Fiction

Katy! Katy, as she was when they were still friends, and half in love. Those green eyes, once innocently joyful and not without mischief, in a young girl’s face.

“Mrs. Dos Passos, you knew the defendant long before he went off to war. Please tell the court where and how you became acquainted.”

“My aunt used to take my brothers and me to spend our summers in Horton’s Bay, in Michigan. That wasn’t far from the Hemingway cottage, and our families naturally got to know each other. I was eight years older than Ernest, but in the summer of 1915, Ernest and my younger brother Bill began to pal around, and so he became a friend of the family.”

“Please tell the court how it came about that you were the one who brought the defendant together with Hadley Richardson.”

“Hadley and I were best friends for our whole eight years at the Mary Institute, which was a private school for girls in St. Louis. After we graduated in 1910, we stayed close. I knew all about her home life, so when–”

“What do you mean, `all about her home life’? Would you elaborate on that, please?”

Shortly, almost curtly: “Her mother and her sister. They ganged up on her, and treated her like an invalid, and did everything they could to destroy her self-confidence. If it hadn’t been for them, she might have become a concert pianist. She at least would have finished at Bryn Mawr, instead of leaving after her first year! Hadley spent months nursing her mother in her final illness, and when, in the autumn of 1920, I heard that her mother had died, I wanted to get her out of St. Louis before her sister could get to work on her. I immediately invited her to come up to Chicago and spend a couple of weeks with me. My older brother Y.K. and his wife were letting me live with them in this  big apartment, and there was room for her and they were all for it.

“So in October, she came to visit, and in some ways it went perfectly. The night she got there, I threw a party for her. I wanted her to meet young people, alive, after all those half-dead years in St. Louis. Everybody who met her always loved Hadley, and our crowd scooped her up as if she’d been one of us for years, and instead of feeling left out, she was right in the center of things. I wanted her to have fun that night, and she did. She really did. She had that gorgeous red hair, and she could play the piano like nobody’s business, and she was friendly. She was a hit.”

Her glance flicked over to him. “Especially with Ernest. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and of course she couldn’t help respond.  Ernest had this way of giving you his full attention that was hypnotic. I never saw anybody else who had it.”

“Would you say that this was a trick he employed?”

She stopped to consider. “A trick? Well, it wasn’t something you could pretend. But it was something he knew how to use, like a woman might use her hair.”

“Or her green eyes.”

She flushed in annoyance, but waited for the prosecutor’s next question.

“And so Hadley Richardson fell under the defendant’s spell.”

He could see her making the effort to be fair. “They fell under each other’s spell. They fascinated each other. They spent hours together, every day of her visit, and when she went home they started writing to each other. Long letters every day. Some days two letters, even three. In those days, long-distance telephone calls between Chicago and St. Louis were harder to make, and would have been too expensive, certainly for him. So they wrote.” She sighed. “I don’t know, maybe it was all for the best, all things considered, even in the long run.”

“I recognize that this may be a sensitive subject, but tell us please, what was your relationship with the defendant at the time he and your best friend met? Were you lovers?”

“That’s what everybody wondered at the time, but it was none of their business then and I don’t see that it’s anybody’s business now. We’re past all that.”

“You are aware that the defendant –”

“You can’t believe anything Ernest ever said about his love life.” There was that edge in her voice, an edge he had gotten used to in their later years. “He was always making up stories. In 1921, he and I were half in love, or something. I don’t know how to define it. We’d known each other so many years, and we were very fond of each other at the time. Maybe it was just sexual attraction.”

“At this point in his life, did the defendant have a reputation as a seducer of women?”

She took her bottom lip between her teeth. “He wasn’t very careful. Especially after he came back from the war. You could lose your reputation, going out with him.” She gazed at him, a steady unwavering gaze. “You could lose your reputation even if you didn’t do anything. He liked to brag. I know girls who weren’t careful enough around him. An Indian girl named Prudence, for one. Marjorie Bump, for another. And I could easily have been a third, if I hadn’t been more careful than they were.”

“Did this result from malice on the defendant’s part, do you think?”

“More like carelessness. He was conceited and self-absorbed and careless.”

“So even though you consented to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, you weren’t entirely happy to see your best friend marrying him.”

He watched her narrowly.

“I suppose I had mixed feelings. It was so good to see Hadley that happy and alive. She glowed! But I didn’t want to see her get hurt, and I thought that’s what was likely to happen, because I knew Ernest. But I wasn’t going to stand in the way of whatever Hadley wanted, even if she had been in a mood to listen. She was already 30, and who knew if she would ever have a better chance? And, they were very much in love, it was obvious. I wished her well and hoped it would work out better than I thought it would.”

“Thank you. No further questions. Your honor, the prosecution calls Yeremya Kenley Smith, known as Y.K. Smith.”

.2.

Oops. Well, he should have figured on this.

“Mr. Smith, you and the defendant were good enough friends, despite the fact that you were so many years his senior, that you invited him to stay in your apartment without paying rent.”

A shrug. “It was a big place, more than my wife Doodles and I needed, and he was a veteran, looking for a job, wanting to be a writer, trying to get by. Even after he found a job, he didn’t have a lot of money. And he and Bill and Katy had been friends for years.”

“Did the two of you like each other?”

“Oh yeah, while it lasted. He was quick and lively and he could be fun.”

“And he fit in among your friends?”

A slight, ironic smile. “They found him entertaining. Hemingway liked to think of himself as a man of the world, seen everything, experienced everything, but he was still a kid, with a kid’s illusions. Most of his stories about what had happened to him were bu- were made up fairy-tales, like riding the rails, or making his living as a pro fighter’s sparring partner. Pretty good stories, some of them, and if you kept your eyes half-shut you could believe them, for a while. If he’d just minded his own business, we would have been okay.”

“You are referring to his talking about your wife’s affairs.”

“He thought his few months in Italy had left him all grown up and disillusioned, but he didn’t really know anything except Oak Park, which includes Oak Park’s ideas of what you did or didn’t do in a marriage. Hemingway found out that Doodles was carrying on with other men, and, being Hemingway, he had to talk about it. And I told him to mind his own godd – uh, mind his own business. I more or less knew what Doodles was doing, and she more or less knew what I was doing, and it suited us. What business was it of his to talk about her to other people? Particularly, what business was it of his to take it on himself to warn me?”

“I was just trying to help.”

Y.K. looked at him, their first direct contact in forty years. “Yes, trying to help. That’s the busybodies’ theme song. Well, you didn’t help. How can you help when you don’t know what’s going on?”

“And when your mistress took a shot at Doodles a couple of years, later, how did that work out?”

The prosecutor said, quickly, “You need not respond to that, Mr. Smith.”

“No, but you see, that’s exactly what I was talking about. And apparently he hasn’t changed.”

“Mr. Smith, before the breach between you, is it not true that the defendant first met the famous writer Sherwood Anderson through you, at your apartment?”

Smith nodded. “He met lots of writers at my place. Anderson and I were working together as ad men at the same place.”

“Anderson had just published Winesburg, Ohio?”

“That’s right, his first big hit.”

“And the defendant made it a point to cultivate him as a successful, published writer.”

A pause, as Smith weighed reactions. “It wasn’t just opportunism, if that’s what you mean. Hemingway was serious about writing, and Anderson was a middle-aged writer who maybe enjoyed having a protégé.”

“One final thing, then, Mr. Smith. How did this – ah, disagreement between you and the defendant affect your relationship?”

“Until then, we were planning on Hemingway and Hadley living in our apartment with us for a while after they got married. But that put the kibosh on that. And then he told me I wasn’t welcome at the wedding or the reception.”

“This, after you had let him live rent-free in your apartment.”

“I didn’t care about that part of it, I just didn’t like being read out of his life when I wasn’t even the one to blame.”

“Thank you, Mr. Smith. No further questions, your honor.”

“The defense waives cross-examination, your honor.”

“The prosecution calls Sherwood Anderson to the stand.”

.3.

Anderson looked as he had in 1920, when they had met, Sherwood Anderson, the successful author in his middle age, and Ernest Hemingway, the would-be author, in his early twenties.

“Mr. Anderson, please tell the court when and where you met the defendant.”

“It was at a party some time in 1920, at Y.K.’s place, in the summer, I think. Y.K. and I were working at the same advertising agency, and Ernest had an editing job with the Cooperative Commonwealth. He wanted to be a writer, and that’s all he wanted. It was like looking at a younger version of myself.”

“Please tell the court a little about your background up to that time.”

“I was born in Ohio in 1876, quit school at 14, moved to Chicago , and supported myself by manual labor until the Spanish-American War broke out. I enlisted, and after the war I went to college, and then I worked at this and that, and got married and had children. But in 1912, in my mid-thirties, I chucked it all, career and family both.”

“Why was that, Mr. Anderson?”

“I couldn’t take any more of that life. I didn’t want to manage businesses, I wanted to write.”

“You became part of the literary movement known as the Chicago Renaissance.”

“That’s right. Floyd Dell, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, all of them. But by the time I met Hemingway, pretty much everybody except Ben Hecht and me had already moved east. And I wasn’t exactly famous. I was still writing advertising copy for a living.”

“Still, you had published Winesburg, Ohio, your first collection of short stories, and it had attracted more attention than anything you had published previously.”

“That’s right.”

“So when you and the defendant met, it was very much a meeting of a young unknown with an established author, was it not?”

“Oh yes. He wanted to know everything I knew. Not only the mechanics and the day-to-day reality, but all the literary gossip. He loved literary gossip, I think it made him feel like there was less of an abyss between published authors and himself. We met several times that winter, and we had some great talks. He was extremely young and bright, and in those days he was well aware of how much he had to learn – and he wanted to learn it all. He was curious about everything, very focused. He asked for advice on his career, and he listened to it.”

“What kind of advice did you give him?”

“I told him to be an American writer. That’s what the Chicago Renaissance was all about. All the literature he had been fed growing up was Englishmen and a few Americans who might as well have been Englishmen. Maybe the most important thing I did was show him the difference between real, serious fiction and the dishonest slop that appeared in the slick magazines. I pointed him toward certain writers he should read, Russians like Turgenev, for instance.”

“In April of that year, you took a trip to Paris, and met several important writers and painters.”

“Yes. I was extremely fortunate. Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Picasso, others. When I got back to Chicago in November, I learned that Ernest and Hadley had gotten married, and they were planning to live in Italy while he became a writer. I told them that Paris was the place, not Italy, and I gave him letters of introduction to the people I had just met.”

“Mr. Anderson, we will have to discuss your later relations with the defendant at the proper time, but that’s all for the moment.” The prosecutor turned to the defense attorney. “Cross examination?”

“Mr. Anderson, would you describe the last time you met the defendant in Chicago?”

“Do you mean when he and Hadley were leaving for Europe?”

“That’s right, in late November, 1921.”

