eating insides out funny how people manage to look for replacements everywhere they go. in absense of grandfathers, rowena tiempo torrevillas, in "eating at the roots," replaced them both with ernest hemingway. you never go about defining things at age 10, and it was only years later she'd realize what she'd done when hemingway shot himself and left her with nothing but his books and his news articles as remembrance. in 1961, illness beat rowena to hemingway and forever kept from him a 10-year-old's admiration.

hemingway was born in the chicago suburb of oak park. architect frank lloyd wright also lived in that suburb. we visited once, but never got a chance to visit hemingway's neighborhood. wright's street had large, squat houses later known as "prairie style." hemingway's neighborhood had slate sidewalks and looming trees that reached for each other in the sky. we visited his neighborhood on a rainy summer afternoon, the moss sweet in the air.

that's about all i know about hemingway. i tried reading "a moveable feast" for a class, but couldn't get passed his personal life. i didn't like that he was first made to suffer, spiralling into mental illness before inevitably shooting himself; i didn't like that his granddaughter, muriel hemingway, played roles of loose women on the big and small screens. it wasn't right somehow, but i should have reconsidered because it shouldn't suprise anyone that he who would eat a bullet would inspire progeny that play roles of troubled women on screen. like most prominent families, the hemingways play roles in public for self-preservation.

further into "a moveable feast," i realized it somehow didn't seem right reading someone's piece after knowing that while he was suffering he was giving space for his characters to deal with their own dilemmas. or that maybe he had to suffer for the piece at the start, that the piece was somehow the spawn of something else brewing in his life. it probably should have made me appreciate his work more, but it just did the opposite. i heard he wrote best while drunk. how then did he disguise it? or did it just help loose his tongue?

perhaps the best tribute one could give to someone else whose time's already passed is to appreciate the works they've left behind - that when your father tells you to read the 1,500 page "war and peace," you actually do it, simply because, as he says so, it is a good book. and no, i haven't started it yet, and yes, i am trying to. ...

Since that morning twenty-five years ago, I have taught "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" to 24 different semesters of mostly indifferent undergraduates. I used "A Small Well-Lighted Place" as a point of reference in my dissertation. I counted the prepositional phrases in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" underneath an avocado tree one noon, in the ringing mountain silence of our summer cottage, up in the same hills my father walked as a guerrilla-and I knew for myself, at last, that Hemingway had some terrible tics in his writing, but that he could construct an ending like it was the beginning of the world. And three years ago in Iowa City, on payday, I bought The Garden of Eden, which is still sitting on my shelf unread. I am doing work in Iowa City that has nothing to do with my dissertation, and a novel sits among the bits and bytes of my home computer, residues of a distant and different self sticking to it where it's planted, but not growing. The unwritten novel is there, among the invisible electronic annals of the magical box that makes words, if one but had the sense of wonderful odd terror that comes with looking around the corner of one's idle complacency, to the place where the known world drops into space. Most days it hardly seems worth it to find that corner.

I purchased The Garden of Eden out of a sense of duty or as the assertion of some fading sense of self-respect; or, who knows, as a salute to a white-haired man who has, since his death, occasionally been denounced as a fraud, and who was never quite my grandfather.

Still, I'd like to think I was closest to Hemingway when I heard he was gone - I was closer then than I would ever be, even in my reading and writing and wanting to write: grown-up bones finding themselves in that place where the air had become the right size and nothing more. When I was ten, I heard he had taken his own life, and I said, "Maybe he just didn't want to grow old." [ more ]  ¶ 9/17/2004 03:07:00 PM