My Big Bust Up with the Pfizer Billionaire

The Blickensderfer 5 upon which John Millington Synge

wrote The Playboy of the Western World, set in the west of Ireland.

There’s a nasty bun fight going on in this country concerning who did and who didn’t speak to Pfizer about getting more of its Covid-19 vaccine to Australia, and when they did or who didn’t speak to Pfizer. It’s a diversion from the realities: the Delta variant is raging out of control in Sydney and just 9 per cent of Australians have been fully vaccinated. Here in Covid-free Canberra it was a bit of a lucky dip for people of our age. My wife was directed to the Pfizer jabbing rooms and I was shepherded toward AstraZeneca. Go figure.

The TV news is full of Pfizer talk and all I can think of when I hear the name is that of John Augustine Mulcahy, who was once a big deal at Pfizer and with whom I once had a major falling out. And when I think of Jack Mulcahy, I am reminded of the Norman Wisdom movie, There Was a Crooked Man. This is in part set in a quiet, dreary seaside town called Sleath, where the bigwig McKillup owns everything and everybody and is bleeding the place dry. Norman eventually exacts his revenge by blowing up Sleath. When I saw this film in the Regent Theatre in Greymouth 60 years ago, I wondered if anyone had ever thought of coming back to my own home town and doing the same thing. But the real reason Jack Mulcahy puts me in mind of McKillup is Waterville, a village on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland, which in the 1960s was Charlie Chaplin’s favourite holiday hideout. The town's name in Irish, Coireán, means “little cauldron”, but when I went there, there was nothing much cooking except for whatever pie Jack Mulcahy had his finger in. And there were, it seemed, a great many. His pride and joy, however, was the championship golf links he’d had Eddie Hackett build in 1968.

More on that later. First, a little bit about Jack Mulcahy, a self-made billionaire. He was born in 1906 at Harbour View, Dungarvan, County Waterford. He once claimed to his family that he had spent time in Kilkenny jail for killing the Black and Tans who attacked his sisters, and that he escaped death only because he was under age. It is known that he was a dispatch carrier for the IRA during the Irish civil war and was imprisoned by the Free State government for 13 months before emigrating to the US in 1923, aged 17. He went on to make millions from an odd mix of steel and pharmaceuticals, the latter an investment to avoid taxes.

On September 10, 1975, I was sent with my trusty Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter to Waterville to cover the first Kerrygold Classic golf tournament. I drove down from Dublin in a Datsun 1200, got lost on the Ring of Kerry, and told bewildered readers of The Irish Press the next morning that I thought I deserved to win the pre-tournament long-driving competition instead of some bloke called Tony Jacklin, who had to pay a heavy price by shooting 82 in the first round of the tournament proper. What I’ve never previously revealed is that the barman at the golf club calmed me down with the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had: fresh Kerry milk and dry ginger ale (don’t try it unless the milk is super fresh).

The five days I spent in Waterville rate high among the most memorable in my half-century sports writing career, though none of the more pronounced recollections have anything to do with golf. The first night a Kerry friend, who’d played rugby for New York and Ireland and later became one his nation’s leaders, caught up with me and we gatecrashed what idle bar gossip had it was an orgy on the top floor of the Waterville Lake Hotel. It was nothing of the sort, of course, but a wild gathering of drunken and uncouth cashed-up Kerrymen, returned from their building sites in England (perhaps with the intent of blowing up their old home town). I met the sister of the young American amateur who was about to win the tournament, but that’s a story which will have to wait for the Messenger memoirs. And those will have to first get past the censors and defamation lawyers before publication, so don’t hold your breath.

The next evening was spent in Ballinskelligs just outside Waterville, in the company of a couple of notorious drug smugglers and gun runners, Howard Marks and Jim McCann. Things turned decidedly ugly, and I ended up giving Simon Owen and his wife a dreadful fright (Simon shot a first up 90). But even those events gave no warning as to the horror that lay ahead of me. On the Friday morning I was summons to a meeting with Jack Mulcahy and Bob Hope. Mulcahy, who’d given Richard Nixon $600,000 toward his 1972 re-election campaign, liked to show people that his millions allowed him to mix with the rich and the famous, and he had invited golf fanatic Hope to attend the Kerrygold Classic. Mulcahy mistakenly assumed I’d enjoy listening to Hope’s wisecracks, but I was much more interested in hearing what Mulcahy and Hope, who had both helped Nixon get re-elected, thought about Watergate. Hope promptly got up and walked out, leaving me to deal with an irate Mulcahy. His 'friend' felt slighted, apparently. Little did I know then that the year before, Mulcahy had taken offence at the mention of Nixon during the sermon at a Sunday morning mass in Waterville. Mulcahy intervened from the congregation and objected to Nixon's being mentioned from the pulpit, describing him as an honest man and a friend, and accusing the US media of being inspired and run by communists.