Anderson smiled. “I was in my apartment and I heard Hemingway clomping up the stairs, shouting for me. I opened the door and there he was with a knapsack full of canned goods. He and Hadley were cleaning out their place, heading off to New York, and they were giving me the food they had left over. I didn’t care about the canned goods, but he’d made the trip across town just to bring them. And all that energy and boyish enthusiasm.” Wistfully: “That was the Hemingway people loved. Back before he became a success.”

It made him squirm, and it made him sad. Anderson noticed, but said nothing.

“No further questions, your honor.”

“Very well. Mr. Prosecutor, your next witness?”

“The prosecution recalls Hadley Hemingway Mowrer to the stand.”

.4.

Hadley was dressed as she had been on September 3, 1921.

“Mrs. Mowrer, your wedding day. You were 30 years old, married now to a boy of 22. Any second thoughts at the time?”

“None, Mr. Prosecutor. I was looking forward.”

“And, in the next few days?”

“I was still very happy.”

“Mrs. Mowrer, the court recognizes that you never lost your affection for the defendant, and nobody is asking you to go out of your way to paint him in an unfavorable light, but, after all, this proceeding is designed to establish the whole truth. Would you tell the court, please, what happened when you and he traveled to the nearby town of Petosky, while you were still staying at your honeymoon cottage?”

“You mean the other girls, I suppose. Ernest took me around to meet several of his former girlfriends. He said he wanted me to see what he had passed up in my favor. It was supposed to enhance his desirability in my eyes, I suppose. I can laugh about it now. As a matter of fact, I was already laughing about it not long after he and I split up. It was just like when he got drunk and drove the motorboat back from town, not realizing that he was towing part of the dock, because he had forgotten to unmoor one of the lines. It showed me, right away, that Ernest was still immature in a lot of ways, and I would have to make allowances.”

“Not a promising start to a marriage.”

“We were young, we were in love, and we had all the world ahead of us. I knew he was special, and I knew he loved me. He didn’t have to be perfect.”

“Your honor, in the interest of continuity, I should like to ask the defendant one question, then continue with Mrs. Mowrer.”

“Objection? No? Proceed.”

“Mr. Hemingway, within two months of your wedding day, you and your wife were on your way to live in Paris. Mrs. Mowrer has testified that you intended to earn your daily bread by selling feature articles to the Toronto Weekly Star, while you taught yourself to write. Would you please tell the court how this arrangement came about?”

“I was spending a few months living in the Connable house, in Toronto, acting as a companion for the Connable boy while his parents and sister were in Florida. I had Mr. Connable get me an introduction to the staff at the Toronto Weekly Star, and I started hanging around the office, and finally Greg Clark, the weekly’s features editor, offered me a job writing feature articles at space rates. Couldn’t make a living at it, but I liked doing it, and they liked my stuff and ran it pretty regularly until I left in May for one more summer at the lake. So when Hadley and I started thinking about living in Europe, I made the same deal with John Bone, the weekly editor. I would scare up stories, and they’d pay me space rates plus expenses for anything  he accepted. I figured it would help pay the bills while I learned to write. Soon enough they started sending me to economic conferences, to find human-interest slants on the front-page news. It worked all right.”

“Thank you. Now, Mrs. Mowrer, let’s discuss Paris as you experienced it.”

 

His father appeared as he had looked when they met again in January, 1919.

The prosecutor’s manner was that of a townsman to a respected physician. “Dr. Hemingway, please describe for the court what happened when you and your daughter Marcelline met the train from New York that brought your son home from the World War.”

“I had seen the doctor’s reports, and so intellectually I knew the extent of the damage he had sustained, but I suppose I envisioned him essentially as I had seen him eight months before. Instead, I saw him get down from the train, stepping down so cautiously, concerning himself with his balance, leaning a bit on the cane he had in his right hand. He saw us, and came limping to us, walking so slowly, so gingerly. We had to go down some steps, and I offered him my arm as a support, but he wouldn’t take it. He walked all the way to the car that way, on his own, slowly.”

He could see it from his father’s side now, a father seeing his young son getting down from the train, seeing the boy who had left home whole and had come home damaged. At the time, he had taken it all as criticism. He hadn’t understood the anguish.

“Dr. Hemingway, perhaps you could describe for the court the changes you observed in your son when he returned from the war.”

“It was heartbreaking. For his mother, too, nothing less than heartbreaking.” There was that familiar look of resolute disapproval, but not aimed at him this time. “You must remember, we grew up before all these wars. We never heard words like `shell shock’ and `combat fatigue.’ Other than a few months in 1898, and Indian fighting on the frontier, the country had been at peace for 50 years, ever since the Civil War. We didn’t realize what war did to those who survived. So when Ernest came home from the war, we weren’t prepared for the changes. He had been such a fine boy, and he had come back so damaged!

“He came home so bitter! Nothing about our pleasant life suited him anymore. The ideals he had been brought up to revere were meaningless. Oak Park was narrow and provincial, our tastes in literature were moronic, our ambitions were silly and our ordinary life was unbearably dull. What was far worse, Ernest had succumbed to just those influences we had feared. He drank. He smoked. And in our worst nightmares, we had never envisioned his bringing the language of the barracks into the Hemingway parlor.

“We tried to make allowances, but his behavior didn’t get any better. He would have good days and we would think, `at last, he’s through the worst of it,’ and then he would be worse than before.”

His mother, too, had been so visibly taken aback at the toll the war had taken. She had babied him, at first, until he had had to push her away. With her, too, he hadn’t understood the anguish.

“No, Ernest, you were entirely centered on yourself. As sensitive as you were, you seemed to have lost the ability to feel anybody else’s concerns.”

“Oh, I know that tune! It was always straighten out and fly right. But none of you had any idea what was actually going on with me.”

“Perhaps not. The things that had happened to you were beyond our experience. But your grandfathers had had their war – and much more of it than you had! They had not come home changed in the way you did. It was beyond us to know how to deal with you. We did try.”

“You tried to make me into a child again, living in his parents’ house, with his parents’ rules, living by his parents’ values.”

“Try to understand. You didn’t seem to realize how much life you had ahead of you. Nineteen is too young to live in the past! You needed to prepare yourself for a career.”

“It worked out all right in the end.”

“We couldn’t know that, and neither could you. You could have gone to college, as your mother and I expected.”

“How could I, when she had spent all the money?”

His father looked at him straight and level, that look he had gotten so familiar with, that long year at home. “Ernest, you know that isn’t true, and it is time that you admit it to yourself.”

He felt the old anger rising, then felt the defense attorney’s hand on his arm. “Mr. Hemingway, a piece of advice. Clear your mind of preconceptions and look carefully. Your father testified that you could have gone to college, yet you would not. Why was that?”

Slowly, reluctantly: “Maybe because it was expected.” Vivid memories of Oak Park, so self-consciously cultural and respectable, the land of the Pharisee. “Going off to college would have cemented me into the family mold. I had to get out of there.”

His father: “Then, Ernest, whose choice was it, and whose fault was it?”

“All right, I see it. If you need me to say I’m sorry for getting the story wrong, I’ll say it. I’m sorry.”

So you could still hurt people here! Interesting. He worked to undo it. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Really, what you shouldn’t have done is spend years lying about your mother who loved you, telling people what an evil woman she was. Telling Hadley until she half-believed it. Telling all your wives, and your friends, and even strangers.”

“No, you’re right. I shouldn’t have. I see that now. I’m sorry.” And, for the first time, he really was. But that was almost too much.  “On the other hand, you can’t deny that I was thrown out of the family cabin the day I turned 21!”

“Dr. Hemingway? Is that what happened?”

“Ernest’s mother wrote the letter, and delivered it, while I was in Oak Park. But when I saw it, I approved of it, 100%. We were at the end of our rope, and thought, this may be our last chance to save our son. Understand, by that time he had been living at home for a year and a half. The help he provided was minimal and grudging, but he was always there at the dinner table. His attitude toward his mother and me was beyond disrespectful, it was defiant. And perhaps worst of all, it seemed to us that he was well on his way to becoming a loafer and a parasite, living off his charm – he could still be charming when it pleased him to be – and expecting to get something for nothing. Getting by on charm is one thing when you are young and handsome, but it wears thin later in life, and by that time you may have closed so many doors that none remain. We didn’t want to see that happen to our boy.”

“And so?”

“And so, on July 21, 1920, when we should have had every reason to be proud because our son had attained his majority, his mother had to hand him an ultimatum: As they used to say later on, shape up or ship out.”

“And I shipped out.”

“Yes you did. But Ernest, I ask you. Do you still think we were wrong to give you the ultimatum?”

He took a long moment to see how he felt about it. “You were wrong in your facts. I was working hard, learning how to write.”

“How were we to judge that? We couldn’t know what it would come to. We didn’t even know if you were really working, or merely pretending.”

“And I liked wine and beer and liquor, and I swore, so I must be becoming a monster of depravity. But those things were part of a man’s world, no matter what Oak Park believed. I had done a man’s job in Kansas City, and I had suffered a man’s wound in Italy. Two wounds, if you count Agnes. I wasn’t going to let your standards of propriety emasculate me.” But as usual his innate sense of fair play kicked in when emotion subsided. “Maybe it was just that we couldn’t understand each other.”

“No further questions, your honor. I should like to recall the defendant to the stand.”

And his father was gone, and he was back in the witness box.

.2.

“Mr. Hemingway, now please give the court your view of the year 1919, when you returned from the war.”

He tightened, remembering. “Tough year. I pretty much had to live at home during my convalescence, if I was going to stretch out my insurance payments; it bought me time to learn to write. But it also meant living where I didn’t fit. I was not the person who had left home for Kansas City after high school. How could I be?

“My parents thought I wasn’t doing anything, because I didn’t have a regular job. But I couldn’t go back to the Star. Hobbling around with a cane: Is that any way to chase ambulances? And I didn’t want to go live among college boys. I wanted to become a writer. I spent my time writing stories, hoping to break into the magazines. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was trying. But none of it showed.”

Talking about his inner life seemed to be becoming easier as he went along.

“We need to speak about Agnes von Kurowsky, Mr. Hemingway.”

“Why? You know what happened, what’s the point? She sent me home, she told me she’d follow after a while and we’d get married as soon as I’d gotten a start on a career. But then in March – in March, not three months after I left Italy! – in March she writes me that she’s sorry, she still likes me fine, but we weren’t really in love and now she’s met somebody she’s going to marry. Three months!”

“Please tell the court how you reacted.”

“I got sick.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. I got sick enough I spent a couple of days in bed, alone on the third floor. I couldn’t take it.”

He would have liked to leave it at that, but the prosecutor prodded him. “Proceed, please.”

“Mr. Prosecutor, I had given myself totally, without reservation. Maybe it wouldn’t have lasted. Maybe even at the time it wasn’t what I thought it was. But I gave her my heart and soul, and somehow it wasn’t enough.”

