I have been spending some time going through the record of my altered-state conversations with Ernest Hemingway between 2006 and 2011, which I printed as Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway. I have always regretted that I didn’t think more carefully about the content an purpose of that book. It should have been primarily about him: his life then, his life now. Instead, I printed the conversations in chronological order, that is, as they occurred, to demonstrate the nature and possibilities and pitfalls of the process as I experienced it.
So now I want to correct that mistake. Since Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway is out of print, and the copyright reverted to me, I intend to rework it to center on Hemingway rather than on the process of contacting him.
A small sample, from a session held Tuesday, July 31, 2007, I having been reading Michael Reynolds’ book The Young Hemingway, which detailed the tall stories Hemingway told about his World War I experiences when he returned home in 1919:
Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?
That is quite an indictment, but I have to concede it. In my defense I could say this. It is one thing to pretend until you can achieve, and another very different thing to pretend that you are what you are not. It is true, there isn’t much difference in a boy.
I am sorry, I can’t see much difference in a grown man protecting a territory of lies however young he was when he created them.
Perhaps you can see it this way. Lies, stories, imaginings, have consequences. Some are internal, the stories you tell yourself in order to bring a better you into existence. Others are external, and you have to live with them. If you tell someone you are 22, and you are barely 20, at some point you may have to overcome the consequences of even so small a thing. The internal consequences may be small or nonexistent — you were, after all, merely wishing yourself a little farther along the path. But the external consequences may be larger, or even maybe important, depending on what that lie or exaggeration does to the person you told it to. Will she then know to distrust your facts? Will she distrust you? But there isn’t any going back once you’ve made the wrong step.
Why isn’t there?
If I said I was in the Italian army when the truth is that I wanted to be with the Italian army, and wanted to be a soldier among the soldiers, to correct this story would be merely to adjust it to the externals rather than the internals. Why do you think I was in harm’s way in the first place? I wanted to be a soldier among soldiers, a man among men. There was no reason for a Red Cross man to be at a forward post except wanting to be among the men at the lines, and do what I could even if it was only bringing them little comforts. To correct my story would have been to dishonor that aspiration, as I saw it then.
You were improving on the truth.
I was reporting what I was experiencing on the inside.
And wearing the uniform and the cape afterwards?
You should understand clinging to what had been.
And I understand your needing to remind yourself that you were not merely what you appeared; were not fated (doomed) to return to your hometown and revert to being seen as what you didn’t want to be.
I had an eye that would have kept me out of it entirely, so life found a different path for me to get the taste I needed, then pay prolonged consequences.