The golf tournament was decided in a playoff but the winner couldn’t claim the prizemoney and was given a butter tub of gold instead. I headed off to Celbridge in Kildare to catch up with Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine, Burgess Meredith, Judy Geeson, Milo O’Shea and John Huston for the filming of Circasia under a big top beside Straffan House. Outside, in the dusk, I told Clapton his skin looked purple and he said I didn’t look too well myself. After five days in Waterville, it was hardly surprising.

All of the above is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent.

With a Lot of Help From My (Typosphere) Friends

 

Help Needed With Replacing a Spring on an Olivetti Lettera 22 Portable Typewriter

This is how the spring normally fits, but I can't work out

how it attaches on the right side.

The spring is missing from the machine I'm trying to fix. A replacement spring will be easy enough to attach on the left, but what about on the right side?

The Politician Who Took His Hermes Baby Portable Typewriter to War

“[He] intends to take his typewriter with him, as he did through his Middle East campaign, and write when the spirit takes him, and as often as the Japanese will permit.”

-       The Land, referring to its columnist Hugh Roberton, April 2, 1943

Once Hugh Stevenson Roberton had acquired his Hermes Baby portable typewriter for £14 in 1936, the two could not be thereafter parted. So attached was Roberton to his Hermes that when, on April 16, 1942, he claimed to be 39 (he was actually 41) so he could enlist in the Australian Imperial Force, the Baby went off to World War II with him. His commanding officer turned a blind eye when Roberton tossed away his gas mask and spare pair of army boots so he could carry his typewriter, nor did the intrepid Roberton ever have any problems with wartime censors.

The Hermes went with him to the Middle East so Roberton, writing under the pen-name “Peter Snodgrass”, could continue to write his weekly newspaper column. He had started contributing the column to the Coolamon-Ganmain Farmers’ Review in 1930 and in 1932 it was taken on by The Land. With active war service failing to stem his flow of typewritten words, Roberton maintained the column for an unbroken 42 years. (Peter Snodgrass was a character in a play written by Roberton’s father.)

After being taken on by the AIF, Roberton trained as a gunner and served in the 2/3rd Tank-Attack Regiment of the Ninth Division in Palestine and Gaza from November 1942 until January 1943. He was discharged in December 1944.  

Roberton, left, in MacGillivray tartan. His mother was a MacGillivray.

Roberton was born on December 18, 1900, in Glasgow, the son Sir Hugh Stevenson Roberton (1874-1952), a Scottish composer and Britain's leading choral-master. The younger ‘Hughie’ was educated at the West of Scotland Agricultural College and in 1922 migrated to New South Wales. He started working as a share-farmer growing wheat for the Scottish Australian Investment Company outside Junee, where he later bought land. Under the headline “Has Fluent Typewriter”, The Sydney Morning Herald in November 1949 promoted Roberton’s political ambitions and the next month he became the Country Party Member for Riverina, a seat he held for more than 15 years. The Herald said his “prolific writing power astonishes professional journalists. As ‘Peter Snodgrass' he sits down at his typewriter and tears off regular strips on politics, economics and what have you ... with no apparent effort. He has also succeeded in selling short stories in Britain and America as well as here.”

Georg Sommeregger's early Hermes Bay

In January 1965 Roberton was appointed ambassador to Ireland, the first to hold the post following the re-establishment in 1964 of diplomatic relations between the two countries.  He retired in 1968 and ended his column writing career in 1972. He died aged 86, in Canberra on March 13, 1987, leaving an estate worth more than $1.9 million.

