The Trip to Echo Spring (19 page)

Hundreds of people were shooting themselves in Florida that summer, and the death was not investigated by the police, though there are suggestions in both Berryman's biographies that it didn't resemble an ordinary suicide owing to an absence of the powder burns that tend to be visible with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. As for Martha, ten weeks later she married John Angus and bestowed his name upon her sons, taking, at her new husband's request,
Jill Angel
for herself. Little wonder then that the adult Berryman, tottering in and out of rehab, drinking himself halfway to death and back, might set down in Dream Song after Dream Song the story of the bullet and the swim, concluding: ‘That mad drive wiped out my childhood.'

A line came into my head then. It was from another Dream Song. What was it? Something about pieces. ‘The pieces sat up and wrote'? Yes.

The overwhelming infantile wail of that
need need need,
too urgent even for punctuation. If you carry that sense of starvation – for love, for nourishment, for security – with you into adulthood, what do you do? You feed it, I suppose, with whatever you can find to stave off the awful, annihilating sense of dismemberment, disintegration, of being torn apart, of losing the integrity of the self.

These are the terrors of the infant waiting for the breast, or they are if you read Freud and Melanie Klein; and these are also the terrors of the adult whose childhood sense of security was ruptured before they'd managed to build a sturdy enough skin with which to face the world. Hardly any wonder that the Dream Songs are so obsessively interested in the state of being skinless or of having one's pelt ripped off or stripped away. Indeed, Berryman once joshed bleakly to his editor about having them bound ‘blue-black' in scraps of his own skin.

It struck me then that Berryman's pieces might have some kind of kinship with the objects raked out of the fire in ‘Now I Lay Me': the broken knives and broken arrowheads, the blackened, blunted parts of things that were once whole and useful. The mood of that whole
story radiates outward from the fire (in fact I'd read in one biography that its forcefulness as an image meant it must have literally happened; a statement that seems gravely to misunderstand the novelist's art). Nonetheless, I wondered if its extraordinary intensity derived in some way from a child's sense that in the silent, smiling war between his parents, there was a terrible heat, and in that heat things that should be kept entire were broken or struck apart. And then of course Nick fetches a newspaper to wrap up the relics: containing them in a false skin made literally of words.

Hunger, liquor, need, pieces, wrote.
Something about that list of words was crucial. I could feel it, but I couldn't quite crack it. Linear A. I'd been banging my head against these questions for months, years. The three-way relationship between childhood experience, alcohol and writing. I'd read paper after paper about early life stresses and mediating factors, about the hand-me-down catastrophe of genetic predisposition and the unearned luck of genetic resilience. I'd read about castration complexes and death drives and how Hemingway's mother was the dark queen of his internal world and in the midst of all these things I could hear the stripped-down elements of Berryman's poem: five words, clicking like beads on an abacus.

Hunger, liquor, need, pieces, wrote.
A sense was building in me that there was a hidden relationship between the two strategies of writing and drinking and that both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, and a desire at once to mend it – to give it fitness and shape, in Cheever's phrase – and to deny that it was so. Hence those obsessive retellings: hence Nagasakit, Nick Adams, Henry Pussycat, Dick Diver, Estabrook and Coverley.

Writing about Marguerite Duras, another alcoholic writer who
liked to rake over the live coals of her own experience, Edmund White once observed:

Perhaps most novels are an adjudication between the rival claims of daydreaming and memory, of wish-fulfilment and the repetition compulsion, Freud's term for the seemingly inexplicable reenactment of painful real-life experiences (he argued that we repeat them in order to gain mastery over them). And as with music, the more familiar the melody, the more elegant and palpably ingenious can be the variations.

If I had to answer the question, I guess I'd say that fiction might – in addition to all its other functions – serve as a kind of storehouse, a way of simultaneously expelling something while keeping it close to home. And if I had to elaborate on this, I might say that when Ed Hemingway shot himself, the coroner took the gun, a Civil War .32 pistol, but later Grace managed to facilitate its return. At his request, she posted it to her son in Key West, along with a couple of her own paintings, adding in the accompanying letter that it was not to be considered a permanent gift. One version of this story says Hemingway defied her by throwing it in a lake. Perhaps. But what certainly did happen is that just over a decade later, married by now to a third wife, Martha Gellhorn, and living between Cuba and Sun Valley, he went to his desk – early in the morning, to judge by his habits – and wrote the following words:

Then after your father had shot himself with this pistol, and you had come home from school and they'd had the funeral, the coroner had returned it after the inquest . . .

