the day Wallace Stevens punched out Ernest Hemingway

It happened in Key West, Florida: "sort of pleasant like the cholera," (sez Hems).

Stevens, the mild-mannered and canny insurance-man-stroke-seminal-Modernist (adjunct anecdote: Stevens to someone from his publishers, who had haplessly called him at the office to sort some urgent piece of business: "What are you doing calling me here? I told you never to call me on this number!"), turfs up at a party in Key West. Stevens says: "By God, I wish I had that Hemingway here now, I'd knock him out with a single punch!"

Hemingway's sister is at the party, and forcefully tries to convince Stevens, through her tears, what a sap her brother is - he's no man, etc. Hemingway, drinking quietly at home,is sent for, and meets the very drunk Stevens coming out of the party into the rain. Stevens swings the promised punch, but misses, and Hemingway punches Stevens three times, "and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating." Into a puddle, apparently.

Someone suggests that Hemingway take off his glasses: whereupon - according to Hemingway's account in a letter - "Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn't harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him."

This happened in 1935: Hemingway was 36, Stevens was 56. you have to wonder whether the weekday punch would've floored Hems.