Authors: A. E. Hotchner
Q: How many books have you written?
A: I think thirteen. That's not very many, but I take a long time to write a book and I like to have fun in between. Also there have been too many wars and I was out of the writing business a long time.
Q: In your novels are you writing about yourself?
A: Does a writer know anyone better?
Q. That book
A Farewell to Arms,
how many years or months did it take you to write it?
A: I started it in Paris in the winter and wrote on it in Cuba, and Key West, Florida, in the early spring, then in Piggott, Arkansas, where my wife's parents were; then came up to Kansas City, where one of my sons was born, and finished it in Big Horn, Wyoming, in the fall. The first draft took eight months, and another five months to rewrite, thirteen months in all.
Q: Do you ever get discouraged—did you ever quit on a book?
A: Been discouraged but can't quit—there's no place to go. Mr. Joe Louis said it very well—you can run but you can't hide.
Q: Do you ever get your characters in a spot from which they can't escape?
A: Well, you try to avoid that or else you'll put yourself out of business.
Q: All these stories you write about Africa—why do you like Africa so much?
A: Some countries you love, some you can't stand. I love that one. There are some places here in Idaho that are like Africa and Spain. That's why so many Basques came here.
Q: Do you read a good deal?
A: Yes, all the time. After I quit writing for the day, I don't want to keep thinking about it, so I read.
Q: Do you study actual people for your books?
A: I don't go where I go for that purpose; I just go where my life takes me. There are things you do because you like to do them, other things because you have to do them. In doing these things you find the people you write about.
Q: We write essays and stories all the time in school. It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do. Is it?
A: Not at all. All you need is a perfect ear, absolute pitch, the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his, the guts of a burglar, no conscience except to writing, and you're in. It's easy. Never give it a thought. Many people have a compulsion to write. There is no law against it and doing it makes them happy while they do it and presumably relieves them. But the compulsory writer should be advised not to. Should he make the attempt, he might well suffer the fate of the compulsive architect, which is as lonely an end as that of the compulsive bassoon player.
Q: How did you learn so many languages?
A: By living in those countries. The Latin I had in school made language-learning easier, especially Italian. I was in Italy for quite a while during the First World War, and I picked up the language quickly and thought I spoke it rather well. But after I'd been wounded, I had to spend some time on therapy machines, exercising my wounded leg, and I became friends with an Italian major who was also getting therapy on the machines. I told him I thought Italian was an easy language. He complimented me on how well I spoke. I said I hardly deserved compliments since it was so easy.
"In that case," he said, "you might take up some grammar." So I began to study Italian grammar and I stopped talking for several months. I found that learning all the Romance languages was made easier by reading the newspapers—an English-language paper in the morning and then the foreign-language paper in the afternoon —it was the same news and the familiarity with the news events helped me understand the afternoon papers.
Q: After you finish a book, do you reread it?
A: Yes. Today I reread and rewrote four chapters. You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.
Q: How long do you usually write?
A: No more than six hours. After that you're too pooped and the quality goes. When I'm working on a book I try to write every day except Sunday. I don't work on Sunday. It's very bad luck to work on a Sunday. Sometimes I do but it's bad luck just the same.
Gary Cooper and Ernest had been good friends from the time they first met in Idaho in the early Thirties. They respected each other's hunting skills and knowledge of the outdoors, and they were always completely honest with one another. Cooper was an unaffected, compassionate man; and neither of them played the role of author or actor, which also had a lot to do with it. They shared rough jokes, swapped philandering secrets and enjoyed their mutual disdain for the encroaching years.
In the field Cooper was not quite as fast as Ernest in getting a duck in the gun sight, but he had just as pretty a move and was almost as accurate. We went out every day, regardless of weather, until a really fierce blizzard socked us in, and on that day Cooper came over in the afternoon with a whole smoked goose, Ernest brought in a half-gallon of Chablis that had been chilling in a snowbank, and we sat around the table in front of the fire all afternoon cutting off slices of the delicately smoked goose and drinking the Chablis.
"Ain't this Mormon country wonderful!" Cooper said. "They know how to live."
"I'm practically one myself," Ernest said. "Had four wives, didn't I?" He took a sip of wine. "To tell the truth, if I were reborn and I had a choice, I'd be a Mormon."
A bit self-consciously, Cooper confided to Ernest that after all these years he had finally converted to Catholicism to please his wife, Rocky, and his daughter, Maria. But he said he felt uncomfortable about it and wondered whether he had done the right thing. Ernest said that since he himself was only a miserable, failed Catholic, he couldn't give him a reading on it but he thought it would work out all right.
The talk then shifted to work projects, with Cooper wondering whether there was anything of Ernest's that might be good for him. "When you get my age," he said, "you get to scratching pretty hard for lead parts."
Ernest asked me what I thought might suit Cooper and I suggested
Across the River and into the Trees.
"Good idea," Ernest said to Cooper. "You'd just be playing Robert Jordan ten years older." Cooper hadn't read the book but said he'd get a copy as soon as he got back to Hollywood the following day.
In March of 1959, after completing the taping of the three-hour telecast of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
with Jason Robards, Maria Schell, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach heading the cast, I returned to Ketchum for a motor trek Ernest intended to make to Key West. I planned to drive him as far as New Orleans, where I had to catch a plane to Hollywood.
During my absence Ernest had bought from Dan Topping a Ketchum house of his own—a modern concrete abode that Topping had built into the side of the mountain rise, with the clear trout waters of the Wood River bowing around it. The view from any of its windows took your breath away.
