Once there was a traveller who journeyed alone to the Grand Canyon. He came to the brink just as the day died, and the slow mists circled upward. There he stood and he looked.

And there came, from behind him, the sound of footsteps—large, firm steps dealt by the accustomed feet of a lady tourist. She gained his side and stopped there, radiating native friendliness and the good cheer provided by Fred Harvey. She, too, looked. And woman’s world-old need of speech seized her, and seemed as if it would rack her very tweeds apart.

And I feel, my friends—for I think of every one of you gathered here tonight as my friend, and I want you to think of me that way, too!—I feel not unlike that good lady of the Canyon when I am asked by this hospitable house-organ to speak a few words about Ernest Hemingway. Well! He certainly is attractive.

For it is so neat in my mind that the author of “In Our Time,” “Men Without Women,” and “A Farewell to Arms” is far and away the first American artist, that it is the devil’s own task to find anything more complicated or necessary to say about him.

It is no misses’ size assignment to dash off a description of Ernest Hemingway, Writer and Human Being. One hesitates, in the first place, to add to the measure of bilge that has already been written; probably of no other living man has so much tripe been penned and spoken. And it is the present vogue to rip off sketches of the famous in a sort of delicate blend of the Anecdotal, or Brightest-Things-Our-Baby-Ever-Said, manner, and the Tender, or Lavender-and-Old-Rubbers, school. As a subject, Mr. Hemingway does not lend himself to the style. He will not—indeed, it is my belief that he can not—pluck you down from his memory any cobwebby pretties about his favorite school-teacher; nor will he help you along with your work by uttering Good Ones that you can set promptly on clean white paper. There are anecdotes about him, and beauties, too; and there are quotations from his conversations that, I think, must pass eventually into folk lore. But I may not give them to you here. I am sorry but I really can not feel that we are well enough acquainted for that. Mrs. Parker to you, if you please.

But people want to hear things about Ernest Hemingway. As the boys used to say, before they left the phrase flat and ran off in all directions with “gesture,” “good theatre,” and “the American scene,” he intrigues the imagination. People so much wanted him to be a figure out of a saga that they went to the length of providing the saga themselves. And a little peach it is.

Ihave heard of him, both at various times and all in one great bunch, that he is so hard-boiled he makes a daily practice of busting his widowed mother in the nose; that he dictates his stories because he can’t write, and has them read to him because he can’t read; that he is expatriate to such a degree that he tears down any American flag he sees flying in France; that no woman within half-a-mile of him is a safe woman; that he not only commands enormous prices for his short stories, but insists, additionally, on taking the right eye out of the editor’s face; that he has been a tramp, a safe-cracker, and a stockyard attendant; that he is the Pet of the Left Bank, and may be found at any hour of the day or night sitting at a little table at the Select, rubbing absinthe into his gums; that he really hates all forms of sport, and only skis, hunts, fishes, and fights bulls in order to be cute; that a wound he sustained in the Great War was of a whimsical, inconvenient, and inevitably laughable description; and that he also writes under the name of Morley Callaghan. About all that remains to be said is that he is the Lost Dauphin, that he was shot as a German spy, and that he is actually a woman, masquerading in man’s clothes. And those rumors are doubtless being started, even as we sit here.

For it is hard not to tell spectacular things of Ernest Hemingway; people are so eager to hear that you haven’t the heart to send them away empty. Young women, in especial, are all of a quiver for information. (Sometimes I think that the wide publication of that smiling photograph, the one with the slanted cap and the shirt flung open above the dark sweater, was perhaps a mistake.)

“Ooh,” they say, “do you know Ernest Hemingway? Ooh, I’d just love to meet him! Ooh, tell me what he’s like!”

Well, I warned you the task sinks me. Ernest Hemingway is something—not exactly—like this.

He has, I should think, the best and the worst times of anybody living; he experiences several examples of both, every day. He has an uncounted number of interests, and a passionate concentration. Whatever he does, he goes in for hook, line, and good red herring. He has a generosity of energy that is absolute. He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks to those about him, and never even misses them. I can say no more of him than that he can take you to a bicycle-race, and make it raise your hair.