Unreliable Reiley: A Blinkered History of the Evolution of the Typewriter

Alan Campbell Reiley (1869-1947)

Alan Campbell Reiley’s much-quoted article, “The Evolution of the Typewriter”, which appeared in The Rotarian issue of March 1914, reflected no more than the narrow view of Reiley’s employer, the Remington Typewriter Company, on what were the most important developments in the typewriter industry in the preceding 40 years. To begin with, Reiley made no mention of Christopher Latham Sholes, yet in 1923 Reiley was recruited by the Herkimer County Historical Society to write The Story of the Typewriter 1873-1923, and in that paid (albeit uncredited) role had no choice but to acknowledge Sholes' pioneering work.

Reiley’s primary position with Remington was in advertising, although he was described in The Rotarian as a “department manager”. He was certainly Remington’s advertising manager when, at the end of 1916, he was elected president of the Association of National Advertisers in Boston.

Admittedly, to meet the needs of this particular edition of The Rotarian, Reiley concentrated on the use of typewriters in business. But there was no excuse whatsoever to dismiss the emergence of visible typing in a mere two lines. Remington had only switched to visible writing five years before Reiley’s article was written, but visible writing typewriters had been around for at least 13 years before that. Portables were not, of course, designed for business use, but a passing mention, perhaps of just one line, would have been justified given the impact portables had on the typewriter industry in the 20th Century. Instead, Reiley focused his attention of billing and tabulating typewriters and the adding and subtracting device. Reiley ends his article by asking, “ … has the writing machine realized and completed its mission?” Well, obviously not, considering the enormous financial returns on portable production from 1912 onwards. Reiley believed no man could answer his question, when in fact it already been answered. His article, in other words, is by no means rounded, nor does it justify the headline. It was little more than a publicity plug for Remington (which took out a full-page advert in the same issue). And of course Remington didn’t start thinking seriously about a portable until 1919.

Reiley, who was born in 1869 in New Jersey, started working with Remington in 1900 as an advertising clerk. He also wrote a history of the typewriter for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He died in the Bronx 1947.

David Unaipon: "Australia's Leonardo da Vinci"

It's appropriate in this, NAIDOC Week in Australia, to pay homage to David Unaipon, the Aboriginal whose 1909 shearing invention allowed this nation to ride more easily to great wealth on the sheep’s back. NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, and the week celebrates the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. None deserves greater recognition than Unaipon, who developed and patented a modified handpiece for sheep shearing. It formed the basis of modern mechanical sheep shears. Aided by this, the wool industry gave Australia one of the highest living standards in the world, its economy booming from primary exports. By the 1950s, wool was synonymous with the Australian way of life.

Daily Telegraph, Sydney, August 2, 1924.

Unaipon was the first Aboriginal author to be published. He did the legwork for "Legendary Tales of Australian Aborigines" in 1924-1925, but when the work was published in 1930 he received no recognition.  

A Ngarrindjeri man of the Coorong region, Unaipon (Ngunaitponi) was born on September 28, 1872, at the Point McLeay Mission on the banks of Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. At 13 he become a servant in Adelaide to C. B. Young, who encouraged Unaipon’s interest in literature, philosophy, science and music. Back at Point McLeay from 1890, Unaipon read widely, played the organ and learned bootmaking at the mission, and later became book-keeper in the Point McLeay store. He was obsessed with discovering the secret of perpetual motion and spent five years trying to create a perpetual motion machine. Between 1909 and 1944 Unaipon made patent applications for 19 inventions, including a centrifugal motor, a multi-radial wheel and a mechanical propulsion device, but the patents lapsed and he made no money from them. The nation, meanwhile, made zillions from his shears.

From the early 1920s Unaipon studied Aboriginal mythology and compiled his versions of legends; he was influenced by the classics and by his researches into Egyptology at the South Australian Museum. He died aged 94 at Tailem Bend Hospital, on February 7, 1967.

The Dancing Typiste and the Sydney Underworld

Underworld (noun): the part of society consisting

of criminal organizations and activities

Imagine if you had a grandmother or a great-grandmother who, as a highly impressionable teenager, had become infatuated with a freeloading young man and who, at her boyfriend’s urging, had committed a crime.

It wasn’t what one might call a major crime; it was the theft of a blank Bank of New Zealand cheque. The teenager started in a new job on a Monday, stole the cheque the next day, tried to cash it on the Wednesday, was arrested on the spot, and was in court with her boyfriend by the Friday. Hardly gangster stuff. The pair pleaded guilty and got what we now call today suspended sentences.

