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

would not argue that Scott Fitzgerald and my Manley Halliday were brothers.
    And that, it seemed, was my problem, or was it Ernest’s? Scott Fitzgerald was “Papa’s” friend. Scott and Zelda belongedto “Papa.” “Papa” was outraged that I would dare invade his territory. In his not so humble opinion, both Mizener and I were “gravediggers,” disturbing the bones of his old friend, who should be allowed to rest in dignity and peace. “Papa” had already fired off furious letters to Mizener and Breit protesting my invasion of Scott’s privacy. Oh yes, I could hear the voice of our literary god bellowing down from his finca: “What the hell do you know about Scott Fitzgerald, for Christ’s sweet sake?”
    And I could see him pushing his hard belly against me and trying to bull me up against the wall. And hear myself trying to hold my temper as I recited my own knowledge of Scott—no, maybe not so deep as Ernest’s—but that ordeal at Winter Carnival had brought us together, and when we got back to California we had visited back and forth and had remained friends.
    In the autumn of what was to be his last year on this earth, he had volunteered to write what turned out to be a rave notice of Sammy for the book jacket and, just a few weeks before the end, in his modest flat off Sunset Boulevard, he had written a touching inscription in my first edition of his Tender Is the Night and had shown me the opening chapters of The Last Tycoon.
    No, “Papa,” maybe I didn’t know your Scott Fitzgerald from the opening bell, but I had seen him go a couple of rounds, a name fighter from the East who had blown his title, like Pinkey Mitchell. Actually, I had been struck by Scott’s generosity, his interest in and sympathy for young writers. Even with his back against the wall, practically pushed through the wall, he had gone out of his way for “Pep” (Nathanael) West, as he had for me and, some twenty years earlier, for Ernest himself. Gratitude was not an easy emotion for “Papa,” and so, when I’d had an opportunity to look through Scott’s papers at Princeton, I had been surprised to find canceled checks from Scott to Ernest for $100 each, quite a lot of them from the young, hot author of This Side of Paradise to the young, still undiscovered Hemingway. Not only that, but an appeal from Ernest to Scott to help him leave his “Jew publishers” (Covici-Friede) for Scott’sfar more prestigious Scribner’s. As the record shows, Scott did intercede for Ernest with Scribner’s, which would publish him to the end of his career. “Gratitude” would be expressed only in the reverse English of “Papa’s” mean-spirited postmortem on Scott in A Moveable Feast.
    But that was years later, and this was now at the Ambos Mundos. I was beginning to feel like Charlie Chaplin in City Lights with its classic running gag: Whenever the big, rich heavy is drunk, he loves Charlie and insists he come home with him as his guest. But when his fat host wakes up in the morning, now sober, and sees Charlie, he says, “Who is this bum?” and throws him out. It happens all through the picture, and gets funnier every time. But this thing with “Papa” didn’t strike me as all that funny.
    Toby took it so seriously that he actually flew over from Key West to see if he could patch things up. “Papa’s kinda in a bad way right now,” he tried to explain. “The new book [Across the River and Into the Trees] is taking a beating. The worst of it is critics are trying to tell Papa he’s washed up, that this book is gonna finish him. They think he’s run out of gas and beginning to repeat himself. So it’s a tough time for him. And then, when he saw your book doing so well and on a subject he feels belongs to him—well, I still think he should be big about it and ask you up, but that’s the way he gets sometimes. He’s feelin’ lower’n the belly of a rattlesnake that just slipped off the sidewalk into the gutter. But I