I’ve always liked Hemingway’s writing, but I’ve never quite known what to make of Hemingway himself. Was he gruff, but lovable? Generally shy, but expressive in writing? Was he merely a talented dorky-mean who got famous?
Reading his memoir, A Moveable Feast, has not provided great insight into Hemingway’s soul, but it has certainly served up a sugary slice of one element of his personality: a true and abiding gift for insulting other famous people.
Call it callous, but there’s something to be said for a dis so good you yell it from the bedroom, so everyone in the kitchen can hear it. A dis so good you cringe to think the dissee ever read it. Such a dis is this:
On Wydham Lewis—painter, author, founder of the Vorticist movement and editor of modernist literary magazine BLAST.
Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Boheme. His had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra [Pound’s] left leads or blocked then with an open right glove [while boxing].
I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him… and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great race-horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.
Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, his eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
“I met the nastiest man I’ve ever seen today,” I told my wife. “Tatie, don’t tell me about him,” she said. “We’re just going to have dinner.”
About a week afterwards I met Miss [Gertrude] Stein and told her I’d met Wydham Lewis. “I call him the Measuring Worm,” she said. “He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb, seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.”
This is how he seemed to me the first day I ever met him in Ezra’s studio.
OUCH!
On the poet Ernest Walsh.
Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic, and clearly marked for death. [At lunch], he appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat—[but] he did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then, but he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this.
I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask them.
[When he said I would win the writing award], I was embarrassed and it made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. Death was not conning with him. It was coming alright.
YOUCH!
Read the book for more.
