Tuesday, August 10, 2010
5:45 AM. A delicate question, papa. One whose answer may prove difficult. Reading Baker, page 222. This is in 1931:
“On a visit to the MacLeishes at Uphill Farm in Conway Massachusetts, Ernest was standing before the fireplace when the MacLeishes’ daughter Mimi came in to greet him. Something in his manner frightened her and she ran off to her bedroom. Ada found her crying and saying over and over that this was not the Hemingway she knew. Ernest spent nearly an hour talking to the child upstairs, and afterwards compared her to the child Ellie in “Disorder And Early Sorrow,” the story of Thomas Mann’s that he liked best after Buddenbrooks.”
There is no further mention of the incident. What was that all about? I don’t know the Thomas Mann story, so I don’t know what you were referring to. But something in that description makes me think that the girl accurately saw you as being different. Did she?