Page 52 - WTP VOl. XII #1

Fielder and Me (continued from preceding page) civilization is heading.
When the lecture was over, Fiedler walked toward a car that was going to take him to his hotel. I followed him, telling him that he was my literary hero and that I’d read most of what he’d written, at least most of what had been published, including his poetry and his fiction: a novel, The Second Stone, and short story collections. He smiled but kept moving toward the street. Before he got to the car that was going to whisk him away, I managed to tell him that of all his writings, the piece that had affected me most deeply was an article of his published in Partisan Review
in 1962, a memoir about his strange visit to Ernest Hemingway a few months before Hemingway took his own life. He stopped, as if waiting for me to go on.
I told Fiedler that his article about Hemingway had moved me to tears, and that what I most recalled was that he said he “loved Hemingway for his weakness without ceasing to despise him for his strength.” I told him that that phrase had lodged itself deep in my consciousness.
Fiedler turned and faced me, acknowledging that I was not just another random fan. He looked at me for a few seconds. Was he deciding if I could handle what he was about to say?
“It’s hard to be honest,” Fiedler said, almost under his breath, in a kind of confessional tone. “It’s really hard to tell the truth. We all lie, to one degree or another. We all do. But that line about Hemingway, that was one of the most truthful lines I’ve ever committed to paper.”
The word ‘truth’ triggered another memory from his writing. I told Fiedler it was from him that I learned the concept of ‘symbolic’ truth-telling, a lie that points to a deeper truth.
(Fiedler wrote an essay about Americans who had been Communists in the 1930s being accused of treason and perjury in the 1950s. Since they felt that what they did was for the good of mankind, their declaration of innocence, though a lie, was what he called a symbolic truth.)
Fiedler smiled, nodded. He wanted to know who I was. I told him my name and that I had worked on audiovisual shows for the USIA. I added that I was such a big fan of his that a recent audiovisual show I’d co-produced was influenced by his literary concepts.
To my surprise, Fiedler said he’d like to see that audiovisual show. I was speechless, as if, after seeing Elvis perform, a fan meets ‘the King’ and is then
invited to play some of his own songs for Elvis. Dan Scherr, the Jerusalem USIA director, was next to me, and he stepped in and told Fiedler that we could arrange a private showing of “Shifting Gears.”
“How about ten o’clock tomorrow morning, right here at the USIA center in Tel Aviv? They have a projection room we can use.” To my surprise, Fiedler eagerly went along with this plan. We decided to meet at the Tel Aviv USIA building the following day.
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On the way back to Jerusalem, I thanked Scherr for his help in setting up a showing of “Shifting Gears.” He asked me about the article I’d mentioned, the Partisan Review piece.
I told him the article describes a trip in November 1960, when Fiedler and a colleague of his visited Hemingway at his home near Sun Valley, Idaho. Hemingway was 61 then and already an old man,
all macho bluster having disappeared. He moved unsteadily, stammered, his hand-grip was weak and flabby. He cursed at a screen door that wouldn’t close, lost track of what he was saying, mumbling to himself. It was very uncomfortable for Fiedler, who preferred the silences among them as a respite from what he called Hemingway’s “platitudes.”
Fiedler had written about him, so he felt Hemingway was a character in his writing. Meeting him was disconcerting, as if Shakespeare were to run into Hamlet who’d critique the play about him, a kind of dislocation that a fantasy writer might invent. This surreal experience yielded what Fiedler called an “imaginary interview,” in which reality and imagi- nation, past and present, were superimposed in a confusing jumble.
In the article, Fiedler revisited literary territory he’d mined before: giving Hemingway credit for develop- ing a terse prose style—the “closest thing to silence available in words”—and a short story technique that spawned countless imitations; on the negative side, Hemingway’s work was “sentimental” and he never created a truly tragic hero. He came closest to that with Jake Barnes, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, who was impotent because of a war wound and whose truncated romance with Lady Brett was therefore doomed.
Fiedler wrote that Hemingway the man went from being the “beautiful” youth in Paris’s moveable feast days, to being ‘Papa’ in Cuba, the ‘old stud’ with a rifle in hand and a ‘splendid beard,’ ceding
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