retype the next thirty pages. Something had to be done on page eight of the second draft and perhaps to page nine, to make them final so the rest of the typescript could be left as it was. Thinking about copy typists and their like, all the way back to the monks with their dirty habits, copying the word in their cells, David believed he had discovered his life’s work.
Once attuned, he found examples in everything he taught—we all contributed suggestions—and he is currently applying for a Canada Council grant to get the time to work up a paper on the topic. In the course of his enquiries, David stumbled across the case of Jake Barnes, the impotent hero of The Sun Also Rises, a case which David saw as a valid extension of his own method.
When preparing a lecture on the novel, he saw that all the usual explanations of Jake’s impotence were beside the point. What he found in the learned journals was that the literary meaning, the symbolism of Jake’s problem, though endlessly and variously teased out, was first of all seen as essentially personal, representing Jake’s inability after his war-time experiences to find meaning in the universe (this view is often supported by quoting from a passage in A Farewell to Arms, a tragic love story written several years later). Secondly, and universally, was the inability of the world to replace the loss of faith brought on by the failure of the war to end wars. Nada.
It is David’s contention that all this is no more than elegant chat, a collection of verbal constructs spun out of the critics’ bowels. The real point is that Barnes is impotent because Hemingway at the time decided that impotency was one of the few ways left in which sex, especially the sex act, could be made interesting on paper. Thus Hemingway, needing a love story, and unable to believe that anyone could still render the climactic act interesting, rendered it impossible, because that was interesting. Departments of English had been searching for a symbolic understanding of what was only a technical difficulty. (Wintergreen, by the way, also allows for the possibility that Hemingway’s age had something to do with it. Impotence, Wintergreen speculates, might have been a good literary idea to the youngish writer of The Sun Also Rises, but to the mature writer of A Farewell to Arms, it was something to be feared.)
Finally, David wonders if the idea of impotence came to him one day during the act, as it were, while he was making mental notes as to how he would describe it in his novel and thinking about it so deeply that it took his mind off the act and, bingo, the idea of impotence was sprung. But this is mere speculation and no use in a serious academic discussion.
Wintergreen is very deeply read, in Hemingway and elsewhere, as he searches for the solutions writers have employed to solve the day-to-day problems of their trade, and he was able to supply me with everything I needed to know.
“The hotel Hemingway stayed in was the Selby,” he said, “But the one you want is the Garrick, about half a block south on the other side.”
I waited.
“It’s something that often gets muddled in the printed accounts. The point is that the manuscripts, the papers, whatever, were found in a renovation of a hotel that is not connected to Hemingway at all. How did they get there?” He placed his fingertips together.
“David. I’m not a seminar. Just tell me. Surely someone like you has tried to find out.”
“Sorry. Yes. No. So far no one has cared enough to find out. I’m keeping my eye on it, of course, and if you come across anything, let me know.
“The two hotels have become one in the accounts I’ve read, always called the Selby, but that isn’t where the papers were found. Point is, we know where Hemingway was every day of his stay in Toronto, so no one cares that seventy years later some papers surfaced at the Garrick, then disappeared. If they reappeared, it wouldn’t matter where they were found, as long as they were authentic.
“I think it’s interesting. It may be that the papers were, in fact, discovered at the Selby by a workman who was painting one of the bedrooms, and discarded or forgotten at the Garrick when the workman was on the next job. Another theory involves a prostitute—the Garrick was part brothel—and there are plenty of others. But the speculation, never very strong once the papers disappeared, died out.
“Nowadays the biographies don’t even mention the Garrick, and a casual mention of “the Hemingway Papers” generally refers to another set lost on a French train. And now they’ve found a whole new batch in Hemingway’s old basement in Cuba, but if I were you and wanted to find out whose hands were last on the Toronto Hemingway papers, I wouldn’t bother with the Selby yet. Think Garrick.”
chapter eleven
It was Carole’s turn to cook so we had the thawed three-month-old remains of a carton of arrabiata sauce from Pusiteri’s poured over spaghettini with some grated parmesan, a salad from the bin of pre-washed green stuff in Loblaws, the heel of a loaf of Italian bread from Spiga’s (the best bread in Toronto),and a bit of Stilton with Carr’s water biscuits, all washed down with the dregs of a bottle of Penascal, a Spanish wine we buy by the case and will continue to do so as long as the LCBO continues to stock it.
I go into such brand name detail only to show how well we live considering how much Carole dislikes cooking. It’s not that she can’t cook, it’s just that it interferes with the six or eight hours a day she sets aside for reading. I, on the other hand, like the idea of cooking; I’m just no good at it. I have no instinct for it, and too often when I am following a recipe I concentrate so hard that I can’t remember where I’m at and omit or double the quantity of some spice like cayenne with the result that the dish withers the taste buds or turns into baby food. So nowadays, when it’s my turn, like Carole, I tend to rely on whatever Pusiteri’s or Ziggy’s has cooked and I can take home to warm up. The task has lately been made more difficult by the disappearance of Marks and Spencers, at one time the purveyors of the most edible instant food in town. As back-up we buy assorted spaghetti sauces from Pusiteri’s, six cartons at a time. Though I have no talent for the stove, I have developed three company dishes that even I can’t screw up, three dishes that I now cook in rotation whenever we have guests. We entertain so rarely that these three should see me out.
Carole said, “How’s Ginger?”
Ginger and Carole like each other. They communicate on some wavelength outside my range. Nothing to do with sex, I’m sure. When I brought him home for dinner she sensed almost immediately that Ginger was sexually audacious, and successful, but when the two of them locked over the dining-table it was because of something else they found in each other. When he was gone, I asked Carole what women saw in him, and she said she hadn’t the faintest idea. She thought perhaps he had something that he switched off in our house as a courtesy to me, but said I could bring him to dinner whenever I liked because he was one of the select group of people (two or three) who were as interesting as the book she was currently reading. Then, mind-reading, she said, as she had said once or twice before over the years of our relationship, “Don’t worry. It’s you I love.”
I said, “Thanks. But back to Ginger. I think I may have a problem.”
“As a roommate?”
“Sort of. I don’t know how it didn’t come up at dinner, but we have another roommate.”
“And they might not get along? Something like that?” Carole looked at her watch and hung on to her book.
“I’m afraid they’ll get along very well. Our new roommate is female, Japanese and luscious.”
“Says you?”
“Objectively. She just is. You can’t avoid seeing it, and thinking it. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to knock on the door when I come back from class.”
“Don’t be silly.” She looked up from her book and focused on me. “Bring her home.”
“Here? I thought feeding Ginger was our quota for this term.”
“I didn’t mean for dinner, but okay, if you like.” She thought about this for a moment.“No,” she said. “Not for dinner. She might be a vegetarian,