Chekhov's Mistress
Papa on Fatherhood
I’ve been reading Stephen Koch’s The Breaking Point about Hemingway, Dos Passos and the murder of Jose Roblés during the Spanish Civil War. In discussing “Hem’s” alleged affair with Martha Gellhorn, Koch quotes her son as saying that she was “one of the great letter writers of the twentieth century.” This sent me to my copy of Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters: 1917 – 1961 looking for some correspondence between the two. I forgot that these were just Hemingway’s letters (and besides, Gellhorn letters seem to have been expurgated). But perusing, I ran across this bit, which from spending the last two years in that chaos known as fatherhood, I enjoyed:
“Waldo [Pierce] is here with his kids like untrained hyenas and him as domesticated as a cow. Lives only for the children and with he time he puts on them they should have good manners and be well trained but instead they never obey, destroy everything, don’t even answer when spoken to, and he is like an old hen with a litter of apehyenas. I doubt if he will go out in the boat while he is here. Can’t leave the children. They have a nurse and a housekeeper too, but he is only really happy when trying to paint with one setting fire to his beard and the other rubbing mashed potato into his canvasses. That represents fatherhood.”
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: On The Art of On-line Criticism
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: December 11, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
