An American storyteller

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Part of Panorama

Title: An American storyteller
Language: English
Year: 1960
Subject: Hemingway, Ernest M., 1899-1961.
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Fulltext: You know him — An American Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: Famous .at twenty-five: thirty a master — Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April City. Thus Poet Archibald MacLeish recalls one of the great American writers in his davs of early glory, back in the 1920s, when it always seem ed to be April in Paris. To day Ernest Hemingway is a long way from Paris and a long way from April. He was 55, but he looked older. He cruised in a black and green fishing boat off the coast of Cuba, near where the Gulf Stream draws a dark line on the seascape. The grey-white hair escaping from beneath a visored cap was un kempt, and the Caribbean glare induced a sea-squint in his brown, curious eyes set behind steelrimmed spectacles. Most of his ruddy face was retired behind a clipped, white, patri archal beard that gave him a bristled, Neptuneian look. His leg muscles could have been halves of a split 16-lb. shot, welded there by years tramp ing in Michigan, skiing in Swit zerland, bullfighting in Spain, walking battlefronts and hiking uncounted miles of African sawari. On his lap he held a board, and he bent over it with a pen cil in one hand. He was still whittling away at his walnut prose. Five thousand miles away in Stockholm, a white-starched, tail-coated assembly of the No bel Foundation was about to bestow literature’s most distin guished accolade on the pro ducts of his pencil. Then, “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,” the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway, ori ginally of Oak Park, Ill. and la ter of most of the world’s grand and adventurous places. 62 Panorama Storyteller Few would deny that Ernest Hemingway deserves the trum pets of fame. As an artist he broke the bounds of American writing, enriched U.S. literature with the century’s hardest-hit ting prose, and showed new ways to new generations of wri ters. He was imitated not only by other writers but by un counted young men who, in fact or fancy, sought to live as dash ingly as he. From Paris bistros to Chicago saloons, he is known as a character — not the sallow, writing type with an indoor soul, but a literary he-man. When his plane crashed on safa ri in Africa one winter and for nearly a day he was believed dead, even people who do not like his books felt a strange, per sonal sense of loss, and even people who never read novels were delighted when he walked out of the jungle carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, and was quoted, possibly even correctly, as saying: “My luck, she is running very good.” The hero of th egreat He mingway legend was still not sufficiently recovered from his accident to travel to Stockholm for his latest, biggest honor (hit herto awarded only to five other American-born writers: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner). Furthermore, the first announcement of the Nobel award and the bustle of publi city that followed had thrown Hemingway off his writing pace. He took to his boat in hopes of getting back to work on his new novel about Africa. “I was going real good, better than for a long time, when this came along,” he said. “When you’re a writer and you’ve got it you’ve got to keep going because when you’ve lost it you’ve lost it and God knows when you’ll get it back.” Hemingway’s African injuries were a ruptured kidney, bad burns, cracked skull, two com pressed vertebrae and one ver tebra cracked clear through. December 1960 63 These were added to scars that cover perhaps half his body sur face, including half a dozen head wounds, 237 shrapnel scars in one leg, a shot-off kneecap, wounds in both feet, both arms, both hands and groin, all acquir ed in the two World Wars. In a few weeks he was much im proved, but his back was still bothering him. When he sat, he lined his chair with big flat pic ture books and a backboard. “I have to take so many pills,” he said, “they have to fight among themselves if I take them too close together.” His daily quo ta of alcohol, though still sub stantial enough to keep him in good standing among the alltime public enemies of the W. C.T.U., had fallen far below the old records. Gone were the unin hibited wine-purpled, 100-proof, side-of-the-fnouth bottle-swig ging days of the swashbuckling young Ernest Hemingway who was “the bronze god of the whole literary experience in America,” the lionhunting, tro phy-bagging, bullfight-1 o v i n g Lord Byron of America. “I’m a little beat up,” Ernest Heming way now admits, “but I assure you it is only temporary.” Even though held in by in" jury and age, Heming way’s life — on a small plan