Writers Read online

  BARRY GIFFORD

  SEVEN STORIES

  N EW YORK • OAKLAND

  Copyright © 2015 by Barry Gifford. Drawings by Barry Gifford.

  a seven stories press first edition

  “Spring Training at the Finca Vigía” was published in the magazine Zyzzyva (San Francisco) No. 93, in the Winter 2011 issue.

  “After Words” (“Palabras después”) was published in the magazine Nexos (Mexico City) in the January 2015 issue.

  “The Last Words of Arthur Rimbaud” was originally published in a limited edition by the Bancroft Library Press (University of California, Berkeley, 1998).

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gifford, Barry, 1946-

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Writers / Barry Gifford. -- Seven Stories Press First edition.

  pages cm

  isbn 978-1-60980-649-1 (hardback)

  1. Authors--Fiction. I. Title.

  ps3557.i283a6 2015

  813’.54--dc23

  2015006307

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  These plays are fully protected in whole, in part, in any form, under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, radio, television, and public reading are strictly reserved. All inquiries should be addressed to the author’s agent: Matthew Snyder, Creative Artists Agency, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

  For Dan

  Author’s Note

  These pieces are intended to be read as stories as well as performed as plays. They are portraits of writers in wholly imaginary or relatively realistic moments in their lives. I’ve taken liberties, certainly, with what in several cases has passed for biographical information. The facts are to be found in what they wrote.

  —b.g.

  Contents

  SPRING TRAINING AT THE FINCA VIGÍA

  [Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn]

  ONE NIGHT IN UMBERTO’S CLAM HOUSE

  [Jack Kerouac]

  THE PITH HELMET

  [B. Traven and John Huston]

  IXION IN EXILE

  [Albert Camus]

  ALGREN’S INFERNO

  [Nelson Algren]

  THE LAST WORDS OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  [Arthur Rimbaud]

  SERIOUS ENOUGH

  [Jane Bowles]

  THE CAPTIVE

  [Marcel Proust]

  THE TRUE TEST OF GREATNESS

  [Herman Melville]

  FAREWELL LETTER

  [Charles Baudelaire]

  THE NOBODY

  [Emily Dickinson]

  AFTER WORDS

  [Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño]

  MUSIC

  [James Joyce and Samuel Beckett]

  SPRING TRAINING AT THE FINCA VIGÍA

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Ernest Hemingway, American writer

  Hugh Casey and Kirby Higbe, pitchers for the Brooklyn Dodgers

  Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s wife, also a writer

  Manuel, Hemingway’s right hand man

  Two Men in the darkness

  SETTINGS

  The Finca Vigía, the home of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, outside Havana, Cuba, in 1941.

  The Floridita, a bar in Havana.

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  The time of year is early spring. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team is in training for the upcoming major league season and two of their players, pitchers Hugh Casey and Kirby Higbe, have become companions of the forty-two-year-old author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, among other books.

  SCENE ONE

  It is just after ten thirty p.m. when CASEY and HIGBE, led by HEMINGWAY, storm into the house through the front porch door and mill about in the livingroom like lions or tigers driven by the lash of a whip into a cage. Each of them stalks the room warily for a long time, as if they—even Ernest— had never been in it before. They are all more than slightly inebriated.

  CASEY

  So this is your domain, hey, Ernie? Where you do your drinking.

  HIGBE

  Call him Ernest, Case. He told us he don’t like people callin’ him Ernie.

  HEMINGWAY

  Wherever I am is where I drink. I’m here now.

  HIGBE

  So are we. We’re all three of us here in Cuba.

  CASEY

  That’s right. Higbe’s right. What’re you gonna do about it, Ernesto?

  HEMINGWAY

  Might I offer you gentleman a libation?

  HIGBE

  I thought there was only Cuban women in Cuba.

  HEMINGWAY

  What’s he talkin’ about?

  CASEY

  What’re you talkin’ about, Ernesto?

  HEMINGWAY

  I’m offering you bums a beverage.

  CASEY

  Hell, yes, Hem, we’ll take you up on that offer.

  HIGBE

  Up and up!

  hemingway goes to his wet bar and pours whiskey into glasses for each of them, hands out the drinks

  HEMINGWAY

  The regulars at the Havana Gun and Country Club surely appreciate your patronage, boys, but I’m not certain they’ve got enough doves to last you until the end of spring training.

  HIGBE

  Us country boys are sure as shit some sharpshootin’ sons of bitches, you bet.

  HEMINGWAY

  Hig, I wish I had eagle eyes like you, but I inherited my eyes from my mother. I would’ve been better off having had an eagle for a mother than the one I have. Her character is as fucked up as her eyesight.

  HIGBE and CASEY can sense HEMINGWAY’s mood shift at the mention of his mother. They all drink harder.

  HEMINGWAY

  Come on, Case, let’s put on the gloves.