How would you feel if 92 years later, the National Archives of Australia used that grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s photo to promote an exhibition called “Underworld: Mugshots from the Roaring Twenties”.

Edna May Lindsay was not part of any underworld. Far, far from it. She was a 19-year-old typist who fell helplessly in love with a dance hall denizen called Ces Smith. He lived off her money. Ces told her to get a job and she did, with the Mercantile and General Insure Company on Spring Street in Sydney City. Ces then told her to bring home a blank cheque and one already signed. She did that too, and Ces filled it out for £310 ($25,000 today). They got arrested the day they took it into the Bank of New South Wales.

The love angle - they planned to marry and spend the money on dancing careers, Ces told police - ensured their ill-fated little heist got a few paragraphs in the Sydney newspapers. At their first hearing, the magistrate cried, “She is only a child! Bring in her father.” And in the Supreme Court New Zealand-born judge Laurens Frederick Matthews Armstrong, impressed by Edna’s striking good looks, stylish clothing and very apparent sense of shame, said, “Dancing is not everything in life” and essentially let the pair off.

And that was it. Edna found work as a stenographer and five years after her scrape with the law she got married. She had a family and led an ordinary, perfectly respectable life, and died at the age of 60.

Come on, National Archives! An underworld figure? Get real. How can we trust you with our national records when you can’t even tell a duped teenager from a hardened criminal? Shame on you!

Judge Armstrong knew the real underworld when he saw it. Here he is visiting the Surry Hills home of Sydney’s “Queen of the Underworld”, Kate Leigh, on Anzac Day 1930. Leigh was a major New South Wales crime figure, dealing in sex, drugs, gambling and alcohol. She was also involved in the notorious Sydney razor gang wars.

Karl Clauss Dietel's Typewriter Designs

Hundreds of typewriter users worldwide will be very familiar with the designs of German Karl Clauss Dietel, probably without realising the portable typewriter they are using is Dietel’s work. I’m a case in point. Until an exhibition of Dietel’s designs opened at the Chemnitz Art Collections (Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz) at the King Albert Museum on Theaterplatz last week, and a 1974 Erika Daro 50/60 appeared in it, I had no idea Dietel was responsible for the no-frills look of so many of the machines I’ve been using in the past 24 years.

Karl Clauss Dietel

The exhibition is called “Simson, Diamant, Erika - Formgestaltung von Karl Clauss Dietel”. Two years ago Dietel, 87, who had archived his oeuvre for almost five decades, handed the lot over to the care of the Chemnitz Art Collections. This included personal drafts, models, products, photographs and documents.

The Robotron Cella shows the influence of the Olympia Traveller C and the Brother 762TR,

 and appears to have the Silver-Seiko mechanism.

Most of Dietel’s early work was done in the days when East Germany existed and its typewriter industry was incorporated into the overarching Soviet Union economic apparatus. It stands to reason, then, that Dietel-designed typewriters from that period look like they could have been shaped by artificial intelligence. Ironic, given that in his younger days Dietel declared East German cars as not being designed at all. But with his typewriters there’s not much in the way of flair or imagination. Functional, unobtrusive, durable, yet practical - these were the key approaches. Dietel’s designs have been described as “committed to the ideals of a caring humanist society”. They very much fitted in with the modes on the east side of the Berlin Wall. Dieter’s typewriters are stylish in a minimalist way, but whether they can be called aesthetically pleasing is another matter. There’s no nod to the fancy stuff the like of Ettore Sottsass and Mario Bellini were producing for Olivetti on the West side of the Iron Curtin. Not even the colours were bright, at least not until the Cella came along.

This Erika was also sold as an Imperial 34

It’s understandable, then, that Diedel’s designs are considered today to be “German Democratic Republic classics”. They are said to be “outstanding works of Eastern European modernism that have an enduring appeal”, and that much is certainly true. They include, apart from Erika, Robotron and Optima typewriters, the Simson motorcycle and Diamant radios.

Erikas 1963 to 1967.

