New Yorker writer Lillian Ross made her reputation as a journalist on this 1950 profile of Ernest Hemingway. And she also made a lifelong friend of Hemingway on the head of it. Yet, strangely enough, despite her tremendous admiration for her subject--"the greatest American novelist and short-story writer of our day," she declares in the opening sentence--the piece was widely viewed as an assault. Some readers were "almost deliriously censorious," Ross writes of the book's original publication, "about the way Hemingway talked and the way he enjoyed himself and the way he was openly vulnerable." Ross essentially made herself a fly on the wall during two days that Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, spent in New York City while en route to Venice, and she wrote down everything the great man said and did. Hemingway hit the airport bar within minutes of landing, proceeded (several shots of bourbon later) to his suite at the Sherry-Netherland, summoned his old friend Marlene Dietrich for caviar, champagne, and war stories, bought a winter coat at Abercrombie at his wife's insistence, looked at pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art while pulling on a flask, met with his publisher Charles Scribner, and ran into friends. And he talked ceaselessly, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes foolishly in a kind of pseudo-Native American dialect (dropping articles) about life and art, baseball and women, hunting and horseracing, writing and competing ("I beat Mr. Turgenev," he declares at one point. "Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant").
Whatever one feels about Hemingway, one has to admire Ross's extraordinary success in bringing the man to life in this slim volume. Her Portrait of Hemingway is worth any hundreds of chapters of standard, fact-filled biography in conveying a tangible, immediate sense of what "Papa" was really like. --David Laskin
From the Inside Flap
950, Lillian Ross's first portrait of Ernest Hemingway was published in The New Yorker. It was an account of two days Hemingway spent in New York in 1949 on his way from Havana to Europe. This candid and affectionate profile was tremendously controversial at the time, to the great surprise of its author. Booklist said, "The piece immediately conveys to the reader the kind of man Hemingway was--hard-hitting, warm, and exuberantly alive." It remains the classic eyewitness account of the legendary writer, and it is reproduced here with the preface Lillian Ross prepared for an edition of Portrait in 1961.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, and to celebrate the centenary of this event, Ms. Ross has written a second portrait of Hemingway for The New Yorker, detailing the friendship the two struck up after the completion of the first piece. It is included here in an amended form. Together, these two works establish the definitiv
From the Back Cover
"Lillian Ross is the mistress of selectively listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, of fastening on the one quote that tells all. She is a brilliant interpreter of what she hears and observes."
--Irving Wallace
About the Author
Lillian Ross was born in Syracuse, New York. She worked as a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1945 to 1987 and returned to the magazine in 1993. Ms. Ross is the author of twelve books, including Picture (available as a Modern Library hardcover), Talk Stories, Takes, Reporting, Vertical and Horizontal, and Here but Not Here.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One of the earliest of my privileged friendships that developed with people I've written about was with Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Mary. In 1950--when he was, as he liked to put it, "half a century old"--I wrote a long Profile about him in The New Yorker, and after it appeared, I didn't understand why some people were almost deliriously censorious about the way Hemingway talked and the way he enjoyed himself and the way he was openly vulnerable. By now--having the advantage of years of friendship with the Hemingways after the publication of the Profile--I've gained some insight into that peculiar response to him.
I once wrote, in an Introduction to an edition of my book Reporting: "Anyone who trusts you enough to talk about himself to you is giving you a form of friendship. . . . If you spend weeks or months with someone, not only taking his time and energy but entering into his life, you naturally become his friend. A friend is not to be used and abandoned; the friendship established in writing about someone often continues to grow after what has been written is published." That's the way I like it to be for me.
As a friend, Hemingway was stalwart. He had told me to feel free to write whatever I chose to write about him, and he never reneged. "I thought your piece was a good, straight OK piece," he said about the Profile initially. A week later, he said: "Don't ever worry about loseing"--it was his habit to keep the "e" in his participles--"me friends nor anything about piece." He added, "I take the wind like an old tree; have felt the wind before; north south east and west." Another time he said that he lost about a friend a day over the Profile. "But what the hell; any friend you can lose you might as well lose them early and anyway it is too late." Once he said: "Please don't think you ever have to answer any jerks or ever defend me. I am self-propelled and self-defendable." And again: "Actually good old Profile made me about as many enemies as we have in North Korea. But who gives a shit? A man should be known by the enemies he keeps." Several years later, he told me that people continued to tal
k to him about the Profile: "All are very astonished because I don't hold anything against you who made an effort to destroy me and nearly did, they say. I always tell them how can I be destroyed by a woman when she is a friend of mine and we have never even been to bed and no money has changed hands?"
He had some succinct advice for me as a writer: "Just call them the way you see them and the hell with it."
Throughout the succeeding eleven years, until his death, Hemingway wrote scores of letters to me. Mary also wrote from time to time. An unshakable friendship developed, and Hemingway called our correspondence "the best invention since penicillin." He paid me what I considered the ultimate compliment, when he said, "I know you will stick like the Third or Fourth Infantry Divisions." I last heard from him in 1961--fourteen years after we met--when he was in St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had gone to seek medical help. It was about five months before he killed himself, in Ketchum. After that, I would see his wife, Mary, from time to time, especially when she came to live in New York, until her death in 1986.
In his letters to me, Hemingway often used the joke "Indian" talk he had invented in conversation with his wife and friends, dropping his articles and being intentionally ungrammatical. He knew that time was short ("Time is the least thing we have of," as he says in the Profile) so he devised a way of talking that was free and loose and full of his own kind of shorthand. He kidded around in other ways, too. For example, while writing a letter he would switch from typewriter to handwriting: "Had to quit typing due to my self pity + cramps. There are a lot of compensations in life. Anyhow, I don't have to re-marry Dorothy Parker. Please write. Huck Hemingstein." Or: "Wrote you a funny letter last night when yours came. But had to tear it up because it was too rough. I shouldn't have said that about the sin house, etc. anyway. But I got used to telling the truth to you and it's a hell of a habit to stop. Probably am just as much of a jerk as those bastards that rush to their analysts. My analyst's name is Royal Portable (noiseless) the 3rd." He also liked to refer to his typewriter as the Royal Deportable Machine.
Hemingway signed a few of his letters "Papa," but mostly he signed them "Ernest" or "Honest Ernie" or "Huck von Hemingstein" or "Ernest Buck Hemingstein" or "Mountain Boy Huck" or "Huckmanship von Hemingstein" or "Love and good luck, Ernest." Or, after signing, he would draw three mountain peaks, which I assumed was his own idea of an Indian sign.
Occasionally, he would apologize for his "sloppy writing." And he would ask, "But you don't want me to write all the time with a hard, gem-like flame do you?" Then he would throw in a Hemingway sentence as only Hemingway could write it. In talking about the "haunted, nocturnal life" he led in Cuba, he once wrote that he had been up since "0230" and it was now "0530": "It is getting light now before the sun rises and the hills are grey from the dew of last night."
