'Tis a dreary day in DC, the temperature having dropped twenty five degrees, pouring rain.  Monday night jazz at The Dying Gaul, always complicated, no offer of any help restocking, the old shared server up and down routine, the busser tailing off at the end of the nigh, singing to himself quietly in the corner, eating something.  Good help while it lasts, and we get through the night, the food run up from the distant kitchen, the band's needs seen and conqueredBut at the end of it, after the last customers, I get a nice lesson in Gypsy swing jazz guitar from my friend who's been playing music with us for eleven years.  We start with some Hank Williams, and he has his custom made Craig Bumgarner guitar, a beauty, solid sound, followed by a  chord tutorial.  The guitarist's fingers and hands move so quickly I've not been able to decipher exactly what they are doing, it all looking like ninth chords and minor sixths, up and down the neck at speed.

Earlier, I've made an Aviator cocktail, for friends, a Georgetown couple we go way back with here at the Gaul--she tells stories of personal Obama encounters, he's just back from a colonoscopy--and they end up engaging with our two guitar players who are talking a bit of shop at the bar.  I take a seat next to their low table, to be friendly, and then for me some red wine on ice with a little orange and lime and a splash of soda water.  I'm obliged, earlier, to taste the gin and maraschino cocktail, and of course that's enough to get me started.  But they are kind to me, and we are overdue for a chat.

When I get home, finally, after eating my veal cheeks with rice instead of oriechette, no cream, but still the vital dash of truffle oil, I'm stirred up.  I don't necessarily want to turn on the television, but I do, crack open a can of soda water, and the CNN news desk is bright blue, offering the late night brain the drug of blue light in a large dose, stay up, stay up.  But I gain will power, and turn the damn thing off, take a trazodone sleep aid and go off to bed, the lights out, the bedroom door chinked with a towel at the base to avoid the front stoop porch light's stray beams.  And it takes a while to fall asleep, laying there in the pitch dark, but I wait it out, and even with the anxiousness of running like mad to take good care of everyone, I refrain from getting up and having another glass of wine.  I've not had too much, but with any drug or stimulant, when you've had a little bit, it asks you to have some more, to maintain the effect.

Earlier in the day, the day before, a walk through the woods.  My best friend Dan has taken up painting with house paints, and after some Rothko like experiments, some canvases of stylized owls.  Coming up the paved road, two thirds of the way up with the stone eastern wall of Dumbarton Oaks and bamboo above, there below, near a maple leaf flat on the wet pavement, a small gray snake the size of a number two pencil.  I stop and take a picture of him or her, and it stays still, then lifts its head, turns slightly toward me and flickers its little forked tongue as only snakes can do.  Hello, my friend.  I've seen at least one of these little guys on the paths here through the woods, in my years of commutes, and I've very glad this one is alive.  I go on to work, happy for the encounter.  An Englishman who passes in the opposite direction on a silver bicycle coming down the hill bids me a good afternoon, and I return the greeting, sir, and look behind to make sure he's on the right side of the path, not to run over my discreet little snake friend.

Hemingway, I've often wondered what he meant in that passage toward the end of A Moveable Feast. His regrets for having ever gotten involved with the rich and their pilot fish, with those who patted him on the head to praise his writing efforts.  Nearing age 60, he writes he should never have listened to them, in strong enough terms, that he should have ran in the opposite direction.  Hmm.

There was a tall gentleman with cool but understated style who didn't look like typical DC in for dinner at the old wine bar Sunday night, and engaging him, I find he's in from Vancouver, flying out tomorrow.  He orders soup and dinner, a glass of Cotes de Bourg, and I engage him later on with a little sip of this and that.  At the end of the dessert, handing me his credit card, I see his name is Karsh.  And he's Canadian.  He has cool round glasses.  Sir, may I ask if you are related to the photographer.  Yes.  He was my great uncle.  Cool, I say.  My parents got me a book of his portraits.  His pictures of Hemingway, how he was the shyest man that he ever met...   The man tells me the story the photographer included in his notes on the encounter, a story of asking for a daiquiri, then the writer peeking his head out of the kitchen, Karsh, it's 8 in the morning!  I thank him for the story again, as he, tall, departs down the stairs.  You're welcome, he says.


