Lillian Ross’s 1950 Profile of Ernest Hemingway, in which he, unenthusiastically, visits New York. NewYorkerArchive
Hemingway poured himself another glass of champagne. He always wrote in longhand, he said, but he recently bought a tape recorder and was trying to get up the courage to use it. “I’d like to learn talk machine,” he said. “You just tell talk machine anything you want and get secretary to type it out.” He writes without facility, except for dialogue. “When the people are talking, I can hardly write it fast enough or keep up with it, but with an almost unbearable high manifold pleasure.
Miss Dietrich was wearing a mink coat. She sighed loudly, took off the coat, and handed it to Mrs. Hemingway. Then she sighed again and sat down in an overstuffed chair. Hemingway poured a glass of champagne, brought it to her, and refilled the other glasses. Mrs. Hemingway told me that Bumby is the nickname of her husband’s eldest son, John, an Army captain stationed in Berlin. His two other sons, she said, are Patrick, known as Mouse, who is a twenty-one-year-old sophomore at Harvard, and is planning to get married in June, and Gregory, known as Gigi, who is eighteen and a freshman at St. John’s, at Annapolis. In addition to the present Mrs.
Hemingway asked her about some recordings she had made, during the war, of popular American songs with lyrics translated into German, and said he’d like to have them. “I’ll give you manuscript of new book for recordings if you want to trade even, daughter,” he told her.“You’re the best that ever came into the ring,” Hemingway said.Late the next morning, I was awakened by a telephone call from Hemingway, who asked me to come right over to the hotel. He sounded urgent.
Jack Britton, he continued, was a fighter he admired very much. “Jack Britton kept on his toes and moved around and never let them hit him solid,” he said. “I like to keep on my toes and never let them hit me solid. Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer,” he said, assuming a boxing stance and holding his right hand, which was grasping the champagne glass, close to his chest. With his left hand, he punched at the air, saying, “Remember. Duck a swing. Block a hook.
Hemingway began with oysters, and he chewed each one very thoroughly. “Eat good and digest good,” he told us.He nodded. Then he nodded a few times at me—a repetition of the sign for attention. “What I want to be when I am old is a wise old man who won’t bore,” he said, then paused while the waiter set a plate of asparagus and an artichoke before him and poured the Tavel. Hemingway tasted the wine and gave the waiter a nod.
I asked him if he wanted to stop first at his optician’s. He said no. I mentioned the coat. He shrugged. Mrs. Hemingway had suggested that he look for a coat at Abercrombie & Fitch, so I mentioned Abercrombie & Fitch. He shrugged again and lumbered slowly over to a taxi, and we started down Fifth Avenue in the afternoon traffic. At the corner of Fifty-fourth, we stopped on a signal from the traffic cop. Hemingway growled. “I love to see an Irish cop being cold,” he said.
“How about this one, sir, with a removable lining, sir?” the clerk said. This one had a belt. Hemingway tried it on, studied himself in the mirror, and then raised his arms as though he were aiming a rifle. “You going to use it for, sir?” the clerk asked. Hemingway grunted, and said he would take the coat. He gave the clerk his name, and the clerk snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he said.
Our next stop was the shoe department, and there Hemingway asked a clerk for some folding bedroom slippers.“ ’Levens,” Hemingway said bashfully. The slippers were produced, and he told the clerk he would take them. “I’ll put them in my pocket,” he said. “Just mark them, so they won’t think I’m a shoplifter.”
The big man and Hemingway embraced and pounded each other on the back for quite some time. It was Winston Guest. Mr. Guest told us he was going upstairs to pick up a gun and proposed that we come along. Hemingway asked what kind of gun, and Guest said a ten-gauge magnum. The following morning, the door of the Hemingway suite was opened for me by Patrick, a shy young man of medium height, with large eyes and a sensitive face. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, Argyle socks, and loafers. Mrs. Hemingway was writing a letter at the desk. As I came in, she looked up and said, “As soon as Papa has finished dressing, we’re going to look at pictures.” She went back to her letter.
When we drew up at the Museum entrance, a line of school children was moving in slowly. Hemingway impatiently led us past them. In the lobby, he paused, pulled a silver flask from one of his coat pockets, unscrewed its top, and took a long drink. Putting the flask back in his pocket, he asked Mrs. Hemingway whether she wanted to see the Goyas first or the Breughels. She said the Breughels.
Mrs. Hemingway called to us. She was looking at “Portrait of the Artist,” by Van Dyck. Hemingway looked at it, nodded approval, and said, “In Spain, we had a fighter pilot named Whitey Dahl, so Whitey came to me one time and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, is Van Dyck a good painter?’ I said, ‘Yes, he is.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m glad, because I have one in my room and I like it very much, and I’m glad he’s a good painter because I like him.’ The next day, Whitey was shot down.
Patrick admired several paintings Hemingway didn’t approve of. Every time this happened, Hemingway got into an involved, technical discussion with his son about it. Patrick would shake his head and laugh and say he respected Hemingway’s opinions. He didn’t argue much. “What the hell!” Hemingway said suddenly. “I don’t want to be an art critic. I just want to look at pictures and be happy with them and learn from them. Now, this for me is a damn good picture.
As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.” He had learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, too.
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