Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Read Free

God help you if you boated the biggest. I liked deep-sea fishing, loved to be outon the water. But it wasn’t life-and-death with me, as everything was with “ Papa.”
    “Tell him thanks but I’d just as soon get my own boat. I c’n take the family. More relaxing.”
    “All right, mon.” I had never heard Toby argue with anyone. It wasn’t subservience but instinctive respect for other people’s ways of seeing things. Unlike friend “Papa,” who was a highbrow with lowbrow affectations, Toby was a genuine lowbrow with unspoken and unspoiled sensitivity. As I got to know them both better, I began to feel that Toby was the man Ernest truly wanted to be. I could understand why “Papa” liked him so much. It wasn’t simply because Toby hero-worshiped him, although it seemed to me that the need for such worship had already begun to poison the Hemingway well.
    A few days later the Hemingways left town, and Key West settled down again. But Toby and Betty were still convinced that “Papa” and I were meant to be friends, and that in time they would bring us together. “You two guys would like one another,” they kept insisting, urging me to give him another chance. I began to feel that maybe I was being the difficult one, that he had apologized in his own proud way and that perhaps I should be a little more forgiving.
    The following winter I happened to be at the Bruces’ when a phone call came in from “Papa” in Cuba, and when they told him I was there he asked them to put me on the phone. He was warm and friendly. He asked me if I was writing and I said yes, working on another book, and he said he was working on a book, too, a new novel and he couldn’t tell yet whether it was any good. He didn’t ask me what mine was about and I didn’t ask him about his. He said Toby had told him we had been tarpon fishing and that I had caught one large enough to mount and he urged me to try the waters around Cay Sal, between Key West and Cuba, one of his favorite fishing grounds. He sounded the way the Bruces described him. Couldn’t have been nicer.
    A year later my book was finished—it was called TheDisenchanted —and this time, for the winter respite, we decided to move on from Key West to Cuba. Toby steered us to “Papa’s Hotel,” the Ambos Mundos, and told us to be sure to call “Papa,” who (the Bruces assured me) would like to invite us out to the Finca Vigia for lunch.
    At the front desk of the old Spanish-Colonial hotel—the kind I took to immediately, with its faded tiles and worn mahogany—the clerk said there was a message from Don Ernesto. Frankly, I was pleased, in a good mood about the success of my book and more than ready for a truce. But the message from El Papa was: When I arrived, he wanted it clearly understood that I was not to call him. The clerk passed this on to me in a world-weary monotone. I had the feeling he was accustomed to handling these negative invitations from El Maestro.
    I made some phone calls to learn the nature of my sins. From Arthur Mizener, who had written the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald; from Harvey Breit of the New York Times Book Review, another friend of Ernest’s and mine who had made it his mission to bring us together; finally, from Toby himself, who got it straight from “Papa,” I discovered what it was I had done to him this time. The Disenchanted drew in good part on my ill-fated cross-country trip from Hollywood to Hanover, New Hampshire, with Scott Fitzgerald to write a movie with him about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. My central character—the tormented, fading novelist scrambling for movie money so he could shore up his literary reputation—had been based on all the “failed priests” (as Scott had called them) who had worked for my father, the producer B. P. Schulberg. I had known them well—Herman Mankiewicz, Vincent Lawrence, John V. A. Weaver, Edwin Justus Mayer—all of them desperate for that “second chance.” Still, I