Hemingway’s Chair

like a schoolteacher.’
    ‘Well,
you forget, Mr Sproale, that I am a teacher. That’s my job.’
    ‘What?
Pretending that Ernest Hemingway really wanted to be a woman?’
    ‘Teaching
English to the people of New Jersey.’
    ‘Why
don’t you just tell them to go and read his books? Why do they need to know how
long he slept with his mother or how old he was when he stopped wearing
dresses?’
    ‘We’re
talking about his relationship with mothers and wives here, Martin. Aren’t you
interested in what they were like too?’
    ‘No.
I’m interested in him. He was special. They weren’t. They didn’t write A
Farewell to Arms. They didn’t write The Old Man and the Sea or For
Whom the Bell Tolls. They didn’t fight in wars or win the Nobel Prize.’
    Ruth
shook her head angrily. ‘Do you think Hemingway would have written A
Farewell to Arms if he hadn’t fallen in love with Agnes Kurowsky? Why did
he dedicate For Whom the Bell Tolls to Martha Gellhorn? He shaped his
life around women, Martin. You can’t have one without the other.’
    ‘Of
course there were women in his life. They loved him. Women loved him. I’m not
surprised. But they did what women do. They cooked for him and cleaned for him
and gave him children and looked after his houses and his friends but they
didn’t write a single word of his books.’
    ‘May
I ask you a question as you, rather than him?’
    ‘It’s
up to you. You’re the one who wants the rules.’
    ‘What
do you think about women?’
    Martin
stared into the fire. ‘I like women,’ he said, slowly. ‘But I could do without
them.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think I could do without him.’
    Ruth
didn’t reply immediately. She leaned over to the log basket and picked out the
two remaining lengths of cherry wood. She laid them on the hot but dying fire
and knelt to watch them burn.
    ‘May
I suggest just one ground rule, Martin?’
    ‘All
right. I’ll let you have one.’
    ‘That
both of us accept the possibility that we may be wrong.’
    He
chuckled. Then he held out his hand to her. ‘Okay, daughter. It’s a deal.’
    She
smiled and they shook.
     
    That
night Ruth stayed up quite late after Martin had gone, writing another letter
to her friends in New Jersey.
     
    Dearly beloved,
    The book goes
well and keeps me warm. (Why do I go on like this about the cold? I sound like
one of those bleached Florida matrons that come north once a year to grumble
about the weather. It’s no worse than New Jersey. It just feels so
fucking cold.) Anyway it’s late and my Hemingway partner has just cycled off in
a blaze of grappa after a kind of revealing evening. No, nothing romantic. If
you saw him you’d know why, but he is interesting and a little strange. I told
you that he’s mad about Hemingway — has pics of him all around his room etc.,
all pretty much standard retarded-development high school fan stuff — except
that he does know one hell of a lot about the man, has an authentic bar with
all Hemingway’s specialities disguised inside a medical supply cabinet from the
Ospedale Croce Rossa in Milan (Farewell to Arms) and has this day given
me ONE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS in sterling to purchase on his behalf a
chair (see Christmas letter) which the illustrious MCP personally sat upon
while, mercifully unsuccessfully, trying to pluck innocent marlin from the
Pacific Ocean. And this from a post office clerk’s wage.
    What is kind
of fascinating, frightening and a little astral are the things he does and says
and the way he behaves which are uncannily like what I imagine E H to have been
like. He does this by a sort of referred experience. He hasn’t been anywhere or
done anything but like one of those Indian holy men who concentrate their life
on the Buddha’s toenail he has projected himself into Hemingway to the extent
that at moments, it truly seems as if he has the potential to become him, or at
least the essence of him. I know this will sound crazy but if I write it all
down you can at least see that I’ve thought about it. I can assure you I’m not
hysterical and only a little drunk, but it is weird. How can a nice, shy,
screwed-up, small-town postal clerk who lives with his mother and cycles to
work tell me more about the essence of Ernest Hemingway than all the reading
I’ve done in six months?
    Whatever the
answer I’m going to try and push this on a little further. No, don’t worry,
nothing kinky. I’ve prepared some questions I’d like to have