Arthur Miller on Marilyn Monroe

Miller and Monroe in happier days

The following passages about Monroe are taken from Arthur Miller's autobiography Timebends - A Life, published in 1987.


... a young woman to whom Kazan had introduced me some days before created a quickened center for the company's interest, attended by its barely suppressed sneer. Her agent and protector, Johnny Hyde, had recently died, but not before managing to get her a few small roles that had led to John Huston's using her in The Asphalt Jungle as Louis Calhern's mistress. In a part practically without lines, she had nevertheless made a definite impact. I had had to think for a moment to recall her in the film. She had seemed more a prop than an actress, a nearly mute satirical comment on Calhern's spurious property and official power, the quintessential dumb blond on the arm of the worldly and corrupt representative of society. In this roomful of actresses and wives of substantial men, all striving to dress and behave with an emphatically ladylike reserve, Marilyn Monroe seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that it was the best one in the room. And she seemed younger and more girlish than when I had first seen her. The female resentment that surrounded her at Feldman's approached the consistency of acrid smoke. An exception was the actress Evelyn Keyes, a Huston ex-wife, who managed to draw Marilyn out, sitting  with her on a settee, and who softly said to me later as she watched her dancing with someone, "They'll eat her alive." 

... A few days earlier I had gone to the Twentieth Century Fox studio with Kazan. ... We had just arrived on a nightclub set when Marilyn, in a black openwork lace dress, was directed to walk across the floor. ... She was being shot from the rear to set off the swiveling of her hips, a motion fluid enough to seem comic. It was, in fact, her natural walk: her footprints on a beach would be in a straight line, the heel descending exactly before the last toeprint, throwing her pelvis into motion. 

... The three of us [Miller, Monroe and Kazan] wondered through a bookstore. ... She had said she liked poetry, and we found some Frost and Whitman and E. E. Cummings. It was odd to watch her reading Cummings to herself, moving her lips - what would she make of poetry that was so simple and yet so sophisticated? I could not place her in any world I knew; like a cork bobbing on the ocean, she could have began her voyage on the other side of the world or a hundred yards down the beach. There was apprehension in her eyes when she began to read, the look of a student afraid to be caught out, but suddenly she laughed in a thoroughly unaffected way at the small surprising turn in the poem about the lame balloon man - "and it's spring!" The naive wonder in her face that she could so easily respond to a stylized work sent a filament of connection out between us.

... She [Marilyn] was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence. Sometimes she seemed to see all men as boys, children with immediate needs that it was her place in nature to fulfill, meanwhile her adult self stood aside observing the game. Men were their need, imperious and somehow  sacred. She might tel about being held down at a party by two of the guests in a rape attempt from which she said she had escaped, but the truth of the account was far less important than its strange remoteness from her personally. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. She was at this point incapable of condemning or even of judging people who had damaged her, and to be with her was to be accepted, like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicion was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to judge but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it - "Oh, there's lots of beautiful girls," she would say to some expression of awed amazement, as though her beauty  betrayed her quest for a more enduring acceptance. I was in a swift current, there was no stopping or handhold, she was finally all that was true. What I did not know about her was easy to guess, and I suppose I felt the pain of her memories even more because I did not have her compensating small pride at having survived such a life.

... She knew she could walk into a party, like a grenade and wreck complacent couples with a smile, and she enjoyed this power, but it also brought back the old sinister news that nothing whatsoever could last. And this very power of hers would eat at her one day, but not yet, not now. 

... Oddly enough, she seemed not to know fear as she went about rearranging her life; it was when she tried to assert herself and act that the terrors she was born to had to be downed. Strassberg had suggested she study the part of Anna in O'Neill's Anna Christie, and one evening she tried a few pages. Here was the first inkling of her inner life, she could hardly read audibly at first, it was more like praying than acting. "I can't believe I am doing this," she suddenly said, laughing.Her past would not leave her even for private affirmation of her value, and that past was murderous. Something like guilt seemed to suppress her voice.

... Marilyn came up to Boston for the day. No one recognized her in her heavy cable-knit sweater, a deep white knitted hat that came down over her forehead, a black-and-white checked woolen skirt, and moccasins. at twenty-nine she could have been a high school girl. Her sunglasses attracted a few glances on the street since the weather was so dark and overcast. We took a long walk, saw a new movie, Marty, in a neighborhood theatre, and ate in a diner where the waitress, mysteriously drawn to her, kept talking at her, instinctively smelling out something unique about her even in those unexceptional clothes. 
A podiatrists' association, she said, wanted to take casts of her feet because they were so perfectly formed, and a dental school wanted one of her mouth and teeth, which were also flawless. Not without fear we sat looking at each other waiting for the future to come closer.
"I keep trying," I said, "to teach myself how to lose you, but I can't learn yet."
Her face filled with an unspoken anxiety. "Why must you lose me?" And she removed her glasses with a compassionate smile.
The waitress, a middle-aged woman with bleached hair, happened to pass out table just then and overheard Marilyn. Her mouth dropped open in recognition, and she turned fully to me with a mixture of amazement and resentment, perhaps even rage, that I would be so stupid or cruel as to cause her idol the slightest unhappiness. In that second her proprietary sheltering of Marilyn, whom she knew only as an image, sprung forth. In a moment she was back with a piece of paper to be autographed.
As we walked back to the hotel, Marilyn sensed an amorphous weight on me. "What is it?"
"It's as though you belong to her." I left out the rest of it.
"It doesn't mean anything."
But on that empty sidewalk we were no longer alone.