And Hemingway, too, even as a sophisticated observer with the built-in bullshit detector, even he was an innocent, the kind of idiot who manages to bring some perspective by seeing with fresh and wondering eyes.  I make my scrambled eggs and eat them straight out of the old teflon pan, a simple family heirloom from the Sixties, and I think of him up in Michigan, camping, making hot cakes and coffee over a fire.  Even Hemingway, who'd sort of laid down the classic claim of having seen it all, gangsters, wars, courage, death, riding the rails with hobos, sex and marriage and drunken fishing guides preying on newly married couples and dining and oysters and wine and Paris, and old ladies and bullfighters and travels in Spain on the top of busses, in trains, places to go swimming, far far beyond the normal range of American experience, yes, even he too was an innocent, a newcomer, and one with that typically dumb naive idea that he wanted to write and that he could teach himself by reading, and then matching, the greats...

Only far late in his life would he reveal, behind the bluster, that he too was a kind of Dostoevsky idiot, caught up in immature adventures, clueless, attempting to learn, attempting to be himself, as is revealed in the incandescent early works, the Twain like offerings rich in physicality, of the story collection In Our Time.  Then, he would be in the role of knowing he was a writer, or thinking so, having to protect himself with his bluster, looking for new material, to keep up the same pace of insight, of capture.  The spiritual moments sprinkled throughout his writing career reveal that big kid, the person behind his persona, even as he tried to live simply and cleanly as he could.

And Hemingway, maybe he too yearned to have some profession, some professional life, but one on his own terms in tune with the natural chemistry of his being.  Something like being a fisherman, or the waiter back in Paris he was fond of who kept a garden and had to shave off his mustache under the new bistrot management, or the tag-along kid who hitchhiked to Key West to study how to be a writer, taken under the Hemingway wing.  That sensitivity one sees in a late letter from the Mayo Clinic, an ailing Hemingway writing a very ill boy, with the unmistakable tone, on weather, birds, mentioned by author Paul Hendrickson in Hemingway's Boat:


                                                                     St. Mary's Hospital
                                                                     Rochester, Minn.
                                                                     June 15, 1961

Dear Fritz,
I was terribly sorry to hear this morning from your father that you were laid up in Denver for a few days more and speed-off this note to tell you how much I hope you'll be feeling better.
It has been very hot and muggy here in Rochester buy the last two days it has turned cool and lovely with the nights wonderful for sleeping.  The country is beautiful around here and I've had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north.  Saw some good bass jumping in the river.  I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall.
But not as many as in Idaho and I hope we'll both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together.
Best always to you, old Timer from your good friend who misses you very much.
                                                                       Mister) Papa

Best to all the family . am feeling fine and very cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all soon.
                                                                       Papa





He seems to have liked working people, the physical sort of work, fisherman, Gary Cooper the outdoorsman, identified with cowboys, bullfighters, waiters, maitre d's, professional soldiers, outdoor guides...  As if he were looking for the kind of a job that he could actually deal with himself, without getting bored, hemmed in, stuck in an office, a place in the world as a useful professional in a way that would have agreed with him.  Indeed, The Pilar was a refuge for him, the sea a safe place, upon which he was a naturalist as much as a hunter, fisherman.  (Hemingway died half a month later.)



I feel the same, ultimately, when I get to work.  The clock is ticking and I must prepare more or less blind for what might happen in a night, the reservation pad, the stocking.  Movement, physical, carrying, dragging the night's supplies and prep up two flights of stairs.   Bar work is part acting, naturally, movement, precision, entertaining...  I enjoy it, once I get there, wake up after the commute, shake the cobwebs off, get the adrenaline going.  Speed, the challenge of figuring out the things people speak of when they're ordering wine...  I like the physicality of it, working with hands, opening wine bottles, lining things up, then finally after all the talk is gone, quietly cleaning up in Zen fashion.  I always have.  Working a bar with hands, legs, arms, back, offering up the working man's wit, it always agreed with me, after my fall from academia.

