(2 of 2)
The cult of death is the other side of the cult of life, as the Hemingway people's worship of the bull ring suggests (it was perhaps no real mistake in identity when, Lael Tucker notes with pleasure, her husband once was mistaken for "Papa" Hemingway at Spain's Pamplona ring). And so a story that is often deeply moving is also overlaid with words and gestures that have the air of gruesome parody, as when Lael Tucker says to her husband in the last moments: "I love you I love you please die." Or when Wertenbaker with one hand holds his bleeding surgical wound (an abscess had formed soon) and with the other twirls a bottle of champagne in a cooler—Bollinger '47.
Toasts & Hubris. The book is crowded with friends who somehow all sound alike. Novelist John (The Wall) Hersey sets the note when he says ("tightly") by way of farewell: "You make me want to write!" and adds in a letter: "My dear, calm friend! . . . You are noble . . . You manage to make a kind of dance of it." Not all will want to follow the last steps of the dreadful dance, when Lael Tucker's second husband (whom she divorced to marry Wertenbaker) visits the dying man and sitting before the fire says: "You are the best . . . Tell me what you want me to be or do."
With fierce, proprietary propaganda,
Lael Tucker pleads a moral cause: a kind of private euthanasia, her husband's "right to die as he wished to, when he chose." She knows that this claim is based on pride: several times during the last painful months, the Wertenbakers gaily toasted what they called their hubris, a word which they thought defined their own gallant pagan defiance of fate. Each reader will have to judge the moral issue for himself; the real significance lies in the fact that, in this book, the issue is only seen in terms of responsibility to oneself and to other human beings, never in terms of responsibility to God. Readers may salute Charles Wertenbaker's attempt to live and die courageously according to his lights; but some may also feel that ultimately this courage was a pathetic and a lonely thing.