... By this time [1956] she had been in psychoanalysis for more than a year.with a woman doctor in New York and there would later be two more analysts, ... both of the physicians of integrity and unquestionably devoted to her. But whatever its fine details, the branching tree of her catastrophe was rooted in her having been condemned  from birth - cursed might be a better word - despite all she knew and all she hoped. Experience came toward her in either of two guises, one innocent and the other sinister, she adored children and old people, who, like her, were altogether vulnerable and could not wreck harm. But the rest of humankind was fundamentally dangerous and had to be confounded, disarmed by a giving sexuality that was transfigured into a state beyond even feeling itself, a purely donative femininity. But that too could not sustain forever, for she meant to live at the peak  always; only in the permanent rush of a crescendo was there safety, or at least forgetfulness, and when the wave dispersed she would turn cruelly against herself, so worthless, the scum of the earth, and her vileness would not let her sleep, and then the pills began and the little suicides each night. But through it all she could rise to hope like a fish swimming up through black seas to fly at the sun before falling back again. And perhaps those rallies - if one knew the sadness in her - were her glory.

Miller in 1987, the year his autobiography was published.

To find out more or to order a copy click on the banner below and paste this ISBN No. into the search box > > > 1408836319

Jed Kiley - a mini biography

Kiley in 1925

This mini biography of Jed Kiley is an edited extract from the publisher's introduction to the American edition of his book Hemingway - A Title Fight in Ten Rounds, published in 1965, three years after Kiley's death..

In the fall of 1954 Jed Kiley sought Hemingway's consent for a series of articles he was hoping to sell about their friendship.

"You can write anything you please as you recollect about me, but please don't expect me authenticate it or authorize it," wrote Hemingway to Jed Kiley, adding, "Good luck with everything you write."
 
But Jed Kiley's luck by then was not very good. Although he sold his series of articles on his recollections of Hemingway to Playboy, where they appeared during 1956 and 1957, he sold little or nothing else thereafter. He died in New York in 1962 at the age of seventy-three.

John Gerald Kiley was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 10, 1889. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and became a reporter on the Chicago Examiner. In later years he was remembered there for, among other things, being the first Chicago reporter ever to own an automobile.

His association with that newspaper ceased when, sent to cover the departure of the First Illinois Cavalry for the Mexican border, he enlisted in a flush of patriotism.

Eventually, Kiley was mustered out of the National Guard and, after a brief stint on the Chicago Tribune, by 1917 was in Paris as a driver for the American Field Service. When the United States entered the war, Kiley joined the American army in the Service of Supply and remained in Paris. After obtaining his discharge from the army he remained in Paris and took his first steps at becoming a night club entrepreneur. Kiley introduced some of the first Negro jazz bands and blues singers to Paris.

One of his patrons and good friends was a rich young man named Erskine Gwynne, a great-grandson of the Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt. In 1927 Gwynne started a magazine in Paris called The Boulevardier and Kiley became an assistant editor.

During Kiley's tenure at The Boulevardier its contributors included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Noel Coward among others.

The Boulevardier died of financial anaemia in 1931, but Kiley had already returned to the States at the end of 1929, to work as a screen writer at Universal Pictures where he remained for about four years.

From 1943 to 1946 Kiley published a series of articles on such varied subjects as Monte Carlo, Al Capone, the Gestapo, etc.

In his later years he traveled, revisiting Paris at the age of seventy, and shortly before his death, he made a trip to Japan and the Philippines. On his return, he visited an old friend of his Paris days, Basil Woon in Carson City, Nevada, and then went on to Las Vegas, where his weakening condition resulted in his hospitalization. After his release from hospital, he went to Chicago to visit his sister, and then on to New York, where he died shortly afterwards at age seventy-three.

~ ~ ~

Hemingway - A Title Fight in Ten Rounds was subsequently reprinted with the title Hemingway - An Old Friend Remembers.

Harold Nicolson: To Sweden in the bomb bay of a Mosquito (1943)

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968)

Harold Nicolson  was a member of parliament from 1935 to 1945. In 1943 he was flown to Sweden to give a series of lectures on Britain and the war. The following excerpt is from a letter to his two sons who were at the time serving in the army. The passage is taken from Diaries and Letters 1939-45.


7 November, 1943

It is almost a month since I last wrote to you. During the interval I have been to Sweden. I left on 9th October and returned on 4th November.

I flew from Leuchars near Dundee in a Mosquito. I donned a huge quilted suit like that of a Mandarin. On top of that I put a sort of a gaberdine which fastened all round me with a zip. Then came the Mae West, in the pocket of which there was a small whistle and a little flash-lamp. 'If we are ditched, Mr Nicolson, do not waste energy shouting. Merely blow the whistle and flash the lamp'. I was not encouraged by the picture of myself blowing a lonely whistle in the middle of the North Sea. Then came the parachute harness and I was trussed and hooked up and tied down. I was then led (since I could scarcely walk, having become a tight parcel and no longer a mobile man) towards the aeroplane. I had to go on all fours beneath it and then rise up into a little hole. I was connected with the intercom and oxygen tubes and shown how to adjust the oxygen supply when told to by the pilot. Slowly the bomb doors closed below me. I was completely alone in a little box feeling like a hazelnut in its shell. The engine started. There was a bump or two and we were off.

