Undefeated

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. -- Hemingway

Though he has fallen into so much disfavor over the last 50 years, Ernest Hemingway remains the most accessible and immediately emotional author of contemporary American prose. Most of us who wander sideways into literature from journalism identify with his lean and muscular style, although our university professors hammer home his brutal sexism and defiance of more textured literary conventions. When I taught at the University of Illinois, I loved to use his short story, Hills Like White Elephants, as a brilliant example of how setting amplifies character. The protagonists share an oblique argument over abortion. For the man, anyway, it's an idea. A baby would crimp his style. For the woman, it's real and she has heard enough. They wait on a station platform, railroad tracks moving off in opposite directions. In the end, he believes he convinces her, but what he has done is kill off any remaining love she may have had for him.

In his time, Hemingway's language introduced a wide American audience to the experience of literature. There is little doubt that Hemingway became a caricature in the end, crippled from successive concussions and alcoholic depression. His suicide is deconstructed as a death wish, but anyone who feels his prose -- the rhythms of Bach beneath repetitions of sentence structures, the vivid Cezanne brush strokes in Hemingway's landscapes -- understands that he had a thirst for life. His prose ignites the Now-ness of things.

While in graduate school, I wrote about Hemingway's homage to painting and classical music. and my professor sent the paper to the New York office of the International Hemingway Society. I was invited to present the paper to the society's annual meeting in Lignano Sabbiadoro--a small beachfront resort near Venice.

I landed in Milan and took a four-hour train to the sea, speaking my poor Spanish with fellow riders, sampling Italian cheese and bread, and chocolate laced with liquor. I reached Lignano at dusk. The following morning, the convention met in a conference hall shaped like a conch shell at the end of a pier that stretched out into the Mediterranean. To each side of the pier women from northern Europe sunned topless on the strand while Italian men scurried about indelicately with cameras. In the afternoon, racing boats raised their dazzling sails against the sky.

On the afternoon I was scheduled to appear, I was terrified. I was the only graduate student selected to read a paper. All around were full professors and authors who had written critical books and biographies on Hemingway. I was certain I was a fraud. Local dignitaries filled the tables, sipping regional wines and working through plates of cold cuts and melon, city elders who wore their suit coats draped over their shoulders and pinky rings that caught the overhead lights.

I worked through the paper without much flair, but in a steady voice, looking my public in the eye. And when I was done, there was great applause and two professors I had met at my hotel spirited me off for cocktails.

We were seated at a seaside cafe in the blush of sunset, aperitif saucers piled neatly in the center of the table, and I praised the mighty gods for carrying me across the prickly seas of academe. My two table-mates, Roger and Mary Grace taught at Canisius College. Roger suggested that I consider pursuing my PhD immediately. I was beaming.

The night settled down about us and the lights came on the masts of idle boats in the harbor. We had finished the antipasto and settled on our dinner order when two critics marched up under the arc of the table lights.

"You know," one of them said rather drunkenly, "everything you talked about has already been done."

The other pointed his finger at my chest. "Been done," he said. Several critics at the conference who had written books on the subject, he said.

I looked down at the plate of olive pits. Mary Grace put her hand on mine.

Just as suddenly, the critics turned and walked arm-in-arm into the night. If there was more to say on the subject, neither I nor my dinner companions choose to bring it up.

We had four more days in Italy, traveling to Harry's Bar, where Hemingway had held forth with peach bellinis, toured the countryside in WW1 trucks courtesy of the Italian army, and I shared laughter with one of Hemingway's granddaughters at the villa where Hem had written Across the River and Into the Trees. She had his high forehead and melting smile. And I got to tell her that I loved her grandfather for other than the obvious reasons. That I heard the footfall of his sentences in my ear. That I dipped my hands into his icy rivers and threw water on my face when it felt too damn hot to walk on.

And when I flew back to Alabama, I vowed to shun literary criticism for the rest of my days.

Men's Men

Bob Shacochis. He's a man's man, a teller of tall tales, noodler of great sentences set in the broth of political intrigue, a straight-talking lover of language with a delightful intolerance of hacks and pretenders. I had swapped letters with him long before we ever met, but when I first saw him, he was barbecuing leeks and asparagus that he had marinated in balsamic vinegar, a half-cigarette's worth of ash dangling from his lips, and what looked like a nasty case of windburn.

