My Papa, Papa

When I Was six, in 1934, Papa would take me up on the Florida Keys to shoot shore birds--golden plovers and yellowbills. They would fly in small flocks and make a whistling sound. Papa would sit in the mangroves and make a soft imitation of their call. The birds would circle curiously and Papa would fire with deadly accuracy. I was retriever, pulling the birds out of the water; and as the stack grew, Papa would whet my appetite by telling me (he called me "Mouse") how good they would be to eat. They certainly were delicious cooked his way, baked in a bird pie, like "four and twenty blackbirds."

This is my earliest recollection of my father, Ernest Hemingway. We lived in Key West in the late winter and spring of each year and when the real hot weather came, we boarded our yacht, the Pilar, and made off for the fishing camp Papa had built at Bimini in the Bahamas.

In the fall, we went to the ranch in Wyoming and hunted grizzly and mountain sheep. The fishing and the hunting were like a reward for the routine of settling down and seriously raising a family. Yet even sports could not be pure relaxation. They were always part of an education. He was out to understand the mysteries of life.

A sportsman knows the habits of what he hunts. " 'All real hunters are in love with the animals they hunt,' " Papa used to quote Karen Blixen, " 'but it is not reciprocated.' " Papa had that love; but as a hunter, he was fully aware that the animals had no reason to love him.

Hunting was a challenge and Papa needed the challenge and effort to prove himself. The animal has a chance, he felt. He did not like the hypocrisy of people who protested about hunting. He knew how brutal men could be to one another and to animals. He spoke about the zoos that show lion cubs because they are so pretty. But, because lions are prolific, many zoos have too many cubs. If they cannot trade them, they kill the cubs. He thought shooting a brave beast on the plains was preferable to putting a cub against the wall and blowing its head off. Or do they chloroform them now? Enslaving and imprisoning animals seemed to Papa a lot more dreadful than hunting them.

But at heart, Papa was a fisherman. That was his real sports love. He spent his whole life at the art of fishing. He never found the complete freedom in hunting that he did in fishing. On the oceans, there were no licenses required. "There are no plains wider than the ocean," he said. "The ocean belongs to no one."

In those Key West days, we first went out fishing in a hired boat belonging to Joe Russell, who ran a pub known as Sloppy Joe's. We went for sailfish, marlin, tuna, wahoo, dolphin. I was always seasick. Papa treated it as a joke. "The cure is to eat lots of mustard pickles," he would say. After throwing up, I felt fine and Papa and I would sing, "The music goes round and round and it comes up here--oooooops."

Papa was observant and he fished very methodically. He knew the birds to watch--a flock of terns working over a school of small fish meant big ones below. But he did not always catch his fish. One summer he fished 100 days without a catch. It made no difference. He got as much out of the ritual as out of the actual climax.

On days when there was no wind and it was unsuitable for trolling, he used to cut the engine and ride the sea. He would fish with live bait hooked through the back, where it did not hurt. The fish would move and the amber jacks would come up for them. He enjoyed this. There was always a good picnic lunch and the phonograph would be playing. The live bait would swim deeper and deeper into the clear water. You could see all the things going on in the ocean. Papa was always amazed to see a logger-head turtle eating a Portuguese man-of-war. He had a pleased look on his face as the turtle ate what was almost straight acid.

Fishing kept Papa fit. There is some exercise in hooking a 500-pound tuna that had weighed 1000 pounds when it headed down from Nova Scotia, but now, off the Cat Cays, was a lot trimmer and tougher. Papa could fight a big-bill fish for from four to seven hours straight. He once weighed himself before and after a day in the chair. He had lost 15 pounds.

He always watched as the fish was gaffed and brought over the stern. How the fish would thrash about. Papa enjoyed the beautiful colors: the dark blue and light green of the pectoral fins of the sailfish; the bluish black and silver stripes of the wahoo, which reminded him of the zebra; the brilliant blues, greens and gold of the dolphin. Once the gaff went in, it was all over. The colors quickly faded to a dull silver, a monochrome death.

Papa held some fine fishing records. He was the first to catch a tuna off Bimini not marked by sharks. Some fishermen let the tuna run out the line and die of exhaustion; then they pull it in. That was not sporting to Papa. Also, to boat it without a shark having a whack at it is extremely difficult. It was considered impossible in these waters, so packed with sharks. With his tuna, Papa had to fight like hell to beat the sharks to it.