  HEMINGWAY takes down two pairs of boxing gloves hanging by their laces from a hook in one corner of the room, tosses a pair to CASEY. As the men are pulling on and lacing up the gloves, assisted by HIGBE, Hemingway’s wife, MARTHA GELLHORN, enters. She’s a dirty blonde, Barbara Stanwyck type, tough and sassy, not terrifically beautiful but attractive and smarter than the men, including her husband, who knows this and hates her because of it. She swiftly and accurately appraises the scene.

  GELLHORN

  Good evening, children. I’ll be damned if I can’t hear the third sheet fluttering in the wind.

  CASEY

  Evenin’, Missus Hemingway.

  HIGBE

  Evenin’, missus.

  HEMINGWAY

  You can dispense with the formality, boys. Señorita Gellhorn don’t cotton to the marital terminology. Martha, my esteemed opponent is none other than Mr. Hugh Casey, presently a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Serving as second for both of us is Mr. Kirby Higbe, also of the Brooklyn team, and noted author of what has been appropriately dubbed the high, hard one.

  HIGBE

  Don’
t listen to him, missus—I mean ma’am. I ain’t no author. I’m a pitcher, like Case. It’s what they call my numero uno.

  GELLHORN

  Your Spanish is very good, Mr. Higbe. But don’t worry, I listened to Mr. Hemingstein once, and that was enough.

  CASEY

  I know what you mean. Ol’ Ern knows how to convince people in a hurry.

  HEMINGWAY

  Cut the crap, Case. Hig, get us out of the clinches and keep the furniture out of our way.

  GELLHORN

  Pardon my asking, Mr. Casey, but aren’t you in training?

  CASEY

  You know, ma’am, I always pitch better when I have a few the night before. It always gives me a guilty feeling out there, and I bear down a little harder.

  HIGBE

  That’s right. Our general manager, Mr. MacPhail, once asked Case with a month to go in the season if he could hold out and Case told him, Larry, if there’s enough whiskey left, I can make it.

  HEMINGWAY and CASEY begin boxing. GELLHORN leaves the room. The two men hit each other hard and often. HIGBE scurries around in a futile attempt to preserve lamps, chairs and other stationary items.

  Later. HEMINGWAY and CASEY, exhausted, drop into armchairs. HIGBE unties their gloves and pulls them off.

  HEMINGWAY

  How many times you go down, Case?

  CASEY

  I don’t know. Six or seven, I guess.

  HEMINGWAY

  You count the knockdowns, Hig?

  HIGBE

  Yeah, six, seven maybe if it weren’t for him landin’ on the settee.

  HEMINGWAY

  Never for more than a second or two. You knocked me down twice, Case. You’re a tough fella.

  HIGBE

  I’ll say he’s tough, Ernest. One day last September the Cardinals was poundin’ Hughie pretty good and Durocher stomps out to the mound to get him. Had me warmin’ up. I’m ready to go, about to leave the bullpen, but I see Case and Leo jawin’ for a while, then Leo walks back to the dugout. I never saw so many batters hit the dirt as after that. Case musta hit eight or nine.

  CASEY

  Ten.

  HIGBE

  They beat us nine to one. Back at the hotel, I asked Case why Leo left him in. Tell Hem what you told me, Hughie.

  CASEY

  It looked like the game was lost anyway, so I asked Leo to leave me in and I would teach those Cardinal hitters a lesson they’d never forget. Told Durocher I’d put stitchmarks on their sides and backs so they wouldn’t dare dig in against me again. But my fastball ain’t nothin’ compared to Kirby’s. His heater sounds like a freight train comin’ in.

  HEMINGWAY

  I heard a sound like that once. It was on the front in the war. When I woke up, two Italian soldiers were dead and a third was screaming. I picked him up and carried him back to a medical tent while the Jerries kept firing their machine guns. I got hit in the ankle and then the knee, but I managed to crawl the last ten yards to the tent. When I got there the third soldier was dead and my kneecap was blown off. The doctors fished out a hundred or more pieces of shrapnel from my leg. Three months later, I limped out of the hospital with a metal kneecap. Couldn’t walk without a cane for almost a year.

  HIGBE

  Me’n Case put a few boys in the hospital, usually from throwin’ the spitter, which ain’t easy to control, but even we can’t compete with a machine gun.

  CASEY

  You win, Ernesto. Let’s drink to it.

  HEMINGWAY rises with difficulty, goes over to the bar, opens a new bottle, puts out three clean glasses, and pours.

  HEMINGWAY

  Fire when ready, gentlemen.

  ***

  SCENE TWO

  Midnight at the Finca Vigía. HEMINGWAY stands on the front porch of the house wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and sandals. He is holding a shotgun, which he points into the darkness.

  HEMINGWAY

  Come on, you cowards! Come into the light where I can knock you on your asses. I’ve shot and killed leopards in less light by just the glint off the cinder in their eyes.

  GELLHORN comes out onto the porch wearing a nightgown and slippers.

  GELLHORN

  What is it, Ernest? Who are you going to shoot?

  HEMINGWAY

  Thieves in the night, Martha. Gutless creeps who call themselves rebels to justify stealing from people who’ve worked goddamn hard to get what they have.

  GELLHORN

  I didn’t hear anything.

