The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing

gruff acknowledgement of pain (hell of a damned thing), and then the stoic refusal to be touched by it (it doesn’t bother me much). Of course Hemingway would know exactly how to treat insomnia, just as he knew the correct technique for any number of physical activities, from boxing to fishing to shooting a gun. Of course he wouldn’t whimper about it. What was he, some kind of yellow-bellied dog? Fitzgerald, on the contrary, was more than happy to abase himself. After all, he’d opened ‘Sleeping and Waking’ with the craven line: ‘When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia,’ which is pretty much as low to the floor as you can get without actually rolling under someone’s boot. Mind you, it could also be read as an undercut, a quick little feint to the jaw, since what he’s actually saying is Hemingway hasn’t had the last word, not by any means at all.

      I sat back in my seat, turning these different testimonies over in my mind as the train shuttled from day into night. Story, essay, letter: all of them covering the same rough ground. None of them were straightforward. None of them were reliable, at least not in the way that we commonly use that word. Later in the second letter Hemingway invites Scott to come out on his boat and get himself killed. He’s kidding, of course. But jokes are resistant to outsiders’ eyes. It’s entirely possible that you could read it and think you were dealing with a psychopath (‘we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel’).