He still holds one fishing record. It is the largest Atlantic sailfish caught by any method. He was out in the Gulf Stream with a Jesuit friend in the early Thirties. The priest was in the chair when the sail took the bait. The priest had arthritis and could not keep it up. Papa let him stay in the chair for a while then took over. He brought it in. It weighed nearly 120 pounds. Papa had it mounted and placed in the bar at Sloppy Joe's. He honored the Jesuit by naming a jointed fishing plug after him. He called it "the priest bait."

Papa also liked fresh-water fishing--especially trout fishing. He was very fond of cooking his own catch. Trout meunière was his favorite when outdoors, just cooked in butter with a little salt and pepper. He was as proud of it as a French chef. He taught me how to clean fish and how to tie flies. He was a conservative in doing things the old way. He would never use a nylon leader, always gut. His favorite flies were the royal coachman, the McGinty and the shrimp. Fly-fishing is impossible with a cheap rod. In those days, before glass rods, it took a skillful craftsman and imported cane to give the rod life for casting a fly or the spring and backbone needed to kill a big fish. Hardy's was an English firm and one of the few who could do it properly then. That's why Papa used English rods; they were really necessary.

•••

The challenge of boxing was like the challenge of hunting and fishing. But I think Papa boxed to stay fit. He did his roadwork. I used to go along, following him in the Ford. He also punched a bag on a floor stand in the Key West house. He used to call me up to his room to count for him while he did his "bellies." Legs together and up; he could do 50 at a time.

In Bimini, he built a boxing ring and encouraged the locals to join in. He referred to himself as "a patron of the arts." He used to put up a prize of $50 to any man who could stay in the ring with him. They came from all over the Bahamas for a try. Papa found it a cheap way to get sparring partners. He also liked to show that although he was a rich man (in the Bahamas, at least), he still was a man. He rarely lost.

"I'm pretty safe," he explained. "They're strong, but they have no technical skill."

Papa's style was the left hook. "This is the perfect punch," he said. "The upper-cut is a bad joke." He was what you might call a heavy fighter. He always moved right into his opponent. In those days, he weighed 190 pounds on a six foot frame. He had terrifically strong legs. His calf muscles reminded you of those 18th Century English prints of stocky merchants. He was barrel-chested and had powerful shoulders. Still, he gave the impression of a really graceful finished product.

He needed both weight and shape, for he managed to get into a number of brawls down at Sloppy Joe's, where he liked to drink whiskey and talk fishing with the locals, called conchs. There were several classic fights there. We always heard about it the next day as he was having his hands looked after. There were great stories from him on how he tried to stay out of it and how, just out of kindness, he "put the man away."

One man who picked a fight with Papa in Sloppy Joe's had trained for it for a month in New York before coming down. It was a rough fight. We all worried because, in the later stages, they had fought out through the doorway and were in the street rolling around. They reached a depression in the coral-marl street that was full of water. The man's head was being banged up and down. Everyone was afraid for the man's mind. The poor chap went to the hospital and we were relieved when the report was favorable. There was no lawsuit. Papa claimed, "I was defending my title."

It seemed people made a habit, drunk or sober, of coming up to Papa and saying, "I've read your books, and you know what? You're the biggest son of a bitch going." That was a challenge Papa could not refuse.

After a bit, there were calypso songs around the Caribbean about Papa. One was called Big Fat Slob in the Harbor. The lines were:

He call Mistah Hemingway a big fat slob.

Mistah Hemingway ball his fist and give him a nob.

Big fat slob in the harbor.

Tonight's the night we have fun.

Papa always cautioned me on one thing about fighting. "Beware of the man with sloping shoulders," he said. It does me no good. I'm a lousy boxer.

• • •

In the Thirties in Key West, I was a very young boy, and I think children feel things with different senses from those of grownups. Sight is an adult sense, but smells are my strongest memories of those years. The smell of mud flats at low tide, where the shore birds fed and Papa hunted; the pungent smell of a just-fired cartridge; the stale nitrogen smell of the dead barracudas as you dock at the end of a day's fishing; the refreshing smell of the deviled eggs and potato salad in the picnic lunch box.

