“He loved everything up to a certain point, and then nothing was any good anymore.” – Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester.
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In the war he did horrible things. Put det cord around a prisoner’s forehead and set it off. Vaporized the guy’s head. Laughed and said, “It’s faster than human nerves so it’s completely painless.” Like that made it okay.
He never told that story. He had trouble remembering which war it had been. He sometimes pictured jungle, other times desert. His head ached like a son of a bitch if he tried too hard to decide.
What did it matter? “World’s shit,” he would say. “Makes no sense. It’s crazy. Meaningless. Nothing matters. Doesn’t make a difference what you do or don’t do.” He would drink then. Get drunk but never sloppy.
“Sure it’s true. As true as whisky.” He would snarl a smile. “Universe is indifferent and the world’s hostile. And it always kills you. Just do what you want.”
His words soured younger people. Others turned on him for other reasons. He lied about himself. Bragged and belittled. He often bullied, sometimes stuck up for victims of bullying. “Bullying a bully is the best,” he would say.
When younger himself he took men’s wives. He would then dare them to do something about it. Some of us said he was going to get killed. “Let them kill me,” he would say. “If they can. And they can’t because they don’t have the fucking balls.”
Maybe he was right.
He took himself out one night. Blew his head off with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun. Woke the neighbors. They howled, being coyotes. He lay in that desert cabin for seven weeks until we found him. We never asked ourselves if someone else had been there at the time.
That’s how no one knew to ask me about it.
How easy it was.
Son of a bitch deserved worse but I couldn’t get hold of any det cord. I would have had him swallow one end and I would have ignited the other and showered in his guts and blood for laughs.
Now I’m writing his biography. It will be out next year sometime, if I manage to wrestle it to a draw. Fucking thing is too much like him. It is big, full of shit, and impossible to ignore. If I don’t get it all down my head might explode too.
Anyway, wanted you to know I’m not returning the damned advance. Instead I’m working. Harder than you’ll ever know. And if you don’t burn this when you get it, fuck you, too. It won’t amount to anything against me. Hell, I’d be applauded if anyone knew.
No, it won’t be in the book. I’m telling you only because it’s so lonely here and I never told anyone and I figure if you know, you will understand how I wrote the book and you will go to bat for it. It will sell like his crap sold; better.
Anyway, you take good care of yourself. Say hi to Anne and give Jessie a hug for me. We’ll see each other as soon as I can hand this manuscript to you and be quit of it, done for good, and free of his sodden ghost.
If I can ever be.
Oh, the Leicester Hemingway quotation looked good to me. It fits with the subject of my book; he modeled himself on Ernest Hemingway you know. Hell, we all did.
Why we didn’t think it through better, I’ll never know.
Sayonara, mon frere. Yeah, remember that? Brothers in arms, whether we have all our limbs or not, right?
Gotta go. Damned book needs fleshing out.
You ever hear of a biography that isn’t all lies?
–M.
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Letter found beside the body of a writer who shall remain nameless. Seems he felt guilty for what he did in war, and later, among friends and others. Too bad.
There was no manuscript, no biography. Some say it was stolen by who ever murdered him. Others say he offed himself to complete his Hemingway fixation.
As he said, it’s funny how so many writers ape what they don’t get, and fail to think it through.
–N.
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