“You were devastated.”

“Humiliated, too. Hurt, bewildered, hopeless. Mostly, blank. I couldn’t see how I was going to go on. It was agony.”

“And nobody to tell.”

“I told my sister, and eventually I told the rest of the family, after I had recovered a bit.”

“But you concealed the worst of the hurt from your family.”

“From my parents, especially, yes. It was just too humiliating. You might think it was just puppy love, and maybe it was, but that first day and night, I thought I was going to die. I wouldn’t want to go through that again. Of course, you can’t, you never have your first love twice.”

“Defense?”

“Mr. Hemingway, you have given us a good honest examination of a difficult year in your life. As you look back, who was right and who was in the wrong?”

“There’s always going to be conflict between a grown son and his father, if they have to live together in the father’s house. And it wasn’t all conflict. There were times when my parents and I got along okay. I tried to get along for the sake of peace in the family, but I also needed them to see that I wasn’t a child anymore. But my parents couldn’t see the writer struggling to be born, or the war veteran struggling against being forced back to being a dependent boy, or the traveler who was oppressed by living within narrower limits.”

“And perhaps, they couldn’t see a scared boy over-compensating with over-confidence?”

“I made sure they didn’t see that! I hadn’t really gotten into an army, I hadn’t really been a hero, maybe I wouldn’t really be able to become a writer. Maybe I wouldn’t really be able to get out of Oak Park. Really, when my mother told me I couldn’t live with them any more, and I moved over to Chicago – just a trolley ride, you know, not very far in distance – it was a big relief, even if it was financially inconvenient. I suppose it was going to come sooner or later, and maybe it was a good thing, in that it didn’t tempt me to drag the situation out. It hurt, though.”

“No further questions, your honor.”

Your honor, the prosecution calls Katharine Smith Dos Passos.”

 

 

Chapter 4: The War in Europe

It was all so vivid.

“Brummie and I drew our last paychecks from the Star on April 30, and we met Charlie Hopkins and Carl Edgar, who were waiting to be called up too, and we all went up to Michigan to do some fishing. But we just about got there when my father forwarded a telegram from the Red Cross telling us we had to be in New York City by May 8th. So off we went, in time to get ourselves outfitted and march in the 75,000-man parade that President Wilson reviewed, and on May 21st, we were loaded onto a ship named Chicago. We had an easy trip, we landed in Bordeaux, and they shipped us to Paris to await further orders.”

“Where you promptly went looking for trouble. Tell the court about Big Bertha.”

He grinned, enjoying the memory. “Big Bertha, yeah. The Germans had this long cannon that could shoot 50 miles, or 70 miles, or something, and they were using it to shell Paris. The idea was to panic the Parisians, I suppose. Well, I had spent the winter chasing around in ambulances and fire trucks, so I did what came naturally. Brummie and I hired a taxi and spent a couple of hours chasing around, heading wherever we thought a shell had exploded. After a while a shell hit real near us, and the driver didn’t want to do it any more. But we’d had a lot of fun, while it lasted.”

“No doubt. And then?”

“As soon as they got 150 of us together, they shipped us to Milan, and made all the ambulance drivers soto-tenentes – that’s second lieutenant – and they broke us into groups of 25. My group got Section Four, Schio, which we started calling the Schio Country Club. We were assigned to drive the old Fiat ambulances up and down those steep mountain roads.”

Drily: “And you found this insufficiently hazardous.”

“Mr. Prosecutor, I was 18 years old. What did I know? I had grown up reading Teddy Roosevelt on manly combat and all that. I didn’t intend to spend the war just looking at mountains. So when they asked for volunteers to man emergency canteens on the Piave River, I stepped up. In fact, everybody did. We were each put in charge of a canteen, and I got Fossalta.”

“Please tell the court about the canteens.”

“Since there weren’t any American troops on the Italian front, the Red Cross was there partly to show the flag. We ran canteens where the Italian troops could rest. It would be some house a little bit back from the lines, a couple of miles, far enough to be safe for them. We’d have a room with tables and writing paper, and counters where we served coffee and candy and cigarettes and stuff.”

“Which was still insufficiently hazardous for you. So you decided to get nearer to the action.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I did. I wasn’t sky-larking. I was doing my job; it’s just that I was closer than I needed to be. I would load up with chocolates and cigarettes at night and bicycle up to the trenches, so I could hand them out among the men who couldn’t get back to the canteen. The poor bastards were plenty grateful, believe me. They liked it that I was putting myself in danger for their sake, and they liked that I was trying to learn their language, and they could see I liked being around them. They wanted to know why I was there instead of somewhere safer. The young American, they called me. They had decided I was born under a lucky star, but then on the fourth night, just after midnight, a mortar shell came in, killed the guy next to me, killed the guy on the other side of me, and wounded another guy, and I got my legs filled with shrapnel, and I got buried like the others.”

“Buried?”

“Not like six feet under, just a thick spray of thrown dirt, like being sprayed with water by a boat passing by. But I didn’t notice being buried, because the shock blew me right out of my body.” He paused. “I never romanced that aspect of it, notice. Not in A Farewell to Arms, not anywhere. That should tell you something.”

“Which is?”

“Boys’ fiction was more like valiant death-bed speeches. Nobody wrote about getting your soul blown out of your body and then returning. So it wasn’t anything I romanticized.”

“Mr. Hemingway, nobody in this courtroom will find your story hard to believe, obviously. Tell the court how you experienced it.”

“One minute we were talking and keeping our heads down, and the next minute I, the soul, was flying away from my wounded body, and then I’m hesitating, and I get reeled back in, and I’m lying there covered with dirt. There’s nobody else around but the one wounded man, and I figure I’ll be a hero, so I pick him up and try for the back trenches. My legs feel strange – I know I’m hurt – but they work. Automatically I do what the romantic novels say heroes do: I pick up the soldier in a fireman’s carry and I head for the back trenches. But I got a machine gun bullet in my knee, and I went down, and I would have died there, if the stretcher bearers hadn’t gotten to us.

“My tunic was covered with the other man’s blood, and they thought it was mine. They were saying, `Poor Ernie, he’s done for,’ because they thought I’d gotten a chest wound. I didn’t have a lot of Italian, but I was able to convince them that I wasn’t to be left for dead. Try that sometime, for drama, at 18 years old. I had them take my pants off, because I had to know. But they told me it wasn’t as bad as I was afraid of, and they patted me and told me I was going to be okay, and it was better to be in a hospital than in the trenches anyway.”

He was reliving it now.

“The thing is, you don’t know what the surgeons are going to be able to do or not do, and you’re holding on to your ideas of how a man acts, and you’ve never been nearly as scared as you are, although you are trying hard not to show it. So then they have to carry me on a stretcher, and it takes so long! The stretcher-bearers hit the dirt with me twice, and then we come to this shed with no roof, and we have to wait for an ambulance. So we wait. For hours. And by then the pain has come in, a fast tide that keeps mounting and mounting and never ebbs but keeps on building and it gets to be all you can do to hold on.”

“No pain-killers, Mr. Hemingway?”

“They’ve given me morphine, but the morphine doesn’t kill the pain. You don’t want to cry and beg somebody to make it stop, because when the heroes you’ve read about get hurt it never says they cried or were terrified of consequences: They took it with a smile or a stiff upper lip. And if you’re still a teenage kid, maybe you don’t realize right away that it isn’t how a man feels that counts in such a situation, but how he acts. So maybe you disappoint yourself, and you spend the rest of your life coming to grips with the fact that you weren’t able to feel the way the real heroes feel when they get hurt. And if you start thinking maybe you aren’t what you wanted to be, then you have to try harder to be it. And this puts you on shaky ground, because maybe you aren’t a wounded hero, you’re a scared kid a long way from home who wants his mother.”

“And then?”

“Well, then it’s consequences. The ambulance gets me to the field hospital, and they operate and take out a few of the biggest pieces of shrapnel, and mostly they wait for me to regain enough strength to be moved, because they want to keep the field hospitals cleared out. They put me on a train to Milan on July 15th, and we get there on the 18th at 6 a.m. Slow train.”

“And so you went from being newly arrived Red Cross volunteer to wounded veteran in six weeks.”

“Yeah. Pretty efficient, wouldn’t you say? Other guys spend years in the trenches and nobody ever notices. I leave home in May and before my birthday I’m in the headlines as the first American wounded on the Italian front.”

“In point of fact, Mr. Hemingway, were you the first American wounded there?”

He shrugged. “It’s a matter of interpretation. McKey got killed before me, but nobody got wounded and survived. That’s too technical for newspapers to explain. They just left it that I was the first. I’ll tell you one thing, though. The night of July 8, 1918, was when I learned what all those lying stories about the glamour of war were worth.”

“So, Mr. Hemingway, in Milan you were taken to the new American Red Cross hospital.”

“It was new as a hospital, but it was only the fourth floor an old building. Yeah, I was one of the first patients. When I got there, they had eighteen nurses and just four patients.”

And all the court could hear him remember: (And it was clean and cool, and they were efficient and they spoke English. And then when the doctors have patched you up and you are through with the worst of it, the terror and the shame that you’ll never admit, then you are in this heaven, all these women taking care of you. By then you’re not in the same kind of merciless overwhelming pain, but a sort of intense fluctuating ache that isn’t any worse than a headache compared to a fractured skull. And you are back in control of yourself, because they aren’t going to take off your leg, and you aren’t going to be a cripple, and it looks to other people like you’re sort of a hero.)

“Tell the court about your operation.”

“Which one? I must have had a dozen.”

“The first one at the hospital. The one the worried you the most.”

“That was the day after I got there. They x-rayed me, and counted more than 200 pieces of shrapnel, even after the field hospital took out the half-dozen biggest ones. They found the machine-gun bullet behind my kneecap, and they found one in my foot that nobody had noticed. So they went in to take out the bullets and look around to see how bad the damage was.”

“Before the operation began, you told the doctor that if you didn’t come through, you wanted one of the nurses to get your back pay. Why was that?”

What a romantic boy he had been! “They had been nice to me. It seemed like the thing to do.”

“Did you really think you might not survive the operation, or was this a gesture out of novels?”

“I don’t know. What I was really worried about was, I didn’t want them taking my leg off.”

“Was that a realistic possibility?”

“You mean, was I exaggerating for dramatic effect? You try lying there, wondering what 200 pieces of shrapnel had chewed up.”

“I did not mean to imply –.”

“Two hundred pieces of hot metal, and that’s not counting the two bullets. Nobody in that hospital knew what the doctors were going to find when they opened me up. There was going to be nerve damage, muscle damage, who knows what. Until they poked around, nobody was going to know if I could keep that leg or not.”

“Naturally, it worried you.”

