Thursday, May 16, 2013

He lay there on his back between the sheets with his arms folded across his chest like a dead knight, hands crossed palm downward, bare, the palm of left resting in the hairs of chest, the right hand on top of the left hand, the four fingers on each hand touching his skin.  Then he would turn over on his left side, to the bed's edge and the oxygen, his right hand palm down on the sheet, his left hand propped upward, fingers curled above the open palm barely brushing his lip.  He tried sleeping on his stomach, arm under the pillow, as if embracing something forgotten, head turned to the left, jaw deep with the pillow.  He would turn on his right side, his right fist against the stubble of his chin, thinker style, left arm draped naturally.

He wrote about things like onion sandwiches and coffee-according-to-Myers and beans heated over a campfire, small textural details, the things of regular life.  They were the few things, along with venturing out into the natural world, that helped him in the great unending battle with depression kept-at-bay that one day, one morning he would lose, after a long rich life, up in Idaho.  Often what you had to eat was the only thing to look forward to, so you made the best of the egg or whatever it was.  A small victory before sinking back.  The knowledge of wanting to do something, live somewhere with people he truly liked, but not finding it, nothing but a loneliness that made art private and ill formed.

After the week he didn't want to get up.  He got up, took the tea pot out of the fridge for some cold Moroccan Mint tea, then made a little roast beef sandwich on toasted Ezekial English Muffin with a slice of onion, ate it in careful bites, and went back to bed.  And he thought, perhaps all the while, of the time he'd had to borrow his father's station wagon to get back to a college homecoming weekend.  He went to see her, but when he'd called her that Friday night, not too late, after he'd gotten settled, she'd been very curt with him, and he had even ended up dead-pan laughing, 'ha ha,' into the phone.  "Who's this," she had said, very well, and she probably had a point.  The next day was sunny and bright, and the down at the football game he'd been talking to an acquaintance when she stepped into view, and his psychology had told him to slide in so that he wouldn't see her standing there with her head up, and then he even turned away and walked behind the stands to the far end of the playing field.  She even came down to sit on the grass at the end of the field, but his friends took him back behind a shack where they were smoking, and when he came back he felt stupid and dragged his feet in the cinder track, and when she got up, he didn't look up at her, and she walked past him and away.

He was smart enough to know, had already begun to see it, that steady pushes, didn't have to be anything brilliant, yielded results, and later he understood how perfectly obvious, how appropriate and necessary it had been for her to be mad at him over the initial phone call, and that he shouldn't have taken it as the slight he made it out to be.  And there was his dream, the blond sunlight, the fine Fall day at the old football field where they could sit and just have a nice chat, side by side, and he, not anyone else, had fucked it all up.  Even later that afternoon, back at his friend's room in the old frat house near the four corners at the top of the hill coming into town he had thrown up.  And it quickly became an irrevocable mistake, one he had never intended.  Perhaps the beer from the night before after the phone call had left him depressed, so that he saw things negatively.

Then, yes, things, after that had gone badly.  He kept remembering it all, and how none of it had been right.  And now that he wasn't moving forward and doing anything with his life, now she had a point, or it was as if she had seen something in him.  None of it made him feel any better about the whole thing, and whatever possibilities he had then, were slipping quickly away.  And it was as if, just as she had once said, 'get a life,' the bad things were coming true, at precisely the wrong time.  So, one night, when he called her, after a hard dull day waiting for life to happen working with a landscaper doing tree work on the main residential street in Waterville, a sprinkle of snow on the ground that morning, along with the golden light of morning and the crisp air a sense of not doing anything with his life, of course she said, 'oh, god,' and hung up, and he didn't call back.  Yeah, and anyway he never had that confident manner, so gentle, if that is the word, that he was apologetic, as if asking to be hung up on.

He thought of Agnes Von Kurowsky, couldn't forget the beauty of it all, the kiss, and like Chekhov's shy soldier, tied himself into a knot, didn't become a doctor or a scientist, but a traveller who wrote about his own shyness, as to slightly justify it.  Life was knocked off course, and he had to change, an adjustment that was somehow in keeping with his inner self, but a complete surprise, like it was for the German soldier getting shot just as he came over the stone wall in one of his stories.

No, kid, don't write about things.  That's just giving up, making things worse, probably.  Become a naturalist, go out for a walk and find the stream, where the herring are running now over the creekbed.  Watch the fish swim upstream in the current, flickering their tail fins.  And stay out of the wine.  It will just come round and bite you anyway.

It wasn't the past he had fucked up.  He had done that right, when you stopped and looked back on it.  There had even been some sort of inexplicable virtue, as if coming out of a folk song of an old old sort. It was just the present.  That was always the problem.  Looking back on it, he didn't even want to make too much of it, and had done his best, truly, to let it all go.  But there it was.  The meetings that should have been nice had all gone terribly, after the initial time, but in the present, what? like shouting matches unseen and unheard?  Why?  It occurred to him that there must be something wrong with him, personally, not anyone in his family, who all were great and talented, deep and kind, just himself, inexplicably, confused by time and weather, never in synch.

That depression of Hemingway's he used as a tool, sign of a daily need to pull out the crowbar lever and axis point, to pry, to dig up...  The most meaningful things he came up with were the images of himself as an artist at work, some of it direct, some of it indirect, like the portrait of the old fisherman.  This consciousness of a narrative voice within, needing to find and tell a story, is always there in him.  A man paints a picture of a cat, in doing so revealing his own nature as a painter, in doing so, praying--this is the story of Islands in the Stream.  The depression was a tool.  It kept him quiet enough to write, not mind the solitude, the work, recognize the need for quiet, and it also helped him see, turn on his inner vision to see the real stuff.  Maybe why he did not necessarily avoid depressing things, expose himself to all its forms, brave as he was.

After the Dear Ernest letter, explaining the Italian count and how their own relationship had been a passing youthful fancy, after that there was no contact, no letters between them.  They never spoke as old friends over the phone, and she was probably not a subject to bring up with him.  He used that part of himself, that time, almost defensively, as a way of protecting something.  He accepted his shyness, the strange character of his creative modes, just as Dostoevsky accepted, apparently, his own dislike of electric lights.  And she became woven into the background of his early short story collection and at least two novels, if not, in a way, all of them.

All of it seemed to redefine what it was to be an adult, a human, a person.  And more and more he found that life was far closer to Emily Dickinson's experience, a redefinition of the self, so that being on his own was normal, a way for him to attend to certain realistic things, making narrative art out of the little bits and pieces of life, a base all people could share in.



The problem in the popular image and understanding of Hemingway is viewing him as a layman, as far as his art goes, when he is of a certain church, a church of understanding reality.  He is too immediately constructed out of images of macho outdoorsmen, pompous bullfight aficionado, man of feasts and bars, when he is quieter and more thoughtful than all that.

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