He had put the gun back in the drawer in the cabinet where it belonged, but the next day he took it out and he had ridden up to the top of the high country above Red Lodge, with Chub, where they had built the road to Cooke City now over the pass and across the Bear Tooth plateau, and up there where the wind was thin and there was snow all summer on the hills they had stopped by the lake which was supposed to be eight hundred feet deep and was a deep green color, and Chub held the two horses and he climbed out on a rock and leaned over and saw his face in the still water, and saw himself holding the gun, and then he dropped it, holding it by the muzzle, and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight.

How pleasurable it must have been to write that long second sentence, riding up in one's mind into the high clean country of Montana. Down goes the gun, getting smaller and smaller, until it's disappeared from view: lost in one of those immaculate landscapes that Hemingway loved to reconstruct on the page. There's some funny intensity about the action needing to be witnessed, too. Robert Jordan – both the ‘he' and the ‘you' of this passage and the hero of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
– doesn't drop the gun until he's seen himself holding it reflected in the green glass of the water, which is to say that there's a brief moment of
mise en abyme,
as if even the semblance's own mirror self has to be implicated in the act: another kind of
watch charm.
Finally, the incident is capped with silence, just as the hills are capped in snow.

‘I know why you did that with the old gun, Bob,' Chub said.
‘Well, then we don't have to talk about it,' he had said.

As to the role of alcohol in all this: imagine the mixed relief and terror of getting that sequence down. Imagine pressing the words, letter by letter, into the page. And imagine getting up, closing the door to your study and walking downstairs. What do you do, with that sudden space in your chest? You go the liquor cabinet and you pour yourself a shot of the one thing no one can take from you: the nice good lovely gin, the nice good lovely rum. Click in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.

6

GOING SOUTH

WE CAME IN ABOVE MIAMI
at half past ten. First the lights, in their beautiful switchboard patterns, and then things passing in the space beneath the plane: diffuse dark shapes that must have been clouds, but which looked for a moment like the shadows of something gigantic swimming overhead. We swung out over the Atlantic, descending fast. My ears popped. A woman behind me switched on her phone as soon as the wheels hit tarmac. ‘Guess who's on this plane? My dad and his ex-wife. When I saw them at the airport I nearly freaked out.'

It was the first time I'd caught an internal flight, or flown without checked baggage. There was nothing to do. I just lifted my bag out of the locker and walked away. The airport was brightly lit and almost deserted and for a long time I went back and forth between levels, trying to find the stop for the hotel shuttle. It was very hot, and I went in and out, riding down on escalators and back up in lifts, my tiredness shot through with little fibrillations of alarm. Eventually I called the hotel, but the answering service was stuck on a loop. ‘Dial 5 to speak to a hotel service representative,' a mechanised voice kept
repeating. At last, when I was almost sobbing with frustration, the minibus appeared and swept me away to the Red Roof Inn.

The next morning, I collected the car. The day was overcast and very warm, and there were clouds of vultures circling the city. I drove out on Route 1, past strip malls and strip joints, signs for psychic readings and computer repairs. Then the buildings thinned and beyond the alligator fencing there was nothing but mangrove swamps and pools of standing water, where little white egrets dipped for fish. After a while the land narrowed in like a neck and there beyond the swamp was the sea. It was shallow and seamed with sandbars and deeper channels, the colours shifting musically from turquoise to green to a rich purple like spilled grape juice.

I parked by the bridge to Fiesta Key. There were two elderly black women fishing on the jetty. I said hello, and one turned to greet me. ‘Y'all going to Key West?' she asked, and when I said yes she nodded at the pilings running out to sea, and said: ‘That the old road.' I asked her what she was fishing for and she replied: ‘Snapper. Drum. Whatever comin' through here on the way to the Gulf.'

In Marathon I stopped for lunch at the Cracked Conch Café, drank a beer, ate a chicken quesadilla, drove on. Conch, pronounced
Konk,
the name for Key natives. Within minutes I was at the start of the Seven Mile Bridge. I've had dreams of crossing over water all my life, and as I drove up on to it I had a funny, overwhelming sense of realities collapsing into one another. The road was made of pinkish concrete, and the old bridge ran beside it, handrails rusted. There were mangrove islands far out to sea, and a single white boat in the east. I could still feel it days later: the enormous proximity of water, and the sensation of flying above it, weightless and unimpeded.

