In Hemingway's Boat, Paul Hendrickson brings forth what is quite possibly the last letter Hemingway ever wrote.  He's writing to the son of the family doctor in Ketchum, suffering from a congenital heart defect.  Hemingway is writing from the hospital, the Mayo Clinic.  He is perhaps embellishing the reality of his visit when he closes with a few elegant simple lines about nature, the weather, the water, the wildlife, in classic Hemingway style.  As if to comfort the boy, as if to comfort himself.  Hendrickson's refrain throughout the book, to the effect, 'amidst all the damage, still the beauty,' is applied here as well.

Obviously, nature was important to Hemingway.  A solace, a comfort, often under the excuse of fishing or hunting.  Hemingway, as we all do, dealt with the hustle and bustle of city life.  He dealt with the complications of society, obviously, or there wouldn't be anything to his writings.  He dealt with the great difficulty of communication, to the difficulty of expressing to another being, candidly and honestly what's on your mind, what you'd like to do with your life (often he'd just go and do it, one has the impression, rather than talking it over) and that sort of thing.  The saying, honestly, "no," or, "yes," without complication.

He always kept a way to get back to nature, to get away from the horror of modernity--of walking alongside a busy road with heavy jockeying traffic moving at its unfeeling pace intent on getting somewhere--to get away from the trying obligations and soul lacerating commitments of participation in modern city life as we know it.  (He also took refuge in old European towns.  There is not much 'modern city,' New Yorks and Chicagos, in his work, beside the juvenile gangster story, beside the observation, later in his career, that modern bullfighters don't like being dragged through modern traffic and find it deeply disconcerting.)  It's a theme of his whole life, and it comes as no surprise that human life within the city and modernity can be brutal, as it is brutal, fascist, impersonal and mechanized in his tale of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, as much as it can offer a gentle enough life for humanity.  The return to nature, that moment of direct experience of finding a river before him, offers, if I might write like a complete juvenile for a moment, honesty, salvation, a balm for the great depressive kept privately within.  More than a simple recharge, and relaxation, and 'ahhhh,' the experience of nature uncorrupted by noise and lights and the traffic and the concrete is the thing keeping him alive.

And so he writes a final letter, evoking a nature blocked off from him in the confinement of his hospital room, perhaps completely making up what he wanted to hear, see and experience directly with his senses as one does when outdoors, extending that moment out to another being who could then experience it himself.



Art, of the written kind, to further consider, was basically the only thing Hemingway had ever done, or done well.  Of course, he worked hard at it.  It brought him certain benefits, and even a living, this life of work of his.  Direction, drive, motivation, the sense of accomplishment.  If he ran out of the ability to find truth to relate, what else would such a man of pride do with himself?

I wonder about that enigmatic line of his in A Moveable Feast, the one where he observes himself listening to the praise of the rich and their 'pilot fish.'  In effect saying, "Jesus, if those bastards praised what I was doing, saying it was great, I should have known there was something I was doing wrong."  It's a self-criticism that comes along in a book full of simple reflections, in which the simple description of the artist working comes across with enough tension to carry our interest.  Granted, it has that memoir aspect to it, setting our expectations just so.  But the simple texture of the writing life as he is trying to survive, in that time when he was creating himself as a writer and how he would go about doing that seem somehow to be the finest stuff he wrote, as if he had come home as a modernist, as a Homeric, writing the story that is both without plot and with the great tone of the epic, as he had already done in passages of description that echo, say, Joyce.  Here he is, in touch with a deeper form of consciousness.

And it also seems to raise the question, what are we in general doing wrong as we kowtow to the attractive cultured wealthy tastemaker, to the promises that make us dance as if fine and pleasurable things were being offered to us?  What if, like Ernest Hemingway, you simply wrote as a moral human being, without being seduced, and just tell the story of what you go through, what you think, your observations, about that desire to write primarily for the sake of one's own mental health and higher satisfaction, all that comes with the territory of being a higher being full of deeper thought and questions, (as writers always have.)   Did I let myself get seduced?  Did I sell myself short of my goal?  Well, you probably end up asking yourself those questions anyway as you wander forward in life.  But it is, I hope, something organic that makes art, that the art that is natural for us to make, perhaps simple and unadorned and mysterious, as folk art often can be, makes art what it is, therefore being the ultimate driver of taste.  Simple, old school human art, not in any need of being told whether or not it is or isn't good enough by itself... why not?

Just go about your life, and just keep writing about it and any thoughts you have.  Don't feel that boutiquey urge to make it sellable or popular by placing it under the arc of tension.  It will already have tension, the tension of truth in the world and of survival itself.  I was a bartender for 20 years.  I'm still doing it.  That should be enough.  Though the rich and their pilot fish and taste makers will want to assert their own egotistical importance upon the matter and say, 'oh, but it's not good enough, and you should be like Andy Warhol or whatever.'  That's just human nature, to fall, or almost fall, for the dangled carrot reward system, to be seduced.  And when you get seduced, you are no longer the light but another corrupting element by joining in to the false hierarchy, to the treason against the human heart.



Truth is, Ernest, that it is not easy being a sensitive guy.  It's not easy to make the time for it, unless you give up the time you could spend surviving and competing, for something that is mysterious and higher, higher than material goods.  You have to acknowledge the need for spirituality, for making spiritual meaning out of everyday life.  And Ernest, your work quietly accomplishes a good amount of that, even as you seem caught in a kind of a competitive mode, highlighting conflict even as you grasp deeper truths.  But in a way, you are right, because it is a bit of a struggle, to get up every day, like that old fisherman, and you did that story well and beautifully and lastingly.