“Worried me?” He gave a snort of derisive laughter. “Yeah, it worried me. I was scared stiff. You know my story `The Tradesman’s Return’? Harry Morgan is a tough guy, but I have him worried that his gunshot wounds are going to cost him his arm. He says, `I got a lot of use for that arm.’ When I wrote that story in the 1930s, one thing I was remembering was waiting for that operation.”

“Fortunately you did not lose your leg, and further operations repaired much of the damage. But those operations must have been very painful.”

“They were.”

“There are stories of you using a pen knife to take out some of the smaller pieces yourself as they were forced to the surface.”

“That wasn’t any big deal. They hurt, and I was glad to get rid of them as best I could.  The doctors never did get them all, you know. I carried them all my life. Sometimes they would shift and play hell with the nerves around them. It came with the territory, like having to wear a knee brace.”

“In a letter that you wrote your father in 1918, you said, `Dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death and really I know. If I should have died, it would have been … quite the easiest thing I ever did…. And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.’”

“Truer than I knew.”

“Yes, but at the time, how much of that was what you thought you ought to be feeling?”

“Well, Mr. Prosecutor, I don’t know. What I said was true enough, but I couldn’t bring myself to say, `You were right, dad, you were smarter about the war than I was.’ And anyway, I wasn’t all that clear how I felt, because now that it was over, I was proud. I had been wounded because I’d been at the front. I had tried to save a life, and I was going to get a medal for it. I had stood up like a man, in other words. And if the war had continued, I would have been back driving ambulances in 1919, after I had finished recuperating. As it was, I was in the hospital, convalescing, when the armistice with Austria was signed, the week before the armistice with Germany.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hemingway, you may step down for the moment. Your honor, we now come to the second wound the defendant experienced as a boy with the Red Cross in Italy. The prosecution calls Agnes von Kurowsky Stanfield.”

“No!”

But then he subsided.

The prosecutor, however, chose to respond. “Mr. Hemingway, we all recognize that this procedure can be painful, but painful procedures are sometimes necessary. We are probing for the same reason surgeons probe, so that you may heal. That is our only interest in the matter.”

.2.

Agnes looked the way she had in those golden few months, even to the nurse’s uniform. Seeing her after Hadley, after Pauline, after Martha, even after Mary – not to mention Jane Mason and Ava Gardner and the Kraut – she was still pretty, still had that mischievous sweetness he had loved, but she looked surprisingly ordinary. And yet the heart connection was still there. Looking at her, a part of himself that he had tried to kill came back to life. She smiled at him, and it was as though nothing had come between them, not his wives and her husbands, not her Dear John letter, not the years, not his own bitterness. He couldn’t help it. The 19-year-old inside him broke through. “No hits, no runs, no errors,” he blurted out, and they were both laughing, remembering.

“Mrs. Stanfield,” The prosecutor said in a dry, amused voice, “I take it that you and the defendant recognize each other. Would you summarize for the court what happened between Agnes von Kurowsky and Ernest Hemingway in the latter half of the year 1918?”

“I suppose everybody knows some part of it, after Ernie’s novel. I was a Red Cross nurse, just arrived, assigned to the new hospital in Milan. He won our hearts, pretending that getting wounded was just a nuisance. Don’t ever let anybody tell you he wasn’t brave. We nurses had plenty of chances to compare patients’ attitudes, and we knew.”

“So, tell us about the romance that developed.”

“I suppose everybody knows about that too. Ernie was terrifically handsome and vital, with all that energy. As soon as he could get on his feet and hobble around, after all those weeks when he couldn’t even stand up, he wanted to go out and do something.” She shrugged. “Being cooped up in a hospital can get as boring for nurses as for patients. We were allowed to escort convalescent patients, so he and I would go walking around town, or would  go to the races, or would find something amusing to do. But even before that – well, he was very ardent, and I suppose I was young for my age, even though I was eight years older than he was. He swept me off my feet, you could say, and before I really knew it, we considered ourselves engaged. He was going to go home and get well and find a way to support me, and then I would join him and we would get married.”

“And when did you begin to wish you had not agreed to do that?”

“Almost right away. It was a very bad decision, and I knew it the first time I was out of his presence for a few days. It was a shipboard romance. I was too old for him. And besides, I really wasn’t ready to settle down. I wanted to go places and do things.”

“However, you let him go home thinking that you would soon be married.”

“Mr. Prosecutor, I sent him home. I did everything I could to make sure he would go home!”

“In order to free you from your engagement?”

“No! In order to be sure that he wasn’t still in Italy when I told him. And that wasn’t for my sake, it was for his.”

“Explain, if you would.”

“There was a part of Ernest that was a spoiled child that felt entitled to whatever he wanted. And he had a lazy streak. You might not think so, but he did. He was ambitious, and later in life he proved how hard he could work, but right then, before he had accomplished anything, I thought he was vulnerable to temptation, and there was rich Captain Jim Gamble, offering Ernie a year in Italy together at Gamble’s expense. I knew that Ernie was mighty tempted, and I knew it would ruin him. So I told him I wouldn’t marry him if he didn’t go home and start preparing for a career so he could support me. And he did, and it was the best thing for him.”

Looking at him: “Wasn’t it, Ernie?”

“I wonder if you ever realized how much it hurt, that Dear John.”

“Oh Ernie, of course I realized. And if I hadn’t known at the time, I would have realized it when you killed off Katherine in A Farewell to Arms, and later, when you learned that I was on Key West and you didn’t want to see me. I didn’t make any attempt to see you, did I?”

“Would you tell the court what happened at Key West, Mrs. Stanfield?”

“In the 1930s, I was living in Key West. My married name, Stanfield, wouldn’t mean anything to Ernie, so he didn’t know I was there. But of course I knew he was there. Everyone on Key West did. Well, Lorine Thompson, who was a good friend of Ernie and his wife Pauline, figured out who I was, and came to the library where I was working and asked me if I had any photos from that time. I gave her my war scrapbook, since I didn’t have anyone to leave it to. But Ernie wouldn’t even look at it. Lorine was terribly annoyed at his attitude. I guess she thought he should be less unforgiving.”

Yes, he remembered Lorine’s annoyance.

“Thank you, Mrs. Stanfield.”

And she was gone again, without them having exchanged goodbyes.

.3.

“Mr. Hemingway, would you return to the stand? Would you tell the court, if you please, how you experienced your romance? Was this a real-life dress rehearsal for A Farewell to Arms?”

“Let’s get something straight, here. Frederic Henry wasn’t me. Even though Rinaldi called him `baby,’ Frederic Henry was a man, and really I was just a kid.”

“Was Frederic Henry what you wished you had been?”

“No, no, not at all, that totally misses the point of the story. Frederic Henry was a long-term veteran, experienced as a taster of women. He was looking for sex, not love. He was surprised to find himself in love with Katherine. The experience re-educated him, so that he became innocent for the first time. I wasn’t like that at all. If I hadn’t been a starry-eyed kid, I wouldn’t have seen her as my ideal other half. In fact, I wouldn’t have been within 4,000 miles of the Italian front.”

“So you and Agnes fell in love and that experience was right, in the way your war experience wasn’t right.”

“That’s it exactly. The hero-stories didn’t match my experience, but the love stories did. I could reach out and encompass her and be encompassed by her, and it was a very pure, very satisfying love that promised to just keep getting better.”

“Do you think perhaps it turned out for the best?”

“Maybe. But you know, you don’t ever forget your first love. If it doesn’t work out, you either put the whole thing aside as a misinterpretation, or you read it as a betrayal. Either way, maybe you never again are able to give yourself in that complete beautiful unselfish way. When Ag rejected me, I had to kill my love for her, or I couldn’t have stood it. Life killed off the innocent open-hearted boy I had been, and the life Ag and I might have had, and the children we might have brought into the world. That’s why I had to kill off Katherine. But it’s all mixed up with getting wounded in a way that is hard to explain.”

“Explaining  is what we’re here for.”

“Look, you’ve been blown up, badly hurt, in the middle of the night. You died, or you started to die, and you came back not knowing how badly you’ve been hurt. You are scared you’re going to lose your legs, and you’re trying hard not to show it, holding on to your ideas of how a man acts. And then you’re in this heaven, in a clean hospital, and you’re surrounded by these nurses, and some of them aren’t interested in you as any particular person, and then there is one who is. And you give yourself entirely and after a while you find out it didn’t mean to her what it had meant to you. And by the time I could talk about it, I wasn’t that kid anymore, and I had walled her out of my emotional life. The parts of me that had fallen in love with Agnes went away, and I never heard from them again.”

“That was a different kind of wounding, and nobody ever treated you for it because nobody ever really understood what it had done to you.”

“That’s true. I certainly didn’t. I never was able to trust women in the same way, couldn’t trust my feelings in the same way, for I’d been fooled. After that, I had to be the dominant one so I’d never again get hurt like that. And I was always prepared for them to go.”

“You never considered getting help with it from a professional?”

“I never dared trust any of them.”

.4.

“Mr. Hemingway, during your convalescence, you paid close attention to the wounded veterans around you.”

“Well sure. I wanted to fit in and be accepted.”

“And were you in fact accepted?”

Hesitation. “You mean about the time in the hospital in Florence?”

“Yes, Would you explain for the court, please?”

A sigh. “Well, Ag had  been sent down there to deal with some flu cases, and I went down to visit her. I walked into the hospital in uniform, with my medals on my chest, and the guys were laughing at me. Not looking for a fight, just amused, and I could see it.”

“Because even though you had been wounded, and had medals, you weren’t quite a veteran.”

“That’s a good way to put it. I wasn’t quite a veteran. I was like a new recruit in 1864 among men who had been wounded at Gettysburg. The real soldiers saw through me at once. My industrial accident had given me a sort of membership in the club, but it was only an honorary membership.”

“So then in January, 1919, when you arrived in New York with a shipload of wounded veterans, why were you dressed in what looked like an Army uniform, wearing an Italian Army officer’s cape? Why did a reporter for the New York Sun who interviewed you after you limped down the gangplank on your crutches, report that you had served with the Italian army? How did your new friend Eric Dorman-Smith, a veteran of four years of warfare, whom you met while you were both convalescing in Milan, get the impression that you had been wounded while fighting alongside the Italian shock troops, the arditi? The prosecutor waved his notes. “I could continue with other examples.”

But he was a man now, not an easily intimidated boy. “Are you going to let me answer, or are you just going to keep asking more questions?”

“Answer, by all means. Is it not true that you made up stories one after another, reinventing your past, providing yourself a brilliant war record, representing yourself as older, more experienced, and braver than you knew yourself to be?”

“It’s true I was making up stories. I was 19. But you see, in a way, those stories were truer to the real me than what had happened. I had wanted to be with the army. I had wanted to be a soldier among soldiers. Why do you think I was in harm’s way in the first place? 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. That’s the inner truth that I was – dramatizing, say.”

