Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny

WHEREFORE THE REST IS SILENCE GERALD HAUSMAN

In Ketchum, Idaho, the little town where Ernest Hemingway had taken his life, I lay stretched out in the sun, enjoying the clear cold mountain air, and the only thing moving around in the desolated cottonwood trees was the eye of a magpie. I was thinking, however, not about Hemingway but of my friend, Roger Zelazny, and how he had urged me to take this trip.

We were talking about daemons one day, and he said in that cellar-deep voice of his, “Yes, I’ve seen a few.”

I asked him if he had ever done battle with a daemon, a real one.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” he said. And said no more.

So I explained that one of my personal daemons was Ernest Hemingway.

“Why Hemingway?” Roger asked.

So I told him that my father had physically resembled Hemingway, and that, from the earliest time that I could remember, I always identified with Hemingway as a father figure.

“In the literary sense?” Roger queried.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “You see, he looked so much like my dad that I sometimes thought they were the same man. An overactive imagination will do that for you when you are a kid.”

“So Hemingway,” he mused, “is someone you must meet, if not in the flesh, then in the spirit. And if only to find out that you are wrong—that he is nothing like your own father.”

I nodded. Then, “Do you believe that the spirit lives on after death?”

He chuckled. “The spirit lives before, during, and after death, and it is no more confined to our definitions of existence than we are bound by our limitations in not being able to see it with our eyes. For some people, there is only spirit; for others there is only flesh. Your man Hemingway had a great deal of spirit, of life-force, we might say, and something of that must live on in that place that he loved up there in Idaho.”

“It was the wrong place,” I suggested. “Ray Bradbury said as much in a short story that he wrote, ‘The Kilimanjaro Machine.’ In the story, Hemingway is returned to Africa, to the place where he almost died in one of several airplane crashes.”

Roger smiled. “You certainly know a lot about the great white hunter, don’t you? I have to confess, I have hardly looked at any of his books. Maybe because his persona got too much in the way of his well-chosen words.”

“Have you ever read Islands in the Stream?”

“No. Is it good?”

“I think it’s his greatest book. But then I am a bit hung up on blue water and white sand.”

“Do you have a copy I could read?”

“Yes.”

So, here it was a few months later, and I was up in Idaho, in Ketchum where there was no blue water or white sand. There was, however, white snow and blue sky. It seemed odd now that I had asked Roger for permission, as it were, to visit the Hemingway house, to meet an old daemon, to kill off perhaps, once and for all, a false father-figure, a writer whose ghost had loomed large in my adolescence, and had haunted me even now. But Roger had urged me to meet the ghost. And then I had asked him, point blank, how much of Amber Castle was real, and how much of it was ghostly vision. He took a long time to answer that one, but he finally said this: “I have been in Amber Castle, I have set foot in it.”

I pushed it a bit further. “Have you ever laid hands on any of the daemons that you’ve written about. I mean, actually put your hands upon them?”

His face furrowed. “Yes,” he said. “I have done violence with a few of them.”

I wondered about this; wondered if he were kidding me. A couple days later, however, I was talking with Roger’s son, Trent, who had asked me what my favorite movie was, and I had told him, without hesitation, Black Orpheus. No sooner had I said this than I looked up, and, about one hundred yards away, we both saw Roger’s van pull into the parking lot. He got out and stood for a moment in the bright sun, leaning against the van.

I said to Trent, “One would almost think, even at this distance, that Roger could hear us talking.”

Trent laughed. “He probably can.”

We walked to where Roger was, and he greeted us warmly. Then he whispered two words in my ear. “Black Orpheus,” he said, his face lit with a grin that quickly faded as he got into the van. I think that was the precise moment when I knew that I was going to visit the Hemingway house in Ketchum and see what was there. And now, as fate, or will, or writer’s madness, would have it, I was there, or at least I was on my way. Actually, I was sitting in front of a vast woodpile in the Sun Valley sun, watching the darting eyes of a magpie, feeling quite foolish. Here I was a thousand miles from home on a crazy quest-—to see if a writer whose face resembled my father’s had left any part of his spirit behind when thirty years ago he had taken his life. I wanted, perhaps, to see if that shotgun blast was trapped in the walls of the house; I wanted to touch Amber Castle, too, but the Hemingway house was a tangible place, and if a spirit resided within it, I felt that somehow I would know it.

Later that afternoon I drove over to the big house on the Big Wood River, and saw it for the first time, sitting like a grayish bunker against the snow. A two-story cinderblock structure built above the river about a mile north of Ketchum. Aspen, cottonwood, and spruce hemmed the house, sheltered it, and the river ran below. All round the house were great white breadloaf hills. As I looked upon it, I realized this house was as far as one might get from the Cuban farm called Finca Vigia where Hemingway had spent the latter part of his life. And yet there was something fitting in the gray building’s shape, so square and blocky, against the northern sky of Idaho. Its lonely massivity against the steely winter landscape was like the old man himself. I drew an odd sigh of relief when I first beheld the sight, for it was, somehow, just what I expected.

Inside, it was a hunter’s house. It had all the requisite hides and heads and trophy items from Hemingway’s life with his gun. However, there were also paintings from the Paris days, bookshelves laden with faded hardcovers, a writing desk with green-globed desk lamp on top of which hung a slightly soiled duckbill hunting cap. I was drawn, of course, to the bookshelves. Touching them with my fingers, I heard my host, who was the caretaker of the estate, remark, “I’m sorry but you won’t find anything of literary value here. All of the limited editions of the Hemingway household have been sold off or donated to the Kennedy Library.”

