Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on Visiting Pamplona Cathedral)

“At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the façade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”—American Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), on Pamplona Cathedral, Spain, in The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on ‘The Feeling of the Actual Life’ in His Work)

“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You cant do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you cant believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to.” — American Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), in a Mar. 20, 1925 letter to his father Clarence, in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2, 1923-1925, edited by Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, and Robert W. Trogdon (2013)

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on His Antidote to Writer’s Block as a Young Man)

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”—American Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Moveable Feast (1964)

Not bad advice for those of us staring at a blank screen. It’s also, of course, even more beautifully written than I had remembered, with the images of the oranges and the fire combining, in a wholly organic way, into a symbol for the creative process, with the nonessential discarded into what’s left is something unusual and colorful: “the sputter of blue.”

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, With One of the Great Openings in American Literature)

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”—Nobel Literature laureate and American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Farewell to Arms (1929)

In a post from nine years ago, I discussed how, by force of will—anywhere from 39 attempts (the author’s estimate) to 70—Ernest Hemingway came up with an ending to A Farewell to Arms that finally satisfied him.

I don’t know if Hemingway struggled quite so much with his opening to this novel from his golden period, but I do know that it is magical in a way that his bleak conclusion isn’t, and probably couldn’t be.

The cadences of the sentences—filled with short words, but featuring multiple clauses that add complexity—feel inspired by the King James Bible in their constant repetition of “and.” The details of the landscape were born of close observation by a writer who, on childhood fishing trips with his father, developed a lifelong love for nature.

Put all of this together and the results are lyrical. But Hemingway has also slipped in, as naturally as the pebbles and dust he notices, three symbols that will dominate the rest of the novel: the plain, the mountains, and the river.

The plain is the scene of suffering and death, created in this case by the havoc caused by World War I. Even the movement of troops through the village disturb the natural order, raising dust on the trees. The mountains come to represent refuge and home, the transitory “separate peace” that narrator Lt. Frederic Henry and his lover Catherine Barkley treasure.

The river signifies rebirth, a departure from the devastation of war into a new realm of freedom and love, where Frederic will dive to escape the carnage and madness of war.

World War I wounded civilization as a whole and Hemingway in particular. The wound to the then 18-year-old ambulance driver on the Italian front was physical (fragments from a mortar shell entered his right foot and knee, striking his thighs, scalp and hand—and, most ominously, the first in a series of concussions) and psychological (a belief that violence could intrude at any time on life).

For all the granular physical description in the opening of A Farewell to Arms, it paradoxically gains power through the blurring of other details. “In the summer of that year”—which year? “A village”—which one? Likewise, the river and mountains go unnamed. It is all so mysterious that the reader wants to know more, but at the same time the experience has become universal, beyond a particular time and place.

Although Hemingway has been frequently criticized for his treatment of the women in his life and his fiction, two female writers were looked beyond his blustering macho and found inspiration in the powerful opening of A Farewell to Arms. Joan Didion analyzed it in a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, but had already hailed it in a 1978 interview for The Paris Review:

“He taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”

Equally seismic was the impact on the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, one of Hemingway’s most perceptive and eloquent advocates in the Ken Burns biography of the Nobel laureate. In her own 1984 interview with The Paris Review, she explains how she first encountered this passage:

“Shortly after I arrived in London I saw an advertisement for a lecture given by Arthur Mizener [author of a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise] on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You must remember that I had no literary education, but a fervid religious one. So I went to the lecture and it was like a thunderbolt—Saul of Tarsus on his horse! Mizener read out the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and I couldn’t believe it—this totally uncluttered, precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my urgency to write.”

Flashback, August 1936: Hemingway Weighs Price of Fame in ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’

When Esquire Magazine published “Snows of Kilimanjaro” in its August 1936 issue, readers unfamiliar with the recent circumstances surrounding Ernest Hemingway would have regarded the short story, rightly, as one of the finest of his career, representing an artistic summit analogous to the African peak which served as the ultimate destination of his fictional character Harry.

With prior short stories and novels preoccupied with the theme of death, his return to the subject would not, at first glance, seem unusual. 

But this time, the treatment became more coruscating, even self-lacerating, as Hemingway created a protagonist with fears all too close to his own—and imagined a heedlessness in the face of danger paralleling the same tendency in himself.

In its own time, the story raised more than a few eyebrows because of its shot at F. Scott Fitzgerald, who a decade before had offered Hemingway both a useful introduction to influential Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins and astute editing advice, when the fledgling fiction writer needed both.

Fitzgerald’s recent series of confessional essays, later collected as The Crack-Up, had recounted, in what now seems oblique if elegant terms, his emotional anguish. Together with his 1934 novel Tender is the Night, that malaise suggested self-pity—or, put in more basic terms, weakness—to Hemingway.

Fitzgerald felt rightly aggrieved when he turned to page 200 in the August issue of Esquire only to read:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

The quote referred to the famous beginning paragraph of Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Rich Boy.” All things considered, his response to the younger writer he had considered a friend brimmed with restraint:

“Dear Ernest:

“Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it in a book would you mind cutting my name?