“Mr. Hemingway, you went to great lengths to get into the war, you were wounded most honorably, and you behaved bravely. No one can take any of that away from you. As you look back, do you regret making up those stories?”

“I know you expect me to say yes, but I can’t, not really. I came out of the hospital in Italy the way Jack London came out of the bars in the Klondike, with no first-hand experience, but a wealth of secondhand experience. What I knew was pain and suffering and irrational fear. Everything else was secondhand. All right, I romanced. I told it as I dreamed it, rather than as it was. But the things that I pretended had happened to me, I knew, even though I knew them only secondhand.”

“And wearing the uniform and the cape, months after you returned home to Chicago?”

“Maybe I needed every prop I could come up with, to help me remember that I was not what everybody thought I was. I was being true to my inner world. I hadn’t been able to get into the army, but I still found a way to get to the front. I did get a taste of that life, and I was paying the consequences. Limping around may be romantic, it is also a damn nuisance. I had suffered a real loss, and it was bearable because it was an honorable war wound. Shouldn’t I use it if I could?”

“One final thing, then, since we are speaking of wounds. Is it not true that for months you had to have a light burning at night or you could not sleep?”

“Yes it is.”

“What was that all about?”

“I’ll tell you. Robert Graves, the poet, said he have a solar mind and a lunar mind. In other words, a daytime mind, logical and prosaic, and a nighttime mind, which sees things entirely differently. In The Sun Also Rises, I had Jake say that it’s easy to be hard-boiled in the daytime, but the night is a different thing. That’s what I was referring to. My daytime mind knew I was home, safe. My nighttime mind knew that death came out of the darkness without warning, death and pain and possible mutilation. So yes, it was a good long time I slept with the lights on, and if I wasn’t proud of it, I wasn’t ashamed of it either – and actually I was a little proud of it, in a way; it showed that my medals and my wound-stripe and my service itself hadn’t come free.”

Intently: “This was the foundation for all the rest of my life.   Being wounded without warning, being the first American casualty in the hospital, listening for months to the real veterans, and sort of feeling that because of my wounds, I was a veteran too, and knowing that I had a whole life to lead that I almost lost: This was the central experience of my life, and it came before I was 20.”

The prosecutor’s pause underlined the statement. Then, “Thank you, Mr. Hemingway. The prosecution calls the defendant’s father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway.”

 

Chapter 3: The War at Home

His mother had chosen her dress and her apparent age from 1899, the year he  was born. William McKinley in the White House, Teddy Roosevelt still Governor of New York. Well, it would make sense that’s when she would choose, she was at her peak then. Young, talented, still beautiful, married to the vigorous young doctor.

“Mrs. Hemingway, one of the roles you came into life to play was as Ernest Hemingway’s mother. Perhaps you could begin by telling the court what that experience meant to you.”

She beamed at the prosecutor. “Well, of course his father and I were so pleased and proud that our eldest son proved to be so very talented and successful. To think that he spread the Hemingway name across the world! It would naturally make a mother very proud.”

(“That’s not what I heard! ‘Filthiest book of the year.’”)

“Yes, Mrs. Hemingway, but for the moment I’d like us to concentrate not on the author but on the boy, and the teen, and the young man. Tell us, if you would, what that was like.”

“Ernest was a sensitive child, very sensitive, he got it from both sides of the family. It made him somewhat high-strung. Self-control was always a difficult issue for him.”

He could feel himself bristling, but worked at preventing his reaction from turning into thoughts that would be overheard.

“As a little boy, he was so affectionate, and we were all so close. His father taught him hunting and fishing, and living in nature, and I taught him to appreciate music and the finer things in life. He always had a keen imagination and he was always overflowing with enthusiasms.” She smiled, almost laughed. Boys can be a little much for a mother to deal with, you know. I used to tell myself there was a reason why the word was `boisterous’ and not `girlsterous.’ But I never minded it, in fact I was proud of it.”

“Was he a lot of trouble as a teenager?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. He loved to fish, and to camp out, and go on little excursions with his friends, and he did his full share of chores during our summers in Michigan. And in high school, he worked on the student newspaper, and was part of the literary society, and the football team, everything. He was a normal happy boy, until he graduated from high school and went off to Kansas City to work. I thought he would grow up to be as fine a man as my father.”

Yes, like her father, but not like her husband.

“Mrs. Hemingway, you testified that when the defendant was a little boy, `We were all so close.’ Did that closeness last, or did things change?”

She knew what he meant, of course, and she knew that Oak Park reticence was impossible when everyone could overhear what you knew. Still, she chose her words carefully. “Everything changes with time. Life always brings new problems. For many years, my husband was a loving husband, a good father, a competent, caring physician with many outside interests. But, over time, he became more rigid in his views, more demanding of others, less able to bear contradiction.”

“Did you see this as mental illness?”

A hesitation. “We didn’t have the distinctions you have today. To us, mental illness would have meant crazy, and he was not crazy. He would get ‘nervous,’ we used to say.”

“Presumably this affected his relationship with his children.”

“With all of us. We tried not to set him off, but it became difficult. He seemed to find life less and less bearable, year by year.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hemingway, you may step down. The prosecution calls the defendant.”

.2.

He turned to the defense attorney. “They can do that?”

“As I said, Mr. Hemingway, procedures here are flexible.”

“What about my right to not incriminate myself?”

“Different world, different rules.”

And there he was testifying.

“Mr. Hemingway, you heard your mother’s testimony. Do you think that your father became mentally ill?”

“Mental illness wasn’t allowed to exist in Oak Park, it would lower the tone. But sure, it’s clear enough. I really noticed the change about when I became a teenager. I thought maybe it was because didn’t like what I was becoming. I remember how my hands would sting from being hit with a switch. And all those confessions, asking God to forgive me, and half the time I couldn’t even quite figure out what I had done, or hadn’t done!”

“And what do you think caused it? Was it something you did, or didn’t do?”

“I think it was from living with my mother.”

“Mr. Hemingway, consider carefully. Do you think it is that simple?”

He replied slowly, watching his thoughts marshal themselves. Such a change from the fog he had been living in.

“I was there. I saw it. I lived with it. I think the story of my father’s life after a certain point was his living with a continuous unbearable pressure that wore him down. I think it gradually exhausted him, having to live with my mother and her ancestors and her standards and her certainties and her expectations and her implacable will. He and mother couldn’t harmonize. Surrender isn’t harmonizing. I think he kept trying to put rules into effect, so he’d have some control over his life, and when we couldn’t live up to those rules to his satisfaction, he blamed his rage on that. He took it all out on everybody, and he didn’t know why, any more than we did.”

“Mr. Hemingway, let me suggest a scenario. You loved your father. He became mentally ill. Since the times didn’t recognize it as an illness, and since it was too painful for you to think of him choosing to be irrational, the only thing left was to blame somebody else. And there was Grace Hall Hemingway, born to play the part.”

“Well, I disagree. Why don’t you ask dad to testify?”

“Because this isn’t about your father. It is about you.”

“You know, I’m sitting here trying to think, when did dad lose his grip on life? I think maybe it was when he lost his joy in the physical world, because then he had nothing to refill the wells.”

He understood the prosecutor’s ironic expression.

“Okay, I know I’m painting something of a self-portrait. But I’m talking about my father.”

“Yes. Let’s return to your father’s son.”

.3.

“After high school, you went to work at the Kansas City Star. To get away from home?”

“Really, I wanted to enlist, because we had entered the war in April of my Senior year. But I needed dad’s consent, and he wouldn’t give it.”

“So instead you went off to work as a reporter.”

He grinned, remembering, after so many decades, how it had felt. “It was so much fun, and they were paying me! I couldn’t get enough of it. It was hard work, damned hard, but it didn’t feel like a job at all. It was a great opportunity for a kid.” He grinned again, remembering the boy he had been. “I had to cover cops, and the hospital, and the railroad station in case some celebrities might come through that I could interview. And sometimes I’d go off to the hospital and the paper would be trying to get hold of me and they couldn’t because I’d gone off with the ambulance, or I’d be supposed to get the news from the fire station and I’d be riding on one of the fire engines. I had so much fun! Of course in those days I still had two good legs to run around on”. Before his eyes was a picture of himself as he had been, all eagerness and enthusiasm and a boy’s fascination with seeing things from the inside. “Kansas City was a world apart from Oak Park.”

“But although you were having so much fun, you stayed only a few months.”

“Well, you know, I wanted to help make the world safe for democracy. The Army didn’t want me because of my bum eyesight, but then, by luck, or fate, or something, Ted Brumback hired on with the Star, and he and I became pals. Brummy had been driving ambulances in France, and he was going back as soon as the winter was over. He told me they always needed drivers. My dad still objected to my going into the army, but by the end of the year I got him to agree that I could go with the ambulances if they’d take me. A bunch of us from the Star decided we’d try it together, and they accepted us, and that was the end of my time as a reporter.”

“Very well. Let us proceed to your first experience of warfare. The whole world knows that you were wounded in Italy on July 8, 1918, two weeks before your 19th birthday. Please tell the court how you came to be in that particular place at that particular time.”

 

Chapter 2: The End and the Beginning

“Thank you Your Honor. The prosecution calls Mary Welsh Hemingway.”

He turned to the defense attorney. “How can they do that? She isn’t dead. At least, she wasn’t dead when I pulled the triggers.”

The defense attorney looked at the judge, who nodded.

“I know that you have the habit of thinking that people are either living or dead, Mr. Hemingway, but the brain is not the mind. The mind uses the brain, but it exists here, in the non-physical, whether the body is alive or dead. If you will be patient, the course of the trial will shed light on the subject.”

“All right.” He turned his attention to Mary. Apparently she had chosen to look the way she did when they met in London during the war. He watched her agreeing to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Apparently the question was ritual. Obviously, if nobody could lie, nobody was going to try it in front of an audience.

“Mrs. Hemingway, we realize that your physical component is presently dealing with the aftermath of the defendant’s suicide. We trust this will not prevent you from giving your full attention to this serious matter at hand. For 17 years, you and Ernest Hemingway joined your lives, very much for better or worse. Would you please describe for us the defendant’s mental state in his last few years, as best you can deduce it from his words and actions?”

She looked directly at him for the first time. “I’d have to say that the past few years of living with him was hell. He was verbally and physically abusive, both in private and in public. “

“Did he ever give you reason to fear for your life?”

She hesitated. “I knew that he would not hurt me if he was in his right mind. But if he had been drinking enough, or if he was in one of his paranoid rages, I couldn’t be sure. I had to be a little bit careful.”

“Was this the pattern throughout your marriage?”

Another pause. “It was one part of the pattern, put it that way. It wasn’t always that way, or we never could have stayed together all that time. But yes, there was this dark side to him, and it showed very early.”

“The abusive behavior continued throughout your marriage.”

