Papa's Poems

Once he became the spokesman for the "lost generation" of the 1920s, not much that Ernest Hemingway ever did escaped the attention of the press. But for the most part, he managed to conceal one pastime: writing poetry.

Treating the practice as something of a family scandal, he let only close friends know of his poems and published just a few in an obscure German magazine, Der Querschmitt. Now, two of Hem ingway's longer poems -- four-letter words and all -- have been published in the Atlantic Monthly.

"They have journalistic and literary merit if only because people are interested in how Hemingway wrote," says Atlantic's Executive Editor Robert Manning. A devoted Hemingway fan, Manning met Papa while interviewing him for a TIME cover. The two became friends and exchanged letters. After Hemingway's death Manning visited his widow, Mary Welsh, to ask if he might see any unpublished manuscripts. He found a pair of love poems written by Papa to Mary during World War II and persuaded Mary to let the Atlantic run them.

One, started by War Correspondent Hemingway during the bloody battle of Huertgen Forest, was apparently a favorite of the author's. Later, in the Ritz Bar in Paris, he would often ask his friend Marlene Dietrich to read it.

"Oh, Papa," she would murmur when she had finished, "I don't care what else you did so long you did this poem."

Love & Death. Marlene may have been carried away. The poems are the usual Hemingway blending of love and death. While Papa was sorry to be absent from Mary, he was even sorrier, it appears, to miss the raptures of combat. Love gets lost in the shuffle:

Onward Christian soldiers

Marching to a whore

With the cross of Mary Welsh

Going on before.

At their best, the poems offer some barracks blasphemy:

In the next war we shall bury the dead in cellophane

The host shall come packaged in every K ration

Every man shall be provided with a small but perfect

Archbishop Spellman, which shall be self-inflatable.

But mostly they are soggy going:

"Reach out your hand to Love's dark sister, Hate, and walk with her across that hill we slowly walked, and see if Love is waiting at the top. Or who is waiting there instead."

Brooding on the Body. Manning follows up the poems in the Atlantic with an affectionate reminiscence. His piece is full of Hemingway's familiar posturing and pseudo-profundities. "You know," Papa solemnly told Manning, "all the beautiful women I know are growing old." But Manning reports one conversation that sheds somber light on Hemingway's writing as well as on his eventual suicide. Brooding over his high blood pressure and spreading paunch, Papa doubts that a writer can function unless he is in top physical shape. "Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempted to say it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don't know anything about the soul."

Jumping on the Hemingway bandwagon, Caedmon Records has just released a record of Hemingway reciting the speech he wrote upon receiving the Nobel Prize, one of the love poems, and a few trivial pieces of self-parody--all in a reedy, nervous voice. But while there are "enough of Papa's poems to fill a book one-half inch thick," according to Mary Hemingway, the rest are unlikely to be published or recorded for many years. "Some of the longest poems are about living people," she says, "and most of them are uncomplimentary, to say the least."

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