Ernest Walsh

Ernest Walsh is a poet and prospective magazine editor whose brief but charged appearances turn on a tension between performance and vulnerability. Introduced as conspicuously marked for an early death, he approaches Ernest Hemingway with an alleged literary award in view; Hemingway suspects a confidence trick, yet later helps Walsh’s magazine through production and chooses to treat him kindly as his health deteriorates.

Introduction and Public Image

Hemingway first meets Walsh in Ezra Pound’s studio. Walsh has arrived with two young women in long fur coats, after crossing on the same ship as them, and a hired car from Claridge’s waits outside with a uniformed chauffeur. The arrangement lends the visit a carefully staged air of success: Walsh is accompanied, well connected, and already being presented to Hemingway as a poet worth knowing. While Walsh talks with Pound, the women ask Hemingway whether he has read Walsh’s poems. He has not; one of them produces a green-covered copy of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, and points them out. She says Walsh earns twelve hundred dollars apiece, a striking claim that establishes the financial promise surrounding his work without clarifying exactly what the payment measures.

Hemingway describes Walsh as dark, intense, unmistakably Irish, and poetic, but his most consequential impression is that Walsh looks like a character already marked for death in a motion picture. That image becomes a filter through which Hemingway reads Walsh’s later conduct. It is not simply a report of illness: it is also a judgment about presentation, and Hemingway repeatedly distinguishes the appearance of imminent death from the ordinary fact of people facing danger. The portrait therefore remains double-edged. Walsh’s manner may seem theatrical to Hemingway, but the illness that later overtakes him is not treated as a performance.

The Magazine and the Award

The account next reaches Hemingway through news from Pound. Walsh has been bailed out of Claridge’s by women who admire poetry and young poets; later, a different source provides financial backing, and Walsh is preparing to start a new magazine in the literary quarter as a co-editor. The change from the hotel episode to a publishing venture gives Walsh a public role beyond that of the promising poet introduced by his companions. He is now connected to the practical work of making a magazine, as well as to its financial prospects.

The proposed quarterly is said to offer a substantial sum to the contributor judged best after its first four issues. Hemingway sets this promise against the established annual award from The Dial, edited by Scofield Thayer: Hemingway recalls that award as worth, he believes, a thousand dollars, and as both prestigious and exceptionally generous. The comparison explains why the new magazine’s offer might matter to a writer. At the same time, Hemingway carefully refuses to settle the rumors surrounding it. He cannot say whether talk of the award was gossip or private information, hopes the arrangement was wholly honorable, and explicitly distinguishes Walsh’s co-editor from any suspicion. The memoir preserves uncertainty rather than presenting the allegation as proof of fraud.

Hemingway’s Suspicion and Response

Walsh invites Hemingway to lunch at what Hemingway calls the best and most expensive restaurant in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter. The meal is elaborate: flat Marennes oysters, Pouilly-Fuissé, steak and fried potatoes, and, later, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Walsh approaches the subject gradually. When he finally tells Hemingway that he is to receive the award, Hemingway asks why, then stops listening as Walsh begins to praise his writing. The offer makes him feel sick, and he silently interprets Walsh’s manner as that of a confidence man attempting to draw him into a scheme.

Hemingway’s suspicion is sharpened by his sense that Walsh’s death-marked image is being used as part of the appeal. He contrasts that conspicuous appearance with the unmarked danger he associates with soldiers he has seen on a dusty road. The contrast reveals more than distrust of Walsh: it shows Hemingway resisting a performance that seems to turn mortality into a means of persuasion. Yet his reaction does not become a public accusation in the evidence presented. The account gives the reader Hemingway’s private judgment, while leaving the award’s actual status unresolved.

Illness, Work, and the Closing Portrait

Later, Walsh suffers hemorrhages and leaves Paris. He asks Hemingway to see the magazine through the printers, who cannot read English. Hemingway does so, having witnessed one of the hemorrhages and regarded it as genuine. He believes Walsh will die, but recalls that, during a difficult period in his own life, it pleased him to be especially kind to Walsh and to call him Ernest. His willingness to carry the magazine through production gives their connection a practical consequence: Hemingway’s earlier suspicion does not prevent him from helping with the work when Walsh asks.

Hemingway also separates Walsh from his co-editor, whom he likes and admires. In his account, she had promised him no prize; her stated aim was to build a good magazine and pay contributors well. This distinction matters because it prevents the magazine’s uncertain award from defining every person involved in it. Walsh remains associated with the offer and with Hemingway’s wary reading of his intentions, but the co-editor is presented through a separate commitment to the publication and its writers.

The portrait ends not with a confirmed account of Walsh’s death or the award’s outcome, but with illness, absence from Paris, and the magazine still requiring attention. In that unresolved ending, Walsh occupies an uneasy space between a literary figure who seems to stage his own doom and a seriously ill man whose request Hemingway fulfills. The memoir neither erases its narrator’s distrust nor lets distrust exhaust the relationship: practical assistance and deliberate kindness become the final facts it records.