Languages were sliding together; the Gulf sluicing into the Atlantic. Bahia Honda Key,
deep bay,
Spanish Harbor Channel, Norfolk Island Pine. In Key West I lost my way and found myself on the estate by the Navy Yard, where Hemingway once kept his boat
Pilar.
I backed out and consulted the map. At first glance the town seemed enchanted, the little clapboard houses overwhelmed by the lusciousness of their gardens. I'd never been anywhere so dense with flowers, so gigantically, preposterously fertile. Banana trees, lignum vitae, cockerels and chickens meandering down the road. There were cats everywhere: cats and little lizards and larger lizards, and people slopping home in flip-flops or weaving bikes through pools of shade.

At the guesthouse my room was painted primrose yellow and the air-conditioning made a reassuring hum. As soon as I'd unpacked I went out to the pool. Two couples were drinking beer in plastic cups and talking about Cuba. ‘They're a horrible people,' one said. I sat on in the sun, reading a book about Hemingway's haunts, and when at last I got up the design of my swimsuit was emblazoned into my skin, white on fiery pink.

For more than ten years Key West was a place that Hemingway returned to: a place to recuperate, to set new things going or finish old ones off. After his father died and he'd dealt with the fallout in Oak Park, he returned to the town to revise
A Farewell to Arms,
leaving only the ending uncertainly set. Then, exhausted by the upheavals of his American year, he went to Paris with Patrick and Pauline, spending almost the whole of 1929 at large in Europe.

They sailed back into town on 9 January 1930. Almost immediately afterwards he began
Death in the Afternoon,
his beautiful, unclassifiable and sometimes maddeningly dull treatise on bullfighting. This time he worked in a rented house on Pearl Street, within spitting distance of the marina. In June he took the book away with him to Wyoming, where he spent the summer on the Nordquist ranch, writing mornings and riding and fishing in the afternoons.

This period of good solid work came abruptly to an end the day after Halloween. Driving a friend to Billings to catch the night train, he wrecked the car in the dark, spilling into a ditch and smashing his right arm. They had been passing a bottle of bourbon back and forth, but he figured afterwards his poor night vision had been to blame. When, weeks later, the hospital released him he chose Key West to recuperate, spending the first few months of 1931 waiting irritably to see if the damaged nerve would regenerate or not. ‘I'm still in bed most of the time,' he told Max, ‘but count on Key West to fix everything up finely.'

It was towards the end of this painful and frustrating period that the Hemingways finally bought a house of their own. On 29 April, Pauline's Uncle Gus paid $8,000 for the Tift property, a big, well-situated wreck at 907 Whitehead Street. The house with balconies opposite the lighthouse, Hemingway described it to a friend, adding happily to Max: ‘this is really going to be the hell of a fine house.' The garden was full of figs and coconuts and limes, and he wrote dreamily about how he'd like to plant a gin tree.

The next morning I went to see it for myself. It had rained before dawn, but by ten the streets were sweltering. I took a shortcut through the cemetery, where I disturbed a bearded green iguana the size of a
cat. The graves were decorated with bunches of faded plastic flowers and painted angels the boiled pink of baby dolls. On Whitehead Street I joined a queue running the length of the wall Pauline had built to dissuade tourists.

Toll paid, I went straight to the pool, palm-shadowed, the trees arching up above it. ‘You'd always be picking out leaves,' an English man muttered. In the shop there were earrings with six-toed cats and posters of Papa beaming next to a giant marlin. ‘He's a very famous writer, honey,' a woman said pleadingly to her teenaged son.

The house was very stately, with yellow shutters and a wrought-iron verandah that ran right round the second floor. I ducked inside and made a beeline for the bookshelves.
Poise: How to Attain It. Danger is my Business. Buddenbrooks.
Hans Christian Andersen's
Fairy Tales. On the Eve
by Turgenev. Two copies of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
There were bits of Africana dotted here and there: horribly caricatured boys with hands like paws, their eyes sorrowful and swollen. Jade ashtrays; a chandelier made of opaque glass flowers in wonderful seawater colours.

At the back there was a smaller building that had originally been a coach house. Shortly after he moved in, Hemingway converted its upper storey into a writing studio, connecting it to the master bedroom by way of a catwalk. It was closed to visitors now, but you could peer in through a wrought-iron gate. The room was big and book-lined, with pale grey walls and a red tiled floor. It was decorated with mementoes of old trips: a model bull, a decoy duck, a marlin. ‘Hey Mom,' a different boy called out, ‘is that a typewriter?'

I wished I could slip inside. It reminded of my grandfather's flat. On the far wall there was a trophy head of a big Grant's gazelle, its
neck long and lovely, its ears alert. I thought it might have been shot on Hemingway's first trip to Africa, one of the hundred and two corpses itemised in Pauline's expedition diary.

