Hemingway, Bumbie, and Wife #1

Lesley Blume‘s Town & Country article begins with a head fake, one that I didn’t even know was making the rounds: “Last week, a letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald—quarantined due to the Spanish Flu in 1920—made the social media rounds. In it, Fitzgerald states that he and Zelda had fully stocked their bar, and called Hemingway a flu “denier” who refused to wash his hands. This letter went viral.”

“The only problem? It was not written by Fitzgerald; its true author is Nick Farriella, who had written it as a parody for McSweeney’s earlier this month. (The story now carries a heavy-handed warning at the top: i.e., this is a joke.) However, for those of you who crave an actual Lost Generation quarantine story, you’re in luck. Please allow me to entertain you with the true story of how Ernest Hemingway was once quarantined not only with his wife and sick toddler, but also his mistress. He actually took quite nicely to it.”

Well, why wouldn’t he? At least in the beginning. The middle and ending were a different story. It didn’t end well.

The occasion was the summer of 1926, when Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, their three-year-old son Jack (a.k.a. “Bumby”) were in Paris. It was a breakthrough season for Hemingway, and he was acquiring the trappings of success – including a mistress, a Vogue editor named Pauline Pfeiffer.

“When Hadley had, just weeks earlier, learned of the affair and confronted Hemingway about it, he had grown furious and told her that she was the true offender. He raged that everything would have been just fine if she hadn’t dragged the situation into the open.

“The couple decided to carry on, but it became clear that Hemingway had no intention of giving up Pauline; nor did his mistress intend to bow out. Rather, she made herself omnipresent. It was just going to take Hadley a while to get used to her new normal.”

But the new normal quickly became out of whack on the Antibes, where “Bumby” came down with whooping cough, then a dangerous and deadly disease, and highly contagious.

“Hadley wrote Hemingway and told him that she’d invited Pfeiffer ‘to stop off here if she wants,’ adding that it would be a ‘swell joke on tout le monde if you and Fife and I spent the summer [together]’ on the Riviera. She appeared to be making light of the tricky romantic situation. In any case, Pfeiffer moved into the house.”

Hemingway and Wife #2

“Soon Hemingway joined them, setting the stage for what must have been one of the odder and more claustrophobic households in literary history. The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as ‘a splendid place to write.’” The story continues:

Pfeiffer remained ubiquitous—“everything was done à trois,” Hadley later recalled. Even now that they were all out of strict quarantine, Pfeiffer even crawled into the Hemingways’ bed in the morning to share their breakfast. Hadley also later recalled that Pauline insisted on giving her a diving lesson that almost killed her.

After Pfeiffer went back to Paris, she peppered the Hemingways with letters, including one that brazenly stated, “I am going to get everything I want.”

Not surprisingly, the Hemingway marriage did not last the summer. They had survived whooping cough and quarantine, but the onslaught of Miss Pauline Pfeiffer proved fatal.

Read the rest here. Hemingway’s second marriage to Pfeiffer didn’t last either. But that’s another story.

Frank Barrett, Ellis Marsalis at a conference in New Orleans, circa 2013

Ellis Marsalis, one of the leading figures in jazz, is among the latest victims of the coronavirus pandemic. He died last night at 85. Frank J. Barrett, author of Say Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz and formerly a pianist with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, is currently writing Ellis Marsalis’s biography as a visiting scholar at Harvard. 

Ellis Marsalis is perhaps best known through refraction – thanks to the accomplishments of two of his six sons, each of whom is a master of his instrument and an innovative leader jazz. Wynton and Branford are famous in the wider world, but within the jazz world two other sons, Delfeayo and Jason, are deeply admired for the trombone and percussion respectively. Delfeayo and Jason are also world-class producers. Branford and Wynton became much more famous and financially successful in their twenties than Ellis did in his entire lifetime. The patriarch was a very innovative, modern jazz pianist in New Orleans, a city that values older, traditional jazz. He knew the costs of taking the road less traveled, and yet he remained committed to his music. He began as a sax and clarinet player and later focused exclusively on piano.

I am honored to be writing his biography, which has given me the opportunity to spend many hours with him over the last few years. He had a special quality that only the best teachers have, in the way he closely assessed his students’ capacities and accomplishments. He could be realistic to a fault. I imagine some of his students could have been deflated by his frank assessments. He might have sounded aloof to some. He was certainly not excitable. But he was always honest, “just telling it like it is.” And he intuitively sensed his students’ learning potential. What might have been his greatest gift of all was his profound sense of what was needed to take a student to the next level. All of this he seemed to accomplish with minimal intervention. That’s one reason so many referred to him as “cool.” He knew what the right amount of words should be, and then he subtracted 25 percent, leaving the student in a field of questions. He overstated nothing.

