"Fair Game" by Howard Waldrop

Note: Photo found on HuffPost, unattributed. Image search turned up no attributions.

Story first appeared in Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson's Afterlives, reprinted by Gardner Dozois (his 4th annual Year's Best--and probably the only way to get Waldrop a few cents for reading this story) and Robin Wilson. Was up for a Locus award.

Summary:

Ernest Hemingway is in Bavaria when a village bürgermeister calls upon him to hunt down the Wild Man wandering the area, causing havoc.

Analysis (spoilers):

Ernest kills the Wild Man and discovers the man he hunted is himself.

[Side Bar: Ken Burns is debuting a documentary on Ernest Hemingway next month, so this story is timely. I'm optimistic it will be rich and dynamic, instead of stuffing a straw man.]

Without context, Waldrop's story seems to suggest that Hemingway needed to kill himself as he may have been upsetting the environments he was in. The title "Fair Game" suggests that perhaps, the only "fair game" is the death of one's self; however, the author fishes, so that cannot be the whole story.

Let's add context. First, the story was written specifically for Sargent's and Watson's anthology Afterlives, which has the subtitle "Stories about Life after Death." So Hemingway is already dead. The story leaves what may be hints: "hovering mountains" which may or may not be figurative. Perhaps he is paying penance for committing suicide, so he has to kill himself again and again. Perhaps this is a "fair game" with game meaning both the hunted and a sport.

We also need to look at the "wild man" figure from mythology.

One thing not to include (unless Robert Bly had been famously doing Iron John tours a half-decade before he wrote his Iron John book) is Bly's version of the wild man from Iron John. There Bly suggests that men need to embrace their inner wild man. But perhaps Joseph Campbell was saying similar things. Avoid misreadings like this one from The New York Times. The book, though, is problematic for my reading. The longer Bly hypothesizes, the less I buy into his theory (see my take-down of The Little Book on the Human Shadow--my feeling is that creative genius like Bly's is sometimes born through strange ways of thinking. See also William Butler Yeats.) though I'm sure many men would disagree. Instead, I recommend his anthology, Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, which is far less theorizing--just a little theory backed up with ample illustration from literature across the ages. The more Bly shows what he means instead of describing, the more I dig his ideas.

Searching for Joseph Campbell, I found this interview with Bill Moyers from 1981, which Waldrop could have watched and internalized--regarding Gilgamesh's grief over pending death of Endiku, the wild man whom Gilgamesh befriends and whom Gilgamesh tries to save by seeking the elixir for immortality:

"what it says to me is that man knows that there is an eternal life inside him, because the going into the depth, there is always the going down until he finds the thing in oneself."

Unfortunately, the wild man [Wiki] has come to mean several things over the millennia, so it's difficult to narrow down, let alone nail down exactly what Waldrop is getting at in this story. A few possibilities:

• loss of civilization
• to be alive (via forest)
• wisdom (which one gains by losing civilization--people would capture and tie up the wild man and would not give him his freedom until he revealed his wisdom)
• abandoned person/orphan
• amazing, strange
• etc.

Perhaps the story suggests that, by killing himself, Hemingway lost his aliveness/vitality although it was probably the other way around. Maybe Waldrop did it the right way: First, the wild man is killed; next, he learns that the wild man is himself. 

Another possibility in killing Hemingway is the writer is killing the previous god so they don't have to wrestle with him. James Gunn used to say that Hemingway said that writing was like getting into the ring with Tolstoy. However, the only ring/Tolstoy quote I found attributed to Hemingway was that he would not get into the ring with Tolstoy. Whatever he said, there is a certain amount of anxiety writers feel about the great writers (see Harold Bloom), so maybe his death here is a writer's way of getting into or not getting into the ring with Hemingway.

As fun and provocative as the story is, it seems to fall short. It might work at a longer (novella) or a short-short length. A writer should have to wrestle with Hemingway and his achievements, especially in a story so built around his biography--as well as wrestling with suicide. The story shows potent promise, but we need more.

I will discuss/speculate on a related, Arthur-Conan-Doyle-and-Hemingway connection later.

Waldrop on Style

The Robin Wilson anthology, Paragons, includes a paired essay on style (mostly about literary chameleons), but I don't think it aids one in reading this story. The best piece on Waldrop's writing is probably Lewis Shiner's introduction to Strange Monsters of the Recent Past where this story was collected.  However, I do highly recommend his story notes. They're just fun reading and indirectly give more insight into the man's voice, style, and sense of humor.