Three Days With Hemingway

My friend Chris McDonald and I drove to Kansas City the week of June 9-13 for the 13th International Hemingway Conference, held at the Marriott Country Club Plaza Hotel in that city. Chris presented a paper at the conference, which had been culled from his master's thesis concerning the influence upon Hemingway's style of the painters Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cezanne and Antonio Gattorno. Since I had given Chris a little help with his thesis last year, I went along as his editor and consultant. Although I've been posting at www.ernest.hemingway.com for several years and have something of a reputation on the Internet as a Hemingway maven, mostly I went along for the ride. It was a good ride. Read all about it in the journal I kept during our three days in Kansas City:

June 9 Monday Kansas City

Left Washington, D.C. Saturday morning at 11 a.m. Pushing 80 mph down I-95 in the PT Cruiser, reached Greenville, North Carolina by 5:30 p.m. Stayed over at Chris McDonald’s place in Winterville Saturday night. We went to a Mexican restaurant where I met his wife Christy, a nurse who met us at the restaurant still wearing her scrubs from work.

Chris and I left Greenville Sunday morning about 7:00. Our route out of North Carolina took us right past the real “Mount Pilot” if you’re a fan of The Andy Griffith Show, as I am. Just outside Mt. Airy, the home town of Andy Griffith which was supposedly the model for Mayberry, there is a granite peak called “Pilot Mountain,” although there isn’t any town there. Chris dissuaded me from wanting to see Mt. Airy. “Dude, I promise you, there’s nothing there,” he insisted.

We were in Evansville, Indiana by 6:00 p.m. CDT, where we stopped for the night at the Holiday Inn Fairfield. Got cleaned up, had a couple of drinks and then went out for pizza. I called Valerie but got voicemail. Left a message and went to bed around 10 p.m. Hit the road this morning at 6:30 CDT. Made St. Louis by 10:00 and Kansas City by 2:00. Checked into the Marriott Country Club, where the 13th Annual Hemingway International Conference is being held this week.

A bit of minor excitement at check-in. Our room wasn’t ready, so we had to go get coffee at Starbucks and wait around the lobby. James Taylor is playing a concert date tonight in KC, and we were checking in at the very moment he and his band were checking out. We didn’t see him, but we did see his band. The desk clerk told me that James Taylor has stayed there twice and he has yet to see him. They must sneak him in through the service entrance. (He added that the band Styx has stayed there a couple of times as well, and the members of Styx are very nice guys. “A lot of fun,” he said.)

Another little event at check-in that pleased me: A group of young Hemingway scholars who had come for the conference checked in shortly after we did. Chris introduced himself to them, then introduced me. “Oh,” one of them said, shaking my hand. “You’re cited in my paper.” There was also some old buzzard wandering around the lobby in a seersucker jacket, ball cap and white beard who looked just like Hemingway. I remarked to the valet parking attendant, “He must be part of the entertainment. Well, why not? If there are Elvis impersonators, why not Hemingway impersonators?”

Chris and I worked on his Hemingway presentation for about an hour before we went to dinner. It’s culled from his master’s thesis and we decided to give it the title: Less Is More: Undiscovered Country in the Fiction Of Ernest Hemingway. What it actually deals with is the influence upon Hemingway’s famous “iceberg procedure” of three painters: Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cezanne and the Cuban Antonio Gattorno. He’s scheduled to read his paper on Wednesday afternoon.

My childhood pal Charlie Berigan, who passed through Kansas City with a road show about 15 years ago, had strongly recommended KC's Savoy Grill, so we’re going there for dinner tonight. It was once one of KC’s toniest restaurants. Seems Harry Houdini dined there once, and after they played a prank on him, locking him in a phone booth, he never went back. I also understand that one scene from the movie Mr. & Mrs. Bridge was filmed there. But the valet parking attendant told me that the Savoy Grill is “not what it was 50 years ago.” Well, since I don’t know what it was 50 years ago, what the hell do I care?

June 10 Tuesday

Met Valerie Hemingway this morning. She’s here for the conference. Very charming lady with a slight British accent, interesting as I think she’s actually Irish. Although I already have a copy of her book Running With The Bulls, I bought a second copy so I could ask her to sign it, which she graciously did. Also met Audre Hanneman, a perfectly wonderful old lady who is apparently the dean of all Hemingway bibliographers. The academics assembled at this morning’s breakfast here in the hotel gave her a standing ovation when she spoke.