“Much more so in the final years than earlier.”

“Would you describe the afternoon and evening and night of your wedding?”

“I would prefer not to. Ernest knows what happened.”

“Is it not true that you went to bed determined to leave the next morning?”

“Yes.”

“Sure at that time that getting married had been a mistake?”

“Yes.”

And this resulted from the defendant’s abusive behavior? On his wedding day?”

A hesitation followed by one word said firmly. “Yes.”

“And what changed your mind?”

“Ernest did. When I got up the next morning, he pleaded with me to stay, and I did.”

“Did you suspect that staying was a mistake?”

“Well – I was of two minds about it. We had been living together for ten months, ever since I returned from Europe in May 1945. I had a pretty good sense of what I was getting into.”

“Yeah, so did I,” he said, and, since he had everyone’s attention anyway, he continued. “Life with me was pure hell, Mary? Nothing else?”

“Ernest, you know that what I said is true.”

“But it isn’t the whole truth, is it?”

“I’m just answering the questions he asks me.”

“Your Honor, if the defendant will contain himself –.”

“Sustained. I would counsel the defendant that although he has the ability, and even the right, to question witnesses at any time, the whole truth will emerge in due course as we follow our usual procedure.”

“I understand, Your Honor. I’ll shut up.”

“You are not required to shut up. A reasonable amount of self-control will suffice. Proceed, counselor.”

“Mrs. Hemingway, I’d like you to talk some more about the defendant’s mental state in his final years. How bad did it get?”

Mary’s appearance changed suddenly: looked old, looked tired, beaten up by life, the way he had felt when he had pulled the triggers.

It jolted him. “Did I do that?”

Mary looked at him. “Some of it, Ernest, yes. A good deal of it, actually. It’s how a person looks after they’ve lived long enough with somebody who is mentally ill. It wears you down, the worry, the lack of rest, taking the abuse and not letting it destroy you, holding yourself together – it takes a toll.”

In 3D life, perhaps he would have denied what she was saying, perhaps exploded in rage at an unfounded accusation. But here, it was so obviously true.

The prosecutor said, “Mrs. Hemingway, this abusive behavior. Did the defendant ever tell you that he was sorry?”

“Not in so many words, not usually. But sometimes. And I knew he was sick. It was like the real Ernest was being held prisoner inside, and only made his way outside every so often, and if I wanted to be there when he surfaced, I had to stay with his jailer in the meantime.”

It was a startling way of seeing himself, from the outside.

“Mrs. Hemingway, would you describe your own mental state in the defendant’s final days?”

“Living with Ernest had become unendurable. He thought that I had acted with his enemies to destroy him. He had come to hate me.”

“I have to ask you this. Understand, you have nothing to fear in telling us the truth, even though you are still embodied. Did you assist the defendant to commit suicide?”

She nodded. “Yes, of course.” Then it was as if she had forgotten about the rest of the courtroom; she was talking just to him. “I think the worst thing is not being able to tell anybody.”

He glanced at the judge, and got no sense that he shouldn’t speak. “I know, Mary, and I appreciate it.”

The prosecutor turned to him. “You approve her actions, then?”

“I do now. I was down to just existing. Either I wound up in an institution, or I brought it to an end. I didn’t have anything left. Ending it was a rational decision. Mary knew it, and she helped me.”

“However, apparently that isn’t how you saw it at the time.”

“While I was busy killing myself? No. I was too full of resentment.”

“Oh, honey, I knew what you were thinking by the fact that you killed yourself in the entry, rather than in the basement. I knew that you held me responsible for what the doctors had done to you, and I knew that you couldn’t realize, in the state you were in, that I had acted from the best motives.”

“Mrs. Hemingway, let me be sure I understand. You are telling the court that allowing the defendant to kill himself was the only way out of the situation.”

“What else could I do? Have him locked away for the rest of his life? Risk that he would talk his way out again, the way he had done at the Mayo Clinic?”

“Did you consider what might happen to you if your actions became known?”

“Mr. Prosecutor, I was desperate.”

“She can’t admit it, any more than I could admit to the Army what I had been doing in France in 1944, and for the same reason: legal consequences. Like me, she did what was right instead of what was legal.”

“Harry Morgan would have approved,” the prosecutor said drily.

“Yes he would have. And I do too.”

A moment’s pause, and the prosecutor resumed. “Mrs. Hemingway, I would like to go back to when you met the defendant during the war.” Mary’s appearance changed again, back to the look she had in London in 1944. “You and he were married to other people when he decided that he was going to marry you.”

“Yes.  He said he made up his mind the first time he saw me. I don’t know why.”

Were you as attracted to the defendant as he was to you?”

“I can’t say that I took one look at him and decided I was going to marry him. But he was a very attractive man, very vital. And it was flattering to be the object of the attention of a world famous writer. I mean, everybody knew Hemingway.”

“So you began an affair.”

“I didn’t feel bound, if that’s what you mean. My husband was off in North Africa, and I had no illusions that he was being faithful to what was already pretty much past by that time.”

“Did you sense any mixed feelings on the part of the defendant?”

“As far as I could tell, he already considered himself divorced.”

“Did it concern you at all that he could turn his back on his previous marriage with so little ado?”

She took a moment to consider. “Actually, I don’t know that I thought much about it.”

“That’s because you weren’t any more married than I was, so you took it for granted.”

“Would you agree with that, Mrs. Hemingway?”

“I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, but yes, I suppose I would.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hemingway. No further questions at this time.”

The judge said, “Defense? Cross-examination?”

“Mrs. Hemingway, you have testified that your life with the defendant was hell. You have alluded to the defendant’s dark side. Do you have reason to believe that your words and actions evoked this dark side?”

“You’re under oath, remember,” he muttered. The judge and the defense attorney and Mary all turned their attention on him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to being on the air all the time.”

Mary picked her words carefully. “I recognize that whatever happens between people, they share responsibility. I wasn’t just a helpless victim. I see that. But he had this dark side, and everybody knew that sometimes they had to step carefully around him, for fear of an explosion.”

The defense attorney looked at him. “You have a response?”

“What?” Hemingway said. “Am I testifying?”

“We all felt your reaction just then, Mr. Hemingway, and this trial isn’t exactly like trials in the 3D world. Procedures are flexible. You can jump in at any time.”

“I just didn’t like her saying that everybody had to walk around me on tip toes.”

“We didn’t like it much, either, Ernest,” Mary said evenly.

The judge said, “Proceed, counselor.”

“Mrs. Hemingway, would you say that the defendant’s mental condition was precipitated by physical injuries?”

“Your honor—“

“Yes, counselor, I agree. The witness’s answer to such a question could only be speculation on her part.”

“Your honor, I recognize that. But she lived with him longer than anyone else. Can we not elicit her opinion?”

“Bearing in mind that it is opinion, and no more than that, I’ll allow it. The witness may answer.”

Mary frowned, thinking. “ I don’t think he ever fully recovered from those two crashes in 1954. Getting out of that second airplane, his head was leaking cerebral fluid. He was never out of pain from then on, and he was never able to be as physically active as he had been, and that was a terrible blow to him.”

“And prior to 1954?”

“I’ve thought about that, a lot. It may be that I never knew him when he was functioning at his best. By the time I met him, he was deeply tired from a year of sub-hunting on his boat, then he got that concussion just a few days before D-Day, and went off reporting instead of letting it heal, and he had more concussions in those hard months with Buck Lanham’s outfit. It all took its toll. He told me later, he had lived an entire year with a headache, day and night. I think after Hurtgen Forest, he had combat fatigue.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hemingway. No further questions.”

“Mary? I’m sorry I left such a mess.”

A wan smile. “It is a mess, honey, that’s for sure.” And she was gone.

“Prosecution?”

“Your honor, the prosecution calls Elizabeth Hadley Richardson Hemingway Mowrer.”

.2.

And there was Hadley, the part of her that was not still on earth living happily married to Paul Mowrer. She looked as she had looked in their early days in Paris, red-haired, serene, radiant with happiness. The fact that he was on trial receded from his mind, and he was flooded with the reality of that part of his emotional life. She knew it, and smiled at him.

“Mrs. Mowrer, you were the defendant’s first wife. Would you say it was a happy marriage?”

“Oh yes, particularly at first.”

“You were married for how long?”

“Six years.”

“While you were married to the defendant, was he abusive to you?”

“Never.”

“Even verbally?”

“No. I know about various aspects of his relationships with his other wives, but he wasn’t that way with me. Ernest was always very good to me.”

“Soon after you married, the two of you moved to Paris so that the defendant could become a writer.”

“That’s right.” It was interesting, everybody in the room had the feel of their early years in Paris. Arrival around Christmas, 1921, finding an apartment, setting up housekeeping.

“And you and he lived on the proceeds of your trust fund, is that right?”

She shook her head, decisively. “Not in the way that that sounds, no. In 1922 and ’23, Ernest was working for the Toronto Weekly Star, paid by the piece, rather than being on salary. So our income fluctuated wildly. One week we would be scraping by with just enough money for a bowl of soup for supper, and then we’d get a check for several stories, and reimbursement for expenses, and we’d live it up. We didn’t live on the trust fund income: It was more our anchor to leeward.”

“But from 1924, when your husband gave up his job, until the end of your marriage, you and he lived on your income.”

“We did while the income lasted, yes. The inheritance was mismanaged, and then stolen. It was very distressing.”

“And as your income declined, the defendant became involved with a rich woman, is that correct?”

Hadley looked at the prosecutor with distaste. “I suppose that statement is true in fact, but it is most certainly untrue in its implications, if you are implying that Ernest married me for my money and then married Pauline for hers.”

“Then should we conclude that this was the old story of the husband wanting a younger woman?”

“That’s not really true either. Pauline was a few years younger than I was, and she was still slim and fashionable, but if she hadn’t been determined to have him, he wouldn’t have fallen in love with her. I know that it looks like he found her physical presence irresistible, but Ernest’s emotional needs were at least as strong as his physical drives. He needed to love and be loved.”

“But he did leave you, and for a woman who had been your friend.”

“It was like a slow-motion nightmare, one of those dreams where you are trying to run, but your feet are caught up in quicksand. Pauline knew what she wanted, and went after it, but I wasn’t able to do that. The quicksand was my passivity, stemming from my terrible childhood, I know that now. I couldn’t assert myself. I didn’t know how to. Besides –”

“Besides?”

“Well, you know, I could see what was happening to Ernest, too. The situation hurt him, and I could see it, and it made it impossible for me to do certain things that other people might have thought natural.”

“So you weren’t even angry with him?”

“Angry? Of course I was angry! It was so selfish, so immature! But I was angry in the way that you get when you see someone you love doing something stupid, something that’s going to hurt himself and you and everybody else besides. And of course I was hurt, and disappointed.”

“And rejected.”

