Papa rises again

We were in a Béarnais restaurant in Montmartre and a young Canadian novelist and short story writer, Bill Prendiville, was speaking admiringly about Hemingway. This was pleasing, because you don’t often hear him being praised now. It was also appropriate, because most of the good early Hemingway was written in Paris, and the best of his later books is his memoir of Paris in the Twenties. Admittedly his Paris was the Left Bank — rue Cardinal Lemoine, Boulevard Saint-Germain, rue Mouffetard, Montparnasse — rather than up in the 18th, and some of the books Bill spoke warmly of are not among those I like. Still, it was good to hear him spoken of in this way.

As with Dylan Thomas, the legend gets in the way of the literature, and Hemingway the celebrity, boastful, brutal, dishonest and talking his Hollywood Indian language, is a fairly awful, even repulsive figure. Sadly, the more one learns the clearer it is that the private Hemingway was every bit as nasty.

I used to think differently. Reading A. E. Hotchner’s Papa almost 40 years ago, I would have given much to have been included in his entourage. ‘Let us resume the having of the fun’ — oh yes, please. Hotchner’s last chapters are of course grim and painful, all the fun evaporated, never to be resumed. The account of the last years when he was crazy, paranoid, miserable, but still trying doggedly to write, is pathetic, even tragic, Hemingway resembling — to adopt a suitable image — a bloodied and puzzled bull, head brought low by the picadors, waiting for the matador’s final thrust to end the agony.

Despite the Nobel Prize, his reputation, as distinct from celebrity, was on the slide long before he shot himself in 1961.