The memories of the sense of touch are strong, too. I remember the prickly feeling of Papa's face when I kissed him good night; the warm, pleasant feeling of the Pilar on my stomach as I lay on it and watched Papa fighting a fish. What an overwhelming vitality he had! You could see it in the fishing and the hunting, but it was just as strong in his urge to write. He was at his best in all things when he was writing. He was at his worst when not writing.

Conditioning was the secret to Papa's writing so well. He wrote in the mornings, every day from about six to ten. He did about 1000 words in pencil on cheap yellow paper.

Then came lunch. In the afternoon, he would fish up the Keys, box if there was a sparring partner available, play tennis or possibly do some drinking. Now, drinking was as much a part of Papa as writing, reading, hunting or fishing. It was a pleasure, not a social obligation or a way of forgetting something.

The big event, to which we were all usually summoned, was the first drink of the day. Papa never drank in the morning and I never saw him drunk. But we often found him asleep in his chair in the morning. I guess he had hangovers, but he never mentioned them and they never showed.

The thing is, if you follow as tough a physical schedule as he did then, you can drink as much as you want. In those days, it was strictly Scotch, and beer and tequila when he was out fishing. In different periods of his life, it was the gimlet, the bloody mary and, of course, the daiquiri at La Floridita, though his affair with that Havana pub ended the day it became air conditioned. Papa also went through an absinthe period. He would pour some in a glass. Over the top of the glass he put a filter paper. He filled this with crushed ice. He then poured water on the ice. The ice water began to drip through the filter paper. The absinthe started to turn milky from the bottom up. Papa waited until it was all milky to drink it. He claimed it was a test of character. He also took aquavit, but only to "protect me from the cold," he insisted.

Papa liked parties, and in the later stages of an evening, when the liquor was poured with a heavy hand, he had a dangerous habit: knife throwing. He would pull out a long knife of his. He knew it well and trusted it. He would then ask for volunteers to stand against a wall while he proved his skill.

There were rarely any takers, thank God. So he would throw the knife at himself. This consisted of taking off his right shoe and sock, aiming carefully and flipping the sharp knife. He was quite good at it, actually, though he did end up with two or three bad slices out of his big toe.

Papa liked many bars, but Sloppy Joe's was his favorite. There his big sailfish hung. There was also a large mural of him and other habitués of the bar. Papa was portrayed with a crown of grapes around his head in a bacchanalian scene.

Joe Russell, the publican in charge, was one of Papa's best friends. "Mr. Josie," Papa called him. Mr. Josie was not just a saloonkeeper. He was a boot-legger in happier days, as well as one of the best charter-boat skippers along the Keys. He taught Papa much about deep-sea fishing, or as much as Papa wanted to learn.

After we left the Keys, once a year, Mr. Josie visited Papa in Cuba. For him, Papa would give up his writing routine. It was one long lost weekend. Mr. Josie provided much of the juice for To Have and Have Not.

• • •

The unemployed veterans from World War One who were quartered in Key West cashed their relief checks there and Papa was usually around for the roughhouse of payday. At our house on Whitehall Street, Papa kept peacocks, beautiful birds with full glittering plumes. One day Papa was in the yard when two of the vets came up to the gate.

"Hey, buddy, can you help me?" one of them called out.

Papa went over to the gate and listened.

"My friend, here, he says the peacocks do it like turkeys. I say the male drops a pellet and the female, she picks up the pellet and swallows it. That's how. Which of us is right, huh, buddy?"

Papa hated to do it, but he admitted that it was his observation that they did it like turkeys.

• • •

Papa loved red wines from Spain. Bodegas Bilbaina, a raw and rugged one, was his favorite. He liked French wines, too, but Spanish wines told him stories. He never smoked, because he claimed smoking destroys the sense of smell. He had a keen sense of smell. It shows in his writings.

He liked to eat, too. When we were in Cuba, we once had a Chinese cook. Papa loved Chinese food. While preparing the evening meal, the cook was forever coming in to see Papa about the champignons, the mushrooms. One evening, he had a heart attack right at, and I think on, the stove. The only reason we knew he was dead was that supper was late. There was also the smell.