The trip had been in the planning for a very long time. Before the accident in Billings, Uncle Gus had promised $25,000 for an African safari on the understanding that a good book could be wrung from it. Hemingway initially figured on an all-male group, but by the time his arm was strong enough to shoot only his pal Charlie Thompson was still on board. In the end Pauline made up numbers, though she never enjoyed hunting with quite the zeal of her husband.

On 20 December 1933 they travelled from Nairobi to the Masai game reserve in the Ngorongoro Crater, west of Mount Kilimanjaro. From the beginning, Hemingway was out of sorts. He missed a gazelle, missed a leopard, then wounded and failed to find and kill a cheetah. He had frequent attacks of diarrhoea, and by January was evidently suffering from a serious case of amoebic dysentery. In
Hemingway: The 1930s
(the fourth volume in a wonderfully detailed and novelistic five-part biography), Michael Reynolds observed: ‘By January 11, he was taking chlorine salts continuously, but his evening drinking undermined any good the medicine might have done.'

Eventually their guide telegraphed for a plane. Hemingway spent that day in bed, going to the campfire in the evening to eat a bowl of mashed potato. The plane was promised for the following morning but all day it failed to arrive. Then at ten the next day they spotted it glinting in the sky. It whisked him off to Nairobi, where he was treated with the anti-protozoal emetine and ran up a spectacular bar bill in the New Stanley Hotel. Returned to the field, his shooting
improved, but now every kudzu, every rhino he brought down was markedly smaller than those bagged by Charlie. Not a man not to mind, he drank whiskey in the evenings and brooded, becoming sour and aggressive, and sometimes, in the mornings, visibly sad.

Back in Key West, he wrote his account of the trip,
Green Hills of Africa
, in a great tumbling rush, finishing the first draft in six months. But Africa lingered in his mind, and a year or so later he turned to it again. ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro' is the story of a writer, Harry, who's dying of gangrene on an African hunt, incurred by failing to take proper care of a little thorn scratch on his knee. The plane that's supposed to take him into town hasn't arrived, and all day he lies on a cot in the shade of a mimosa tree, insulting his wife while drinking whiskey and sodas, though she begs him to lay off. (‘It said in Black's to avoid all alcohol.') ‘You bitch,' he says to her. ‘You rich bitch.'

In the space between fights he dreams of the stories he hasn't written yet, the ones he's been saving up and now will never start. ‘Snows' has the same doubled, riddling structure as ‘Now I Lay Me'. It's packed with fictions within the fiction; landscapes within the landscape. These italicised paragraphs are dense and impressionistic, dark rivulets that cut right through the central frame. Many of them are about Paris, and one is about Harry's grandfather's guns, which were burned in a fire, the lead melting in the magazines.

Hemingway pulled off a similar feat in the last chapter of
Death in the Afternoon,
which starts ‘If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it', and then rises to its own challenge, listing a swelling tide of images and memories that ought to be there, that should have been there, that are not there, but somehow magically also are: the smell of burned powder and the noise of the
traca and the last night of the feria when Maera fought Alfredo David in the Café Kutz and the trees in the forest of the Irati that are like drawings in a child's fairy book.

All his life, Hemingway possessed a genius for packing, for assembling trunks and fishing boxes; for stowing the things he needed on his travels in the most elegant and ingenious of ways. There's something of the same facility here, in this knack for building secret layers, for filling his fictions up with more than you'd think they'd bear. ‘I put all the true stuff in,' he said of ‘Snows' in the
Paris Review,
‘and with all the load, the most load any short story ever carried, it still takes off and flies.'

All the true stuff.
The story is clearly freighted with objects and incidents from his own trip – the cot, the missing plane, the bowl of mashed potato, the insistence on drinking despite medical advice. Harry keeps having visions of his death and in the last of these the plane arrives, and he flies up above the bush just as Hemingway did, seeing the zebra and the wildebeest moving in long fingers across the yellow-grey of the plains, and then the square white summit of Mount Kilimanjaro itself, as wide as the whole world.

Before this final dream, Harry asks himself why he failed as a writer. ‘He had destroyed his talent,' he answers, ‘by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions.' The woman, Helen, gets a portion of the blame. She's very rich, and he feels that he let himself be bought, for comfort's sake, and that the proximity of money rotted him hollow, just like the gangrene in his leg. ‘You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had,' he thinks, but even good insides don't last forever.