The Pipsqueak Syndrome

Last evening, I walked down to Henry’s shack—I’m not quite sure how I should refer to the derelict place he calls home.

Nevertheless, there was a fire going in the wood stove and a computer screen gleamed in the corner. Henry was angry, which is normal, and finding him so, I registered no surprise.

“I call it the ‘Pipsqueak Syndrome’,” he shouted.

I was clearing books off the spare chair so I could sit down. “Do you?” I said. “Do you now?”

“Don’t sit down yet. Come over here, I want you to read something.”

Actually—I was already beginning to sit down by then, and, with my knees, I didn’t have much choice but to complete the act. But then I dutifully got back up, went to the computer and leaned over to read:


    I do find it perplexing that a bar would be named after Hemingway, a notorious alcoholic whose drinking hastened the slow burn of depression and led to his suicide. What’s next, the Hannibal Lecter Organic Café?

“Hmm,” I said, “the writer compares a real person to a fictional character. Do you think he knows the difference?”

“That’s not the point,” Henry said. “This is a blogger—in the New York Times, no less—sneering down on Hemingway from his pompous perch!”

“I like that,” I said. “Pompous perch—that’s pretty good.”

“And a few days ago there was another blogger—in the Guardian—saying that the writings of John Updike were ‘insipid’!”

“I can see why you’re upset. We need to stop these pipsqueaks before the pipsqueak squeaks again.”

Henry paced back and forth in the small room. His dog Hilda lay on her bed in the corner, gently snoring and twitching, lulled to sleep by the warmth of the soporific stove.

Henry moved back to the computer. “And here is something else he says about Hemingway. He refers to ‘the uncompromising machismo of his characters’.”

“That might be the worst kind of machismo,” I said.

Henry stared at me for a moment and then held out his arm and pointed at the computer. “Have you ever googled the words “Hemingway” and “Macho” together? Have you ever googled the phrase ‘the Hemingway Myth’?”

“No,” I said.

“Well then you’ve missed out on 14,000 smart-asses who think they have exposed the fly in the Hemingway ointment—that he was macho and yet he drank. How macho is it to be a drunk, right? And then they all pat themselves on the back for their brilliant afflatus.”

“What the hell is an afflatus? I said. “Is it like being flatulent?”

“It damn well is in this case. They completely miss the sensitivity in the writing. They miss what Hemingway is all about.”

“Well, I’m afraid I might just have to agree with you,” I said. “It’s like going to the beach and never noticing the ocean. But we’re old. We have a different beach and a different ocean from these young ones. And they naturally want to rise by slaying their elders.”

I thought back to growing up with a WW II father, in a neighborhood of WW II fathers, and I remembered how much they liked the image of the hard-drinking hero who could hold his liquor. They reserved their scorn for the drinker who supposedly couldn’t “hold it,” while conveniently forgetting their own occasional, or not so occasional, failings. And, yes, they liked to hunt and they liked to fish, and they liked boxing. Boxing was about the most popular sport in America at the time, and the names of Dempsey and Joe Louis were famous names. Hemingway didn’t invent this sort of character—they were all around him; machismo in no way distinguished Hemingway from the rest of them. What set him apart was that he found a way to turn his wounds into art.


It was time for me get on home. As I was leaving I said to Henry: “Here’s a little something for your Hemingway defense. Did you know that Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich were friends for decades and he never slept with her? That doesn’t exactly sound like uncompromising machismo, now does it?”

Later that night, I took down a book from my bookshelf, and thumbing through it, found this passage. The writing was not all that bad for a writer who at that time was at the height of his notorious-alcoholic-uncompromising-machismo stage:

    There was no more true elephant, only the gray wrinkled swelling     dead body and the huge great mottled brown and yellow tusks that     they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with the dry blood     and he scraped some of it off with his thumbnail like a dried piece     of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he     took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of     loneliness.
    After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the     fire.
    “He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says     nobody knows how many people he has killed.”
    “They were all trying to kill him weren’t they?”
    “Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”
    “How could he be a murderer then?”
    “Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed     up about him.”
    “I wish he’d killed Juma,” David had said.
    “I think that is carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s     your friend you know.”
    “Not anymore”
    “No need to tell him so.”

It’s morning now, and I’ve decided just to let Henry fight his own battles. In fact it’s Saturday, thank God, and I plan to drive up into the Palousie creek drainage. On an old map I found a symbol for a logging camp that would have long ago disappeared, and I’ve marked the spot on my topo map and drawn compass bearings from the nearest road junction. I believe I’ll take along my metal detector, and if the brush isn’t too thick, push through and try to locate the site. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll find something old and interesting.