February 19, 2009
Hemingway’s fight club (1936)
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but harsh words can also lead to a punch in the mouth.It happened on this day when modernist writer Ernest Hemingway encountered modernist poet Wallace Stevens on a dock in Key West, Florida. Hemingway’s sister, Ursula, came to her brother in tears after encountering a drunken Stevens at a cocktail party and berated Ernest as a “sap” and “no man.”
Odds makers would have had a tough time handicapping this bout. Although Stevens was 56 to Hemingway’s 36, he was taller, heavier and had been an amateur boxer. He had also been drinking.
It turned out to be not much of a battle. When Stevens saw Hemingway in the street, he said, “You think you're Ernest Hemingway” and threw a punch. During the bare-knuckled dust-up on the dock, Stevens broke his hand on Hemingway’s jaw, and suffered several knock-downs, a black eye and a bruised face.
Stevens, worried about his standing as an insurance executive in Hartford, Conn., asked his sparring partner not to tell anyone about the fight. Hemingway agreed, but the request must have rankled him, because he used it in his current story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” When Macomber asks the Wilson to keep quiet about his cowardly flight from the lion, the hunter reflects: “He had not expected this. So he’s a bloody four-letter man as well as a bloody coward, he thought …. ‘It’s supposed to be bad form to ask us not to talk.’ “
Fortunately, Stevens probably never found out. “About Hemingway,” he wrote a friend in 1945, “I can say little because I don’t read him. This is merely because I read little or no fiction, and really read very much less of everything than most people. It is more interesting to sit round and look out of the window.”
Born: David Garrick, actor, playwright, poet, Hereford, Herefordshire, 1717; Kay Boyle, author, poet, St. Paul, Minn., 1902; Carson McCullers (ps. Lula Carson Smith), novelist, short-story writer, playwright, Columbus, Ga., 1917; Bollingen Prize Award for Poetry, Yale University, 1949; Amy Tan, novelist, Oakland, Calif., 1952.
Died: Multatuli (ps. Eduard Dekker), author, verse dramatist, Nieder-Ingelheim, Netherlands, 1887; André Gide, moralist, humanist, Paris, 1951; Knut Hamsun (ps. Knut Pederson), novelist, poet, near Grimstad, Norway, 1952; Leo Rosten, humorist, novelist, New York City, 1997; Virginia Hamilton, children's writer, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 2002.
Quote for the Day: Success is never final and failure is never fatal. — Winston Churchill
Also from “Writers 365”:
- Pooh Poohed and Other Small Slams
- Ulysses reaches a safe harbor (1934)
- Theodore Roethke’s Walk in the Woods (1935)
- Elvis Lives (1935)
- Malraux flies for Spain (1936)
- "Federico Lorca is Dead and Gone” (1936)
- Hemingway vs. Eastman (1937)
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