By some mischance my intercom became unscrewed from the start. I did not dare to touch any of the tubes or gadgets around me, fearing that I might release myself through the bomb doors. I had a little reading lamp and read Elizabeth and Essex which I had bought in Dundee. I just guessed at the amount of oxygen I should need. When, as I calculated, we were over the middle of the North Sea and five miles up above the world, I turned out the little reading-lamp and communed with myself. 'This', I thought, 'is the moment for deep philosophic reflections.' But none came. So I turned on the light again and went on reading. After about two hours from the start, I was aware of a slight movement which indicated that we were over land. Having adjusted my parachute in case I released myself, I began very gingerly to finger the tubes and gadgets which surrounded me. Yes, the switch of the intercom had got detached. I adjusted it and said, 'Hullo!' 'Thank God, Mr Nicolson', vame the pilot's voice. 'I thought you had passed out.' A few minutes later I heard his voice again. 'I can now see the lights of Stockholm.' Within a trice there came a few muffled bumps, the engine stopped, the bomb door opened slowly revealing below me a square if cement identical with the square I had said goodbye to at Lauchars 2-1/2 hours before. I undid my various umbilical cords and let myself down upon the soil of Sweden. Down on all fours I went to creep under the machine and then straightened myself to observe a blazer of countless arc-lights. I took off my flying helmet and was greeted by an English voice. 'my names is Leadbetter. I come from the Legation. I hope you had a pleasant journey.' ...

~  ~  ~

Jed Kiley on Hemingway in Paris in 1926

Jed Kiley in 1925

When Hemingway was a young man struggling in Paris of 1926, Jed Kiley was the owner of a successful night club and editor of
The Boulevardier, a satiric magazine for the English-speaking colony. Killey, who befriended and published Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, became Hemingway's friend as well and introduced one of his first stories in The Boulevardier. The friendship lasted for the rest of their lives. The following story is from Kiley's book Hemingway, a Title Fight in Ten Rounds, re-published after Kiley's death with the new title Hemingway - A Friend Remembers.  

