Imagine you’re doing your daily swiping left on whatever app you kids are using these
days, every guy you come across is whatever, but you come across this knee-buckling bio:
All-around Manly Man. Consummate outdoorsman, marlin fisherman, bullfighter, big game hunter.
War hero. German submarine hunter. Bestselling novelist. King of the Short Story. Nobel and
Pulitzer prize winner. Forever changed the World of Literature.
Hmm. interesting.
So, ok, here’s the problem with tackling Ernest Hemingway—Ernest Hemingway himself.
While the iconic author is mostly known for his feats of literary prowess, from The Sun
Also Rises to For Whom the Bell Tolls, to countless short stories—perhaps his greatest
fiction of all is his own self-mythologizing. As his brand grew in the 1920’s and 30’s,
so too grew his celebrity and, well, his ego.
So, with Ernie all the while throwing so much self-mythologizing in the mix that it became
nearly impossible to separate the Man from the Myth.
But gosh darn it, we’re going to try.
So if you’ve ever taken a writing course, you’re probably familiar with Hemingway’s
iceberg Theory—that the words on the page are like part of the iceberg that’s above
the water and what is OMITTED or not said is the much more substantive part. Basically,
it’s a “keep simple, stupid” methodology prioritizing qualities like: (display points
as visuals, not said aloud). All of this done in the pursuit of writing what Hemingway described
as “one true sentence”.
But the greatest irony is that as Hemmingway transitioned from journalism into fiction—short
stories at first and then novels—his relationship with the truth and the facts, so cut-and-dry
from his years as a reporter, started to get messy. Said Hemmingway:
“Writers of fiction are only super-liars who if they know enough and are disciplined
can make their lies truer than the truth…. That is all a writer of fiction is.”
Life experiences were everything to Hemmingway, for he believed his “lies,” his fiction,
could only be as good as the experiences from which they were mined. It’s no wonder then
that Hemmingway had some pretty wild adventures, including:
Getting into two back-to-back plane crashes! fighting with Orson Welles after calling him
an “effeminate boy of the theatre”! shooting himself in both legs while trying
to shoot a shark! trying to kill himself by walking straight
toward a plane propeller! saving a friend from getting gored to death
by an enraged bull! getting married four times!
being a spy against the Germans! hanging out with movie stars like Ingrid Bergman
and Gary Cooper! and more
Given that Hemmingway’s life experiences were such essential fodder for his stories,
it’s no wonder he was very protective of them. After the publication of a 1949 biographical
profile in Life magazine, he was worried that the stories covered in the piece “used up”
those life experiences, making it impossible for him to mine them in his later writings:
“[The Life profile] made me feel bad to lose things I was happy about because nobody
knew them.”
Born to Ed and Grace Hemingway in 1899, Hemmingway had the kind of hands-on-outdoorsy uprearing
one would with only the scantiest knowledge of the author could imagine: From his mother
claiming he could shoot and load a gun from the age of three, to his father’s endless
polemics on the ethics of hunting and fishing, to his grandpa lovingly dubbing him “The
Great Hunter Ernest MIller”, it seemed his own family was gassing him up to be a protagonist
in one of his books.
Shortly after graduating high school, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas Star,
where he began honing his “one true sentences”, and shortly after volunteered to become an
ambulance driver in Italy during World War One. And here, an almost superhero-like narrative
arises -- one that claims Hemmingway won a medal of valor for carrying multiple soldiers
to safety, despite his legs being torn apart by enemy shrapnel. And as cool as it sounds
on paper, the validity of said narrative raised more than a few eyebrows. Observed Hemingway
biographer Mary V Dearborn:
Many versions of the story would surface in the weeks and months to come as he told, retold,
and embellished the tale of his exploits. Indeed, he would return to his wounding and
his heroism obsessively, for the rest of his life, changing his report as the occasion
demanded.