Papa enjoyed his delicacies. One, especially, was percebes, a Spanish barnacle. These came packed in ice and Papa ate the long, black, rubbery stalks. He was also fond of Russian caviar and sailfish roe. When in New York, he enjoyed going to Maison Glass and picking out various canned and preserved delicacies. He bought Brazilian palm hearts, squid in ink and one truly horrifying dish, baby eels, which looked like a plate of worms. All the horror was in the looks; they tasted very good.

For days on end, though, he was happy with plain food. When writing, he thrived on peanut-butter-and-onion sandwiches. When he was in Africa on his last safari, his favorite meal was what he called "beans en can." This was Heinz baked beans eaten from the tin.

• • •

Papa never painted, but he did have a tremendous feeling for the art. He did not think writing and painting professionally could go together. But he was a good student of contemporary art. He could judge artists when people had not (continued on page 263) Papa, Papa (continued from page 200) yet put a price tag on them. He spotted Juan Gris and Joan Miró. He bought no Picassos; by the time Papa could afford to, Picasso was already a big name. With Picasso there is always the feeling that the talent is greater than what he has to say. Papa bought both Gris and Miró. When he wrote Death in the Afternoon, he asked Gris to do the original frontispiece, which he did.

Papa liked Gris very much. He was an engineer turned artist. He did still lifes in the cubist manner. He put all his serious nature into his work. He was the opposite of the facile painter. Perhaps he even had difficulty pulling down on canvas what he wanted to say. But when he got it down, it was exactly right and you could tell he really meant it. There was much in Gris that was in Papa.

The picture that Papa liked the best and that he always had in his bedroom wherever he lived was Gris' Man with a Guitar. If anyone ever writes the definitive work on Papa, it should be called Man with a Guitar. The colors are blues and grays. It is very gentle, very exact, very melancholy. It is a portrait of the artist alone and with his instrument.

Papa loved music as well as art, but he did not love his musical childhood. His mother had given up a promising career as an opera singer to marry his father, and she never really let anyone in the family forget it. All the children were trained to play a musical instrument so that they could have a family chamber-music group. Papa drew the cello. Even this horrible experience, for a little boy who loved fishing and hunting, did have some compensation in later life. He grew to love Bath, and the one musical analogy I ever heard him make to writing was the use of counterpoint.

Papa could not work by music, but he could relax by it. He collected the latest albums from the Broadway shows. His favorite performers were Fats Waller and Ethel Merman. He was not taken with mood music. When a New York critic he was not fond of died in the late Forties, Papa wrote that "he listened to the Stokowski version of Komm, Süsser Tod once too often." This is a moody piece by Bach. It translates to Come, Sweet Death.

Both recorded music and the pictures on the silver screen were nothing but pure illusion to Papa and not to be taken seriously. Hollywood certainly made money from him, and he never got used to it. It began as early as 1930. A studio paid him $500 for Men Without Women. All Hollywood wanted, however, was the title to go with a yarn about men caught in a disabled submarine. That was not exactly the theme of Papa's story.

I remember when Mr. Zanuck cabled Papa about changing the title of one of his books then being made into a movie: "Can you come up with short snappy' title for short happy life of francis macomber?" Papa typed out a reply: "how about 'fuck.' " But he never sent it.

He got to see the pictures they made from his books and usually snored through them. As far as I know, he considered it all intellectual masturbation. Except, perhaps, for Gary Cooper. This was the one actor Papa respected both as an artist and as a friend. What he liked about Gary Cooper first was his fine portrayal of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then they became friends and hunted together a lot in Sun Valley.

Broadway was not much better than Hollywood. His contact with it was unfortunate and, despite his friendship with people like George Jean Nathan, Papa and Broadway just never clicked. Franchot Tone, the lead in The Fifth Column, soured the whole thing. Mr. Tone was enough to sour anyone. Papa did not try playwriting again. To be a successful playwright, life has to be a compromise. He could not do it.

I am sure people do not realize that Papa never really made any money out of the grandiose color productions of A Farewell to Arms. The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea and the rest. What money he made came essentially from the sale of his books. Many lesser authors have made considerably more money than Papa. A couple of times, he even was forced to do commercials. He once did a beer advertisement. He appeared in the picture and even wrote the copy. It went something like: "What a good beer it really is--cold, drunk directly from the can...." And once he let the Johnson Wax people photograph the floors of the Key West house all polished and shiny. As I remember, he got a year's supply of wax for that.