While doing interviews for this book, I once asked Wynton what adolescence was like for him, whether and how he rebelled against his father, as one would assume all adolescents are prone to do. There were stories of Wynton as a sometimes stormy adolescent, and so I asked him directly how and when he rebelled against his dad. When Wynton responded I knew immediately what he meant: “Not with my dad. There was nothing to rebel against.” Nothing for an adolescent son to rebel against? Unless you knew Ellis you wouldn’t understand how he seemed to have no guarded ego, no defensiveness, no need to assert his knowledge or authority, the great temptation for many teachers. He was devoted to learning and teaching. And with his sons he was the opposite of the Great Santini. Rather than tell them what to do, he asked provocative questions and let them find their way. And we know how they managed to do just that.

Barrett: What he learned.

Wynton tells a story that captures how his father was a role model for him. He had a recording date with Columbia for an album that would include several standard songs from the Great American Songbook – “Street of Dreams,” “Where or When,” “The Very Thought of You,” “I Cover the Waterfront.” For this album, the best pianist he could imagine was his father. So he asked him to play on this session.

“My father’s so much hipper than me and knows so much more,” he reflected afterwards. “I can tell him, ‘I don’t like what you played on that’, and he’ll just stop and say, ‘Well, damn, what do you want?’ Then I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ and he’ll try it. That’s my father, man. … If I said I didn’t like it, he’d change it and at least look for something else, because he’s a sensitive musician. The more I get away from him, man, the more I know how much I learned from him just by looking and watching. I grew up with one of the greatest examples.”

This exchange says so much about Ellis and what Wynton learned from him. Wynton apparently had musical insight that he thought was harmonically more appropriate than the chords his father was playing. Ellis did not defend the correctness of his musical ideas, or generate rationales to explain his choice, but immediately respected his son’s suggestions.

There is an irony in this exchange, too. Who is the learner here? Ellis appeared to be the one learning to try different musical ideas, but Wynton walked away with a lasting insight, admiring his father’s approach to and immersion in music, an openness to learning and commitment to creative invention. What he taught him apparently is to avoid becoming too attached to what is comfortable and secure, to be open to exploring new pathways, to avoid defensive routines. The young Wynton was learning that even established, competent musicians must be willing to abandon comfortable practices and to abdicate postures of established status that block the emergence of good ideas.

When I first began to meet with Ellis, I thought it would be a good idea to take a piano lesson from him. I wanted to impress him, so I prepared an arrangement of a standard tune, “The End of a Beautiful Friendship.” I was a bit nervous so I spent many hours preparing complex and rich harmonies up front, two solo choruses, and dramatic finish. I tried to make my solo as “hip” as possible, throwing in some be-bop licks, working in some two-handed phrases, quoting a Monk tune. Ellis sat about five feet away watching and listening. Finishing with a flurry, I looked up. After what seemed like a long silence he said: “Okay, for starters, I never comment on players’ solos. That’s too personal.” Then he asked this: “Do you know the lyrics to that tune?” Huh? The lyrics? I’m not a singer. Why would he ask that? I was perplexed and mumbled something about the tune’s theme of friendship and love. “How can you know what a song means if you don’t know the words?” he asked. He pointed to rows of file cabinets in his music studio that contain songs and lyrics. Then before we were about to leave for dinner, he said: “I insist on one thing. Students must play the melody correctly.” I was puzzled because I had learned this song by heart. Then he asked: “How does this song end?” I played the last four bars. “That’s not the correct ending.” And he sang back the correct ending in perfect tune. On the surface it was only a slight variation from the ending, but I learned that for Ellis one must be loyal to the essence of the song.

Anyone who wonders how this sensibility matters should listen to the album “Loved Ones,” in which each of the fourteen selections is a woman’s name. When Ellis was getting ready to record it he realized that in order to fully realize the delicate emotion he wanted to convey, he needed a lyrical horn player. The most sensitive, melodic musician he could think of was his son Branford, so he invited him to join. There’s a tenderness in these songs that can move one to tears. You can tell that Ellis feels each note. Listen to their version of “Maria” from West Side Story and you would swear that they are singing the lyrics. On “Miss Otis Regrets,” an ironic Cole Porter tune about a lynching, you can hear Ellis conveying the lyrics during the song’s denouement: “The moment before she died / she lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam/ Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.” Ellis feels each note deeply. Listening again to this recording I am reminded – instead of just working on flashy, impressive soloing it’s more important to be loyal to the meaning and essence of the music. In fact, who even knew that a song can have a denouement?

For me personally, he was a friend and a teacher. I will miss him.

Biographer and subject: Frank Barrett and Ellis Marsalis

Making his mark, as always

Steve Wasserman has 15,000 books –all of them choice, and all of them on display at the offices of Heyday Books, where he is publisher. I don’t know how this compares to other Bay Area private collections, but it must be high in the rankings. Certainly when it comes to quality:

“I’m a snail who’s hostage to an oversized shell,” he jokes during a tour of his library. Unlike most personal collections, Wasserman’s is intrepid and surprising: belles lettres, poetry, literary criticism. Black history, civil rights, California history. Fiction from The Arabian Nights to Stefan Zweig.