~ ~ ~ 

He was standing next to me at the bar. He was a big fellow. About twenty-five, I thought. He needed a shave and a haircut. And his sports coat looked like he had slept in it. But you could see he was not a barfly. He threw out a big hand in my direction. It was a hand you would not want thrown at you in anger. His coat sleeves were short and you could see the heavy black hair on his thick wrists. He had a short black moustache that looked like his eyebrows. He grinned all over. It was a pleasant grin, I thought. I winced as we shook hands. Some grip.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," I said.
"Remember me?" he said.
"Sure, sure," I said.
Who is this guy? I thought. Must have met him up at my place in Montmartre. I had an American night club up on the Hill and everybody knew me. You could see he was a Yank by the way he held his drink. Had a death-grip on it. Like somebody was going to take it away from him. But that did not mean a thing. They had Prohibition then back in the states and that's the way all the tourists drank. Like somebody was going to take it away from them. Some law, I thought.
I said aloud, "Have a drink?"
"Why not?" he sad.
He knocked off his old drink at a gulp. You could not see what he was drinking. His big hand hid the glass. Alphonse brought us two fines. He had a paw wrapped around his before it hit the bar. Some hands. Wonder what he does, I thought. Probably one of those sculptors from the Left Bank. Did not seem to be holding enough dough for a tourist. Must have met him in one of the bars. Some drinker. Better let him talk some more.
"Been reading your stuff in The Boulevardier," he said.
Well, I thought, that's different. Erskine Gwynne and I were getting out a smart little magazine on the Champs Elysees and I was the to writer. They used to read my stuff in The Boulevardier and then come up the Hill to meet the author. You might say I was literary in the daytime and mercenary at night. I liked to talk about my stuff too. So I hooked my cane over the bar rail and ordered a refill on the fines. If there is one thing an author likes it is honest criticism from a stranger.
"Like it?" I said.
"No," he said.
"Oh," I said. What are you doing here besides drinking?"
"Writing," he said.
"Writing what?" I said.
"A book," he said.
"Oh," I said.
This bird is a wise guy, I thought. He has probably been around Paris three weeks , and he is writing a book about it. That is a way a lot of them do. They sat around the Dome drinking fines and Pernods and wrote books about Paris. The you never heard about them again. I had been around Paris for six years and still did not know enough about Paris to write a book about it. Maybe that's the way it was. The longer you stayed around the less you wanted to write a book about it.
"Like it over here?" I said.
"No," he said.
Better get out of here fast, I thought. The man's a poseur. Whoever heard of an American not liking Paris?  No wonder he didn't like my stuff. The guy's taste is all in his mouth. I hooked the Malacca back on my arm and gave him the old night-club smile.
"Nice seeing you again Doc," I said
He roared out laughing and slapped me on the back. I can still feel it.
"The name is Hemingway," he said.
Well, what do you know, I thought. It's old Ernest Miller Hemingway from Old Park. Nobody else could have a name like that. Had not seen him since the war. Knew he was in Europe somewhere. He had come over in the French Ambulance in '17 when I had. But he had been in an Italian section. Heard he had enlisted in the Italian army and had been badly wounded. I hung the cane back on the bar and shook hands again. There is nothing wrong with his grip, I thought.
"Didn't know you with the false moustache," I said.
"Bar stance is changed too," he said.
That's wright, I thought. Used to stand with the other leg on the rail. No wonder I didn't recognize him. Must be that war wound, I thought.
I said aloud, "Have a drink,"
"Sure," he said louder.
Hasn't changed a bit, I thought. He was quite an amateur boxer, I remembered. Used to say he was going to be the world's heavyweight champion some day. And he might have made it. Guessed the wound must have knocked that idea out of his head, I thought.
"Still going to be the Champ?" I said.
"Yes," he said, "but not in boxing." 
"Wrestling?" I said.
"No," he said.
"What?" I said.
"Literature," he said.
"Oh," I said.
Still shooting at the moon, I thought. Never pools his punches. Always in there trying. Why, when he was a kid in the school he used to pick up a tough five bucks acting as a sparring partner for the pros in O'Connell's gym. He didn't care how big they were either. Plenty of guts. Well, he could count on me to be in his corner over here. I knew the ropes. You know how it is when you run into a guy from your own home town. Might start by running something for him in The Boulevardier. You could see he could use the prestige. If he can write like he can drink, I thought, I'll take him in my stable.
I said aloud, "What's your record?"
"Just a couple of amateur warm-ups," he said. "Three Stories and Ten Poems and a six-rounder called In Our Time."
"Kayos?" I said.
"No," he said. "Didn't want to hurt my hands. I'm turning pro in my next bout. It's an eight-rounder that will put me in the semifinals. Then when I get into the main bouts and grab those big purses in the States I'm going to buy me a boat, a house on a tropical island, and go fishing."
"And retire with the title?" I said.
"No," he said. "I'll defend the title. You know, fight in spurts. Stall for the first two minutes of each round and then go in slugging the last minute like the champs do."
He's got it all figured out, I thought. Sounds like he means it too.
"What's this eight-rounder you are writing?" I said.
"The Sun Also Rises," he said.
"Come again," I said.
"The Sun Also Rises," he said.
The suns also rises, I thought. What the hell has the sun got to do with Paris? You never see it. You go to bed when it rises and you get up when it sets. What a title for a book on Paris, I thought.
"Better call it the moon also rises," I said aloud.
"Gertrude likes it," he said.
"Gertrude who?" I said.
"Gertrude Stein," he said. "She is my trainer."
Holy smokes, I thought. A champ is a champ is a champ. If he listens to those Left Bank oracles he's going to be throwing iambic tetrameters instead of punches. Better get him across the river and under the trees of the Champs Elysees fast.
"Ernest," I said, "how would you like to do a one-round benefit for The Boulevardier? If you got something short and sweet with a wallop I can run it for you. No purse, as you know, but plenty of prestige."
"Glad to help you boys out," he said.
"Well, it would help you too," I said. "To have the name Ernest Miller Hemingway up there with Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, and the rest of us."
"I have dropped the Miller," he said.
"O.K.," I said, "I'll call you Kid Hemingway, if you like. What kind of stuff are you doing?"
He feinted with his left, shot a straight right and picked up a big envelope from the bar.
"Here's a short left hook," he said. "Travels only about eight inches but carries authority. If it isn't a knockout, I'll eat it. It is not for The Boulevardier however. You guys would duck and let it go over your heads."
Oh yeah, I thought. I opened it up and looked at the title. "The Killers" it was called. I'll say it's not for us, I thought. "The Kissers" would have pleased me better. I ordered another round to give me strength, and glanced through it.
The story was all dialogue. It was all right as far as it went but it didn't get anywhere. Some gangsters were going to kill a Swede. They walked into a cafe where the Swede used to eat and waited for him with their hands in their pockets. Then they walked out. The Swede came later and when he heard they had been looking for him he couldn't eat. Just went home to his furnished room and went to bed. That's the way it ended. With the poor Swede waiting in bed. Sort of left you up in the air.