Dinner at the Savoy Grill last night. As my mother once said of San Diego’s University Club, it was “like dining at Hubbard Mortuary.” The dark, 100-year-old dining room was nearly deserted. The meal, with drinks, ran $150. I had veal marsala and of course, managed to get gravy on the sleeve of my new sportjacket. Was running downstairs this morning to catch the hotel’s dry cleaning service before the truck left. Although the meal wasn’t much, and the Savoy Grill itself a rather tired dining experience, the manager of the place made up for it by being extremely hospitable to Chris and me. He gave us a tour. Among other things he showed us the table where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward did indeed sit when they were filming the “tornado” scene of Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. We also saw the table at which Harry Houdini sat the night some practical jokers reportedly locked him in a phone booth at the Savoy and he couldn’t get out.

Back at the hotel, we went out to the bench in front of the lobby near the street, the designated smoking area, to have a cigar. There had been rain upon our arrival that afternoon, but by 9 p.m. it had become a lovely, mild spring evening. A tour bus pulled up, bringing back to the hotel a group of conference attendees who had just taken a tour of the Kansas City Star building, an event Chris and had I skipped in order to dine at the Savoy. I was told there had been free food and liquor provided as part of the Star tour. There must have been plenty of the latter, because as I sat there smoking, a young woman got off the bus being supported by two people, one on each side. Her body was so out of control that for a moment I thought she might have cerebral palsy. But no, she was just drunk. So drunk in fact that they had to use a wheelchair to get her into the hotel. I wouldn’t have wanted to be inside her skull this morning.

June 11 Wednesday

Speaking of drinking, after the thrill of meeting Valerie Hemingway yesterday morning after breakfast, the rest of the day devolved into one of the booziest I ever spent. But I was still walking under my own power when it was over, so I suppose I would have passed one of Hemingway’s key tests of “manliness,” that being the ability to hold your liquor.

It started out innocently enough. After Chris and I had attempted a “dry run” (no pun intended) of the paper he will be presenting this afternoon, I concluded that it would be best to run off copies for the audience. Chris resisted the idea, but I overcame his resistance by offering to pay for the copying. The hotel shuttle took us to the FedEx Kinko’s downtown. It was a beautiful day and I am really impressed with Kansas City; it’s a much more attractive city than I might have expected; I even told Chris that it reminds me slightly of San Diego. Chris, who has lived in San Diego himself, agreed.

The girl at the FedEx counter told us that the copying job would take about 30 minutes. Next door was a restaurant/bar called Tomfoolery. While waiting for our copies, we slipped in there, sat at the bar and ordered tall, frosty mugs of Fat Tire. We both flirted with the bartender, "Mary" from North Platte, Nebraska, one of those slim, tough, slightly homely gals who nevertheless manage to be sexy by sheer force of personality. When I asked what people do in North Platte on a Saturday night and she replied, “Get drunk and fuck,” Chris and I were both immediately smitten. Chris ordered a salad and I ordered some chicken tenders. To wash the taste of the beer out of my mouth, I asked Mary for a Jack Daniel’s straight up, then had another. Chris had a Bloody Mary. Then we paid our bill, retrieved our copies and went back to the hotel, where we wound up spending the shank of the afternoon sitting in the hotel bar working on the PowerPoint portion of Chris’ little dog-and-pony show about the influence of certain painters on Hemingway’s style. We were in the bar because there is WiFi there, whereas if you access the Internet in your room they charge $9.95 a day for it. Chris drank White Russians as we tinkered with his program; I followed suit with Dewar’s on the rocks. There was a little excitement around 3 p.m. when the hotel experienced a partial power outage. The elevators and the air conditioning went out. For some reason the fire department showed up.

Late in the afternoon, as we were still sitting in the hotel bar arranging visuals on Chris’ laptop, he suddenly decided he wanted to try a Papa Doble, the legendary daiquiri whose recipe was supposedly invented by Hemingway. Chris got on the Internet and looked up the recipe, wrote it down and asked the bartender to make one for each of us. The Papa Doble mixes up as a pinkish concoction which is actually quite tasty, if a bit sweet. When the bartender put the drinks in front of us, I went into my best Hemingway-imitation voice and growled, “Made a run of 16 in here one night!” Chris doubled over laughing. We each had two.

