[lit-ideas] Re: Wallace Stevens' fist-fight with Hemingway

  • From: "Steve Chilson" <stevechilson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 01:30:31 +0100

Thanks for this Lawrence, it was quite entertaining.  The depths
insurance executives will go to...


On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:30:29 -0700, "Lawrence Helm"
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> From page 273 of Hemingway, A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers:
> 
>  
> 
> "While Hemingway was writing 'Francis Macomber' an incident in his own
> life
> provided additional material for the story.  Hemingway, thin-skinned and
> quick-tempered, was famous for brawling. His most notorious fight took
> place
> with Wallace Stevens, who weighed 225 pounds but was twenty years older
> than
> Hemingway.  The poet, while drunk, made Ursula Hemingway cry at a Key
> West
> cocktail party by insulting her brother and 'telling her forcefully what
> a
> sap [he] was, no man.'  According to Matthew Josephson, who spoke to
> several
> eyewitnesses, Stevens was the belligerent one.  When they met, he
> exclaimed:
> 'You think you're Earnest Hemingway' then challenged him to put up his
> hands.  Stevens was of good height and he had been an amateur boxer, but
> he
> was nearly sixty and very tight.  Ernest, usually pugnacious, this time
> urged the older man to go away and sober up.  But Stevens threw a punch
> at
> him; and there followed a bare-knuckled fight on the dock in which
> Stevens
> put up a good show of resistance, but was badly battered.'  Hemingway
> pursued the poet, 'knocked all of him down several times and gave him a
> good
> beating,'  Before Stevens broke his hand in two places by hitting the
> novelist on the jaw.  Stevens, who had disturbed the idea of order at Key
> West, emerged from the fray with a black eye and bruised face, and was
> seen
> the next day wearing dark glasses to conceal the damage.
> 
>  
> 
> "Though Hemingway gleefully revealed the story to Sara Murphy, he warned
> her
> that Stevens was anxious to protect his reputation as a Hartford business
> executive: 'you mustn't tell this to anybody . . . because he is very
> worried about his respectable insurance standing and I have promised not
> to
> tell anybody and the official story is that Mr. Stevens fell down a
> stairs.'
> Hemingway added that Pauline, who usually hated his fights, was delighted
> that he eventually shook hands and made it up with the poet.  Stevens
> apparently held no grudge and later praised Hemingway's art in his
> letters:
> 'Some one told me the other day that Ernest Hemingway was writing poetry.
>  I
> think it likely he will write the kind of poetry in which the
> consciousness
> of reality will produce an extraordinary effect.  It may be that he will
> limit himself to the mere sensation.  No one seems to be more addicted to
> epatant [shocking] (but not in any meretricious sense).'
> 
>  
> 
> "The fight took place on February 19, 1936, and 'Francis Macomber' was
> completed on April 19. . . ."  
> 
-- 
  Steve Chilson
  stevechilson@xxxxxxxxxxx

-- 
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