“It’s a fine story– one of your best even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald etc.’ rather spoiled it for me.”

A change of the name from “Scott” to “Julian” for later collected editions of the story provided the merest figleaf concealing the author’s identity. The immediate effect of "Snows" was that it commenced “open season” on Fitzgerald, noted biographer David Brown’s Paradise Lost. The following month, New York Post reporter Michael Mok profiled Fitzgerald as an alcoholic wreck, his youthful promise evaporated at age 40. Not long after, Fitzgerald attempted suicide.

The very public jab at Fitzgerald puts Hemingway admirers such as me face to face with an unsettling situation in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: a writer creating some of his most subtle, controlled and beautiful work, but unable to hide his more obvious, uncontrolled and ugly emotions.

The denigration of his early champion and friend took as much chutzpah as it did rewriting history. Nobody—certainly not Hemingway—made to Fitzgerald the wisecracking rejoinder about the rich included in the story.

Instead, the remark came at Hemingway’s expense, when he grandiosely remarked to visiting friends that he was studying the very rich. As biographer Brown noted, the fact that the crack came from a woman—the Irish writer Mary Colum—could only make Hemingway smart even more.

Decades later, however, knowing how Hemingway’s life turned out, many readers might feel that certain women in his life might have even greater reason than Fitzgerald for annoyance about "Snows," including his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway.

Or, I should say, his second of four wives. Hemingway had written about her in Green Hills of Africa with what passed for his highest praise: the good sport who shared his big-fame adventures on the continent.

But, fatally for their marriage, Hemingway also associated her with the end of his youthful innocence: as the woman who lured him away from his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and introduced him to a world of wealth he believed undermined his discipline as a writer.

Then, after the Catholic Pauline insisted that they follow the rhythm method in intercourse to avoid a third pregnancy that, doctors had warned, could endanger her life, Hemingway found himself not merely creatively cosseted but sexually dissatisfied.

Hemingway responded, in troubling fashion, to an urge that had last darkened his work the decade before: attacking in print, in thinly fictionalized form, people who had once meant a great deal to him.

In 1926, he had made his reputation with The Sun Also Rises, a roman a clef whose characters—drawn from a booze-filled trip to Spain to watch bullfights—included an anti-Semitic portrayal of the writer Harold Loeb.

A year later, in a move that then-wife Hadley warned him against, Hemingway had used The Torrents of Spring to satirize Sherwood Anderson, an older mentor who gave helpful advice on his early fiction.

By the mid-1930s, Hemingway was lashing out—again, in veiled, fictionalized terms—this time against a trio of women. Two of the three would form the composite character "Helen" in "Snows":

* Jane Kendall Mason, who had engaged in an intermittent four-year affair with Hemingway while he was in Havana, spurred the creation of two of the most misogynistic works in all his fiction: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and To Have and Have Not.

* Helen Hay Whitney, an heiress who, speculates Paul Hendrickson in Hemingway's Boat, offered to help bankroll a future Hemingway safari—helping to inspire the “Helen” character in “Snows.”

*Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, the Arkansas heiress whose uncle had not only furnished the money for the Hemingway’s Key West home but also for the recent safari that gave rise to Green Hills of Africa. 

How could Pauline not have thought of herself when she read passages like this in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”?

“It was strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved.”

Character assassination remained among the instruments that Hemingway employed throughout his life. Friends who found themselves at the receiving end of his inexplicable cruelty were, more often than not, bewildered by what might have caused the disruption in their relationship.

But, with Hemingway’s multiple eruptions in the mid-1930s, the motive may have been fear. Fame and fortune were complicating his life, propelling Hemingway towards creating a macho image he found increasingly difficult to maintain.

Although the printed version of “Snows” gave the protagonist’s name as, simply, Harry, the manuscript called him “Harry Walden”—a more explicit recognition of the simple life that Hemingway felt he was abandoning.

In an August 1968 article for American Heritage Magazine, Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker spelled out the consequences: “One of Hemingway’s recurrent motivations to literary creativity throughout his life was the conviction that he might soon be going to die without having completed his work or fulfilled his unwritten promise to his talents. At the time when he wrote this story he knew very well that he had climbed no farther than the lower slopes of his personal Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway compressed his self-doubt into a single memorable sentence in “Snows”: “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.”

Four italicized vignettes in “Snows” offer a glimpse of the stories Hemingway desperately wanted to write, in some of the most lyrical passages he ever wrote, including this one of an Austrian village he had visited with Hadley:

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird….

And an even more nostalgic look back at Paris in the Twenties:

And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.

In his 1938 short-story collection, The First Forty-Nine, Hemingway concluded his preface with a note ironic and poignant in retrospect: “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories.” In fact, he wrote three more novels published in his lifetime and about twenty short stories not collected till after his death in 1961.