“This is all wheat, no chaff,” he says with pride. Turn a corner and find Antiquity, Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt, geology and dinosaurs. Civil War, the Holocaust, Vietnam. Art, dance, architecture.

“Books are like Aladdin’s lamp,” Wasserman enthuses. “You don’t rub the lamp, the geni doesn’t come out. And a book that lies on the shelf is in something of a coma. Writers need readers to complete the work.” 

We’ve written about him here and here and here, among other places. Now Edward Guthmann, a former San Francisco Chronicle writer, has written about him, too. He has just published a profile of Steve, one of our favorite subjects, for the current Oakland Magazine. But the best parts always are the bits from Steve himself. He has an enviable way with words. And a sense of style.

Back at his table at Chez Panisse (photo: Moi)

Guthmann captures the trademark nattiness of Steve in this paragraph: “There’s a watchful, canny look in his eyes. On the day of our meeting, he’s dressed in a retro, semi-dandy style: Purple corduroy trousers, purple necktie, black vest, button-down white shirt, and cuff links. His shoes are two-toned, brown and buff, and a handkerchief blooms in the breast pocket of his wool blazer — a gallant sartorial gesture.”

Steve was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review when it was the best book section in the nation, bar none. Then he did a stint as editor at large at the Yale University Press. What lured him back to Berkeley? You can read the reasons in the piece, but this some of those factors were Heyday’s small-scale “lack of bureaucracy” and the chance  “to write Heyday’s second chapter and to make a mark on independent California publishing. Plus, Alice Waters promised me I could have back my old table at Chez Panisse.”

Steve has a remarkable gift for the crisp, polished, quotable phrase that makes me weep with envy. Here’s an example:

“I feel a little bit like Rip Van Winkle,” Wasserman says. Soon after his return to the East Bay, he took his dog, Pepper, for a walk in Codornices Park in the Berkeley Hills and entered a small redwood grove he hadn’t seen in 50 years. “It was a summer day, the sunshine dappling through the trees, and the smell of the redwoods braided together with eucalyptus and oak and that particular kind of barometric pressure that suffuses the Bay Area, which is very light on the skin. None of the East Coast humidity. I stood there, my eyes welling up with tears. It was almost, I’m tempted to say, a Proustian moment.”

Shit, Steve. Braided. The smells were braided together. I wish I’d said that. (I know, I know … I will). 

Read the whole thing here.

While we wait for the all-clear on coronavirus so we can resume our lives, maybe you’d like some historical perspective. Robert Harrison for a Zoom discussion of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron this Sunday, March 29.

Links to join us are included in the notice below, from today’s Stanford Report:

Online discussion: Join a Zoom discussion of The Decameron, the 14th-century masterpiece that begins with 10 young people fleeing to the countryside as the plague of 1348 ravages the city of Florence, Italy. Robert Harrison, professor of French and Italian, will discuss what the book says to us today. The Zoom session will take place from 10:30 a.m. to noon (PST) on Sunday, March 29. Members of the Stanford community are invited to join via this LINK. Discussion will focus on the preface, introduction and first tale in the book, which was written by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Participants are encouraged to read these in advance. The Project Gutenberg e-book of The Decameron is available at no cost here.

The announcement specifies members of the Stanford community, but Robert Harrison asked me to spread the word. Consider yourself invited. I’ll be there, too – cybernetically, of course. There is no “there” in cyberspace.

Eavan Boland: one of Ireland’s leading poets

Update: Eavan Boland died of a stroke this morning at her home in Dublin, on April 27. She was 75.

Ireland’s terrible period of starvation and disease from 1845 to 1849 was called the “Great Famine” or the “Great Hunger” – George Bernard Shaw had a different term for it: “the Great Starvation.” About a million died, and a million emigrated. The worst year was 1847.

I ran across Eavan Boland‘s poem “Quarantine” the other day over at the Poetry Foundation website. It is said to be Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney‘s favorite of her poems. It is certainly mine. I asked her how she came to write this poem about the Great Potato Famine, and whether the story was true. Here’s what she replied:

The story itself is anecdotally true – that is, it comes from a book called Mo Sceal Fein by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire (the title means he was a priest). The book was published  as autobiography somewhere about 1907 and in the Irish language. The title means “My Own Story.”

There is a brief recounting in that book of the story of Kit and Patrick, who left the workhouse during the 1847 famine to return to their cabin. Both were weakened by lack of food and she had famine fever. In the morning they were both found dead. In the text it says “the feet of the woman were in Patrick’s bosom, as if he had tried to warm them.”

It’s a very brief story and I first heard it as just that, when I was a teenager. Later I read a translation of it in the book. It seemed to me then, as it does now, to bring together so much of the public agony and private experience of the Ireland of that time. Just a terrible parable of people on the dark side of history, who somehow amend it for a moment by the grace of their actions.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
.  of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
.  He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
.  Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
.  There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
.  Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.