Sublime

sounding the way expensive perfume smells.

The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big

Roosevelt relished the company of pretty, attentive women, and flirting with them was one of his favorite pastimes.

Ernest Hemingway thought the “Crack-Up” pieces were “miserable.” People experienced emptiness many

batter,”

“The gloom intensified when I received a letter from Fitzgerald telling me that Hadley had remarried with Paul Mowrer, a journalist I knew. Gentle, thoughtful man, he was Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Letter said they were going to live in a country place near Crécy-en-Brie, outside Paris. What threw me was how quickly Hadley had

So, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity.

“He was in an extra rage that Labor Day. Against his own decline. His death. I think he actually believed that, because of who he was and what he had, he wouldn’t die. Not because he took great care of himself, because he didn’t, but because he couldn’t imagine being anything less or other than what he was.”