“You would expect so, wouldn’t you? But somehow that isn’t what I felt. I think it’s because I could see so clearly that what Ernest wanted was not to leave me but to have both of us, and that’s not rejection, that’s just being put in an impossible situation.”

“Mrs. Mowrer, do you feel that you can give the court a fair estimate of the defendant’s relationships with his other wives?”

“Of course not. Nobody ever knows the reality of anybody’s relationships. I can say this. Ernest was the most sensitive man I ever met or expect to meet. He could be hurt so easily! And when he was hurt, his natural instinct was to lash out, and it might be two minutes or it might be two days or it might be never, before he realized that he had misinterpreted what he had taken to be an attack. I understood it, and I made allowances for it, but of course it’s difficult to be in a position where, if there’s an argument, you’re always wrong.”

“And yet you overheard two of his friends talking about him, when he was still in his twenties, saying that he used to be a nice boy, which of course is the same as saying that he was not that, any longer. And instead of getting angry at them, you recognized that they were correct, and your heart sank. Is this not so?”

“Don’t you think I was sick about it? But no matter how much you love somebody, you can’t make them see themselves from the outside if they won’t look, and you can’t make them over. If you see them going wrong, and they aren’t responsive to your suggestions, what can you do? You have to let them live their life as best they can. All you can do is love them and be loyal to them and hope for the best.”

“No further questions.”

The judge said, “Defense? Cross-examination?”

“Mrs. Mowrer, you seem remarkably free of rancor when it comes to the defendant. Why is that?”

“Why on earth should I feel rancor? Because he left me? But look what he did for me. I used to say – I still say – he gave me the key to the world. He loved me, and he taught me that I was lovable, and so I learned of my own ability to love. He encouraged me to try things. He awakened me in so many ways.”

Looking directly at him: “If Ernest Hemingway hadn’t come into my life, I might have gone through life thinking I was a semi-invalid. But he never thought of me that way. He pushed me to do things. He assumed that I was healthy, and I found that it was true. And in return, I understood how important his writing was to him, and I appreciated it, at a time when he had not yet developed it. I provided financial support for a while, yes, but he always would’ve found a way to live. What was more important, terribly important to him, was the emotional support I gave him, and the intellectual support. And he knew it, and he appreciated it. We were great pals.”

“Then why, in your opinion, didn’t it last?”

Returning her attention to the defense attorney: “Well, I suppose Ezra Pound was right, once you have a baby, it changes things. You’re not pals in quite the same way after that. And, you know, you gain a certain amount of weight while you’re carrying the baby, and it isn’t always so easy to lose it again, and maybe you don’t look quite as young as you had. And it got harder to keep up with him. There was that age difference between us, there wasn’t any getting around that.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mowrer”

“Hadley –” ignoring everyone around them – “Hadley, you know that –”

“I do, Tatie. And I’ve never said otherwise.” And it didn’t matter how many others were in the room, it was the two of them alone again.

The judge gave them that moment, then said, “Mr. Prosecutor, next witness?”

“Your honor, I think this initial testimony establishes that this is a complicated man, his life best understood by proceeding chronologically. The prosecution calls Grace Hall Hemingway.”

 

 

For Nancy Ford

Who accompanied Papa and me

Every step of the way

Acknowledgements

Who could write a book, without books? So many interesting books by Hemingway, and about Hemingway! Dozens of them, scores of them. My thanks to scores of unnamed authors I have never met, especially those presently residing elsewhere, such as Carlos Baker, Michael Reynolds and, of course, Ernest Hemingway.

 

“No biography can portray a man as he actually was.”

-Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story

 

“But when it came time to go, all I could think of to say was, Good luck, Papa. I figured he knew how much I loved him, so there was no point in mentioning that.”

-A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

 

“But life is a cheap thing beside a man’s work. The only thing is that you need it.”

-Thomas Hudson, Islands in the Stream, p. 464

 

Contents

                                    Prologue: The end?

Chapter 1. On Trial

Chapter 2: The End and the Beginning

Chapter 3: The War at Home

Chapter 4: The War in Europe

Chapter 5: No Home to Return To

Chapter 6: Chicago and Hadley

Chapter 7: Paris

Chapter 8: Contacts

Chapter 9: O Canada

Chapter 10: The Literary Game

Chapter 11: Friendship

Chapter 12: Changing Wives

Chapter 13: Breakthrough

Chapter 14: A Farewell to Europe

Chapter 15: Key West – First Years

Chapter 16: Africa

Chapter 17: Key West –Middle Years

Chapter 18: Spain

Chapter 19: Key West – Final Years

Chapter 20: A Long Way from Home

Chapter 21: War at Sea

Chapter 22: Ground War

Chapter 23: Starting Over

Chapter 24: Higher Mathematics

Chapter 25: End Game

Chapter 26: The Life He Led

Chapter 27: What if?

Chapter 28: The Verdict

Epilogue

 

 

Prologue: The End?

His 62nd birthday was approaching, and he didn’t want to be there to see it. He wasn’t Hemingway anymore, he was a frail old man. The doctors had him at 50 pounds under his fighting weight. He couldn’t fish, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t write. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t fuck or fight or do one damned thing he loved doing. He couldn’t even remember!

This was worth clinging to?

In the early morning he went downstairs, quietly. Mary wouldn’t thank him if he forced her to prevent it again. She had left the keys where he could get them.

He had the shotgun out of the case. He thought of his father, long dead, remembering how bitterly he had criticized the old man, and for how many years. “It took a while, dad,” he thought, “but I finally saw your point. Sometimes there just isn’t any going on.”

He had the shotgun loaded. Where to do it? Somewhere where she couldn’t help seeing it. “Take that, you bitch! You were hand in glove with them, you’ve whittled me down, you’ve got me where you wanted me, at least see the result.”

(Was that fair?  Was it Mary’s fault, really? He pushed aside the whisper of doubt, as he held off any thought of his sons, of anyone he had loved. The Hemingway they had loved was gone. This was just clearing away the debris.)

He pulled the triggers, expecting it to be the end.

 

 Chapter 1. On Trial

“The goddamn shells must have been too old.” That was his first thought. “Didn’t get the job done, and I’ve got it all to do again. God knows when I’ll get another opportunity. They’ll be watching me twice as close now.”

He was lying on a bed; he knew that without opening his eyes. And he could feel the presence of someone sitting at the bedside. Mary? A guard? Warily he opened one eye the slightest bit.

It was a man, smiling at him. No one he recognized. “Good morning. Welcome back.”

He gave up, and opened both eyes. “Back. As in, back from the grave?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He looked around. They were in a small room, pleasant but undistinguished. If this was a hospital, a private room. He had questions, but he didn’t want to ask them. Instead, he sighed. “Now what?”

“Now you get on with your life, of course. No hurry. When you feel up to it.”

The man was somewhere in the prime of life. He gave off a sense of being open, alive with anticipation, the way he himself had had once been, before so many injuries, before he had suffered so many betrayals.

(Suffered? Well, inflicted, too, if truth be told. It hadn’t gone only one way. Hmm. He had been pushing that thought away all his life. He could admit it now, for some reason, and admitting it was easier than he would have thought.)

“Starting to feel better?”

Suspicion was a habit of many years’ standing. “Who are you?”

“The real question is, who are you?”

“If that’s a riddle, I’m not in the mood. If you’re trying to find out if I’m delusional, I’m not. I’m Ernest Hemingway. I’m a little beat up, but I’m not out of my mind.”

“In this place, being out of your mind is the one thing no one would ever accuse you of. But — you’re Ernest Hemingway. Are you sure?”

Another sigh. “Yes I’m sure.”

“You say that as though the answer is obvious, but — a few moments ago? Did you feel like Ernest Hemingway then?”

“I feel like what I am, a sick old man who has seen better days.”

“You’ve gotten used to the suffering. But are you in pain at the moment?”

Some cautious stock-taking. “No, as a matter of fact.” More cautious exploration, the kind of physical assessment he had been so good at when he was in his prime. “No, actually I feel pretty good.”

The man nodded. “That’s to be expected. Now, let me ask you this: What makes you think the shotgun shells were no good?”

A sharp jolt of suspicion. But the man shook his head. “No, you weren’t talking in your sleep. What makes you think you failed?”

He didn’t dare say anything, hardly dared move. Another sanity test? What was the right response?

The man’s mouth remained closed, but the words came anyway: “Don’t worry so much. It’s not a trap. I was listening to what you were thinking.”

He looked at him, a hard flat stare.

“No, it’s true. Here, we communicate directly, mind to mind. I’ve been pretending to speak, but that’s just something we do at first to give people an easier transition. As you see, it isn’t necessary.”

His mind was working. (In fact, his mind was working better than it had been for some while.) “If you know what I’m thinking, how come I don’t know what you’re thinking?”

The smile broadened. “It’s just a matter of mental habits. You assume that you aren’t going to know what thoughts people are keeping from you, and you get what you expect. As soon as you open yourself up to it, it’ll be there. After all, you were reading people’s minds your whole life.”

(I was, like hell! Wish I could have!)

“Think about it. All your life, you knew what people were thinking. Not always, nothing is 100%. But often. That was telepathy, pure and simple, as natural as breathing.”

(Telepathy! Shades of my mother!)

“Mr. Hemingway, there isn’t anything mystical about it, and it doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. The fact is, you used it, routinely, the same way you knew what a fish was thinking, 50 fathoms down. Or are we not conversing with our mouths closed?”

Reluctantly: “I suppose you’re saying I’m dead.”

The man cocked his head sideways, a sort of shrug. “Of course you’re dead. Thing is, though, dead isn’t what you were thinking it was, all those years. You were closer to the truth when you came back from dying in Italy in 1918.”

Not the same thing at all! He was 18 years old then, not old, fragile, used up.

The man smiled at him. “You don’t have to be that way.  It’s just a matter of choosing. Pick an age, a time of life, and intend to be there.”

Skeptically: “That easy?”

“Not everything pleasant has to be difficult. It’s just remembering.”

He could feel himself frowning in concentration. Nothing changed. Still the same withered chest, still the same fragile sticks for arms and legs.

“Think how you were the last time you saw your father, down in Key West. Remember what that felt like.”

He had been in his late twenties then, his hair thick and black, his body tanned and well exercised, unbent. Solid. The remembrance came first as a concept, then as a sort of reconstruction, and then suddenly he recaptured the feeling of it, and presto, he had his old body back. Bum knee, shrapnel and all, but vigorous, alive. He threw his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up. “Unbelievable! Unbelievable.”

“Nice trick, isn’t it?”

He felt a spasm of pity for the used-up old man he had just been. He stood up. “It was all an illusion, wasn’t it? Life, I mean. First to last, an illusion.”

“A very realistic illusion. Nice clothes, by the way.”

He was wearing old familiar clothes that he must have brought from Paris, not yet the clothes that became his Key West uniform. He brought a finger up to his mustache, and smiled. He felt so good! It had been a long time.