But, except perhaps for For Whom the Bell Tolls, none of these approached in quality the works up to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” that had made him such an icon of creative self-discipline. As an enthusiastic but none-too-adept amateur boxer, he knew the risks of softness and lack of alertness. Yet he had fallen victim to these dangers in the arena that mattered the most to him: writing.

Moreover, he had, with an uncanny sense of foreboding, anticipated the fate that overcame him in his last decade. As with his short story, a trip to Africa precipitated a medical crisis—in this case, two plane crashes in Uganda in 1954, in which he had suffered a fractured skull, a ruptured liver, a collapsed intestine, several broken vertebrae and a burnt scalp. 

As his fictional stand-in Harry had done in not cleaning his wound with iodine, Hemingway incurred further risk after the crashes by continuing to drink heavily. And his fourth wife, Mary, took on the same role of nurse assumed by fictional counterpart Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in tending to a husband who alternated affection with outbursts of contempt and abuse.

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on ‘What a Writer in Our Time Has To Do’)

“What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with dead men.”— American Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Esquire, October 1935, reprinted in Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips (1984)

I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway absolutely enthralled. I had known the general outline of his life and career, but the details divulged in these first two hours—particularly about his anguished relationship with his family in Oak Park, Ill., and the lift to his career and spirits given by his first wife, Hadley Richardson—shed new light on this endlessly discussed American legend.

But Burns, collaborator Lynn Novick, and series writer Geoffrey Ward keep in mind, above all, that they are telling us a story, and this first episode ends with a quote that can’t help but feel ominous, given how we know this will all turn out. “Hem,” wrote friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos in 1929, after the publication of the acclaimed A Farewell to Arms, “do you realize that you're king of the fiction racket?”

From this point on, it’s all that Hemingway can do to hold onto his balance as he remains atop this mountain of celebrity. From the moment he returned from WWI to his hometown, puffing up the actual story of his wound in Italy to a fake one involving him then carrying a wounded soldier to a first-aid station, he couldn’t resist embellishing his real achievements for an audience.

By the mid-1930s, when he was sending material (including today’s quote) to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, the temptation to posture and perform loomed even larger. He could try to resist—writing “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” for instance, as a warning to himself on being led away from his gifts.

But now, it wasn’t just a matter of writing “the truest sentence” he knew, but also of “getting in the ring” against prior literary greats like Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal. And the more Hemingway felt obliged to construct his own myth to compete against them, the harder it was to live up to that image. He might have been better off, as difficult as it might sound, to “write what hasn't been written before.”

So, one has to ask: was the tragedy of Hemingway’s life simply his suicide, or was it how the need to embody machismo sapped him of the iron self-discipline and critical judgement that produced the great work that secured his reputation in the Twenties—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and his short stories?

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on Why Snow Was Beautiful in Paris)

“Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk. It is very beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.” —American fiction writer and Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Christmas at the Roof of the World,” Toronto Star Weekly, Dec. 22, 1923, collected in By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White (1967)

(The image accompanying this post shows Hemingway with F. Scott Fitzgerald, frenemy and fellow American expatriate in 1920s Paris.)

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, Imagining Ernest Hemingway as an Intern Broker)

“Europe’s fiscal woes worry the Canadian investors. It is not fine to worry the Canadian investors, because if the Canadian investors worry about the leveraged-debt problems of Southern Europe, then the Americans will worry next, and after them the toreadors. This is not fine. It is fine to worry the toreadors a little, but it is not fine to worry them a lot. ‘Que tal?’ ask the worried picadors. ‘Que tal?’ ask the bartenders. The camerieri and the garcons and the chanteuses all worry about international sales exposure within the Dow. All of them say: ‘If the report on consumer durables is not fine today, will the report on cyclical goods and copper be fine tomorrow?’” —Joe Queenan, imagining Ernest Hemingway as a 22-year-old intern at a Toronto brokerage house, in “The Hunger Artists,” The Weekly Standard, Sept. 1, 2014

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on ‘Half-Baked, Spurious Nationalism’)

“To fear the world we have organized and led the three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”—John McCain (1936-2018), U.S. Senator (R-AZ), Presidential nominee, and Vietnam veteran and POW—and American hero, speech accepting the Liberty Medal, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 2017

If someone were to update John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage today, John McCain would be among the half-dozen U.S. Senators selected for this new pantheon. He was not perfect, any more than the figures JFK picked to honor in his Pulitzer Prize-winner were. But like them, he also found a point beyond which he could not be pushed.

In the last three years, that has come in his relationship with Donald Trump. It had to bother the President that the senior Senator from Arizona could not be bullied. Trump may have scoffed at McCain’s captivity in Vietnam, but that period of anguish and torture left him singularly unmoved by any sarcasm or threats Trump could hurl. 

I am not surprised that one of McCain’s favorite books was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. There were so many quotes about freedom, the preciousness of life, and the brotherhood of men in arms that must have appealed to him. 

But I think that another quote from that novel must have struck him with full force as he witnessed the threat that Donald Trump posed to the cooperative style of legislating and the international security arrangements to which McCain dedicated his adult life: “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”