One day in July, I was riding in my Uncle Emmett’s boat on the San Joaquin River, reading The Sun Also Rises, when we heard on the radio that Hemingway had shot himself. At first, his wife, Mary, said it was an accident, but later admitted it was suicide.
Hemingway was 61.
My father was shaken.
“He was so macho. Why would he do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He writes so simply. Did you like his work?”
“Sure,” Father said. “I liked For Whom the Bell Tolls. He described Garbo in that book.”
My father, Tom, was handsome in his late thirties with a full head of hair and a rich voice.
“The sleeping bag scene,” a woman on the boat said.
“Of course,” Tom said. “You would remember that one.”
Emmett, a journalist, also liked Hemingway’s work. “Simple and clear and evocative,” he said. He looked at me. “I see you are reading his first novel. I still believe it is his best.”
“I’m not sure I understand all of it.”
“You will in time,” Emmett said.
Though younger than my father, Emmett was bald.
That night, I found For Whom the Bell Tolls on Emmett’s bookshelf and looked for the Garbo reference and found it:
“Maybe it is like the dreams you have when someone you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely... He could remember Garbo still... Maybe it was like those dreams the night before the attack on Pozoblanco, and Garbo was wearing a soft silky wool sweater when he put his arms around her, and when she leaned forward, and her hair swept forward and over his face, and she said why had he never told her that he loved her when she had loved him all this time? ... and it was as true as though it had happened.”
The paragraph about Garbo had a universal yet lyrical feel. I had seen Queen Christina on television. Garbo had an aloof yet mesmerizing beauty on screen, and I could imagine how a viewer of the film could feel that way about the Swedish star.
When I finished The Sun Also Rises, I knew I had become a Hemingway aficionado— that is, a true fan with a deep understanding and not simply moved by excitement.
At that time, I had no favorite actress to admire. Maybe Natalie Wood. I would imagine being her James Dean. I had no young woman in my life.
But of course—I had dreams.
Perhaps one day, I would write about them.
(1) comment
Is this article a foreshadowing of a future play? Are you completely out of ideas or new material. Do you really get paid by the ISJ for such dribble? "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we try to just get by." Paraphrased of course.
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