Conversations with Hemingway (13)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Papa’s code 

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

7:45 AM. Papa, my friend Christel asks an interesting question. Did it occur to Jake (or to you) that a man might have ways to sexually satisfy a woman other than normal intercourse?

Think about it, and you will see that in this case he could satisfy her, but she couldn’t satisfy him, and over time it could only lead to humiliation and resentment, even though it was nobody’s fault. Jake wasn’t impotent, he was mutilated, and had no way to relieve the pressure — and so she couldn’t help him. If he had had his testicles removed or destroyed it would have made him less of a man sexually but it would have been easier to bear, in the way that a forgotten state of mind is easier to bear in memory from a different state of mind than from the same state of mind. In other words, he wouldn’t then have felt the urgency so much as remembered it, which is sort of abstract.

Continue reading Conversations with Hemingway (13)

Papa Hemingway

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

In rereading The Sun Also Rises, I realized for the first time that Hemingway did not admire or entirely approve of his narrator. At least, that was my conclusion. So, I asked him.

Papa? That right?

Is your narrator you, however many of your traits you may have given him? Yes, I didn’t approve of his pimping his love to Romero. It amounted to betraying himself and his aficion. “It was not pleasant,” I said, not meaning that he was misunderstood but that he was reaping where he had sowed. A man may share one of our passions as he may share our politics or our taste in art, and yet have no fundamental connection to us.

Of course. Thank you. Is there anything that we who have profited from your life and words can do for you?

Our reputations don’t mean anything to us now in terms of ego or career-building — but they do matter in that they can make it easier or harder for someone who needs us to find us. So merely spreading the word about how you see us helps us.