“
Is it any wonder the most imitated writer of the twentieth century rose sometime after seven o’clock that morning, slipped a red dressing robe over blue pajamas, put on slippers, moved past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping, padded down the red-carpeted stairs, crossed the length of the living room to the kitchen, retrieved the key to the locked storeroom where the weapons were (inexplicably, Mary Hemingway had left the ring of keys on the windowsill above the sink), went down to the basement, took shells from the ammo box, closed and relocked the door, came back upstairs, walked ten steps to the front-entry foyer (one sees him in this grainy mind-movie moving very fast but also methodically, teeth clenched and bared in that sickly smile he often exhibited toward the end of his life), opened the foyer door, stepped inside, placed the butt of the gun on the linoleum tile, tore open the breech, slammed in the cartridges, snapped it shut, bent over, as you might bend over a water fountain, rested his forehead against the blue steel, and blew away his entire cranial vault with the double-barreled, 12-gauge Boss shotgun with which he’d once shot pigeons?

- the insupportably specific passage from Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson that made me decide to put the book aside and read something else for now.

Look, even though the book is biography rather than fiction, I’ll grant Hendrickson the clenched teeth he hallucinates in his “grainy mind-movie.” But there’s just no reason to write a scene that has Hemingway getting the gun before the ammunition. Except for the obvious fact that the gunshot came last, we can’t know the order of what happened that morning. Hendrickson is free to cope with that uncertainty by inventing an order. I wish he hadn’t. I’m reminded of another bit from the William Langewiesche interview I quoted a couple of days ago:

Writing is a private conversation with the writer and each individual reader. It is a very intimate communication, which relies on trust. So it is crucial to establish that trust by never tricking the reader, never playing cute, never cajoling, showing off, or wasting the reader’s time.

Fair or not, Hendrickson lost me. I tried to go on. I did go on. But I can’t get past wondering where the truth ends and the truthiness begins. My loss maybe.

Notes

  1. davidquigg posted this