Dietel was born in the Reinholdshain district of Saxony on October 10, 1934. He has lived in Chemnitz since 1961, first going there as a designer for the “Central Development and Design for Vehicle Construction” works in what was then called Karl-Marx-Stadt (now back to Chemnitz again).  He went freelance in 1963 and began designing typewriters for Erika and Robotron. One of his first typewriters was the Erika 14 (he also designed the Erika 110/120, as well as the 50/60, and Robotron Cella). Dietel was awarded the 2014 Federal Design Prize for his life’s work, which is inseparably linked with Saxony and Chemnitz. He served an apprenticeship as a machine fitter in Glauchau from 1949-1952, then studied at the engineering school for motor vehicle construction in Zwickau. From 1956 he was at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin, studying industrial design. Active in the GDR’s Union of Visual Artists, Dietel defended the professional independence of freelance designers.

Erikas 1974-1979.

When Hemingway Travelled to Australia (In His Fertile Young Imagination)

Fishing for a good yarn? Hemingway, aged six.

Image from the John F. Kennedy Library's Hemingway Collection.

The first story Ernest Hemingway* ever wrote was about a sea voyage to Australia. He was 11 at the time, and hadn’t actually travelled further from his home in Oak Park, Illinois, than Nantucket, Massachusetts. Hemingway submitted his 182-word, badly spelled story on April 17, 1911, as part of a sixth-grade class exercise at the Oliver Wendell Holmes School in Oak Park. It was titled “My First Sea Vouge (sic)”, and described a young boy sailing around Cape Horn to Sydney with his father, the captain of a three-masted schooner called the Elizabeth.

Hemingway based his story on a legend that had been passed down through the Hancock, Hall and Hemingway families and was told to Hemingway by his mother, Grace Ernestine Hall Hemingway, the grand-daughter of Captain Alexander Hancock. Captain Hancock had sailed the 700-ton, Chepstow-built Miles and Kington emigrant barque the Elizabeth from England to Australia in 1853. The voyage was arranged by William Dobbin of Bristol, an Australian and American emigration officer.

Williamstown Wharf, Port Phillip, Melbourne, c1850

Alexander Hancock was born in Wedmore, Somerset, England, in 1814. Just two weeks after his wife, Caroline Sydes Hancock, had died in a train accident in Llanelli, Wales, Captain Hancock took the Elizabeth out from King Road, Bristol, on January 23, 1853, with his son, Benjamin Tyley Hancock (1848-1933), and two daughters, Caroline (later Hall, 1843-95), Annie Sydes Hancock (later Roome, 1845-1937) aboard. They were headed for Melbourne and Sydney, to join other Hancock family members already in Australia. The ship crossed the Equator on February 16 and arrived in Sydney on April 6. During the voyage a compositor called Churchill published issues of the Tropical Times.

Hancock first moved to Hobart in search of his late wife’s brother, Richard Tottle Sydes. By 1855 Hancock had settled on Coventry Street, Emerald Hill, South Melbourne, where he was foreman of the fire brigade. After getting into a spot of bother in Victoria with a bailiff called George Rees, Alexander, his older brother John and son Benjamin decided to quickly decamp from the colony. In 1856 the family traveled to Panama, crossed the isthmus on mule-back and took passage to the US. From the East Coast they went by rail to Dyersville, Iowa, where they had a relative and where Captain Hancock became the town's postmaster. Alexander died in Dyersville in 1864. Two brothers had earlier died in Australia.

Hemingway aged 12.

Alexander’s son Benjamin, Ernest’s great uncle, kept alive the legend of the voyage to Australia, which Hemingway would, after a trip with his mother to Nantucket in September 1910, turn into his own ripping yarn. This is way Hemingway wrote it in April 1911:

MY FIRST SEA VOUGE

I was born in a little white house on the Island of Marthas Vineyard in the State of Massachusetts. My mother died when I was four years old and my father, a catain of the three masted schooner "Elizabeth" took me and my little brother around the "Horn" with him to Australia.

Going we had fine weather and we would see the porpoises playing around the ship and the big white albatross winging its way across the ocean or following the brig for scraps of food; the sailors caught one on a huge hook baited with a biscuit but they let him go as soon as they had caught him for they are very superstitious about these big birds.

One time the sailors went out on a barrel fastened to the bow sprit and speared a porpoise (or sea pig as they call them) and hauled him up on deck and we had it fried for supper it tasted like pork only it was greesier.