“You don’t have to stay like that, either. It’s up to you. For instance, you could go back to the way you were on July 7, 1918.”

The day before he was wounded. “I could?” He had lived with his injuries for 40 years. “I can’t remember what it felt like.”

“Think of any one specific, given day. How about the time just before you embarked for France with the Red Cross, when you marched down the streets of New York City and President Wilson reviewed the troops? Can you remember that?”

That was just before they’d sailed. He’d been –

“Yes, that’s what I meant. Your Red Cross uniform all brand new. Very spruce. How do you feel?”

“I feel great! I really had forgotten. And it isn’t just the body, is it?”

“No, the body, that’s merely the externals. It’s all there, the way the body felt, your emotions, the way you thought then, the whole package, ready for you to revisit any time you want to. The only reason I suggested going back to one specific moment was to help you recapture your sense of who you were. But you can return to any age you want to be.”

He laughed. “All those years! If I had known it was going to be this way, I could’ve saved myself a lot of worrying.” He could feel, flowing in himself, the full vigor of his early manhood, so long forgotten. He did a little dance, feeling his right knee operating without that accustomed stiffness. “Boy, I wish Hadley could see me! She never knew me before I was hurt.”

“Well, now she can. And there is no telling how she will appear to you, either.”

“Except, she’s still living.”

“That won’t matter. Her conscious self will never know she’s here. But of course we’ll want her at your trial.”

.2.

“Trial.” He said it warily. “What trial?”

“Your life-summary trial. It’s customary when you come back to be examined on what you did with the life you were just entrusted with.”

“Is this because I killed myself?”

“Not really. Killing yourself flowed from what you had made yourself. It isn’t like suicide is going to be judged in isolation.”

“So I’m going to be judged on how I lived my life?”

“Let’s say we are going to see what it looks like from your new viewpoint.”

“I see,” he said, although he didn’t. “All right, how do I prepare?”

“You don’t. You can’t. You don’t need to. You already know everything you need to know, and it isn’t as though words are going to fail you.”

“I’m going to have to defend myself, I suppose”

“In a way. But this trial isn’t really about what other people think, and at least you don’t have to worry about them lying about you. People here can’t hide what they think, so they can’t lie, and so they don’t try to.”

Despite his tension, he grinned. “So I take it this is hell for lawyers.”

The man responded with a dry smile. “Speaking of which, I am here to act more or less as your lawyer.”

“`More or less’?”

A shrug. “The trial itself is `more or less.’ You can’t expect it to be just like life in physical matter. I’m here to be your friend. You’re going to have to trust me a bit. I know that you are in the habit of harboring suspicions. If you don’t like what I do, you can ask to have me replaced.”

In resignation. “By somebody else just like you.”

“You know any good lawyers over here?”

He smiled sourly. “Is a good lawyer like Sherman’s idea of a good Indian?”

“Dead, you mean? Well, yes – as dead as anybody gets. But by definition that makes me a good lawyer, right?”

He let that go. “So what am I being accused of?”

“Nothing. Everything. Your whole life. What you started with, what you did with it, how you wound up the way you are now. What it all became.”

“And do we consider what I accomplished?”

“Certainly. This trial is about what you made yourself into.”

“Swell.”

“Mr. Hemingway, you are too harsh on yourself. There’s no reason to assume that you would have gone to hell.”

He looked at him silently, almost afraid to think out loud.

“Besides, there isn’t any hell except what people create for themselves. Shall we begin?”

“What? Now?”

“No time like the present.” He smiled again. “That’s sort of an inside joke, here.”

“Yeah, great, very funny. Sure, let’s do it.”

Without transition, they were in the courtroom, sitting at the defendant’s table. To his right, there was another table, and the man sitting there was presumably the prosecutor. He saw that the courtroom was filled with spectators.

“I didn’t think that this was going to be an open trial. Who are all these people, and what’s it to them?”

“Later, Mr. Hemingway. Here’s the judge. When he asks, you’re pleading not guilty.”

“All rise!” He hadn’t noticed the presence of the bailiff. “All rise. This court is now in session.”

The judge sat down and said to the courtroom, “You may be seated.” He looked at the bailiff, who said, “The state versus Ernest Miller Hemingway, your honor. Age 61, nearly 62. Committed suicide.”

“Ernest Miller Hemingway, you are charged with willfully abandoning life in physical-matter reality. How do you plead?”

“Well, I did kill myself.” He could feel the defense attorney focusing on him. “But, your honor, I’d like to plead not guilty.”

The judge nodded. “Your counsel is acceptable to you?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Do you wish to request a jury trial?”

He turned to his lawyer. “Should I? What do you think?”

“Juries are unpredictable. Instead of convincing the judge, you’d have to convince twelve people. But, it’s your decision.”

“Does a guilty verdict have to be unanimous?”

“It isn’t exactly going to be innocent or guilty, Mr. Hemingway. I tried to explain that. But if you mean, will everybody’s doubts count, yes, they will.”

Twelve chances, instead of only one. “Okay. I request a jury, Your Honor.”

“Very well.” Instantly, the jury box filled. Twelve jurors and two extras, just like life.

“I assume you are somewhat familiar with standard trial procedures, Mr. Hemingway,” the judge said. “We will hear opening statements from prosecution and defense, then witnesses will be examined and cross examined. You will be allowed to interact with the witnesses. Defense and prosecution will summarize their arguments, and the jury will arrive at a decision. Do you understand?”

“Yes, your honor.”

Observing him. “I am not certain that you do. You will find that your life looks different, away from time and space.” Turning his attention to the prosecutor: “Mr. Prosecutor, your opening statement?”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

.3.

The prosecutor stood up and walked over to the jury box.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as you know, this is the standard rendering of accounts following completion of a life in physical matter. You have all been through physical life, so you understand the opportunities and difficulties it presents. A fair verdict must reflects the difference between what the defendant might have made of his life and what he actually did make of his life. To help us to come to the full truth, we mimic the conditions of polarity. I will present the negative, as fully and as accurately as possible: the case against the defendant. The defense will present the positive viewpoint, equally fully. It will be your job to weigh the evidence in light of your own life-experience and render a verdict neither unrealistically harsh nor unrealistically lenient.”

He paused.

“The prosecution will contend that Ernest Miller Hemingway’s heredity and environment provided him with remarkable gifts and with ample scope to develop them – which is practically the Greek definition of the good life. He was enabled to be in the right place at the right time repeatedly, so that his external success was quick, and sure, and even dazzling. He was surrounded by love, and admiration, and assistance, to the degree that he was able to accept them. Proceeding from this fortunate foundation, he did accomplish an impressive lifework. However, the record will show that throughout his life he allowed himself to indulge in negative traits that took a severe toll on his character.

“In his self-indulgence, he weakened his control over himself, and damaged his ability to use the gifts he had brought with him into physical life.

“In his self-righteousness, he alienated himself from family and friends who would gladly have provided him with the emotional support throughout his life.

“In his insecurity, he undermined the self-confidence he required in order to go his own way and accomplish the work he had come into the body to accomplish.

“In his ruthless determination to advance his own interests, he repeatedly turned on family, friends, and benefactors.

“In the end, his inability to accept the results of his own actions led him to systematically falsify his memories, which led him ultimately to the form of insanity known as paranoia.

“In the course of this trial, the prosecution will present ample evidence substantiating these and other charges. Part of your duty as jurors will be to decide to what extent he might reasonably have been expected to have suppressed or overcome these traits. I thank you for your attention.”

He bowed to the judge and sat down.

The judge turned his head toward the defense table. “Counsel?”

.4.

The defense attorney stood up. “Thank you, Your Honor.” He too walked over to the jury box.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, an old saying has it that, `of those to whom much has been entrusted, much is expected.’ Much was entrusted to Ernest Hemingway, and the expectation was not disappointed. In fact, I am tempted to propose a corollary to those words: `Of those from whom much has been received, much may be forgiven.’

“The very mixture of talents and qualities that allowed Ernest Hemingway to profoundly influence the culture of his society, and indeed of the entire world, presented him with considerable challenges in day-to-day life. My friend the prosecution counsel cited certain of Mr. Hemingway’s character flaws. In the course of this trial, I propose to demonstrate that these were the defects of his qualities, qualities essential to Ernest Hemingway’s personality. The greater the talents we are entrusted with, the greater the responsibility we have, and the greater the burden to bear.

“To say this is not to beg for mercy. The question before us is not what the defendant’s range of possibilities was, but what he did with what was possible. I, and I’m sure the defendant himself, will concede that at times he fell short of his own standards. But I ask you to remember, as the prosecution illustrates these failures, that throughout his life, the defendant also consistently exhibited generosity, sensitivity, courage, intelligence, and the articulation of a positive set of values.

“In his earliest days, dreaming of glory, he put himself in harm’s way unnecessarily. In his middle years, emulating his hero Theodore Roosevelt, he pursued `the strenuous life,’ practicing or observing everything from shooting, horseracing, and boxing to bullfighting and big-game hunting and fishing.

“Later, he did what he could to oppose the success of fascism in Spain. In World War II, he spent more than a year patrolling waters around Cuba in search of U-boats and U-boat supply dumps as part of a civilian auxiliary enterprise. When that effort became no longer necessary, he went to Europe to report on the progress of American troops. There he assisted the Army in ways that went beyond the call of duty.

“Throughout this time, he was crafting some of the finest English prose since Shakespeare, changing the course of literature This achievement not only exhibited technical mastery, but was the embodiment in prose of a way of seeing the world. His life and work presented a model of a man who was habitually active physically and mentally.

“Of the defendant’s relations with his wives, and with his children, and with his friends, lovers, and enemies, much will be said in the course of this trial. I ask you to remember, while you are listening to that testimony, that this is a man in whom strong passions, fine sensitivity, intellectual curiosity and emotional intensity are all present to extremes. It was his difficult job in life to direct many wild horses, not all galloping in the same direction. Thank you.”

He turned to the judge, and bowed, and sat down.

The judge looked at the prosecutor. “You may begin.”

 

My friend Charles Sides has a gift for writing entertaining stories tackling some of the most difficult philosophical and psychological problems and making them not only understandable, but thought-provoking; not only thought-provoking, but funny, intriguing and, in short, warmly memorable.  His first novel, Motorcycle Enlightenment, dealt with a sort of clueless guy, lost in his own head, who begins to figure it out.

This second novel, A Portal to Myself, not yet published, explores the idea of alternate realities. What if you were going along in your own inoffensive but ineffectual way, and — unbeknownst to you — you split into three very different selves, each of whom has the same mixture of characteristics, but with different ones prominent. It’s a very good story, and Charles is putting it up on his blog, bit by bit, as i did some years ago for my first novel, Messenger. Take a look.

Portal to Myself–An Unpublished Novel (1)