“Is that so?” I said. And I remembered that Roger told me that when he entered Amber Castle, he had placed his hand upon a tapestry and felt of the cloth with his fingers to be assured that he was really there. I reached for a book, any book, and withdrew it from the shelf. The cover was black cloth, the book was small and quite old. I opened it to the flyleaf, discovering that this was a collection of poems by Archibald MacLeish. There was a poem written in MacLeish’s hand and dedicated to Hemingway and it was dated 1926. The poem went thus:

At the very bottom of the yellowed page, MacLeish had penned a personal message: “Dear Ernest, I don’t want to make it awkward: and anything else would be inadequate—wherefore the rest is silence.”

My host came over to where I was standing and peeked over my shoulder. “Here’s one the literary vultures seem to have overlooked,” I said, chuckling.

“Good grief,” the man said. “You’ve really found something there, haven’t you?”

A message, I thought, from that good undiscovered country that Hemingway always wrote about, the land beyond the islands, beyond Bimini blue, beyond the Caribbean archipelago, beyond books, beyond time, beyond Bradbury’s Kilimanjaro Machine, beyond the resemblance of the great author to an incidental father whom he had never met. Beyond all coincidences and fateful circumstances, the message traveled straight to the heart. I had really found something, I imagined, and my host, astonished and pleased, announced that my find was going to create a few ripples at the Kennedy Library. “There are scholars who will be all over this,” he said, holding the book reverently.

Back home in Santa Fe, I told Roger what had happened, and he listened eagerly, becoming very interested in the poem. He asked that I write it down for him, and, when a copy turned up in the mail from the caretaker of the Hemingway estate, I took it over to Roger and gave it to him. He read it over and over, and then smiled. “There’s a key in this,” he said approvingly.

“A key?”

“Yes. The key to Hemingway’s passing is in this poem.”

I felt so myself, but I said nothing, waiting for him to go on. But he said no more about it, content that he had recognized the key. “Now you can go on,” Roger said, “with whatever it is you are going to write, for the daemon is gone, burned away by that poem.”

“Do you think Hemingway’s ghost gave me that book?” I asked.

Roger laughed. “Nothing so one-dimensional as that, I wouldn’t think. However, I’d say his spirit is still moving through the work that he did in this life. Still moving, still very much alive.”

“Why do you think no one else ever saw it before? I mean, from what I was told, they’d picked the place clean.”

Roger pondered for a moment, looking down at the floor. “Hmm. That’s a question for you to answer and I suppose you already know the answer. After all, you went up there looking for something, didn’t you?” Then, he asked, “So what is it that you are going to write yourself?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. But I am going to write something.”

“And did anything else happen up there in Ketchum?” he wanted to know. “Anything you haven’t told me?”

I thought about this for a while. We were sipping strong black coffee from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and nibbling on Scottish scones that Roger had bought that morning at the bakery, and I watched the steam rise off his cup. His eyes were agleam, and I remembered that he had once told me the derivation of his name: it came from Poland, as did his family. Sparks thrown off by the hot iron of the blacksmith’s hammer. Roger’s eyes, sparkling with blue fire, reminded me that he himself was forged within the power of his birth name: Zelazny. Spark-maker, smithy of words.

“There is something I haven’t told you,” I recalled. “Something that someone said to me just before I left Idaho. It was weird, too. There was this old man at the airport, who came up to me and asked what I did for a living, and I mumbled, half-heartedly, that I was a teacher. And do you know what he said, that old man? He asked if I were a storyteller. And I told him that, being a teacher, I had to be. Then, while we waited for the plane, he told me a story. It was about a mountain man named John Colter, who ran half-naked across three hundred miles of wilderness while being pursued by half the Blackfeet nation.”

Roger said, “That’s worth more than the MacLeish poem, I’d wager.”

He said nothing more about this, and I did not mention it myself for at least a year. Then, one night, while we were having dinner together, I showed him the first chapter of John Colter’s race for life. Once again, we were sipping coffee. He smiled and put down his mug.

“That’s good writing,” he said.

“I wanted you to see it for a special reason,” I told him.

“Oh?” He took another sip of coffee, set the mug down again.

“I would like to know if you would write this tale with me, if we could possibly write it together?’’

“What’s the main thread?” he asked curiously.

“Two men,” I said, “two mountain men, John Colter and Hugh Glass. Colter, pursued by Indians, runs a hundred fifty miles to safety; Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear, and crawls an equal distance. That is about all I know at the moment. But I know that I want to write it with you.”

Roger’s interest seemed to cool before my eyes. He told me that he had so much to do, contracts to fulfill for books as yet unwritten, and there was just no time for this one. “Maybe in a few years,” he said. Then he changed the subject to what a good book Islands in the Stream had turned out to be, and how much he liked the poem by MacLeish. And that was all he said about Colter/Glass for quite some time.

Then, one day, two years later, while we were discussing an audio project of his which I was busy putting together, he showed me something that he was working on. At the top of the page was the word “Glass.” Amazed, I read on, discovering that this was chapter two of the novel I had proposed that we would write together, a book about two men fighting their own personal daemons in the American West; one turning hawk, the other turning bear, both switching identities somewhere near the end of their travail, so that Colter crawled upon his belly and Glass danced across the snow.

I remember well the day we finished the book. Well, it wasn’t “we,” it was “he.” For when I received the last sheet of typing paper from him, he had written something at the bottom of the page. It was there in his neat and tidy, scrunched-down script: “Wherefore the rest is silence.”