Regardless of what truly happened, Hemmingway’s bravery and heroism cannot be denied, but
Hemmingway’s constant revisionist history makes it frustrating to give credit where
credit is due. For Hemmingway, though, this muddling of fact and fiction would continue
to benefit him and his efforts to build upon the Hemingway Myth long after his heroic war
story. And boy let me tell you, there would be some real whoppers to come.
Hemmingway’s time in Europe, particularly Paris and Spain, that is the stuff of legend.
So much of the Hemingway Myth is born here, including Hemmingway’s romantic view of
bullfighting, writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald toiling
away on their masterpieces in Parisian cafés, and most especially, the concept of the “Lost
Generation,” a term Gertrude Stein used to describe young, aimless American expatriates
post-World War I.
The idea of the Lost Generation was forever memorialized in Hemmingway’s first major
novel, The Sun Also Rises, which many consider to be his masterpiece. And which he wrote
in six weeks. Sigh… if only… When Rises was published, aside from catapulting Hemmingway
to super-writerdom, it also began a trend of Hemmingway using his work to take shots
at people he knew, oftentimes friends and acquaintances who had no idea Hemmingway was
even pissed at them.
The first to be blindsided was Harold Loeb, a friend who helped Hemmingway get his start
by fighting for the publication of In Our Time. Imagine Loeb’s surprise when he appeared
as the villain in The Sun Also Rises. Sure, his name was changed to Robert Cohn, along
with a few personal traits, but it was unmistakably him. Nobody knows exactly why Hemmingway did
this to Loeb, and this confusion is a common thread with Hemmingway’s fiction-as-revenge.
Donald Ogden Stewart, a former friend of Hemmingway’s (Hemmingway would come to have a lot of former
friends), observed:
…if Hem had been just plain mean you wouldn’t have noticed it. But he wasn’t mean, he
was charismatic; and it was for this very reason that the mean streak startled you so
when it came to the surface.
Examples of Hemmingway weaponizing his writing are so numerous, you’d be hard-pressed to
find one of his works that didn’t have at least one diss track. But perhaps the most
tragic is his relentless abuse of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life was also already A
Hot Mess (™). As with Harold Loeb, Scott and Hemmingway were friends, but through the
years it was as if Hemmingway had some inexorable drive to sabotage their friendship. When “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” first appeared in Esquire, Hemmingway used Scott’s real name,
to which Scott responded, “Please lay off me in print.” And this doesn’t even include
some of the smack talk in A Moveable Feast, which I can’t repeat here out of concern
for Viewers Like You.
Just before Scott’s death, Hemmingway wrote to a friend, backhand-complimenting Scott
as only Hemmingway could: “I always had a very stupid little boy feeling of superiority
about Scott—like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.”
With Hemmingway himself so inextricably linked to his work, to praise one was to praise the
other, in so doing feeding the ever-hungry Hemingway Ego Machine. Likewise, an assault
on one was an assault on the other. Hemmingway could certainly dish it out, but he absolutely
could not take it.
As Hemmingway’s notoriety reached boundless heights, he basically painted a target on
his own back. After the great success of A Farewell to Arms, another masterful novel
published three years after The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway biographer Mary V. Dearborn notes:
The critical vultures were definitely circling… the attacks on him took a more personal tone,
perhaps, than did criticism about other writers. Hemingway’s work conveyed not just stories
“in our time,” but, implicitly, his own attitudes, personality, and values.
As Hemmingway the Man became more and more intertwined with his characters, the idea
of the Hemingway hero emerged. The Hemingway hero (almost always a man) is a person of
profoundly rooted principles like courage, honor, and dogged determinism. These morals
are unshakeable in the face of any obstacle, no matter how formidable.
