THE decision by Ernest Hemingway’s son to deny permission for a newly discovered early work of his father’s to be published was attacked in this paper yesterday by Magnus Linklater, on the ground that a dead man’s heirs are not best placed to make decisions about what is fit for publication and what is not. And Magnus was right. God knows, I have not written a word in my life which a dutiful son would not have burnt to save my blushes. It is why I do not have a son.

But what is interesting is the reason that permission was denied. It was because, I believe, the piece in question was an attempt at humorous writing — a dangerous thing for so notoriously unfunny a man as Papa Hemingway to have attempted. The chap who owns the article, the son of a friend of Hem’s, tells us: “Hemingway was trying very hard to be humorous . . . (but my father) read the piece and did not think it was funny and forgot about it.”

For the world to learn, at this late stage, that Hemingway adopted his strapping, macho, heartless style of writing simply because he couldn’t hack it as a humorist would be fatal to his already waning posthumous reputation. Though understandable, the loss is a great shame for his many curious fans. Luckily, I have found among my own papers another gem from the lost “funny period” of Ernest Hemingway, and I reproduce it here in defiance of his po-faced estate:

“In the fall the jokes were always there, but we did not make them any more. Not after Schio, in July, when I was wounded down there. Down there, where it is not funny. And after it Lady Brett wanted me only for a friend. And she went elsewhere for ‘that’. Ooer, missus. Yes, I had me knackers blown off. Ooooh, painful. Cross me legs and hope to die. Imagine that: two balls short of a full service, and that Brett with tits like a pair of piglets rooting in a condom.

“Take my wife, pleeeease. For I am no use to her anymore. Now I prefer bullfighting. The yellow of the sand, gold in the high sun of the Sierras. The red of the gore. España. And then there is the trajo de luces of the torero. Suit of lights. Oo-er, men in tights, more like. Don’t mind if I do. Pert buttocks in pink satin? No wonder the bull’s got the horn. Honk! Honk!

Later, in Paris, at the Coupole, where we sat in the shade and there were the beads of cool on the outside of the pitchers of beer and the silent pulse of the electric fan, out of the hot afternoon (that was too hot for the dogs that loped, hound-lean, in the shade of the plane trees on the Place de la Concorde) there came a woman. To the proud barman she said: ‘Can I have a double- entendre?’ So he gave her one.

“No but seriously, it wasn’t a woman who came in, it was a meat pie. The meat pie went straight up to the barman and he said: ‘Un cognac.’ And the barman said: ‘Sorry, we don't serve food.’ Ha ha. Do you get it? It was a meat pie who wanted to be served, but the barman couldn’t serve him because he is food. It’s a play on words. Eeh, what an audience. Is there anyone in from Pamplona tonight? No? Oh, never mind then.

“Later I was in Milan, in the hospital. The British hospital was a big villa built by Germans before the war. I saw Nurse Barkley in the garden and said to her: ‘Get yer coat love, you’ve pulled.’ Oo-er. Nurses? ‘You can take my temperature any time. I suppository you’ll want to stick it up my . . . hello is that a German soldier? Achtung Fritz! Do you know where Hitler keeps his armies?’

“But she did know. For she had heard that one. Afterwards, at night, the air was cooler and I slept. An hour before the dawn three men entered the ward. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman. They were talking of their teenage daughters. The Englishman said: ‘I was cleaning my daughter’s room the other day when I found a packet of cigarettes. I was shocked because I didn't know she smoked.’ The Scotsman said: ‘Well, I was cleaning out my daughter’s room when I found a half-empty bottle of vodka. I was shocked because I didn’t know she drank.’ The Irishman said: ‘Well, that's nothing. I was cleaning out my daughter’s bedroom when I found a packet of condoms. I was shocked because I didn’t even know she had a willy!’

“Oh come on. That’s funny. Ezra Pound laughed when Gertrude Stein told it at the good café on the Place St-Michel. But, of course, Gertrude did the accents, which always makes it funnier.

“Later, in Africa, we were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt-lick, when I saw the elephant. Why does an elephant paint its feet yellow? To hide upside down in custard. Have you ever seen an elephant hiding upside down in custard? No? Well, I have. It was out at Nga Nga, where the wind blows cold off Kilimanjaro. But he had to come up for air eventually. And that’s when I shot him.

“And perhaps it was not funny at all. After all, it is the way you tell them. If I had told it properly there would have been the laughter on the faces of the readers, and the jiggling of the shoulders, and the saltwater of the tears on hard, Spanish faces. Funny, have you noticed how Portuguese people look just like Spanish people pressed up against a shop window?"

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