"Where's the rest of it?" I said.
"The rest of what?" he said.
"The story," I said
"Don't be silly," he said, "that's my style."
Well, if that's his style, I'll take vanilla, I thought.
"I'm sending it that way to the States," he said.
"Listen, kid," I said, "you gotta have a Hollywood ending for the States. Take a tip from me and have the two killers give it to the Swede with tommy-guns. They step out of the clothes closet and give it to him while he is saying his prayers. Then you got something."
"I'll make a note of that," he said.
I didn't like the way he said it. But I'll bet he does change it, I thought. If he doesn't they will blast him.
Then he shadow-boxed, drove a hard right into the inside pocket f his sports coat and hit me with a few crumpled sheets of yellow paper written in lead pencil.
"Here's a low kidney punch for that throwaway of yours," he said. "Don't change a word."
Get a load of that, I thought. Don't change a word. Here I am doing the guy a favour, and he starts ordering me around. I tell him how to end the killers thing and he fouls me. Offer to print his stuff in The Boulevardier and he calls it a "throwaway". What if he does know the magazine, I thought. He doesn't know me well enough to call it that to my face.
I glanced at the title. It was "The Real Spaniard". Sounded all right. Louis Bromfield, another young Paris writer, had a piece for us called "The Real French". Louis had already hit the jackpot with his second book. It got him the Pulitzer Prize. That meant the other Left Bank writers would be out gunning for him, I thought.
"Parody on Bromfield?" I said.
"Yeah," he said, "I give him hell."
That's O.K., I thought. We liked parodies in the book. But I didn't say anything. Just stuck the thing in my pocket without reading it. Might need it for wrapping up a parcel some day. I was still sore about the crack he had made about the magazine. Better change the subject, I thought. One more drink and I'd tell him what he could do with his wrapping paper. I put on my phony night-club smile.
I said, "Ever been up to my place on the Hill?"
"No," he said.
"Why?" I said.
"Too high," he said.
"The Hill?" I said.
"No. The prices," he said.
I said, "Come up any night. Be my guest. Bring your girl."
"Thanks," he said.
"Got a smoking?" I said 
"A what?" he said
"A smoking," I said.
Can you beat that, I thought. He is writing a book on Paris and he does not know what a smoking is. A smoking is Paris argot for a tuxedo. I told him. You got to be dressed in my place. It;s not Left Bank honky-tonk. We open at midnight and close when the sun also rises, I told him. Might as well impress him that it was a classy joint. He might think it is another Hinkey Dinks in Chicago, I thought.
"There is no sawdust on my floor," I said.
"Too bad," he said. "But I'll give you a break for old times sake. I never play when I work but I'll come up when the book is finished. I'll bring Lady Brett with me."
"Lady who?" I said.
"Lady Brett," he said. "Belongs to an old English family, title and all that sort of thing. You wouldn't know her."
"Oh," I said.
"I'll bring you an autographed copy of the book too," he said.
"Thanks," I said. And I paid the check and left.
I had to laugh when I got outside. Here I had a whole bookcase full of autographed  best-sellers like Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and lot of others. And that kid was going to give m an autographed copy of his opus. Not only that but he was going to lend a little class to my place by bringing Lady What's her name. Why, ever since the Prince of Wales started coming there I had them all. Wait until he sees the cream of British nobility hobnobbing with me, I thought. Lady Mountbatten used to say my dance floor looked like an illustrated copy of Burke's Peerage. The Duke of Manchester was there every night. They liked my jazz band. The Crackerjacks and the Argentine orchestra specializing in the tango, which was a new wrinkle then. Well, I thought, I only hope his story is up to The Boulevardier's standards. Those standards were high in one way and low in another. Look at Sinclair Lewis. He made the Nobel Prize, but he had a tough time making The Boulevardier. We turned him down twice. His stuff was too provincial for us.
In the taxi to the office I got thinking about Lewis. The only way he resembles Hemingway, I thought, is in his drinking. He was a swell guy though. H finally did make the magazine, too. That was when I cut a five-thousand-word yarn of his down to one thousand. He was delighted to make the grade and bought up half the issue to send to friends in the States. Never could do the short stuff, he always said. Nice guy. You don't mind helping out a writer like that, I thought.
I showed "The Real Spaniard" to Gwynne and told him Hemingway was another Bromfield. Gwynne read it, hit the ceiling, and grabbed a big blue pencil. "Where does he write, on rest-room walls?" he roared. I looked over his shoulder and there were two four-letter words. There were words that you heard around the office all he time. But you didn't see them.
"Well," I said, "he spelled them correctly, didn't he?"
And the guy tells me not to change a word, I thought. Gwynne tossed the sheets over to Arthur Moss. Arthur was the editor and said he knew Hemingway and wasn't surprised. He read the piece through and then turned over the last page. "Where's the rest of it?" he said. "You must have lost a page."
"That's all he gave me," I said. I read it myself. It's an unfinished symphony, I thought. But maybe he wants it like that.
I said aloud, "It's the latest style in literature and," - I added - "he comes from my home town."
"O.K.," Moss said, "Write an ending to it and we'll run it on page forty-two."
"Not me," I said. "Promised I wouldn't change a word."
"You don't have to change a word," Arthur said. "Just add a paragraph. I'll take the rap for you if he squawks. We go to press in an hour and we can't print it that way. The story stinks and you know it."
Of course I knew it. But I knew Hemingway too. Well, I thought, if he didn't give me all of it it's not my fault. Besides, Moss had agreed to take the blame. I wanted the yarn to get in that issue, and it wouldn't make the grade the way it was.
So I wrote an ending. I ghosted his style a little and it turned out swell. The story wasn't bad at all with my ending. Then we ran a little blurb about his book. That ought to please him, I thought.
But it didn't please him. The magazine was hardly on the stands before he was on our necks. Came roaring into the office with fire in his eyes and said I had spoiled the story. I told the truth; said I had not changed a word. I should have stood in bed like the guy in the other story, I thought. I glanced over at Moss. Would he take the rap as he had promised?
Li's Abner, as we called him, stood under five feet and weighed  in ringside at 123 pounds. But there was no moss attached to him except his name. He had to bend his head away back to look at our detractor, but he looked the bull right in the eye.
"Pipe down, Big Boy," he said. "I am the editor and I rewrote your story for the better. What are you going to do about it?" Ernest looked like he couldn't believe his ears. He bent over to get a better look.
"Stand up and I'll show you," he said.
"I am standing up," Arthur said, and he was.
That broke the spell. Ernest stuck out his big hand. I knew he would.
"Shake brother," he said. "You got guts."
Then he walked out without a glance at me. That's gratitude for you, I thought. You try to help out a pal and he does not appreciate it. Show him how to write and he says you spoiled his story. Well, let him go back to his Gertrude Stein and see if I care. But that book of his needs a rewrite more than the story  did, I thought. ...

