TO MAKE PAPA PROUD

Gregory H. Hemingway

That summer in Havana I read papa's favorites, from Huckleberry Finn to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: like him, I sometimes had two or three books going at the same time. Then papa steered me to the short story masters, Maupassant and Chekhov. "Don't try to analyze—just relax and enjoy them."

"Now," papa said one morning. "Try writing a short story yourself. And don't expect it to be any good."

I sat down at a table with one of papa's fine-pointed pencils and thought and thought. I looked out the window, and listened to the birds, to a cat crying to join them; and to the scratch of my pencil, doodling. I let the cat out. Another wanted in.

I went to papa's typewriter. He'd finished with it for the day. Slowly I typed out a story and then took it to him.

Papa put his glasses on, poured himself another drink, and read, as I waited. He finished it and looked up at me. "It's excellent, Gig. Much better than anything I could do at your age. Only change I'd make is here," and he pointed to the line about a bird falling from its nest and finding, miraculously, that if it flapped its wings, it wouldn't crash on the rocks below

"You've written ...  'All of a sudden he realized he could fly.' Change 'all of a sudden' to 'suddenly'. Never use more words than you have to—it detracts from the flow of action." Papa smiled. I hadn't seen him smile at me like that for a long time. "But you've won the lottery, pal. Writing takes study, discipline, and imagination. You've shown me with this that you have the imagination. And if you can do it once, you can do it a thousand times. Imagination doesn't leave you for a long time, maybe never. Dostoyevsky was fifty-seven when he wrote Crime and Punishment.

"God, I used to get sad in Key West when people sent me their work and I could tell after reading one page that they didn't have it and never would. I answered every goddamn letter, usually saying that writing well was mainly a matter of luck, that to be given a great talent was like winning a million-to-one lottery; and if you weren't blessed, all the study and self-discipline in the world wouldn't mean a thing. If their letter had something like 'Everybody says I'd make a great engineer but what I really want to do is write,' I'd answer, 'Maybe everybody isn't wrong and you'll probably make an excellent engineer and then forget all about writing and be delighted you never went into it.'

"I wrote hundreds of letters like that and I was getting a dollar a word in those days."

"Later, when there were even more letters, I shortened my answers to 'Writing is a tough trade. Don't get mixed up in it if you can help it.' They probably thought, 'That conceited son of a bitch probably hasn't even read my stuff. But because he can write, he makes a big exclusive thing of it.'

"The important thing is, Gig, that now I can teach you because you have the tools. And, in all immodesty, I know a lot about the trade.

"I've wanted to cut down for a long time. The writing doesn't come so easily for me anymore. But I'll be just as happy helping you as doing it myself. Let's have a drink to celebrate."

Only once before can I remember papa being as pleased with me—when I tied for the pigeon-shooting championship. And he was confident that there was another winner in the family when I entered the short story for a school competition and won first prize.

Turgenev should have won the prize. He wrote the story. I merely copied it, changing the setting and the names, from a book I assumed papa hadn't read because some of the pages were still stuck together.

I didn't feel like a winner and wondered how long it would be before papa found out that the only creative contribution I had made to the story was to alter "suddenly" to "all of a sudden."

Fortunately I wasn't around when papa discovered my plagiarism. It got back to me that someone asked him if his son Gregory wrote. "Yes," he replied, with gusto and sparkle, flashing that "say cheese" smile he sometimes affected. "Gregory writes an occasional bad check." And, of course, everyone laughed.

Someone in that crowd might have thought, "What a brutal bastard to make such a callous wisecrack about his son. I guess all those stories I've heard about him being a hard-shell bully are true."

Hard-shelled, Yes, but I helped make that shell.