tation ten miles outside Havana, called Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm—is still the special He mingway blend of thought and action, artistry and nonconfor mity. The Hemingway of 1954 still has a bit of himself for the many sides of his life—and plenty left over to populate that private Hemingway world where the Hemingway heroes and heroines live their lives of pride and trouble enduring with courage as long as they can, of ten destroyed but never defeat ed. For Ernest Hemingway, when he is writing, every day begins at 5:30 in the morning, before any but some gabby bantams, a few insomniac cats and a can tankerous bird called “The Bit chy Owl” are awake, he goes to work in the big main bedroom of his villa. He writes standing up at the mantelpiece, using pencil for narrative and des cription, a typewriter for dialo gue ‘in order to keep up.” Rising up from one side of his villa is a white tower from which he can gaze meditative ly at Havana and the sea, or at his own domain—the iinca’s 13 acres, including flower and truck gardens, fruit trees, seven cows (which provide all the house-hold’s milk and butter), a large swimming pool, a tem porarily defunct tennis court. In the 60-foot-long living room, heads of animals Hemingway shot in Africa stare glassy-eyed 64 Panorama rom the walls. But most im posing of all are Hemingway’s books. He consumes books, newspapers and random printed matter the way a big fish gulps in plankton. One of the few top American writers alive who did not go to college, Heming way read Darwin when he was ten, later taught himself Span ish so he could read Don Qui xote and the bullfight journals. Hemingway has never slept well, and reading is his substi tute. Finca Vigia holds 4,859 volumes of fiction, poetry, his tory, military manuals, biogra phy, music, natural history, sports, foreign-language gram mars and cookbooks. For 15 years Hemingway has lived in Cuba. “I live here because I love Cuba— this does not imply a dislike for any place else—and because here I can get privacy when I write.” But his life in Cuba is not quiet. Guests at the finca are apt to include friends from the wealthy sporting set, say Winston Guest or Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt; pals from Hollywood, such as Gary Cooper or Ava Gardner; Span ish grandees, soldier, sailors, Cuban politicians, prizefighters, barkeeps, painters and even fel low authors. It is open house for U.S. Air Force and Navy men, old Loyalists from the Spanish civil war, or for any of the eight Cubans, Spaniards and Americans who served with Hemingway on his boat, the Pilar, early in World War 11 when Hemingway and the Pilar cruised the Caribbean hunting for enemy submarines. And even if there are no guests, there is always the long-dis tance phone, which may carry the husky voice of Marlene Dietrich, calling to talk over a problem with “Papa.” For Mary Welsh Hemingway, 46, an indefatigable former newspaper and magazine cor respondent from Minnesota, it is a fortunate day when she can reckon by 7 p.m. how many are staying for dinner and by 12 how many for the night. Life at Finca Vigia is, as she once reported it, a “perpetual weekend . . . involving time, space, motion, noise, animals and personalities, always ap proaching but seldom actually attaining complete uproar.” In the past, when the routine at Finca Vigia grew too dis tracting, Hemingway found es cape along grand avenues—a return to the plains below Ta nganyika’s Kilimanjaro or ano ther trip to Venice, or a nightclub-and-museum-crawling trip to New York. But for the bat tered and mellowing Heming way of today, the favorite re fuge is his boat. December 1960 65 Ana seagoing day (his first after winning the Nobel Prize), Hemingway’s big Buick station wagon bounces through two Chrysler engines, built to the suburbs along the Havana wharfsides by 9 a.m. The Pilar is a hardy, 42-foot craft with Hemingway’s specifications 20 years ago. Hemingway careful ly supervises the provisioning of the Pilar’s iceboxes for a hot day afloat—several brands of beer for his guests and the mate, some tequila for Skipper Hemingway. He consults with his mate, an agile, creased Ca nary Islander named Gregorio Fuentes. Then Hemingway shucks off his shoes and socks, chins himself on the edge of Pilar’s flying bridge, throws one leg up, and, favoring his sore back, slowly raises himself to the roof to take the set of con trols. The Pilar glides trimly past Morro Castle. Hemingway delightedly' sniffs the sea-grapescented air and gestures to the whole ocean. “It’s the last free place there is, the sea.” Gregorio deftly baits four lines and trails them from the stern. In fluid Spanish, He mingway and the mate decide to fish the waters off Cojimar, the little fishing village near which Hemingway set The Old Man and the Sea. The air and the baking sun make him feel good. In the sea haze, from the blue water, amid the occasional flying fish, ideas seem to appear—Heming way notions about how things are. “When a writer retires deliberately from life, or is forced out of it by some de fect, his writing has a tendency to atrophy just like a limb of a man when it’s not used.” He slaps his growing midriff, which in his enforced idleness, is spreading fore and aft. “Any one who’s had the fortune or misfortune to be an athlete has to keep his body in shape. I think body and mind are close ly coordinated. Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempt ed to say that it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don’t know anything about the soul.” In a sense, Hemingway per1 haps never fully faced up to the concept of soul in his writing. Religion is a subject he refuses to discuss at all. He is equally ill at ease in the world of the ruminative intel lectual. But he recognizes that in that world there is much worth knowing. In the bright sun, Hemingway recalls the s’ ut-in figure of Marcel Proust. “Because a man sees the world in a different way and sees more diverse parts of the world does not make him the equal 66 Panorama of a man like Marcel Proust,” says Hemingway humbly. “Proust knew deeper and bet ter than anyone the life of which he wrote.” Suddenly Gregorio cries out: “Feesh! Papa, feesh!” Proust is gone. Hemingway reaches down, grabs one of the rods by its tip and pulls it to the roof. He jerks once to set the hook, then with slow, graceful movements he pumps the rod back, reels a few feet, pumps, reels. To protect his back, he lets his arms and one leg do the work. By the shi very feel on the line he can identify the catch. “Bonito,” he tells Gregorio, “Good bonito.” With smooth speed, he works the fish close to the stern. Gre gorio grabs the wire leader and boats a blue-and-silver bonito of about 15 pounds. A broad, small-boy smile flashes through Hemingway’s old-man whiskers. “Good,” he says. “A fish on the boat before 10:30 is a good sign. Very good sign.” Gregorio takes the wheel and Hemingway lets himself down to the deck and sits down. His voice has an ordinary sound, but high-pitched for the big frame that produces it. For all his years away from his root land, he speaks with an unmis takable Midwestern twang. Ab sentmindedly he rubs a star shaped scar near his right foot, one of the scars left by mortar shell which gravely wounded him at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 when he was a volunteer am bulance driver. Nick Adams, hero of many of Hemingway’s short stories, was wounded at approximately the same place in much the same way. So was Lieut. Henry of A Farewell to Arms; so was Colonel Cantwell of Across the River and Into the Trees. A critic named Philip Young last year pub lished a book attributing He mingway’s approach to life and his artistic creation most ly to the Fossalta wounding (plus some brash sights witness ed when he was a boy in Mi chigan traveling with his doctor father on emergency calls). He mingway does not think very highly of that book. “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was done be cause of some trauma?” he says. “I don’t want to go down as the Legs Diamond of Let ters.” I n the past, hardly anyone ■ ever suspected Hemingway novels of symbolism. Then, in The Old Man and the Sea, peo ple saw symbols — the old man stood for man’s dignity, the big fish embodied nature, the shark’s symbolized evil (or maybe just the critics). “No good book has ever been written that has in its symbols arrived at before hand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. December 1960 67 “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Rai sin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true en ough they would mean many things is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.” He looks ahead at some float ing sargasso weed, where some flying fishes are skittering through the air. “Could be fish there,” he says. A reel gives out a soft whine, and Hemingway goes into action again. “Beauti ful!” he cries. “Dolphin. They’re beautiful.” After landing his fish, shimmering blue, gold and green, Hemingway turns his at tention to his guests. “Take him softly now,” he croons. “Easy, Easy. Work him with style. That’s it, up slowly with the rod, now reel infast. Suave. With style. With style. Don’t break his mouth.” After the second fish at last flops onto the deck, Hemingway continues his re flections. “The right way to do it—style — is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is sup posed to be done. The fact that the right way also looks beauti ful when it’s done is just inci dental.” This feeling about style, per haps more than anything else, has always been Hemingway’s credo—whether it concerned the right way to kill a bull, track a wild beast, serve Valpolicella or blow up a