I had gone to Frisco in North Carolina's Outer Banks to visit him and his partner, Miss Fish. After dinner and oh so many cocktails, Bob drove me out to the dunes in his four-wheel truck, spinning us up the shore to where the waves swept across the black, moonlit sands and the cyclops eye of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse spun at you through the fog.

Months before, Bob sent the kindest rejection letter I had received during a four-year stretch of opening the most vile of commentaries. He was editing The Missouri Review and encouraged me to stay in the saddle, contending that the sorry world we lived in needed writers that could take out your eye with angular prose. He had come into the land of letters through journalism, using the same back door as I had done, as Hemingway had done. We were in fine company.

Shake, as some people called him, also waded ashore into travel writing because he had been mad about surfing. The waves carried him from his childhood home in Virginia to Hawaii, later to South America and, eventually, into the Peace Corps where he discovered the Caribbean. The string of islands opened up a trove of untapped stories that Bob mined for years, studying island life. Eventually, he penned two collections of literary short stories and a novel set in the land of heavy drink, heady women, and brutal politics. He wrote exclusively about the coup in Haiti. An avid outdoorsman, he wrote a cooking column for GQ while crafting journalistic gems for Harpers and Outside, along the way reeling in the Rome Prize for Literature, a National Book Award, and other noteworthy trophies. His writing about the Third World belongs on the shelf beside Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Joseph Conrad. When I knew him, he was the book-blurb king, his nougats of praise appearing routinely on the jackets of short story collections and novels of his peers.

The last time we gathered, I had invited him to Fairbanks as a visiting author at the Midnight Sun Writer's Conference. He was a hit, carving off chunks of wry commentary on stories submitted by participating writers and holding forth on craft without waterboarding the audience with theory.

Toward the end of the conclave, I spirited him out of bed before dawn in my subcompact, and drove the 120 miles west to see Denali. The peak, better known as Mt. McKinley, had been spotted over the past few days and viewing--they said on the news--was optimal. Denali makes her own weather, so you can't trust conditions outside of the park to witness a rare appearance. But when she comes out, she is spectacular, rising 20,000 feet over an expanse that defies the human sense of scale. We had also packed some fishing gear, a couple of sandwiches, and a bottle of vodka, which somehow ended up open by 9 am, passing between us along the highway.

The park has six million acres of wilderness, so there are hours of driving just to get from the front gate to open views of the mountain. It's a track populated with grizzly bears, caribou, wolves, Dall sheep and moose--which of course we were there to see.

We had been motoring at a decent clip along Polychrome Pass when Bob brought out his field glasses. He had a feeling he said, and sure enough he shouted for me to pull over a moment later. We hopped out of the little car and stood along the road, steam rising off of our heads and shoulders.

"Up there!" Bob said, pointing to an overhang. His intuition was right. Seated on a boulder about 50 yards from us was a mature grizzly, his coat brown and red-ocher in the morning sun. If the bear saw us, we were of no significance. But I was impressed. The pass was long, pocked with crags and boulders, and Bob picked the bear out of an impossible backdrop of yellowing tundra.

Not long afterwards, we were finishing off the vodka, driving along the road to Wonder Lake, when Bob had another moment. He shouted for us to pull over and we hurried to a high point where we could look out on the massive valley carved eons ago by glaciers. The backdrop was equally confounded with jigsawed colors and shapes, yet Bob was sure. He pointed to a deadfall of spruce between the rocks and handed me the glasses.

His intuition was uncannily sharp as ever, but he had mistaken the beast's genus entirely. Sure, the chipmunk wore the same fall colors as the bear, and its shape, rising up on it haunches with its furry head certainly suggested a genetic relationship. It was as if I had turned the glasses backwards while looking at a ferocious grizzly, shrinking the image to manageable size for viewing by boys, wimps, or other undesirables who would never makes the rugged pages of Outside.

"Look out!" I shouted. And I shouted it again afterwords, after Bob caught an amazing creel of fish, and I would shout it out on the way home, and certainly a few times the following days until I had surely worn it out. I swear to God, Bob, I'm sorry. Mostly.

"Look out, Bob," I'd shout, "he's getting ready to charge!"