Papa Hemingway Read Online Free PDF

it in—but that was the easy way.
    The women dived off and started to swim. Ernest had taken a pair of shorts and a shirt, rolled them up tightly, with a bottle of good claret inside because he didn't trust the Kawama wine, and secured the roll with his gott mit uns leather belt. He descended the boat's ladder and lowered himself carefully into the water. He had the roll in his left hand, which he held straight up over his head to keep it dry, and began to swim powerfully against the tossing sea, keeping the upper part of his torso out of the water, using only his right arm and kick for locomotion. It was a remarkable exhibition of balance and strength; I swam alongside him and even with two arms found it arduous going.
    I arrived on the beach a few moments in advance of Ernest, and as I stood and watched him negotiating the last few yards, his left arm relentlessly aloft, holding the dry pants-roll like a tubular pennant on the top of a muscled mast, he was an immortal sea god, not from Oak Park, Illinois, at all, but Poseidon, emerging from his aquatic kingdom. He came out of the sea dripping, smiling happily at his dry pants, not even short of breath.
    Ernest phoned frequently about Across the River. "Been jamming hard," he said on one occasion. "Black Dog is tired too. He'll be glad when the book is over and so will I. But, by Christ, I'll miss it for a while. Just wrote a goddamn wonder chapter, the man says modestly. Got it all, to break your heart, into two pages. Yesterday Roberto counted. He hates to count but counts accurately, and through this morning it is 43,745. This is so you know what you have as effectives. Think it should go sixty or just under.
    "About the monies, please advise me. We ought to make a contract before it is finished. It is really the best book that I have written, I think, but I am prejudiced, of course. Have only two more innings to pitch and I plan to turn their caps around."
    Cosmo's reply about the contract was that Ernest was such an old and valued friend of the Hearst organization that he was to name his own price; when I telegramed him that remarkable information he phoned me about it. He wanted to know the most Cosmopolitan had ever paid for a serialized novel. I told him seventy-five thousand dollars. "Okay," he said, "I figure I ought to top that by ten. Please tell them I've been throwing in my armor worse that Georgie Patton ever did and there isn't a plane on the ground that can fly. Brooklyn Tolstoys, grab your laurels and get out of that slip stream. I even throw in the taking of Paris for free. Will probably never live to finish the long book anyway. So what the hell?" Irwin Shaw, Brooklyn-born—an enduring target for Ernest's shafts—had just published The Young Lions.
    Although I did not know it at the time, since I had not known him for long, this rather frequent use of the telephone was highly unusual for Ernest. He later explained to me that there were only a few people he felt comfortable with on the telephone. Marlene Dietrich was one. Toots Shor was another. Ordinarily Ernest advanced upon a telephone with dark suspicion, virtually stalking it from behind. He picked it up gingerly and placed it to his ear as if to determine whether something inside was ticking. When he spoke into it his voice became constricted and the rhythm of his speech changed, the way an American's speech changes when he talks with a foreigner. Ernest would invariably come away from a telephone conversation physically exhausted, sweated, and driven to stiff drink. But he liked to phone Toots Shor from Paris or Malaga or Venice and throw a few lefts at him before placing a bet, through Toots' auspices, on an impending fight or a World Series. Ernest liked to phone Dietrich because, as he said, they had loved each other for a long time and they always told each other everything that happened and they never lied to each other except when very necessary, and then only on a temporary basis.
    Later