the two heroes of my youth
BEGAN WITH ERNEST HEMINGWAY...
FROM WHOM I PILFERED THE GUISE of the stoic, barrel-chested drinker, who mixed it up in olden days of memory with Humphrey Bogart, a man who also enjoyed a drink or two along the way, as well as an ever-present cigarette dangling from between his lips; two men who had apparently come through tough times and deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors (or so I thought), men who quickly taught me that the only unforgivable sin was self-pity. The mantra was simple: If a girl broke your heart? Go get a stunner. You lost a fight with another guy? Get up. Wipe off the blood. Have a shot of rotgut. And go back and break his nose.
Bogie got Bacall.
Hemingway, the Nobel Prize.
I first came across on how I thought I might best live my life in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a romantic novel where in the climax of the drama, the hero, Frederick Henry, deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country. I felt as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these words about who and what I hoped one day to become. I discovered places I wanted to go, people I wished I would one day meet. Women I desired to love.
Then there was the magic of Bogie in Casablanca, as he said: Of all the joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine...and at the end of the movie, with the dense fog and airplane awaiting her departure, Bogie looks into the eyes of Ingrid Bergman: "I'm saying this because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong to Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life..." And Ingrid says: "But what about us?" And Bogie replies: "We''ll always have Paris...I realized at that very moment: this was the honorable way to treat the woman I loved, and if the romance suddenly did go awry, I could always add: Here's looking at you, kid.
There was no doubt about it: I was in awe of these two guys.
Many of the Twenties writers and artists had become expatriates. Which became another word I had become enchanted with; as I read about Fitzgerald going to the Riviera, T.S. Eliot to London, Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I imagined), in countries where there was wonderful food and shelter and the drinks were cheap and the women were beautiful. In my imagination, drinking absinthe with Hemingway in Paris became the golden city of my dreams. I envisioned cafe tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse; and there, striding through the door, was the beautiful Ava Gardner as the Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises: "She wore a slipover sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey...Hemingway wrote.
It was around this time, that I saw Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris with the athletic Gene Kelly and the magical Leslie Caron; and here was Gene, living on the GI Bill after World War II, telling me that if you can't become a painter in Paris, you may as well spend the rest of your life as a packer in a meat-packing plant. He then took me to the windows of the French Quarter that were open to the air of spring, the Paris rooftops, the cobble-stoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and , of course, the cafes. He wasn't Hemingway or Bogie, but he was good enough for me. I had never seen a man as athletically elegant as he was. Oscar Levante was his best friend, a piano player, and they met every day at the Cafe Bel Ami. A relationship which, of course, immediately reminded me of Bogie in Casablanca, and his nemesis, Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains; as the two of them were walking together through the fog at the movie's end, and Bogie says to him: "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
My hope was, that one day, I would find the Cafe Bel Ami and sit at a table and order a liqueur coffee and read little magazines too. And then study at the Sorbonne and paint in the street and all night long, I'd discuss with my fellow expatriates literature and art. And then sample other pleasures, as well. Women and wine and absinthe, of course.
But I didn't go to Paris. Humphrey Bogart died in 1957 at the age of 57 after long bout with esophageal cancer from smoking too many of those god-damned cigarettes. And Ernest Hemingway took a shotgun into the kitchen of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, put it into his mouth, pulled the trigger, then died at age 61 in 1961 because he was clinically depressed.
What the two of them had given to me, however, was what Shakespeare had Prospero say in his play The Tempest:
"We are such stuff As dreams are made on..."
Bogie got Bacall.
Hemingway, the Nobel Prize.
I first came across on how I thought I might best live my life in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a romantic novel where in the climax of the drama, the hero, Frederick Henry, deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country. I felt as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these words about who and what I hoped one day to become. I discovered places I wanted to go, people I wished I would one day meet. Women I desired to love.
Then there was the magic of Bogie in Casablanca, as he said: Of all the joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine...and at the end of the movie, with the dense fog and airplane awaiting her departure, Bogie looks into the eyes of Ingrid Bergman: "I'm saying this because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong to Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life..." And Ingrid says: "But what about us?" And Bogie replies: "We''ll always have Paris...I realized at that very moment: this was the honorable way to treat the woman I loved, and if the romance suddenly did go awry, I could always add: Here's looking at you, kid.
There was no doubt about it: I was in awe of these two guys.
Many of the Twenties writers and artists had become expatriates. Which became another word I had become enchanted with; as I read about Fitzgerald going to the Riviera, T.S. Eliot to London, Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I imagined), in countries where there was wonderful food and shelter and the drinks were cheap and the women were beautiful. In my imagination, drinking absinthe with Hemingway in Paris became the golden city of my dreams. I envisioned cafe tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse; and there, striding through the door, was the beautiful Ava Gardner as the Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises: "She wore a slipover sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey...Hemingway wrote.
It was around this time, that I saw Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris with the athletic Gene Kelly and the magical Leslie Caron; and here was Gene, living on the GI Bill after World War II, telling me that if you can't become a painter in Paris, you may as well spend the rest of your life as a packer in a meat-packing plant. He then took me to the windows of the French Quarter that were open to the air of spring, the Paris rooftops, the cobble-stoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and , of course, the cafes. He wasn't Hemingway or Bogie, but he was good enough for me. I had never seen a man as athletically elegant as he was. Oscar Levante was his best friend, a piano player, and they met every day at the Cafe Bel Ami. A relationship which, of course, immediately reminded me of Bogie in Casablanca, and his nemesis, Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains; as the two of them were walking together through the fog at the movie's end, and Bogie says to him: "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
My hope was, that one day, I would find the Cafe Bel Ami and sit at a table and order a liqueur coffee and read little magazines too. And then study at the Sorbonne and paint in the street and all night long, I'd discuss with my fellow expatriates literature and art. And then sample other pleasures, as well. Women and wine and absinthe, of course.
But I didn't go to Paris. Humphrey Bogart died in 1957 at the age of 57 after long bout with esophageal cancer from smoking too many of those god-damned cigarettes. And Ernest Hemingway took a shotgun into the kitchen of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, put it into his mouth, pulled the trigger, then died at age 61 in 1961 because he was clinically depressed.
What the two of them had given to me, however, was what Shakespeare had Prospero say in his play The Tempest:
"We are such stuff As dreams are made on..."
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