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George Orwell: About Jewish women

From War-time Diary; 1940

George Orwell
(25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950)

The other night examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus and Baker Street. Not all Jews, but, I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off a train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way. It took me back to old days on the Paris Metro.

Surprised to find that D, who is distinctly Left in his views, is inclined to share the current feeling against the Jews. He says that Jews in business circles turning pro-Hitler, or preparing to do so. This sounds almost incredible, but according to D they will always admire anyone who kicks them. What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jew, would prefer Hitler's kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don't say it outright. The fact is that the insular outlook and the continental outlook are completely incompatible.

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Harold Nicolson: End-of-year excerpts from Diaries & Letters: 1939-45

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Harold Nicolson (1886 - 1968)

A few end-of-year excerpts from Diaries & Letters: 1939 - 45

Diary: 31 December, 1939

Cyril Joad* expounds pacifism after dinner. His line is that the ordinary person in England would be less unhappy after a Nazi victory than if he or she lost their sons, lovers or husbands. He thinks only of the greatest unhappiness of the greatest number, and accuses me of national and spiritual pride. It is a pleasure talking to him. He stirs up the mind. He is extremely imaginative about physical pain, and the picture of young men being gored by bayonets is so terrible to him that he would prefer sacrificing liberty to prevent it happening.

I do not stay to watch the New Year in or the Old Year out. I write this diary at 11.45 and shall not wait. The old year is foul and the new year terrifying. I think, as I go to bed, of Nigel and Ben, Ben and Nigel. How stupid life is. Not evil, only stupid. What shall I have to record this time net year?

* The author and philosopher. He was an old friend of H.N., with whom he had been associated during the days of the New Party in 1931. He was a leading pacifist at the beginning of the Second World War as he was in the First. 


Letter from H.N. to V.S.W.:  31 December, 1940
(In the train from Bristol to Cardiff)

I have found a new pleasure in life - travelling with a Private Secretary. One just walks about in a fur coat and things get done. Moreover, he keeps the purse and gives such tips as I should never dare to give. But it is at him the porters scowl, not me. I just walk away and gaze at the show-cases in the hall. 

I lunched with the Regional Commissioner yesterday to meet Alexander, the C. in C. of Southern Command. He thinks the Battle of England has already began - Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, the City. They will burn and destroy them one by one. 'Archie Wavell', he says, 'mops up 40,000 Libyans and we claim a victory. In two hours the Germans destroy 500 years of  our history.' I do think we are going through a hellish time.




Diary: 31 December, 1941

Read Rebecca West's book about Yugoslavia.*  Feed the famished swans. We stay up late listening to the wireless and hearing Maisky, Wellington Koo and John Winant exchanging polite messages. Then there is a Scottish service, in the middle of which Big Ben strikes and 1941 is finished. Not a year on which |I shall look back with any pleasure. I shall say no more about it than that. It has been a sad and horrible year.

* Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 



Diary: 31 December, 1942

Our present worry is (a) the U-boat campaign. It is very serious indeed. We can lose the war by this; (b) the badness of our Army. The cream of our officers and men have been drained off by the R.A.F. and the Commandos. What remains is pretty poor. With good troops we ought to have brought off the dash to Tunis.   As it is ...

I go down to the House to fire watch. I sit in the map-room feeling pretty glum. I hear Big Ben strike out the old year. There are distant shouts of Auld Lang Syne, sung with an American accent. Then the snoring in my dormitory resumes its sway.

Caroline Moorehead: Paris in the '30s

The following excerpt is from Caroline Moorehead's Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Caroline Moorehead (28 October 1944 - )

In the spring of 1930, when Martha arrived in Paris with two suitcases, a typewriter and $75, France was much envied by the rest of the world. The leading economic power in Europe, second only to Britain for the size and wealth of its colonies, its army was strong, its franc solid and French industry was said to be growing faster than any other. 

... On Friday and Saturday nights, the young Americans went dancing at the bals musette around the Luxembourg, or dropped in on the new nightclubs to listen to jazz or practice the charleston or the shimmy. Theatres kept their foyer floors highly polished, and provided orchestras, so that audiences could fox trot in the intervals. Musical reviews were more lavish than they had ever been, the dancing girls wearing great sheaths of feathers and plumes; at the Casino, Josephine Baker, and 'unforgettable female ebony statue', had already made her first appearance naked but for a single pink flamingo feather, in a show that included a live cheetah, a flight of trained pigeons, some roller skaters and an aerial ballet of stout Italian dancers. ... So essential were the fashions dictated by Chanel and Molyneux, that the New Yorker ran a regular column on what smart Parisians were wearing: lipstick, even by day, brightly coloured silk stockings, nail varnish, and perms that rippled the hair like a beach at low tide. Life was glamorous, full of experiments and agreeably cheap. It was a very long way from St Louis.

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Natalia Ginsburg: All Our Yesterdays

The following is an excerpt from Natalia Ginsburg's All Our Yesterdays.

Natalia Ginsburg (14 July 1916 - 7 October 1991)