We arrived in Sydney Australia after a fine vouge and had just as good vouge going back.

Hemingway aged 16.

*Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway.

Archibald MacLeish's Tribute Upon the Death in the Morning of Ernest Hemingway

Tomorrow will be the 60th anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway. Just two weeks after Hemingway’s suicide, LIFE magazine, for which Hemingway wrote some of his last great works, devoted 13 pages of its July 14, 1961, edition to the Nobel Prize-winning author. This included an 1814-word tribute from an old friend of Hemingway’s, the poet Archibald MacLeish. LIFE said MacLeish assessed “the forces that made [Hemingway] great”. Bob Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One that MacLeish “could take real people from history … and with the tender touch of a creator, deliver them right to your door.” Dylan also said MacLeish “possessed more knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than most men acquire in a lifetime.” All of which is certainly evident in the Hemingway tribute. Here, in full, is that tribute:

His Mirror Was Danger

By Archibald MacLeish

I wrote a poem some years ago in which there was a question about Hemingway and an answer:

… the lad in the Rue de Notre Dame des Champs

In the carpenter’s loft on the left-hand side going down –

The lad with the supple look

like a sleepy panther –

And what became of him? Fame became of him.

Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:

Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master –

Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick

In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April city.

Ernest Hemingway in front of 113 Rue de Notre Dame des Champs in Paris in 1924. This is the address mentioned in Archibald MacLeish’s 1948 poem Years of the Dog, the work to which MacLeish referred in the opening lines of his LIFE magazine tribute to Hemingway.

Now, with his death, the questions asks itself again: what became of him?

        How shall that question be answered now? By the fame still? I don’t suppose any writer since Byron has been as famous as Hemingway was when he died, but fame is a young man’s passion. It has little to say to the fact of death.

        Or is the style the answer? The style remains as surely as the fame. It has been praised, imitated and derided for 30 years, but it endures: the one intrinsic style our century has produced. And yet Hemingway was the last man to wish to be remembered as a stylist, and none of his critics, however much he has admired the style or detested it, has been able or willing to leave his judgment at that.

        To answer one must go further back. It is not Hemingway’s death or even the manner of his death which poses the question now: it is his life – the fact that his life is over and demands to be looked at, to be measured. What makes the answer difficult is that Hemingway’s life was a strange life for a writer, as we think of writers in our time. Writers with us are supposed to be watchers: “God’s spies” as John Keats put in once. They are supposed to spend themselves observing the world, watching history and mankind and themselves - particularly themselves: their unsaid thoughts, their secret deeds and dreads. Hemingway was not a watcher: he was an actor in his life. He took part. What he took part in was not the private history of Ernest Hemingway or the social history of Oak Park, Illinois, or the intellectual history of a generation of his fellow countrymen. What he took part in was a public – even a universal – history of wars and animals and gigantic fish. And he did take part. He could never go to a war – and he went to every war available to him – without engaging in it. He went to the First World War as an ambulance driver and got his knee smashed by a shell in a front-line trench where no one had sent him. He went to the war in Spain to write a scenario for a movie and learned how you washed the powder burns off your hands without water. He went to the last World War as a correspondent - and worried the high command by turning up with other tools than typewriters – mementos he called them. And between wars there were lions and elephants. And between elephants and lions there were marlin. Also bears.

        Again, modern writers, if you can believe the novels, associate with other writers or with other writers’ wives or with the people who hang around writers. Hemingway preferred boxers and bicycle racers in Paris, and Charlie Thompson, and Old Bra in Key West, and nightclub addicts in New York and matadors in Spain and commercial fishermen and game-cock fighters in Cuba. He had writer friends. Scott Fitzgerald was a good friend, and Dos Passos sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t. But writers as writers – writers disguised as writers – he didn’t fancy. He and I had lunch in the middles ’20s with Wyndham Lewis, the painter who set himself up briefly and locally as a literary dictator in London. When the two of us walked off home across the river, Hemingway astonished me by saying, “Did you notice? He ate with his gloves on.” He had too – though there were no gloves.

