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“Ernest Hemingway is dead. And I've been asked to write something,” explained the writer of a front page epitaph, “because he was my teacher, my friend, I loved him, and I owed him money.” The simple lead sentence and the following conjunctions and coordinate clauses parodied the young reporter's indebtedness. “But the manner of his death,” he wrote on, “like the manner of his life, was hard and violent and sincere, and there will be critics who will tell that what he wrote was phony because he himself was phony: his death tends to prove it.” But nothing in the epitaph tended to disprove it: “What happened yesterday morning [2 July 1961] in the house in Ketchum happened because it had to be done.”
Like one of Hemingway's characters, the reporter dwelt in a “dislocated and un-unified world,” as Robert Penn Warren once characterized it, where individuals “live a sort of hand-to-mouth existence perceptually and conceptually they hardly live at all.” It is the hardboiled world, filled with sudden death which happens because it has to happen, of countless other reporters, script writers, minor novelists, detective story writers. The tough and simple Hemingway manner, or travesties of it, had become a tradition long before the master's death.
Hardly less influential was the legend. As everyone knows, Hemingway gave unforgettable voice to his generation's lostness. And there were the short stories from the Paris years, the wars pursued to their last retreats, the bullrings with their stylized dance of death, the