Certainly Papa traveled a lot, and almost always this was paid for by the articles he wrote. He lived very well with the money he had, but probably the largest sum he ever spent at one time was for the plain house in Ketchum, where he died. Believe me, he was very pleased to get the $35,000 prize money for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Papa was very unsophisticated about taxes. He felt he could not stand the worry he would have if he made any effort to get out of them. He sold For Whom the Bell Tolls for about $100,000 and paid most of it in taxes--I think $87,000. I don't believe he needed to do this. He could have had someone help him with deductions, but he wouldn't. He was born in a tax-free era and never made the adjustment to the change.

• • •

Papa liked to read. Not many people talk about his reading, but it is as a reader that I remember him best. When he was a youngster, there was some question of his damaging his eyes with the strain from reading too much. He was sent to a farm for the summer to get him away from books. There he still read--package wrappings made of old newspapers.

When he was with Scribner's, he had the publisher send him monthly a trunk-ful of new books. Although he read heavily of the Civil War and Africa, of W. H. Hudson, Turgenev, Joyce, Crane, Conrad and Twain, he read almost anything he could get his hands on. That included detective novels and Ring magazine. He had nothing against soft-cover books. After all, the best writing in France still appears in soft covers. He used to say, though, "I write hardcover books."

Though he read a lot, his work gives little obvious sign of this. He did not believe in making a show of his reading. He knew that it should show, but not like the trimmings on a Christmas tree. Like the iceberg he was fond of using as a simile, what he wrote was the part above the water; what he read made up what was beneath the surface. Though I have never read it anywhere in the critics, I do think that the deceptively simple style of Dame was as much a model for Papa as anything else he may have read. Certainly it was more of a model than the silly nonsense of Gertrude Stein, who once claimed that he had copied her.

One foreign writer who was a favorite from the very start of his career was Georges Simenon. When Papa came back from France after the last War, he had everything--and this was a considerable amount--that the great Belgian had written during the War years. Papa also loved Kipling. He would often quote, "walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch." His favorites among Kipling's short stories were Without Benefit of Clergy and The Mark of the Beast.

Papa's own books were in his library, but he never read them to us as children, nor did he ever recommend them as reading to us. I don't know why; perhaps he thought they were too old for us.

Papa was all things--sportsman, father, husband, soldier--in order to give him experiences for writing. "Water for that well," he said. He insisted a writer should be a person and not someone echoing secondhand impressions of life. He wanted no comparison, good or bad, with any other writer.

"All bad writers are in love with the epic," Papa said. Epic literature substituted a rigid framework for originality and insight. He thought that bad writers, who could not write about what was happening in their own back yards, chose monumental tasks such as Khrushchev or Kennedy to write about. They thought maybe some of the power and prestige of the principals would be transmitted to their work. "Taking a big theme does not make it a big novel," Papa insisted. He thought writers like John Lardner were the best that modern American literature produced. "An excellent model to follow in writing is the sportswriter," he said. "He records what he sees and hears in the original language."

Papa was a subconscious writer. He could have experiences, keep them inside, then let them out later at their perfected leisure. He never believed in talking to anybody about a book he was planning or working on. He was contemptuous of writers who planned out novels. He never took notes. He felt the novel came from inside, not from notes. You can see where all his experiences paid off in a book like The Old Man and the Sea. A lifetime of fishing and living is in that.

He did a lot of soul-searching in his writing. There was no formula. He was very firm about never letting his writing degenerate into that. He referred to this as "The Farewell to Arms Boys Take to the Bush" or "The Farewell to Arms Boys and the Great Train Robbery." He did not want to repeat himself, ever.

He was never cocky. He was very interested in how his books sold. When Across the River and into the Trees first came out in 1950, he said. "Well, they really like it in Wyoming, but I'm not sure about New York." He saw each new book as a fight to defend a title.

Much of the key to Papa's writing is in the women he married. Some gave him the working conditions the writer needs. The wives who looked after him helped produce the great ones. All his wives were writers of sorts. He was not too interested in any competition. Said he of one of them: "She has the talent of a high school valedictorian."

To combine steady writing with the need to gather experiences was probably the hardest thing in his life. When he was writing, he needed routine, but people were always trying to see Papa when he was working". We thought, he was too polite with them. In Key West, we kept the big black gates locked. Papa also built a six-foot-high brick wall around the house, but there were problems with that. The neighbor complained that his family could not breathe, because the wall cut the breeze. Papa cut a hole in the wall for them.

