[originaltext]W: Are these characters real?M: Yes, and both of them tried to w

W: Are these characters real?
M: Yes, and both of them tried to write about their experiences with Hemingway, but their memoirs went unpublished and unknown until I came along.
W: I get it. So what did Pilar actually mean to Hemingway?
M: (6) For Hemingway, Pilar was also the scene of time spent with wives and children, but these reflections do not sweeten Hemingway’s reputation. His youngest son, Gregory, once called him "a gin-soaked monster".
W: What a pity! I guess the relationship between them went rather lousy.
M: Yes. But contrary to other accounts, including Gregory’s own memoir, which depicts them as totally estranged for the last decade of Ernest’s life, their contacts continued, by letter and phone, until a few months before Hemingway killed himself in 1961.
W: Well, that’s really unexpected. Does it have anything to do with Hemingway’s fiction?
M: Yes, (7) Hemingway’s fiction is sometimes said to express the anxiety of American men about their masculinity. But in my opinion, behind the mask of hyper-masculinity lies a trembling soul, which is why Hemingway’s writing survives.
W: So it seems that the hard man we are so familiar with actually wears a mask or something.
M: Yes. "Tenderness", I would like to call it. By the mid-1930s Hemingway found it easier to catch huge marlin than to write. (8) In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize mainly for The Old Man and the Sea. His friend, John O’Hara, declared extravagantly that he was the most outstanding author since Shakespeare. But what Hemingway heard loudest in those years was criticism. While sailing on Pilar he read a good deal of it, and he found it intolerable.
W: So that is what you are trying to evoke in your book, the humanized Hemingway image not as a bullying old booby, but as a person who knows when to laugh and when to cry?
M: Exactly. (9-1) I intended to offer readers a valuable new tool of seeing Hemingway, the great artist, the hero, and the fool, as the same person.
W: (9-2) How did you do that?
M: (9-3) I did that by documenting a fourth persona; Hemingway as a medical basket case. Indeed, Four times between 1928 and 1954 Hemingway suffered major brain concussions in plane crashes and other accidents, often in combination with spinal and intestinal injuries. Then there was his mid-life mania for boxing against much younger men and, in one case, a knockout inflicted by a boxing professional.
W: I see. (10-1) So what happened to Pilar in the end?
M: (10-2) Pilar is now a museum piece like some old and gasping browned-out whale in the garden of Hemingway’s house outside Havana. That image contributes to the strong feeling of melancholy that pervades my book. I sometimes feel we have lost all sense of who Hemingway really was.
W: Then by evoking and interpreting Hemingway’s smaller moments, you have found an ingenious way of showing how this unhappy and vulnerable man was generally nicer outside his family than in it.
M: You can say that again!
This is the end of Part Two of the interview. Questions 6 to 10 are based on what you have just heard.
6. According to the man, what did Pilar mean to Hemingway?
7. What does the man see from Hemingway’s fiction?
8. What did Hemingway hear loudest in those years around 1954?
9. How did the man manage to offer a new tool of seeing a different Hemingway?
10. What happened to Pilar in the end?