In case anyone's interested, here is the recipe for a Papa Doble:

2 jiggers white rum
the juice of two limes
the juice of half a grapefruit
6 drops grenadine or maraschino cherry brandy

Fill blender one-quarter full with crushed ice. Add the rum, lime juice, grapefruit juice and grenadine. Blend until cloudy and frothy.

Chris decided he wanted to have dinner at a jazz club not far from the Savoy called the Majestic Steakhouse. We took a cab there. They had no jazz last night, and the food was only so-so, (as well as pricey) but Chris had another Bloody Mary before dinner and I had more Scotch, then chased down my somewhat dry roast pork loin with an ice-cold Pinot Grigio.

The Majestic is within walking distance of the Savoy, and Chris suggested we walk back over there after we finished dinner. We sat at the bar, drank port and chatted up the bartender. Kansas City apparently has an ordinance which allows cigar-smoking in certain venues after 11 p.m. In any case the bartender told us that, it being after 11 now, we could light up if we wanted. So there I was, following an afternoon of beer, Jack, Scotch, daiquiris, more Scotch and then Pinot Grigio, sitting in the Savoy Grill at 11:15 p.m. smoking a cigar and drinking port.

We got a cab back to the hotel. Chris claimed to be not at all drunk, but I don’t know…this morning when I got up at 7:00 with a slight headache and prepared to go downstairs for coffee, I found his pants on the table, his jacket on the desk and his wristwatch on the floor. I let him sleep and went down to the lobby to read the newspapers and drink Starbuck’s, which is not my favorite coffee but it’s what they sell in the lobby. Took Aleve for the headache.

POSTSCRIPT, 3 PM – Had a “fashion emergency” this morning. Had decided to dress “up” for Chris’ presentation as an expression of solidarity, and had brought along my new, light summer suit for that purpose. But while getting dressed I discovered to my horror that I had brought along only white socks. Can’t wear white socks with a suit; I’d look like Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies. Went down to the front desk to ask where the nearest place was at which I could buy a pair of dress socks. Fortunately they keep an emergency supply of them behind the front desk.

Chris did his presentation at 1 p.m. There were maybe 20 people in the amphitheater. Valerie Hemingway was there. Everything went fine except Chris inadvertently left out one of the slides he wanted to use. Other than that I thought his presentation went quite well. Unfortunately the shadow over Chris at the moment is that his father back in North Carolina is in the hospital and not doing well; we have canceled plans to stop off in Cincinnati on the way back and see the Reds play ball, as Chris, understandably, wants to get home.

And by the way I had another fashion emergency after the presentation. I stuck a felt-tip pen in my shirt pocket and forgot to put the cap back on it. It promptly leaked ink all over my brand-new dress shirt.

June 12 Thursday Louisville, KY

Last night we went out to Kaufman Park in Kansas City to see the Royals play the visiting Texas Rangers. KC proved brilliantly why they’re in last place in the AL Central: going into the seventh inning with a 5-1 lead, the Royals’ bullpen went into action and promptly gave up seven runs, including a grand slam. Texas scored three more runs and won the game 11-5.

Kansas City sports pundits’ general disgust with the Royals was all over KC talk radio this morning as we drove out of town after three very interesting days. John Hemingway was supposed to drop in at the conference today. J’aime Sanders, the little PhD-to-be from the University of South Florida who presented along with Chris yesterday, told me that John Hemingway is a lot of fun. (J’aime’s paper, by the way, was entitled The Study of Death and the Creation of Art: Hemingway’s Philosophy Of Writing In Death In The Afternoon. Fair enough, but I’m not sure what Hemingway would have thought of a paper about his work that used the term “existentialist.”)

But Chris is still worried about his dad, so we left a day early. We had an earnest (again, no pun intended) discussion in our hotel room last night before lights-out. I gave Chris some tips on writing. Mostly I just think he needs to attain focus and establish a routine. Advised him to start keeping a journal, as I’ve been doing for more than 35 years. As Hemingway himself would probably have told you had you asked, 90 percent of what makes a successful or even a good writer is not being a genius, nor is it having a great story to tell or a great idea to put forth. Mostly it’s just sticking your butt in a chair and writing, every day. Unfortunately that’s also the hardest part.