He really was very good at getting on with people, though I don't think he was a lover of human beings in the same way Damon Runyon was. As a professional journalist, he knew how to be entertaining, but I'm not sure how much he liked the people for whom he made the effort; and he could be a terrible snob.

At a party thrown by a friend in New York, the hostess came up to him and asked, "Well, Papa, what do you think of my friends?"

"I haven't seen so many second-class passengers since I crossed on the Mauretania," he answered.

• • •

Just before embarking on a ship for Europe in the 1930s, Papa had a look at the new passport he had just received in the mail. Under "Occupation," he saw it listed "Waiter" instead of "Writer." He exploded with rage. "They can't do this to me," he shouted. "The one occupation you cannot have in Europe is a waiter. They will not let you in anyplace."

He exchanged quite a few hot letters with Ruth Shipley, then head of passports in Washington, on this and other travel regulations.

• • •

When it came to friends, he had many whom he had known for a long time but did not see much of. He had others where the friendship was very intense for a short period but he never saw again. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great friend during the 1920s, but I never remember him much after the Paris period. In those days, Scott had a bad habit of spelling Papa's name "Hemmingway." Scott's shortcomings were very troubling to Papa. Scott had the illusion he was a great broken-field runner, for example. "How can he think that, when he has difficulty crossing Fifth Avenue in light traffic?" Papa used to say with distress.

Papa was not one of the boys, though he did try to be from time to time. He made the effort more often when he was younger. He was pretty stiff on judging people. He had that tendency as a writer. He did not trust too many people. He had had bad experiences with people; he was not very thick-skinned.

Critics got to him and he could get to critics. He made no great friends that way. But, then, treachery and betrayal by friends were things that bothered Papa. He once described New York critics as "worms in a bottle all squirming together but unable to get out." What critics wrote, as far as he was concerned, showed "futility and impotence."

Considering this attitude, it is remarkable that the critics didn't treat him worse than they did. He felt critics were always expecting you to write like a previous work. They had no criteria to judge anything new. I do think that Cyril Connolly was granted a special exemption from Papa's general condemnation of critics, but not H. L. Mencken. There, it was war to the end.

Papa was very fond of Ezra Pound. In the early days in Paris, Papa was struck with how helpful Pound had been when writers were stuck for money. He appreciated and respected him for helping these writers, though he was not himself prepared to be so helpful. He thought Pound a bit foolish, but he loved him for his foolishness.

When Pound got the Lord Haw-Haw treatment after World War Two, Papa did stick his neck out for him. He and Archibald MacLeish arranged to get him committed to St. Elizabeth's mental institution when the heat was on and released when the heat was off.

• • •

Papa was lucky in that at a very early age he knew exactly what he wanted to be. I think he was most disappointed in us boys when we did not know as quickly as he did. But he felt that our careers were our own affair as much as writing was strictly his. But every time we took up a new sport or interest, we could tell he had a great vision of a career for us. At one time, he had hopes that I would become a taxidermist like Carl Akeley, but nothing came of it. I've never stuffed anything.

It is probably too much to hope that an extraordinary man will have extraordinary children. It is almost never the case, and Papa was no luckier or unluckier than any other extraordinary man.

Papa did want to help us ever so badly, though. I knew that for sure at age eight because of the following incident. I was playing cards with some of my young friends at the house in Cuba. Papa was sitting in the room. I said that I was bound to win soon because of the law of averages. Papa was furious at the statement. To my complete surprise, he lit into me and said that I should never talk foolishly about something I didn't understand in the least. After that, the law of averages and I parted company.

Papa's advice about gambling was that it was lots of fun but that you should never gamble unless you could afford to lose. He himself loved gambling. In Cuba, we were able to go with him to bet on cockfights and jai alai. He used to get excited in jai alai when he would get himself in a situation, by a series of bets as the odds were changing, so that he couldn't possibly lose.

I'm sure Papa would have been pleased if one of us had been a writer. He looked after Ring Lardner's son who was killed in the Spanish Civil War and arranged a proper burial for him. Papa was pleased, and maybe a bit envious, that Lardner's children went into writing and made a success of it. He read our childish stuff with pleasure. But he was a tough critic. He was especially strong on what you saw. He did not like false sophistication.

