Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 14

The story of Hemingway’s stay in Toronto is part of the city’s folklore. Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star for a few months before he went to Paris and became the paper’s European correspondent. He discovered that his stint as a reporter had given him his style, and sat down to write “Up in Michigan”.

At one time all Canadian undergraduates registered in English knew the story of Hemingway’s residency in Toronto, and graduate students from Saskatchewan still sometimes pay a visit to the Selby Hotel on Sherbourne Street to raise a glass in the tavern of the hotel where he stayed, and students doing an M.A. in American literature also visit the other places where he slept—on Bathurst Street and Lyndhurst Avenue—if only to avoid being tripped up on their oral.

Somehow I missed hearing the story in graduate school, but as soon as I arrived at Hambleton College it was told to me by David Wintergreen, a specialist in American Literature. Actually, David is now drifting sideways out of American literature into poetry (his own)—something that often happens to senior academics a few years before they retire. In David’s case, he is also drifting backwards into a kind of literary criticism which the periodicals he submits articles to will not take seriously, believing he is not serious. I think he is.

David’s thesis is that much literary writing is affected by technical problems that the writer has to get around. Searching for the meaning of a text in the author’s life, in his or her society, in myth and archetypes, in psychology, is all very well, but before you decide any question of meaning you need to be sure that you have understood the possible reasons why a text is thus and not thus.

David was put on to this by reflecting on his own practices when writing, in the days when he had abandoned research and was looking about for something to do in the three or four days a week left from his teaching schedule, before he took up verse. Back then, before word processors, the skill and energy of the typist would often affect the text of a story, between drafts especially. Narratives would be changed by the need to correct a blunder in such a way that it would not be necessary to retype the next thirty pages. Something had to be done on page eight of the second draft and perhaps to page nine, to make them final so the rest of the typescript could be left as it was. Thinking about copy typists and their like, all the way back to the monks with their dirty habits, copying the word in their cells, David believed he had discovered his life’s work.

Once attuned, he found examples in everything he taught—we all contributed suggestions—and he is currently applying for a Canada Council grant to get the time to work up a paper on the topic. In the course of his enquiries, David stumbled across the case of Jake Barnes, the impotent hero of The Sun Also Rises, a case which David saw as a valid extension of his own method.

When preparing a lecture on the novel, he saw that all the usual explanations of Jake’s impotence were beside the point. What he found in the learned journals was that the literary meaning, the symbolism of Jake’s problem, though endlessly and variously teased out, was first of all seen as essentially personal, representing Jake’s inability after his war-time experiences to find meaning in the universe (this view is often supported by quoting from a passage in A Farewell to Arms, a tragic love story written several years later). Secondly, and universally, was the inability of the world to replace the loss of faith brought on by the failure of the war to end wars. Nada.

It is David’s contention that all this is no more than elegant chat, a collection of verbal constructs spun out of the critics’ bowels. The real point is that Barnes is impotent because Hemingway at the time decided that impotency was one of the few ways left in which sex, especially the sex act, could be made interesting on paper. Thus Hemingway, needing a love story, and unable to believe that anyone could still render the climactic act interesting, rendered it impossible, because that was interesting. Departments of English had been searching for a symbolic understanding of what was only a technical difficulty. (Wintergreen, by the way, also allows for the possibility that Hemingway’s age had something to do with it. Impotence, Wintergreen speculates, might have been a good literary idea to the youngish writer of The Sun Also Rises, but to the mature writer of A Farewell to Arms, it was something to be feared.)

Finally, David wonders if the idea of impotence came to him one day during the act, as it were, while he was making mental notes as to how he would describe it in his novel and thinking about it so deeply that it took his mind off the act and, bingo, the idea of impotence was sprung. But this is mere speculation and no use in a serious academic discussion.

Wintergreen is very deeply read, in Hemingway and elsewhere, as he searches for the solutions writers have employed to solve the day-to-day problems of their trade, and he was able to supply me with everything I needed to know.

“The hotel Hemingway stayed in was the Selby,” he said, “But the one you want is the Garrick, about half a block south on the other side.”

I waited.

“It’s something that often gets muddled in the printed accounts. The point is that the manuscripts, the papers, whatever, were found in a renovation of a hotel that is not connected to Hemingway at all. How did they get there?” He placed his fingertips together.

“David. I’m not a seminar. Just tell me. Surely someone like you has tried to find out.”

“Sorry. Yes. No. So far no one has cared enough to find out. I’m keeping my eye on it, of course, and if you come across anything, let me know.

“The two hotels have become one in the accounts I’ve read, always called the Selby, but that isn’t where the papers were found. Point is, we know where Hemingway was every day of his stay in Toronto, so no one cares that seventy years later some papers surfaced at the Garrick, then disappeared. If they reappeared, it wouldn’t matter where they were found, as long as they were authentic.

“I think it’s interesting. It may be that the papers were, in fact, discovered at the Selby by a workman who was painting one of the bedrooms, and discarded or forgotten at the Garrick when the workman was on the next job. Another theory involves a prostitute—the Garrick was part brothel—and there are plenty of others. But the speculation, never very strong once the papers disappeared, died out.

“Nowadays the biographies don’t even mention the Garrick, and a casual mention of “the Hemingway Papers” generally refers to another set lost on a French train. And now they’ve found a whole new batch in Hemingway’s old basement in Cuba, but if I were you and wanted to find out whose hands were last on the Toronto Hemingway papers, I wouldn’t bother with the Selby yet. Think Garrick.”