Signora Maria related what she had heard in the shops and from the music master she still met sometimes on the road by the river. The Germans were sprinkling a kind of powder that made people stupid. The Allies were breathing in this powder and were fighting half asleep. And the French generals were accepting gold coins from the Germans to make wrong moves. And the Germans were dressing up as French peasants and fishermen and were cutting the telegraph wires and poisoning the rivers.And the roads of France were full of refugees, women running away with their children, and the children got lost and the Germans caught them and sent them off to their laboratories, where they used them for scientific  experiments like frogs or rabbits. Emanuele put his hands over his ears and besought them for goodness' sake to make her stop talking, his nerves were all to pieces and he couldn't control himself, one day perhaps he would strangle Signora Maria. Emanuele disliked the Belgians, the French, the English, the Russians who had allied themselves with the Germans, he limped up and down the room and kicked at the furniture. He disliked Signora Maria who was spreading panic. In his own home he also had Franz spreading panic. He wandered about like a ghost and said that the Germans by advancing in France would overflow into Italy. Emanuele told him he was behaving as though the Germans were already in Italy; but perhaps Mussolini was not sticking by the Germans. Franz said he was not afraid of Mussolini, he was only afraid of the Germans, if he found himself face to face with German soldiers he would go mad. At night he came to Emanuele's room and sat on his bed, and made him repeat that the Maginot Line was impenetrable. But the Germans went on penetrating it. One night he woke Emanuele to tell him that not only was his mother Jewish but his father too, he was completely Jewish and it was well known what the Germans were doing to the Jews, if the Germans came down into Italy the only thing for him to do would be to put a bullet through his head. So many times he had been on the point of going to America but he liked Italy too much, in Italy he felt he was safe even though for some time now there had been laws against the Jews, all you did was to pay a little and the police left you alone. But now he felt the Germans altogether too near, there they were in France behind the mountains and all they had to do was cross the mountains to get to where he was.

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George Orwell: Review of Mein Kampf

The following is an excerpt from George Orwell's review of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

George Orwell
(25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950)

... I should like to to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter- I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs - and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the  expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that there is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at, but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero  who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous, half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers, tin pacifists somehow won't do. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense, they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underestimate it emotional appeal.

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William Shirer: The first day of World War Two

William Shirer (February 23, 1904 - December 28, 1993)

From Berlin Diary

Berlin, September 3

Hitler's "counter attack" on Poland has on this Sabbath day become a world war! To record the date: September 3, 1939. The time: eleven a.m. At nine o'clock this morning Sir Nevile Henderson called on the German Foreign Minister and handed him a note giving Germany until eleven o'clock to accept the British demand that Germany withdraw her troops from Poland. He returned to the Wilhemstrasse shortly after eleven and was handed the German reply in the form of a memorandum. The extras are out on the streets now. The newsboys are giving them away. The D.A.Z. here. Its headlines:

BRITISH ULTIMATUM TURNED DOWN

ENGLAND DECLARES A STATE OF WAR

WITH GERMANY

BRITISH NOTE DEMANDS WITHDRAWAL

OF OUR TROOPS IN THE EAST

THE FUHRER LEAVING TODAY FOR THE FRONT

A typical headline over the official account:

GERMAN MEMORANDUM PROVES

ENGLAND'S GUILT.

I was standing in the Wilhelmplatz about noon when the loud-speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned. The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war. No issue has been created for them yet, though as this day wears on,it is plain that "Albion's perfidy" will become the issue as it did in 1914. In Mein Kampf Hitler says the greatest mistake the Kaiser made was to fight England, and Germany must never repeat that mistake.

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Dorothy Thompson: Letter from Murnau (1934)

Dorothy Thompson (9 July 1893 - 30 January 1961)

In 1934, American newspaper columnist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson drove through the German town of Murnau, passing a Hitler Youth camp that had been built to accommodate six thousand boys between the ages of ten to sixteen. "They were beautiful children," she wrote to a friend. "I did not think they would ever grow up to be thickset beer drinkers with rubber-tire necks. They sang together, and no people sing in unison as the Germans do, thousands of them, in the open air, young voices, still soprano, and the hills echoing! It made one feel sentimental.

"An enormous banner stretched across the hillside [and] dominated the camp. It was so huge that you could see it from the farthest point. It was so prominent that every child could see it many times a day. It was white, and there was a swastika painted on it, and besides that only seven words: YOU WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY!"

H. G. Wells: On meeting Stalin

H. G. Wells
(21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946)

In 1934, H.G. Wells, then one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, was received by Stalin in Moscow. "I have never met a man more candid, fair or honest," he wrote in An Experiment in Autobiography, " and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult or sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him, ..."

Martha Gellhorn: The Carpathian Lancers (Italy, July 1944)

Martha Gellhorn (8 November, 1908 - 15 February, 1998)

This field grew huge dead cattle. They lay with their legs pointing up, and their open eyes were milky and enormous, and the air stank of their swollen bodies. We could not tell what had killed them because we were driving too fast through a long tunnel of dust which was the road. Aside from the hideous dead animals everything looked lovely, with the Adriatic a flat turquoise blue and the sky a flat china blue and the neat green hilly country of the Marche ahead. The Major drove as usual like mad. There was plenty of dust in Italy all the time, but when he drove a roaring surf of dust beat out behind us.

We were going up to have a look at the front before lunch.

We came to a village where the armored cars of the Third Squadron were stationed. They stood in the narrow side streets and were covered with leafy branches, had a pair of German steel helmets over each set of headlights, and flew the small red and blue pennant of the Carpathian Lancers from their radio antennae. Poppi, who commanded this squadron, leaned out the window of a house by the road and invited us in. The infantry was moving forward very slowly in trucks. All the infantry had dusty white faces, as if they had decided on some new sort of masquerade, using flour for make-up. They looked hot and unenthusiastic.

Poppi is more than six feet tall, exaggeratedly blond, about twenty-five years old, with bright-blue eyes and a funny husky voice. I wouldn't have thought that he was a Pole but I have now given up thinking that people look like Poles or don't look like Poles. The Poles cannot be classified, which is one of their chief charms. ...

