Bits & pieces served with Coffey

Coffey told me two stories about his association with Hemingway whom he met in Paris. As I recall in the first story, Coffey said he was sitting with two others at Les Deux Magots, one of whom had recently reviewed, and panned, one of Hemingway’s books. I can’t recall what particular year it was or which book it was since it could have been Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), or In Our Time (1924) (a title slightly plagiarized from Lermontov) or The Torrents of Spring (1926) (a title totally plagiarized from Turgenev) because they were all written in Paris. Regardless, Coffey was sitting at a table where he could see anyone walk into the café and he saw Hemingway walk in apparently in a foul mood. According to Coffey, Hemingway surveyed the café and spotted Coffey with the miscreant reviewer whose back was to the door at which point Papa stormed over to the table. Now, much has been made about how “macho” Hemingway was. Whether he was or wasn’t is open to biographical scrutiny; however, what he did at that moment really gave “machismo” a bad name since without warning he walked up behind the reviewer and coldcocked him. The reviewer fell to the floor and Hemingway stormed out of the café. Moral: be careful about giving your opinion about Hemingway. That made the second story that much more ironic. The second story Coffey told me was also corroborated by Beckett. Of course, Hemingway had no reluctance when it came to offering his literary opinions or any other opinion. One only needs to read his anti-Semitic poem “To a Tragic Poetess” dedicated to Dorothy Parker to appreciate that, but another of his opinions dealt with Joyce’s “Fragments of a Work in Progress” [i.e. Finnegans Wake] to which Hemingway opined something to the effect that people shouldn’t be too hard on Joyce since “Ulysses tired him out.” Curious comment coming from someone who coldcocked a journalist for not liking one of his books. Hemingway stories aside, I was also keenly interested in initiating a correspondence with Coffey and, for a while, I did.

The University of Delaware has Coffey’s correspondence. Alas, any letters from me to him aren’t extant and I don’t have anything I ever wrote to him. However, I kept what he wrote to me and his letters really bespeak of the man’s brilliance and his humanity. We exchanged a number of letters mostly dealing with French literature and, specifically, with the Symbolists. But one letter in particular moved me more than any of the others. It was a transitional time for me when I was at the confluence of deciding what exactly to do with my life (to write OR to teach) and I expressed that anxiety to him. On 14:viii:78 and again on 21:x:78, he wrote me letters, excerpts of which had a major effect on me:

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