sentence than a diagnosis, the kind of call in which the undecided seems suddenly to have been decided long before, as if it’s no accident that in the mystical, kabbalistic workings of language, fate and wait are paired in rhyme.
I don’t remember if that essay on waiting mentioned Ketchum, Idaho, on the morning of July 2, 1961. It didn’t have to. Whether a public gesture such as Yukio Mishima’s seppuku, or a private exit—Virginia Woolf, her pockets filled with stones, sinking into the River Ouse—a writer’s suicide becomes the climax of a reality that the reader appends to a lifework of fiction. It has certainly become the final punctuation for Hemingway, an author who traded the typewriter he referred to as his psychoanalyst for a shotgun. Playing analyst, literary critics wrote that his suicide had been lying in wait since 1928 when Hemingway’s father, Clarence, a doctor, shot himself at the family home in Oak Park, Illinois, with a Civil War pistol passed down from his father.
In “Indian Camp,” an early story, the father, a doctor, while on a fishing trip to Michigan, performs a C-section with a jackknife and tapered gut leaders on an Indian woman who has been in labor for two days. The story is set not all that far from where I rented that cottage up in Michigan, although any trace of Native Americans, Ojibwa probably, is gone. The Indian woman’s husband can’t endure the suffering and cuts his own throat. Afterward, Nick, the boy who has witnessed both the birth and the suicide, asks his father, “Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”
The story ends: In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure he would never die.
* * *
The woman, Liesel—she went by Lise—who wanted to know where on my body I would choose a wound to bind, despised Hemingway. She despised the popular legends about him and the values they represented, despised bullfights and braggarts who spent their considerable disposable income on shooting animals in Africa, despised what she called the Arrested He-Man School of American Fiction. When I suggested that Hemingway deserved his unfashionable reputation, but still, he had written some genuinely original stories that continued to influence writers even if they didn’t acknowledge it, Lise told me she preferred stories that reached for a transformative epiphany to those that settled for irony. I don’t know how much of Hemingway’s work she’d actually read. She revered Dawn Powell, a writer who like Lise had fled a small town in central Ohio for the city. I recall a conversation we had that prompted me to say that Hemingway had referred to Powell as his favorite living writer, and there was another time, on the night we met, when I quoted a Hemingway phrase about how grappa took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth, and she laughed. Otherwise Hemingway wasn’t a writer we discussed much, let alone argued about. I wasn’t going to defend a guy rich enough for safari vacations beating his chest for shooting the last of the lions.
Lise took her literature seriously, although she’d probably say not seriously enough. She was a self-described ABD—All But Dissertation—initials she likened to those indicating a disease, or a social stigma like a welfare mother on ADC. She was kidding, but before I caught myself, the comparison between an ADC mother and an ABD from the University of Chicago reminded me of the lack of proportion in those few poems by Sylvia Plath that used Holocaust imagery to convey the pain of a young woman from Smith.
“Actually, ABD is a minor epidemic at the U of C,” Lise said. “There should be a graveyard in old Stagg Stadium, not under the stands where the atom bomb was hatched, but right out on the playing field where Jay Berwanger dodged tackles, little crosses marking all the dissertations that
I don’t remember if that essay on waiting mentioned Ketchum, Idaho, on the morning of July 2, 1961. It didn’t have to. Whether a public gesture such as Yukio Mishima’s seppuku, or a private exit—Virginia Woolf, her pockets filled with stones, sinking into the River Ouse—a writer’s suicide becomes the climax of a reality that the reader appends to a lifework of fiction. It has certainly become the final punctuation for Hemingway, an author who traded the typewriter he referred to as his psychoanalyst for a shotgun. Playing analyst, literary critics wrote that his suicide had been lying in wait since 1928 when Hemingway’s father, Clarence, a doctor, shot himself at the family home in Oak Park, Illinois, with a Civil War pistol passed down from his father.
In “Indian Camp,” an early story, the father, a doctor, while on a fishing trip to Michigan, performs a C-section with a jackknife and tapered gut leaders on an Indian woman who has been in labor for two days. The story is set not all that far from where I rented that cottage up in Michigan, although any trace of Native Americans, Ojibwa probably, is gone. The Indian woman’s husband can’t endure the suffering and cuts his own throat. Afterward, Nick, the boy who has witnessed both the birth and the suicide, asks his father, “Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”
The story ends: In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure he would never die.
* * *
The woman, Liesel—she went by Lise—who wanted to know where on my body I would choose a wound to bind, despised Hemingway. She despised the popular legends about him and the values they represented, despised bullfights and braggarts who spent their considerable disposable income on shooting animals in Africa, despised what she called the Arrested He-Man School of American Fiction. When I suggested that Hemingway deserved his unfashionable reputation, but still, he had written some genuinely original stories that continued to influence writers even if they didn’t acknowledge it, Lise told me she preferred stories that reached for a transformative epiphany to those that settled for irony. I don’t know how much of Hemingway’s work she’d actually read. She revered Dawn Powell, a writer who like Lise had fled a small town in central Ohio for the city. I recall a conversation we had that prompted me to say that Hemingway had referred to Powell as his favorite living writer, and there was another time, on the night we met, when I quoted a Hemingway phrase about how grappa took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth, and she laughed. Otherwise Hemingway wasn’t a writer we discussed much, let alone argued about. I wasn’t going to defend a guy rich enough for safari vacations beating his chest for shooting the last of the lions.
Lise took her literature seriously, although she’d probably say not seriously enough. She was a self-described ABD—All But Dissertation—initials she likened to those indicating a disease, or a social stigma like a welfare mother on ADC. She was kidding, but before I caught myself, the comparison between an ADC mother and an ABD from the University of Chicago reminded me of the lack of proportion in those few poems by Sylvia Plath that used Holocaust imagery to convey the pain of a young woman from Smith.
“Actually, ABD is a minor epidemic at the U of C,” Lise said. “There should be a graveyard in old Stagg Stadium, not under the stands where the atom bomb was hatched, but right out on the playing field where Jay Berwanger dodged tackles, little crosses marking all the dissertations that
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