Several years ago, I read your “Across the River and Into the Trees,” when it was serialized in the Cosmopolitan. After the beautiful opening description of Venice, I expected the book to go on, and have considerable stature, but was vastly disappointed. Certainly there was opportunity to disclose the rottenness that MAKES wars, as well as to point out hypocrisy of the military organization itself. Instead, your officer was mainly disgruntled because HE had the PERSONAL MISFORTUNE to lose two companies of men, and as a result, received no promotion. Little or NO grief was shown for the young men themselves. Largely it seemed the ineffectual efforts of an old man to try to convince himself and other old men that young, beautiful and even rich young women would love an old man for himself alone, not because he could give her wealth and a position of prominence.
Later, “Old Man of the Sea” was published, and I asked my brother, who is mature, and spent four and a half years in the Army during War LL. if this book were any more emotionally mature than River and Trees, and he grimaced and said it wasn’t.
It is amazing to me that a group of people could award you the Pulitzer Prize. At least everyone does not agree.
This clipping was taken from Harlan Miller’s column of “Over the Coffee,” from The Des Moines Register and Tribune, and I have been meaning for some time to send it. Just add that Hemingway is EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE AND AN AWFUL BORE, and the review is complete. You have had four “wives,” and if you haven’t achieved morality, you should at least be getting a little common sense from your past mistakes. Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?
This woman did not like the book in any way and that was her perfect right. If I had been in Iowa I would have refunded her the money she had spent on it as a reward for her eloquence and the reference to War LL. I took to mean two rather than Long and Lousy and I read where a clipping had been inserted:
Maybe I’ve been slightly stuffy about Hemingway: the most over-rated writer of our time, but still a fine writer. His main faults: (1) scant sense of humor, (2) a juvenile brand of realism, (3) meager idealism, or none, (4) hairy chested bombast
It was enjoyable to sit in the empty mess tent alone with my correspondence and imagine the emotionally mature brother grimacing perhaps in the kitchen over a snack from the Frigidaire, or seated in front of the TV set watching Mary Martin as Peter Pan and I thought how kind it was for this lady from Iowa to write me and how pleasant it would be to have her emotionally mature grimacing brother shaking his head here now at this moment.
You cannot have everything, writer old man, I said to myself philosophically. What you win on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. You simply have to give up this emotionally mature brother. Give him up, I tell you. You must go it alone, boy. So I gave him up and continued to read Our Lady of Iowa. In Spanish I thought of her as Nuestra Senora de los Apple Knockers and at the surge of such a splendid name I felt a rush of piety and Whitman-like warmth. But keep it directed toward her, I cautioned myself. Don’t let it lead you toward the grimacer.
It was exciting as well to read the tribute of the brilliant young columnist. It had that simple but instant catharsis that Edmund Wilson has called “The Shock of Recognition,” and recognizing the quality of this young columnist who indeed would have had a brilliant future on the East African Standard had he been born in the Empire and hence been able to secure a work permit I thought again, as one approaches the edge of a precipice, of the well-loved face of the grimacing brother of my correspondent but my feelings toward the grimacer had changed now and I was no longer attracted to him as I had been but, rather, saw him seated among the corn stalks, his hands uncontrollable in the night as he heard the growth of the stems of the mealies. In the Shamba we had mealies that grew as tall as corn grows in the Middle West. But nobody heard it grow in the night because the nights were cool and the corn grew in the afternoon and at night; even if it had grown at night, you could not have heard it for the talking of the hyenas and the jackals and the lions when they were hunting and the noise the leopards made.
I thought the hell with this stupid Iowa bitch writing letters to people she does not know about things she knows nothing about and I wished her the grace of a happy death as soon as possible, but I remembered her last sentence: “Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?” and I thought, you ignorant Iowa bitch, I have already done this and I will do it again many times.
Berenson was well, which made me happy, and was in Sicily, which worried me unnecessarily since he knew much more about what he was doing than I did. Marlene had problems but had been triumphant in Las Vegas and enclosed the clippings. Both the letter and clippings were very moving. The place in Cuba was OK but there were many expenses. All the beasts were well. There was still money in the N.Y. bank. Ditto the Paris bank but on the feeble side. Everyone in Venice was well except those who had been confined to nursing homes or were dying of various incurable diseases. One of my friends had been badly injured in a motor accident and I remembered the sudden dips into fog no lights could pierce when driving down the coast in the early mornings. From the description of the various fractures I doubted if he, who had loved shooting better than anything, would ever be able to shoot again. A woman I knew, admired and loved had cancer and was not given three months to live. Another girl I had known for eighteen years, knowing her first when she was eighteen, and loving her and being friends with her and loving her while she had married two husbands and made four fortunes from her own intelligence and kept them, I hoped, and gained all the tangible and countable and wearable and storable and pawnable things in life and lost all the others wrote a letter full of news, gossip and heartbreak. It had genuine news and the heartbreak was not feigned and it had the complaints that all women are entitled to. It made me the saddest of all the letters because she could not come out to Africa now where she would have had a good life even if it were only for two weeks. I knew now since she was not coming that I would never see her anymore ever unless her husband sent her on a business mission to me. She would go to all the places that I had always promised to take her but I would not go. She could go with the husband and they could be nervous together. He would always have the long-distance telephone which was as necessary to him as seeing the sunrise was to me or seeing the stars at night was to Mary. She would be able to spend money and buy things and accumulate possessions and eat in very expensive restaurants and Conrad Hilton was opening, or finishing or planning hotels for her and her husband in all the cities we had once planned to see together. She had no problem now. She could with the aid of Conrad Hilton take her lost looks to be comfortably bedded, never an arm’s reach away from the long-distance telephone, and when she woke in the night she could truly know what nothing was and what it’s worth tonight and practice counting her money to put herself to sleep so she would wake late and not meet another day too soon. Maybe Conrad Hilton would open a hotel in Laitokitok, I thought. Then she would be able to come out here and see the Mountain and there would be guides from the hotel to take her to meet Mr. Singh and Brown and Benji and there would be a plaque, perhaps, to mark the site of the Old Police Boma and they could buy souvenir spears from the Anglo-Masai Stores Ltd. There would be hot and cold running White Hunters with every room all wearing leopard-skin bands around their hats and instead of Gideon Bibles by every bedside along with the long-distance telephone there would be copies of White Hunter, Black Heart and Something of Value autographed by their authors and printed on a special all-purpose paper with portraits of their authors done on the back of the dust jackets so that they glowed in the dark.