Most modern writers are literary – more so than ever now that the critical mind has completed its conquest – but Hemingway wasn’t literary. He read as much as most English professors and he remembered what he read, remembered it usefully, and in its relevance to himself – but he rarely talked about writing. Ezra Pound, the greatest and most successful teacher of writing in our time, gave him up. “The son of a bitch’s instincts are right,” said Pound. But you can’t converse about instincts. Even Gide, then most articulate writer about writing in modern France, was defeated by that hulking body and artless air and charming smile. I had dragged Hemingway along to a French literary afternoon where Gide and Jules Romains and others of that generation sat on stiff-backed chairs around a bookshop wall talking as though they had rehearsed all morning, but Hemingway, whom all of them were watching, watched the floor. It was too much for Gide. He dropped the topic, whatever it was, and drew Hemingway aside to explain how he punished his cat. He punished his cat, he said, by lifting him up by the scruff of his neck and saying PHT! in his face. Whether Hemingway restrained a desire to hit him, I don’t know. I was watching the back of his head.

A strange life for a writer and a difficult life to judge at the end. Indeed, a difficult life to judge before the end – which is perhaps why Hemingway attracted, alive, more critics of more schools and opinions than most writers who have been dead for centuries. Writers generally are judged by their work, but Hemingway’s life kept threatening to get in the way of his work with the result that his critics never found themselves in agreement. Those who were drawn to him called him, as one of them actually did on the day of his death, “a man who lived it up to write it down.” Those who were repelled – and most of the hostile critics seemed to have been repelled emotionally as well as intellectually – called him in one form of words or another a phony: a man who ran away from his real task to masquerade as a big game hunter or a hero or a tough guy. What they will say now I don’t know – perhaps that he had run as far as he could and that the truth caught up with him at 7:30 on the morning of the second of July.

        Both views are based on a misconception of the relation between a writer’s task and a writer’s life. Both conceive of life and writing as different and even contradictory things. The deploring critic thinks of Hemingway’s life as a betrayal of his obligation: you don’t fight marlin by the hour and watch the killing of 1,500 bulls if you are loyal to your writer’s obligation to your craft. The admiring critic thinks of the obligation as incidental to the life: you shoot grizzlies and then you write about it. Neither understands the simple and primary fact that a writing – a true writing – is not the natural by-product of an isolated experience, nor the autonomous creation of an isolated man, but the consequence of a collision between the two. Neither realizes that the collision when it occurs, even when the experience is a lion in the gun sights or a German in a Normandy hedge, may provide, for the right writer, something more than a thrill and something very different from an escape. It may, indeed, provide a realization- precisely such a realization as the art of letters at its greatest is capable of providing: the realization of the meaning of a man. Danger is not the least revealing of the mirrors into which we look.

        That this obvious fact was obvious to Hemingway is a matter of record. Long before he had money enough for a safari or time enough to compose a theory of esthetics, had he ever wished to compose one, he had learned that lesson. Of the time in his 20s when he was learning to write, he said, “I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel … was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” The problem, that is to say, was to master the collision of man and event, writer and experience in both its terms: the perception of the event as it really was and the recognition of the emotion that the event really excited. A later remark of his added another dimension to the task. In a letter to a young man who had sent him imitative work he said, “ … see the things you write about not through my eyes and my ears but through your own with your language.” To see “with language,” to see “what really happened in action” and to recognize “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel,” with language was a writer’s task as Hemingway saw it. Most writers I think would agree that the task was well seen and that accomplishment of the task so defined would be anything but a betrayal of the obligation which every writer assumes. To put together what “really” happened and what you “really” felt as you faced it is not only to see the lion but to understand the man. The writer who can do this, as Hemingway demonstrated that he could, is no less a poet of the human experience - God’s spy – than the writer who spies upon nearer and more familiar worlds.

        What became of Hemingway? Fame became of him, yes, but something more, I think, than fame. Art became of him – became of him in the truest and the largest sense. Rilke once said of the writing of a verse: it is not enough merely to feel; one must also see and touch and know. But it is not enough, either, to see and touch and know; one must have memories of love and pain and death. But not even these memories are enough; the memories must be “turned to blood within us” so that they are no longer distinguishable from ourselves. Experience, Rilke was declaring, must turn into man before a poem can be written. Experience, that is to say, must reach such an intensity that it contains our own being. When that happens – when experience and man so meet – the poem may be written and when the poem is written we may discover who we are.

        Hemingway brought himself to face experience of this intensity not once, but more than once. And what became of him was that great triumph.