I couldn't think of any other sort of employment, I really couldn't.   And I feel bad about that, to live here in Washington, D.C. where adults have figured out professional lives, professional existences, money, income, security, the law, the ins and outs, real estate, marriage...  The workman writer at the edges of polite society, struggles with security and aging, courageous.

So, Hemingway's line in the personal reflections of his early career, days in Paris, of the praise of the rich and their pilot fish, how do we interpret?  Is it that Hemingway and his like are stuck in the jobs relegated to those who've never grown up, the wealthy and powerful giving him lapdog praise while he struggles on, poor for all his life, as a way of applauding themselves?

And I wonder, is this in someway a background for the story of Civil War monuments, that by now we are divorced enough from, the physical work, horses, farming, mills, making trains run, building the original infrastructure by hand as much as machine, that we can not comprehend, enough so that  men who led armies doing terrible things in a war they might not have chosen of free will have become alien cutouts...

The writer stands on this edge of a disappearing frontier, the disappearing habitat of the satisfaction of physical labor.  Fitzgerald closes out The Great Gatsby on the note of what the original Dutch settlers would have found, the "fresh green breast" of the land unsullied by modern economics and New York banking.  Peter Matthiessen looks for The Snow Leopard, the Tibetan monastery, the life on ancient trails, guides, monks.  He writes Men's Lives, capturing the last breeds of water men.   Joseph Mitchell prowled a vanishing New York of oysters, rats, eateries, Iroquois steel workers comfortable at heights.   (Ted Hughes writes with direct experience of fox fur and hawk and owl.)  Twain anticipates the change.  Sherwood Anderson...

And these writers must also inhabit the world of modernity, of the financial world, of modern responsibility, taking us further into the strange realms of the computer screen, of high speed banking, of legal minutiae preying on all aspects of life, of the thoroughly computerized home and car and office.  The financial rewards given to the kind of people who figure out how to deepen the mire of our involvement into the virtual increase with the greatest generous speculation of a world we have yet to fully comprehend.  Orwell and Vonnegut write of the new world, of the anticipation with each and every human being implanted with the computer chip and marked according to big data and the mind of artificial intelligence, while the clever creators of such innovations reap impossible wealth beyond all fairness of relative labor.  The missing piece of Marx's puzzle...

So I work, physically, not as a writer who simply gets to write, nor one who will even ever make a buck out of it, the whole thing operating as a costly and dangerous loss, but as a writer who stands at that edge, of recognizable human features and actual physical work...


There are things about literature a college kid can read, but will not be able to comprehend until far later in life.  He might be able to recognize the importance of certain things, accept them on grounds of somewhat blind perhaps somewhat instinctive faith, but he will not be able to understand, not for many years later.  His innocence and naivety, perhaps, will drive him, lead him to a point.  That point itself might be hard to describe.  Some would call it the point at which the wool is pulled from his eyes, a kind of stripping away, perhaps.

Only finally later in life will it dawn upon him, the nature of the work he has attempted to be engaged in.

Could we fairly say that Ernest Hemingway had lots of worries.  But that despite them, he kept on the side of working, of the labor of people physically engaged, even as bygones, in the increasingly modern world.  Would he find our world recognizable?  We know he was a suicide, but perhaps that was the awareness of a man in touch with himself knowing that he was dying...



    The rich came led  by the pilot fish.  A year before they would never have come.  There was no certainty then.  The work was as good and the happiness was greater but no novel had been written, so they could not be sure.  They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure.  Why should they?  Picasso was sure and of course had been before they had ever heard of painting.  They were very sure of another painter.  Many others.  But this year they were sure and they had the word from the pilot fish who turned up too so we would not feel that they were oleanders and that I would not be difficult.  The pilot fish was our friend of course.
      In those days I trusted the pilot fish as I would trust the Corrected Hydrographic Office Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, say, or the tables in Brown's Nautical Almanac.  Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and as stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone.  That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery.  I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
       When they said, "It's great, Ernest.  Truly it's great.  You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, "If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?"  That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.


From the last pages of A Moveable Feast, Scribners.