... The Germans were beyond a ruined medieval tower which was our farthest advance position. They held somewhere in the hills and in whatever farmhouses they thought useful. The tower was being shelled. The Germans had anti-tank guns placed in farm-houses where they dominated the roads. The Lancers' armored cars were intended for was in the Western Desert; they could not operate across country, so they had to stick to the roads. The Germans waited and shot at them point blank. It was like roulette; you either won or you got burned inside your car or maybe you crawled out in time. This went on during the daytime, and the infantry pushed ahead a little, and our artillery shelled the German positions, and at night usually the germans retreated a few kilometers further north. It was a tiny war at the moments, though people got killed in tiny wars also. ...

... the Carpathian Lancers had been the spearhead of the Polish Cores in a spectacular advance of two hundred miles up the Adriaticcoast; and nobody was feeling violently energetic now, a few days after the capture of the port of Ancona. It was too soon for another big Polish drive, and the Lancers and the Germans were only prodding each other, while the Polish Corps reorganized for the next push.

We roared away in our private dust storm. The major was disappointed in the tour. "Nossing," he said, "Tres ennuyeux pour vous. Sie haben nichts gesehen."  The use of three scrambled languages was our regular communication system. Everyone understood everyone else perfectly.

Since the war had so delightfully stopped and since it was beautiful weather and since Second Squadron was in reserve near us and doing nothing in particular, we decided to go swimming. There was a slight snag because no one had had time to investigate the beach and the approaches to the beach for mines; but as the Poles said, if you spent your life always considering mines it would be quite impossible. So we climbed over a German-destroyed railway bridge, climbing as delicately as if we were Balinese dancers, stepped softly on the torn-up wooden ties and jumped prudently down the embankment and then walked very very lightly along a dusty road to the shore. Andrew, who is a second lieutenant and commands a platoon of armored cars, and I did this noble work of reconnaissance. We decided to walk side by side or closely following each other, on the grounds that it would not be fair for just one of us to explode. There were no mines, at least we did not step on any and there was the warm pale sea and a beach of smooth white pebbles.

Ariel Sharon: African Adventure

Ariel Sharon, (26 February, 1928 - 11 January, 2014)

In 1964 Sharon was 36-years old and badly in need of a break from more than twenty years of virtually uninterrupted military life. His fellow officer, friend and mentor, Lieutenant General Avraham Yoffe, who was 51 at the time, was recently demobbed from the IDF and they decided on a brief trip to Africa - for a break from military life.

The following extracts are from Sharon's autobiography Warrior, published in 1989.

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By the end of 1964 I felt I needed to get away from it all and decided to take a leave of absence. Besides, the chance had come up to travel to Africa with Yoffe, who now had been appointed head of Israel's nature preserves.

At that time travelling from Israel to Africa was not a simple matter.  ... 

... In the end we flew on a military cargo plane bound for Entebbe, Uganda, with a load of parachute equipment to be used in some demonstration. We took off from Tel Nof, my old base, and passed over Eilat heading south. As night fell , we crossed briefly over Saudi territory in order to get as far as possible from Sharm al-Sheikh, where the Egyptians had a radar station. As we flew over the black Saudi mountains, I stood in the doorway of the cockpit with a cup of coffee warming my hands. Watching the moon rise in front of us gave me an expansive feeling. ... 

... In the early morning we landed in Masawa, Ethiopia, where an Israeli crew was waiting to refuel us. ... We entered Uganda over a place called Moroto, then flew on to Entebbe, the plane's final destination. There we picked up a car and began our tour of Uganda. ... After several days of sightseeing we found ourselves back in Moroto, the place we have flown over on the way in. Moroto was as primitive a bush town as I have ever seen. ... Yoffe and I went to stock up on canned food and found ourselves queuing up at a little store together with a group of tall Karamojo tribal people. Our queue mates were naked - the men completely, the women wearing only hide loincloths. They carried small three-legged stools so that they could sit down without encountering the biting insects that swarmed on the ground.

From Uganda we crossed into Kenya at Lake Nakuru, a place breathtaking for the countless numbers of flamingos that live there, feeding on the small mollusks and crustaceans in the shallow waters. Thousands of these tall, graceful birds crowded the lake, a shifting living mass of pink and white. When they began moving, it was like watching a cloud come to life. ... 

... We drove on towards Tanzania to visit Amboseli and Ngorongoro Crater, the most wonderful preserve of all, with its huge herds of antelope, graceful impala, and long-necked Geremuk deer, zebras, gnus, waterbucks, and water buffalo with their wide backs and coarse coats. Among them we could see lionesses hunting and lions striding in to dine first at the kill. ...

... We had also made up our minds to visit what was reputed to be one of the most interesting sights in Ethiopia, the Awash River. This river flows through the Danakil Desert, then abruptly disappears into the sands. At the place it disappears, hot springs and sulphur pools dot the landscape, products, perhaps, of the same geological aberration that swallows the river. The desert around is inhabited by Danakil nomads, primitive camel herders with a reputation for savagery. Tourists are warned away from this area, which is considered too dangerous for ordinary travel.

Only recently a British pilot had made a forced landing in the desert and had been killed there. He had fallen victim to a Danakil tradition according to which the most precious gift a nomad groom can present to his intended bride is the testicles of an enemy. Receiving such a gift, the bride displays them on her forehead to proclaim the honor that has been paid her. The British pilot had been castrated and had hemorrhaged to death, after which the Ethiopian army had inflicted their own cruel punishment on the tribesmen.

Having seen quite enough of the Danakil Desert, we drove back to Addis Ababa. We had been in Africa for five weeks and it was time to go home.

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