The thing about teaching us was that Papa wanted to give us an example, but he did not want us to copy him. He thought that was wrong. He wanted us to learn to shoot, so he hired a gun instructor for us. That way, we learned our own style. He certainly liked kids. He would take me along with him even when he went out for a drink. Even though he had problems with his various wives, he wanted that in a separate category from the children. Those today with careers who have no time for their children, take note: Maybe those with the careers are not all that good.

• • •

Now I am a professional hunter. Papa taught me to love nonprofessional hunting, and to me, that is still the best kind, but it is expensive. Unless you are born rich, the only way I know that you can hunt enough to satisfy desire is to be a professional hunter in Africa when you are young.

There are lots of things wrong with the profession. Many times you feel and act like a household servant. So much of the talk of white hunters is servants' talk--all smiles in front of the client; how awful he is when he can't hear you. But in the end, you hunt every animal that's worth hunting. You hunt 200 days in every year. Each one of those days starts at four in the morning with a cup of hot tea and ends at dark. You do it for ten years and you have watched the animals you love for 28,000 hours. If you have the bad luck to die before you wake, you have done what you wanted to do.

I live on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. It's not as good as it sounds. The climate is not perfect. No mountain's is. The mornings are often wet and misty. It is never really warm. But any day, you can come down off the mountain into the loveliest countryside I know. There are no fences, the people are friendly and there is still lots of game.

• • •

Now, near the end, we must talk of parasites. Like any living thing, Papa carried a parasitic load. He did it without any complaints, even with enthusiasm. Key West was the hardest hit of any town in America during the Depression. It was a long way from the mainland. There were no jobs. A man whose character, lack of foresight or just bad luck caught him in Key West without money was soon reduced to beggary. Beggary touched something deep in Papa. He had had to borrow money a few times in his life and I think it always frightened him. He would say, "First you borrow, then you beg."

When a beggar came to the house, it was always the same. Ada Stearns, the housekeeper, who answered the door, would come to say, "Mr. Hemingway, there is one of those exhausted men come to see you." Ada was from Syracuse. New York, and she never really accepted the situation.

The man at the door would say, "Mr. Hemingway, you know me. I've had some bad luck. All I need is a quarter for a can of beans to get up over the Keys."

It came to be a saying in our family, "a quarter for a can of beans to get up over the Keys."

Naturalists make a distinction between the parasite, who is usually small in comparison with his host and whose substance he does not destroy, diverting only a little of it to his own use, and the predator, the big killer, who destroys his prey so that he may feed at leisure on its dead body. Somewhere in between is the hyena.

Naturalists now know that the hyena does, in fact, kill most of what he cats, but the popular conception is still that of a patient and repulsive beast who can uncannily pick out an old lion, one whose teeth are gone. These old lions are reduced to digging for rats, for lions do not have social security. Finally, the hyena can pull the lion down. He is excessively fond of lion meat, on which he grows fat and sleek.

No one has yet been able to teach the hyena how to write. Unfortunately, no doubt, for there is money to be made from it.

Papa had his faults; everybody does. But as a son, I am hard pressed to find fault with him as a father. I love him because he loved me from the start. When I was young, he showed me by splendid example what it is to know people, reading, music, painting and nature. Today, many people are trying to portray Papa as a certain type. It is much easier to do, now that he is dead. Just what purpose it all serves, I do not know. As a writer, his final value lies in what he wrote.

I am luckier than many sons who have lost their fathers. When I really want to remember him as he truly was, I can reread The Three Day Blow or Big Two-Hearted River. Then it is a winter Sunday again in Key West with a norther blowing and the sky gray and cold. We are riding up over the old county road across wooden bridges between the Keys with the English names: Saddlebunch, Pigeon, No Name, Big Pine. The water is the slate-gray silver of a dead mackerel's belly and along the edge of the sand shore, where the storm waves are lapping, is a stretch of dirty foam. We stop the car and walk to pick up the frozen fish from the foam. The norther has made the sea a little colder than they can stand, and it does not take us long to find enough of them for a meal.

Farther down the shore, we spook up a flock of golden plover and, as they circle back high overhead, they make that whistling call that is the pitch note of a truly magical childhood.