bridge. And it was usually the redeem ing feature and ultimate triumph of his characters: they might die, but they died with style. They left behind them some aura of virtue, nose de fiant statement of this-is-theway-it-should-be-done that am ounted to a victory of sorts. The matter of style reB minds Hemingway of ma ny things, things, including his Nobel Prize. He knows just what he would like to say if he went to Stockholm for the ac ceptance ceremony. He would like to talk about a half-forgot ten poet and great stylist—Ez ra Pound. Poet Pound used to look over Hemingway’s early manuscripts in Paris and return ed them, mercillesly blue-pen ciled, the adjectives gone. In dicted for treason for his pro Fascist broadcasts in Italy dur ing World War II, Pound was declared “mentally incompe tent” in 1946 and confined in Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. “Ezra Pound is a great poet,” says Hemingway fiercely, “and whatever he did he has been punished greatly and I be lieve should be freed to go and 68 Panorama write poems in Italy where he is loved and understood. He was the master of T. S. Eliot. Eliot is a winner of the Nobel Prize. I believe it might well have gone to Pound ... I believe this would be a good year to release poets. There is a school of thought in America which, if encouraged far enough, could well believe that a man should be punished for the simple error against conformity of being a poet. Dante, by these stand ards, could well have spent his life in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for errors or judgment and of pride.” Alongside the Pilar, the bait bobbing and Dante gives way to the dolphins. In little time the Pilar boasts 15 beauties. Excit ed as a boy, Hemingway over looks a promise to quit early and take a late afternoon nap. Not until almost dusk does the boat put in to harbor. The sun seems to be setting only a few yards off a corner of Havana, four miles distant, and Heming way savors it as if it were his first sunset—or his last. “Look!” he exclaims. “Now watch it go down, and then you’ll see big green ball where it was.” The sun falls as if jerked below the horizon, and for a long instant a big green, sun-sized ball hangs in its place. As the Pilar turns the harbor mouth, Hemingway takes the controls. Ceremonially, Gre gorio the mate hands up to him what remains of the tequila and a freshcut half of lime. Heming way does not actually drink the tequila, and the whole thing bears the appearance of a ri tual, as if to ward off sea ser pents. Only at the dock does he pass around the bottle. “We went out and had a good day and caught plenty fish and got pooped,” he says. “Now we can relax for a while and talk and go to sleep.” With a tired smile on his tired, grizzled face, he lumbers up the gangway and off to his car and home. TIRED OR NOT, Hemingway is B is a man who likes to re lax with memories. Once, he remembers, there was a bat tered old prizefighter in Key West who wanted to make a comeback and asked Heming way to referee. “It was a Negro section,” Hemingway recalls, “and they really introduced me in the ring: “The referee for to night’s bouts, that world-famous millionaire sportsman and play boy, Mr. Ernest Hemingway! Playboy was the greatest title they thought they could give a man who has heard plaudits like that?” While Hemingway was per haps never a millionaire, the playboy title often fitted him. Oak Park, Ill. (pop. 63,529) saw the earliest Hemingway— the versatile, out-doors-loving December 1960 69 son of respected Dr. and Mrs. Clarence E. Hemingway. Later Oak Park’s people wondered, as one of them put it, “how a boy brought up in Christian and Pu ritan nurture should know and write so well of the devil and the underworld.” (He was born a Congregationalist, became a praticing Roman Catholic, now apparently does not go to church). The city room of the Kansas City Star saw him fresh out of high school and itchy for excitement. He left after only seven months of co vering “the short-stop run”— police, railroad station, hospital. He lied about his age (18) to join the Red Cros ambulance service. Soon, postcards came back from the Italian front. “Having a wonderful time,” they said. The Hemingway who first stepped into Gertrude Stein’s salon in postwar Paris was 22, “rather foreign looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes.” But the Hemingway she remembered later, after they had parted company, was “yellow . . . just like the flatboat men on the Mississippi River as described by Mark Twain.” In his Paris days, he often refused good newspaper assign ments and lunched on five sous’ worth of potatoes in or der to write his stories his own way. Even before any of his work was published (1923), word of Hemingway’s fresh new talent floated like tobacco smoke through Paris’ expatriate cafes and salons. He impressed and became friends with many of the literary greats of the day, including James Joyce. “Once, in one of those casual conversations you have when you’re drinking,” recalls He mingway, “Joyce said to me he was afraid his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get around a bit and see the world. He was afraid of some things, lightning and things, but a wonderful man. He was under great discipline —his wife, his work and his bad eyes. His wife was there and she said, yes, his work was too suburban—‘Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunt ing.’ We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn’t even see the man so he’d say, ‘Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!’ ” The Hemingway of the late 1920s, prosperous and confident, dealt successfully with all comers. But he had his trou bles. His first marriage to Had ley Richardson of St. Louis, broke up in 1927, and his fa ther committed suicide in 1928. Hemingway was later to mar ry two more St. Louisans: Vo gue Writer Pauline Pfeiffer 70 Panorama (1927) and Novelist Martha Gellhorn (1940). From his first marriage he has one son, John (“Bumby”), 32, a World War II soldier and OSS man who is now in a Portland, Ore. in vestment house. From his se cond he has two more sons, Patrick, 24, who has bought a plantation in Tanganyika, and Gregory, 22, who is completing premedical studies in Los An geles. The Hemingway of Death ■ in the Afternoon (1932) was passionate about bulls, ma tadors, violence and the art of risking death. Max Eastman, the pundit and critic, wrote in Bull in the Afternoon that He mingway seemed to have “be gotten ... a literary style ... of wearing false hair on the chest.” One afternoon three years later, 54-year-old, relatively unhirsute Max Eastman was confronted in Scribner’s New York office by bull-angry, 38-year-old He mingway, who ripped open his shirt to prove that the chest hair was real. The scene cul minated in the notorious scuf fle whose true outcome has long since vanished in the fog of subjective claims and counter claims. The Depression and the Spanish civil war produced the short-lived Political Heming way. In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only full length novel with a U.S. setting, he sounded vaguely socialist. Some critics, particularly the Communists, grasped at the death of the novel’s hero, Har ry Morgan, because he died insisting that “a man alone ain’t got no . . . chance.” One critic saw in the book a plea for some form of social collectivism. He mingway wore his heart on his sleeve for the Loyalists in Spain, but For Whom the Bell Tolls clearly showed his con tempt for the Communists. They, in turn, denounced his books for being militaristic and lacking social significance. The Hemingway of World War II wore a canteen of ver mouth on one hip, a canteen of gin on the other, a helmet that he seldom used because he couldn’t find one big enough. Accredited a foreign correspon dent for Collier's (he jokingly called himself “Ernie Hemorr hoid, the poor man’s Pyle”), he took part in more of the European war than many a soldier. With Colonel (now Major General) Charles T. Lanham’s 22 nd Infantry Regi ment, he went through the Normandy breakthrough, Schnee Eifel, the Hurtgen For est bloodletting and the defense of Luxembourg. Gathering 200 French irregulars around him, he negotiated huge allotments of ammunition and alcohol and assisted in the liberation of 71 Paris. Hemingway personally liberated the Ritz Hotel, post ed a guard below to notify in coming friends: “Papa took good hotel. Plenty stuff in cel lar.” The postwar Hemingway ■ settled into another good hotel, the Gritti in Venice, to write “the big book” about World War II (a draft is now finished). But a piece of gun wadding went into his eye dur ing a duck hunt and started an infection that doctors feared was going to kill him. Wanting to get one more story out of himself, he put the big book aside and batted out Across the River and Into the Trees, which most critics found a middleaged love fantasy with an ad mixture of bad-tempered mili tary shoptalk. Said Hemingway about the critics: “I have moved .through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in cal culus. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them.” It is impossible to overlook the adolescent in Hemingway —his bravado, his emotional friendships, his vague but allimportant code, his deep sen timentality about the good, the true, the straight, the beautiful, and occasionally the unprint able. But to preserve some thing of the adolescent through three decades in a world of li terary critics, parodizers and cocktail-party highbrows takes a certain admirable courage. Above all, Hemingway can laugh at himself. Typical of Hemingway making fun of He mingway is El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Ca balleros de Brusadelli—which means, more or less, the Mili tary Order of the Noble and Spirited Nights of Brusadelli. It was founded by Hemingway in Italy, and named, as he ex plains in Across the River and Into the Trees, “after a particu larly notorious multi-millionaire taxpaying profiteer of Milan, who had . . . accused his young wife, publicly and legally through due process of law, of having deprived him of his judgment through her extraor dinary sexual demands.” As Commander of the Great Chain of the Order, Hemingway dis tributed knighthoods to friends; after his recovery he returned to Cuba, and mailed reports to fellow members. A sample writ ten just after he had finished writing The Old Man and the Sea: “Your Cuban representa tive has not been able to do much for the Order in the last year due to the deplorable ne cessity of writing a book . . . The book will be published on Sept. 8th and all members of the Order will observe a mo ment of silence. The password will be: ‘Don’t cheer, boys. The poor readers are dying.’” 72 Panorama |1 ow does Nobel Prizewia" ner Ernest Hemingway stand with his surviving read ers? The Sun Also Rises, which offered an ironical thenody for the “lost generation,” is today appealing mostly as a period piece. But even if Hemingway had stopped after the fine short stories written in the 1920s and A Farewell to Arms, he wojld have won a roomy place in Am erican literature. Years later, when his style had become a fix ture and when Hemingway prose occasionaly dipped to ward banality, the importance of the beginning was sometimes not considered. Much of his out put of the ’30s seems below par today, but For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was one of his best, and in The Old Man and the Sea he is better than he ever was, more mature and less man nered. Unlike most American writers, who seemed inexplicab ly to wither after their triupmhs (e.g., Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, Thomas Wolfe), Ernest Hemmingway has con tinued to grow. Almost from the beginning, critics have talked about Hem ingway’s obsession with death, all the dark and clinical tear and bleeding on the battlefields, in the bull rings, in the lunch room where The Kilers wait, with gloves on, for their victims. Yet somehow, in an atomic age, Hemingway seems much less macabre and violent than he did in the pacifist climate of the ‘30s. Hemingway still stands out from a pack of introspective and obscure writers with a dazzling simplicity, rarely politicking, ne ver preaching, never using Freu dian jargon. Some, including 1949’s Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner, think that his world is too nar row. “(Hemingway) has no cou rage,” Faulkner once said. “(He) has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway has indeed remained in the carefully deli neated, cut-to-the-bone world of simple, palpable acts. But at his best, Hemingway has a sense of fate recalling Melville, an Am erican heartiness recalling Mark Twain (who never used big dic tionary words either). Heming way can carve icebergs of prose; only a few words on paper con vey much more beneath the sur face. The taut, economical style contains more than meets the casual eye—the dignity of man and also his imperfection, the recognition that there is a right way and a wrong, the know ledge that the redeeming things of life are measured in the pro found satisfactions that come from struggle. Said Dr. Anders OsteAing, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm this week: “Courage December 1960 73 is Hemingway’s central theme— the bearing of one who is put to the test and who steels himself to meet the cold cruelty of ex istence without, by so doing, re pudiating the great and gener ous moments...” John Donne provided Hem ingway with the title of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe,” said Donne. Says Hemingway now: “A man both is and is not an island. Sometimes he has to be the strongest! island there can be to be a part of the main. (I) am not good at stating meta physics in a conversation, but I thought Santiago (the Old Man) was never alone because he had his friend and enemy the sea and the things that lived in the sea some of whom he loved and others that he hated.’ ’ His lifetime has brought Er nest Hemingway recognition, distinction and reward that only death and passage of time bring to many others. Hemingway is satisfied. He would not change any of his life or of his writings —anyway, “not yet.” He feels now as he did some years ago, and he is willing to rest on it: “You only have to do it once to get remembered by some peo ple. But if you can do it year after year after year quite a lot of people remember and they tell their children and their chil dren and their grandchildren re member, and if it’s books they can read them. And if it’s good enough it lasts forever.” * * * 74 Panorama