanish Civil War and get put on Hoover’s watch list. I was still going to come to the attention of the Russians.”
“So this is another of the main lines of your life that aren’t easily deflected?”
“Seems like it. Seems like some things, if you don’t come to them one way, you come to them from another direction.”
“And you examined what happened if you didn’t get put on the FBI’s watch list?”
“I did, and that was very interesting.” Bitterly: “Their vendetta cost me, and it cost the country.”
“Now, you know that isn’t balanced.”
Grudgingly: “Okay, no. It wasn’t the FBI alone, and it wasn’t my article by itself. Anybody who supported the Spanish Loyalists got tarred with the same brush. We called ourselves ‘premature anti-fascists,’ after a while, kind of a bitter joke. We were all considered politically untrustworthy. So, yeah, even without Hoover’s vendetta, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten into the OSS. But it was so stupid! When it came to understanding France, and knowing how to deal with the French, who had more to offer than I did? You’ll notice, they were happy to use me when it came to taking Paris.”
“Colonel Bruce was.”
“And you think he didn’t clear that with his superiors? But it had to be deniable, because I was officially a correspondent, so I had to lie about it and they had to pretend to believe my lies.”
Nick let him brood for a long moment, until he said, “Let’s look at something less depressing.”
“Then why don’t we look at your life if you had worked for OSS instead of pretending to be only a war correspondent?”
He brightened. “Good idea!”
.16.
He returned shaken. “I had no idea!”
“Far-reaching consequences, sometimes. Things you never would have considered. So how did you experience it?”
“Well, in the versions where I had been with the Spanish Loyalists, it wasn’t easy to overcome the suspicion. But my Crook Factory work with Spruill Braden helped, because that was running an intelligence network on nothing, and Braden himself said it was helpful. And I told them about using Pilar as a Q Boat, so they could see I understood the need for discipline. They decided to give me a try and hope for the best. But they were always waiting for me to get the bit in my teeth, so I was careful to keep my head down. They thought I would want to perform feats of derring-do, and they were always waiting for me to suggest it. But hell, my son was in the OSS! He was the right age for parachuting behind enemy lines, I wasn’t.”
“So how did it turn out?”
“Being with the OSS let me do on a large scale what I did on a tiny scale on the road to Paris. I knew France. I knew Europe and Europeans. I knew how to piece together bits of information to make a larger picture. And, if it happened that there was occasion to lead some parties, as might easily have happened, where’s the harm in it? This time, I wasn’t a correspondent, I was part of the army.”
“So what did you find so surprising?”
“I’ll tell you. When I was with the OSS, I wasn’t with Buck Lanham’s bunch, getting shot to pieces in the Hurtgen Forest. So, at the end of the war, no combat fatigue. This time, when I came home from Europe in 1945, I wasn’t dealing with all those emotional time bombs. And I came home honored for my contribution. I’ll bet in a lot of those versions, I am going to keep on going for many more years, just because I didn’t incur the damage I did in real life.”
“Any drawbacks?”
“You’re always going to have drawbacks. I didn’t spend the fall and winter with Buck and the 22nd, for one thing, and I didn’t get any first-hand combat experience, or anyway not much. These were powerful experiences and I would hate to have missed them. But, they didn’t come free.”
“No. So your postwar life was very different?”
“I guess you’d have to say I was different. What with China in 1941, then the Crook Factory and the Q-Boat in 1942-43, then the OSS through the end of the war in Europe, I hadn’t written anything since For Whom the Bell Tolls. But this time I had been doing officially recognized intelligence work. So instead of trying to write a series of novels, I wrote one novel about the Q-Boat and another one set among OSS men in France in 1944. Smaller-scale ambitions than this time, but more likely to be fulfilled.”
“One more what-if. In real life, you got into trouble for supposedly playing war when you weren’t supposed to carry arms. What if instead of lying about what you had done, you had owned up to it?”
“They would have kicked me out of the European Theater. Sent me home. That wouldn’t have been so bad in a way, because what was ever going to be as bloody marvelous as that July, August and September? And I’d still have my memories of my time with the 22nd, and I would have missed Hurtgen Forest and wouldn’t have had any idea how bad it was.
“But, you know, I had to lie about it. Bruce and the OSS and the brass were desperate for me to lie about it. Bruce had given me objectives! The brass knew damned well where some of their intel was coming from, and they were glad to have it, but they had to turn a blind eye. I couldn’t tell the truth without causing them a lot of trouble. So , like I said, I lied and they pretended to believe me. And you know what? I think that’s about as far as I want to go with what-if.”
“You don’t want to look at your postwar life with Mary?”
“I don’t think there would have been a life with Mary. That all hinged on our meeting in London, and if I was with the OSS, I wouldn’t have had time to kill waiting for the invasion. I would have been up to my eyes with the advance work. But anyway, no, there’s no point.”
“Then let me suggest one last what-if, late in life but important. Those two successive airplane crashes in 1954. You lived the version where the crashes left you badly injured. But there were two other possibilities, either no crash at all or a crash that killed you. What of those two paths? Care to look”
“Yeah, I do, now that you mention it.” Off again.
.17.
And, for the final time, he returned to this no-place, this interruption-without-context.
“You oversimplified. Lots more things could have happened than just the extremes. Let’s say I got killed, either when Roy hit that power line or the next day in the botched takeoff. ‘Dead. Papa killed at 55, still carrying full sail. End of story.’ Would have saved everybody a lot of aggravation.”
“And is that your considered opinion, that it would have saved trouble?”
“After a full seven years of dealing with the effects of those injuries? Yeah, it is. And they were in addition to concussions, and undiagnosed combat fatigue. All that deterioration Hotch was talking about: Could have skipped all of it.”
“It would have made your life a tidier adventure story, certainly. But what about its effect on you, here, as you came over?”
He shrugged. “If you are asking me, would I regret the years I would have missed, what was there to miss? Seven years of progressive loss of control over my own reactions? I could have skipped all that without regret. The other extreme was more interesting. I suppose you already know, without those crashes, chances are I’d still be in 3D, going strong. I always burned my candle at both ends, all my life. I aged quicker than most people. But it was only after the crashes in 1954 that I suddenly began getting old. Continued pain will do that to you, just the pain by itself, not to mention the effects of all the things causing the pain.”
“Or the effects of the ways you may be tempted to self-medicate.”
“Fine. Booze probably didn’t help. But what else did I have? Anyway, without those injuries, I don’t know how my life ends, but I don’t think it’s over yet. Nothing was going to bring back Charlie Scribner and Max Perkins, or the years I lost to politics and warfare, and there wasn’t any way to undo the results of bad decisions, but the accidents cost the world my second safari book, and I’m sorry about that, because I was doing some good thinking in those African nights. It seems to me I saw a nice companion volume to Green Hills of Africa. Another thing: Without the accidents, I still had time, and I still had the energy, to shape up the two projects I had been juggling since the war. In some versions I did, and in some I didn’t. It’s too bad, because nobody else can finish them for me.
“That second crash cost Mary all that exposed film – hundreds of shots she was planning to use for her article for Life magazine. Cost me my health, cost me several years of good working time. Cost me a place of honor at JFK’s inauguration, when he invited Faulkner and me to represent achievement in American literature. He was a fan, you know, from the time he was a kid.”
“I knew. I wasn’t sure you knew.”
“Oh yes. In good health, I would have enjoyed it..” Briskly: “Enough post mortems. Where do we go from here?”