Before we left Ketchum for Key West, Ernest released Owl, which was quite sad. We took him back to the very tree where Ernest had shot him and placed him on a bough, but when we returned to the car Owl returned too. "Maybe we've softened him up too much," Ernest said worriedly, "and he'll sit around here, waiting for someone to bring him his morning mouse, and starve to death."
"You can't take him back, Papa," I said, sensing what was in his mind. "He's a one-man owl and I don't think any of your friends, all of whom he has nipped occasionally, will offer him room and board."
"Well, what am I supposed to do? Tie him in the tree?"
Once more Ernest tried to talk Owl into staying in the tree but Owl got back to the car before he did. So we all went back to Ernest's house, and later in the day, without Ernest, Duke MacMullen and I took Duke's car and drove Owl to the tree, and this time Owl stayed.
The route Ernest had charted took us due south through Nevada and Texas to the Mexican border, following the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. Ernest's Ketchum car was too beat up for such a voyage so he rented the one and only Hertz vehicle in town, a four-door Chevrolet Impala. Mary cooked a quantity of game birds, which we packed in an insulated carry-bag, and Ernest laid a reserve supply of Sancerre in the trunk; the active supply was kept in the car in a waterproof leather bag that was filled with ice.
The highway through Utah and Nevada had been drawn with a ruler; there were very few cars in March and we traveled eighty miles an hour through gray sage and desert, mountains to right and left, range upon range—you could have put the wheel on automatic pilot. Ernest enjoyed every foot of the way. He remembered early motoring trips, gambling exploits in surrounding towns, hunting expeditions over distant terrain, and trail rides along the faintly glimpsed mountains; at every town we hit he recalled how things were in the good days before neon.
Lunches were roadside, Mary's partridges or teals with the crackling cold Sancerre, and afterward, as I gave the Chevy the whip and she settled into her eighty-mile-per-hour gallop, Ernest would siesta, his chin resting against his chest.
The automobile was Ernest's favorite mode of travel because, he said, it was the best way to see the countryside, the most mobile, and it kept him safe from contact with his fellow travelers. The inside of the chosen auto—Lancia, Packard or Chevrolet—was always a morass of rain gear, vest gear, footgear, food, maps, binoculars, wine bottles, liquor bottles, medicine bottles, cameras, caps, magazines, newspapers, books, brief cases (containing work-in-progress), ice sacks, drinking glasses, limes, knives and spare socks.
The first night, we stayed at the Stockman's Hotel in Elko, Nevada, a small, neat wide-open gambling town. Ernest had a cheerful reunion with two old pals he hadn't seen since Ketchum gambling days, Frosty the Dealer and Pot-Right Purvis, who were working the wheel at the Stockman's.
The next day's routing took us to Las Vegas, where Ernest had never been before. Jack Entratter, owner of the Sands, had invited Ernest and was expecting him, but when we pulled up and Ernest saw the flow of mink revolving in and out of the hallowed portal, he would have gone on if Entratter had not come out at that moment and taken him to his rooms, which were in a building far removed from the main citadel.
We spent two days in Vegas and Ernest had a fine time playing a little roulette, seeing the entertainment and holding court in the Sands cocktail lounge, where he talked gambling with Entratter and some of his boys, talked prize fighting with a couple of fight managers, discussed the Battle of the Bulge with a waiter who had been in his outfit, and conversed about literature with a beautiful Sands chorus girl who had an English Master's from Texas University and had read all his books.
Our journey across Texas from Eagle Pass to Laredo and over to Corpus Christi took us through countryside covered with a profusive variety of spring flowers. In Corpus Christi we checked into an attractive modern motel, the Sun and Sand, which is right on the Gulf. After the clerk had registered us, he asked whether Ernest would give him his autograph for his son, who was a great admirer of his books. Ernest said sure, just to leave a book in his box and he'd write a personal greeting in it. "What's your boy's name?" Ernest asked.
"Nick Adams," the desk clerk said.
Ernest gave him a look but didn't say anything. On the way up in the elevator, Ernest said, "John Gunther would have still been explaining."
The fourth day out, we left Corpus Christi very early in the morning to see the marsh birds, for which this area is famous, and Ernest identified the herons, king rails, slate-colored sandhill cranes and olive-brown courlans, coots and avocets with incisive knowledge and joy. After the marsh birds, we passed another freshet of brilliant wild-flower countryside and it was Mary's turn to effuse over the variety and beauty. By the time we reached Chateau Charles, Louisiana, for the night, we were surfeited with good things.
On the night before we were due into New Orleans, Ernest began to talk about future plans, especially about the following summer. An American friend of his, Bill Davis, who lived in Spain and whom he had not seen in twenty years, had invited them to stay in his house in Malaga; Ernest was considering that invitation and the idea of touring the bullfight circuit with Antonio. He would then write an addendum to
Death in the Afternoon
to bring it up to date; if he undertook such a summer, he invited me to join up. "Would be a beauty summer," he said. "Would do Pamplona, which I visited briefly in '53 but haven't done properly since
Sun Also Rises,
and all
ferias
where Antonio and Luis Miguel will fight
mano a mano.
Might be the most important bullfight summer in the history of Spain."
While he was briefly away from the dinner table, Mary said, "Well, Pd say he was becoming the old Papa again, wouldn't you?"
"You mean the young Papa."
"As he often tells me, 'Never lose confidence in the firm.' "
"I never have—have you?"
"No," Mary said, softly, "but on occasion Pve wavered a little."
Old wine in its cask sometimes reacts to seasons, and the summer of 1959 was, by Ernest's own avowal, one of the best seasons of his life. That aura of keen enjoyment I had found so overwhelming when we had first met in Cuba eleven years before, and which since then had been steadily blunted, now had a splendid renascence.