  HEMINGWAY

  They don’t have the nerve of jackals. You can’t hear ’em or see ’em until you feel their hands in your pockets. Some terrorists, these boys. Afraid of the trip wires.

  GELLHORN

  What trip wires?

  HEMINGWAY

  Shhh. I haven’t installed them yet. Manuel is bringing the explosives tomorrow from Matanzas. Had the ordnance shipped from the Dominican.

  GELLHORN

  I won’t allow it, Ernest. Someone will get hurt.

  GELLHORN

  You’re right about that, sister.

  GELLHORN

  I mean you and your borracho buddies. What’ll the owner of the Dodgers say when his star pitcher comes back to Brooklyn in pieces?

  HEMINGWAY

  Won’t happen, woman. It’s these sneaking phony mothergrabbers who’ll lose the balls they wish they’d had in the first place.

  GELLHORN

  You always say you’re for the rebels.

  HEMINGWAY

  It’s Batista I’m against, not the rebels I’m for.

  GELLHORN disappears for a moment, then reappears on the porch holding a large flashlight, which she shines into the blackness.

  GELLHORN

  I guess you’ve scared them away, Ernest, you and your popgun.

  HEMINGWAY

  I was shooting the tails off lizards at twenty yards up in Michigan when I was eight years old while you were at Miss Prisspussy’s School in St. Louis learning which fork to use first.

  GELLHORN

  (turns off the flashlight)

  I hadn’t yet been born when those lizards lost their tails. Don’t they grow back, anyway?

  HEMINGWAY

  Put that torch on again.

  GELLHORN

  I’m going back to bed. Don’t wound the dogs or shoot the tails off any of the cats.

  GELLHORN re-enters the house. HEMINGWAY stands alone on the porch, still pointing the shotgun into the night. Finally he picks it up and goes inside. The porch light goes off. A few moments later, the door opens again, very slowly, and HEMINGWAY silently re-takes his position with his weapon. There is a rustling sound; some person or animal is moving in the darkness. HEMINGWAY raises his shotgun and fires one barrel, then the second. After the ringing sound of the firings ends, there is complete silence. HEMINGWAY turns and goes back into the house.

  TWO MEN appear, one on either side of the porch. They move toward one another and meet just below the place where HEMINGWAY had been standing. Both have revolvers in their hands. Slowly they slink away from the house and disappear into the darkness.

  ***

  SCENE THREE

  Inside the Floridita, a bar in Havana. HEMINGWAY is seated on a stool in a corner, a daiquiri on the bar in front of him. Seated on stools near Hemingway are CASEY and HIGBE and MANUEL, a Cuban. CASEY and HIGBE are drinking daiquiris. On the bar in front of MANUEL is a small glass of rum.

  CASEY

  But why would they come after you, Ernest?

  HIGBE

  Yeah, especially if you’re backin’ ’em.

  HEMINGWAY

  They killed one of my dogs. It’s Cuba for the Cubans. We Americanos aren’t long for this place.

&nbs
p; HIGBE

  You’re too famous to kill.

  HEMINGWAY

  But not too famous to die. There’s a difference.

  CASEY

  What do you think, Manuel? Would they kill Ernesto?

  MANUEL

  Sí, if they think it is in the interest to advance the revolution.

  HIGBE

  They wouldn’t shoot an American ballplayer, though, would they?

  HEMINGWAY

  A Yankee, maybe, but not a Dodger. All of them laugh. The four men drink.

  MANUEL

  Señor Hugh, who is the best hitter you have ever faced?

  HIGBE

  Yeah, Hughie, who?

  CASEY

  Ducky Medwick, no doubt about it. Up, down, in, out, don’t matter. Ducky swings, bang, it’s a double up against the wall.

  HEMINGWAY

  My wife’s from St. Louis, too.

  HIGBE

  She a Cardinal fan?

  HEMINGWAY

  She likes the color red. She even thought she was one once.

  CASEY

  What, a Cardinal?

  HEMINGWAY

  No, a Red.

  (He stands.)

  Manuel and I have to be goin’, boys. We’ve got some ordnance to unload in Matanzas.

  HIGBE

  When I was in the army, my CO said I wasn’t too good takin’ orders.

  CASEY

  Okay, Ernesto, will we be seein’ you later?

  HEMINGWAY

  Come out to the house tomorrow night. I’ll have something to show you.

  HEMINGWAY and MANUEL exit the Floridita.

  HIGBE

  Do you really think them rebels would kill Ernest, Hughie?

  CASEY

  How do I know, Hig? I can’t even figure a way to get Ducky Medwick out.

  HIGBE

  You ain’t alone.

  (They tap their glasses and drink.)

  ***

  SCENE FOUR

  The next night. HEMINGWAY, HIGBE, CASEY and MANUEL are all seated on the porch of Ernest and Martha’s house. They are drinking. A shotgun is stood on end against Hemingway’s chair.

  HEMINGWAY

  The way it works is someone trips over the wire, the lights come on and the explosive planted closest to where the wire was tripped is set off.

  CASEY