Critic Philip Young entered the Hemingway Octagon with his “wound” theory of Hemmingway
and his protagonists. As one of many critics who viewed the Hemingway hero as a stand-in
for Hemmingway himself, Young proffered that the Hemingway hero strictly adhered to his
codes as a sort of compensation for his battle wounds. Says Young:
The Hemingway hero, the big, tough, outdoor man, is also the wounded man, and descriptions
of certain scenes in the life of Nick Adams have explained how he got that way. The man
will die a thousand times before his death, but from his wounds he would never recover
so long as Hemingway lived and recorded his adventures
Other critics were not so … precious… with Hemingway’s mold of a hero, with critics
like Wyndham Lewis referring to them as “loutish, oafish marionettes” and Gertrude Stein wannabes.
Fellow writer Max Eastman straight up kicked the hornet’s nest by thoroughly dunking
on Hemingway’s bullfighting memoir Death in the Afternoon, disgusted with how he saw
it as romanticizing animal cruelty in the name of Hemingway’s macho image and calling
it “a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest.” This allegedly
culminated in Hemmingway and Eastman going chest hair to chest hair when they ran into
each other and the author allegedly ripped open both of their shirts to see who had more
chest hair and subsequently telling the press that “[Eastman] jumped at me like a woman—clawing,
you know, with his open hands.” Hey, you can’t have a fight without some casual misogyny
Hemmingway’s lasting success in mythologizing himself is no more evident than in his reputation
as the Apotheosis of Masculinity. His refusal to regularly bathe, all his fightin’ and
huntin’ and boxin’ and drinkin’. Heck, Hemmingway even claimed his novel For Whom
the Bell Tolls was so sexy that his ex-Marine pal Ben Finney got hot and bothered by it.
Which ew, TMI Ernie.
But with the passage of time, Hemingway’s aging forced him to confront some hard truths
about himself—getting balder and heavier resulted in women seeing him less as the handsome
lothario he once fancied himself and more as a father figure, the white-bearded “Papa”
Hemingway. But so, so much worse was his declining mental health. The manic depression
that ran in his family was continuing to rear its ugly head as Hemmingway got older, plunging
him into wave after wave of mania and depression, all the while fueled by his worsening alcoholism.
This created a volatile cocktail that was nearly impossible for doctors to adequately
diagnose, especially at a time when we were only beginning to understand the complexities
of mental health. So, they fed him pills. Lots of pills. Just after receiving the Nobel
Prize in 1954, Hemmingway told Time magazine, “I have to take so many pills, they have
to fight among themselves if I take them too close together.”
For those who had been witnessing Hemmingway’s downward spiral throughout the final years
of his life, they seemed to know deep down what they could not admit out loud—that
Hemmingway was on the same tragic path as his father once was. Like his father before
him, Ernest Hemingway took his own life the morning of July 2, 1961 at the age of 61.
Several years after Hemmingway’s death, a memoir about his time in Paris, A Moveable
Feast, would be published, and the original 1964 edition would begin with an odd statement,
especially for a memoir:
“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the
chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”
Fiction? A memoir? It was as if Hemmingway was winking at his readers from beyond the
grave—even a supposed real-life account of his time in Paris should be read with about
the same standard of facts as The Sun Also Rises.
But it was never facts Hemmingway was interested in. He was after larger truths, the deeper
truths of what it is to be human. Facts were just the bothersome details that got in the
way.
A Moveable Feast contains another line that is among Hemmingway’s most oft-quoted: “They
say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in
those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher
grade of manure.”
Despite Hemmingway’s life-long contentious battle with the facts, he was always true
to himself. As a fiction writer, he was by necessity an admitted “super-liar.” A
super-liar forever tilling the garden of his legacy with the highest grade of manure there
is -- Ernest Hemingway’s Grade-A Premium Bullshit-- BS
One more thing — you should check out the new Hemingway documentary from Ken Burns and
Lynn Novick on PBS. The three-part doc goes live on Monday, April 5 at 8/7 central, and
you can stream it on PBS.org or the PBS Video app on your Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast and
other fancy tv boxes. Check the links in the description for more!