Ninety-five per cent of The Sun Also [Rises] was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did. I made it all up.
Ernest Hemingway, letter
to Maxwell Perkins, Nov 1933.
Don Stewart was mildly amused at [sic] the caricature of himself in the figure of Bill Gorton [in The Sun Also Rises]. He recognised a few of his own quips in the talk between Bill and Jake, but the whole book struck him as a little more than a very clever reportorial tour de force.
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.
Whether he is describing a bullfight, discussing literature, or analysing a political event, Hemingway is always center stage, overpowering the nominal subject of these works with sketches towards an autobiography.’
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.
Damon Runyon on Hemingway.
In his fiction, Hemingway’s central characters — notably Nick Adams in his short stories, but also Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Francis Macomber, Harry Walden, Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan, Richard Cantwell, Thomas Hudson, David Bourne and even the old Cuban fisherman Santiago — are arguably all, often idealised, versions of himself.
In their own way they all behave heroically, stoically battling, although not necessarily overcoming, overwhelming difficulties. Pertinently Hemingway even lends one protagonist, the dying writer Harry Walden in the short story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, his own memories of his life in Paris a decade earlier; and Harry’s self-recrimination that he had allowed his wife’s wealth and the good life it provided to corrupt his writing talent is exactly what Hemingway admitted he felt in 1930s.
Mining one’s self and one’s life for material or inventing the kind of characters one would like to be is certainly not unusual among writers; and there is no suggestion that the details of his life were not often reshaped by Hemingway and that there was no artistry at work in his writing. But his insistent, and often angry, denials that his work was in any way autobiographical are thus significant.
Friends and others who met Hemingway all attest that he was a dominant personality and loved being the centre of attention. As psychiatrist Dr Christopher Martin and Swiss psychologist Sebastian Dieguez, who have both considered Hemingway’s personality and mental make-up point out, there was a distinctly narcissistic aspect to his character and that the central focus of Hemingway’s life was certainly always Ernest Hemingway.
Mining one’s self and one’s life for material or inventing the kind of characters one would like to be is certainly not unusual among writers; and there is no suggestion that the details of his life were not often reshaped by Hemingway and that there was no artistry at work in his writing. But his insistent, and often angry, denials that his work was in any way autobiographical are thus significant.
Friends and others who met Hemingway all attest that he was a dominant personality and loved being the centre of attention. As psychiatrist Dr Christopher Martin and Swiss psychologist Sebastian Dieguez, who have both considered Hemingway’s personality and mental make-up point out, there was a distinctly narcissistic aspect to his character and that the central focus of Hemingway’s life was certainly always Ernest Hemingway.
One even suggest that for Hemingway writing fiction was some kind of therapy. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers agrees. When Hemingway was asked to name his analyst, according to Meyers he replied: ‘Portable Corona No 3’; and in a letter to the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross with whom Hemingway had struck up a friendship, he said his
Hemingway’s life has been exhaustively examined by biographers, yet it is still oddly difficult to establish the essence of his personality. Hemingway, the hard-drinking, pugilistic braggart is well-known, but how do we square that man with the Hemingway some friends insist was essentially shy, sensitive and quite gentle, and who could be spontaneously generous? As Dr Martin notes
Physicians sometimes joke that ‘there’s no such thing as a healthy person: there are only those who have been insufficiently investigated’. That observation might also be made of our mental health. How would any of us fare if we were subjected to in-depth psychiatric examination? What is ‘normal’? To behave ‘normally’ merely indicates that our behaviour is close to ‘a norm’ and adheres to an average standard of behaviour accepted, prescribed and tolerated in any given society.
Once in Italy, the Red Cross volunteers were sent to different stations behind the front line, but Hemingway found driving too mundane and volunteered to run one of the rest stations located some distance behind the front where cigarettes, coffee and chocolate were dispensed. Yet even that wasn’t exciting enough, so he began — unofficially — delivering the cigarettes and chocolates to the men in the trenches.
analyst’s name is Royal Portable (noiseless) the 3rd.Both remarks might well have been intended as flip jokes, but from what we know of Hemingway’s life those two comments might well have gone a little deeper. Philip Young, one of Hemingway’s earliest biographers, cites Nick Adams explaining in the short story Fathers And Sons (in Winner Take Nothing, Hemingway’s third collection)
If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.The American academics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and the French philosopher Roland Barthes might advise us against resorting to ‘Hemingway, the man’ and all aspects of his life when interpreting and evaluating his fiction, but no such stricture is in place when considering his overweening ambition and bulldozing personality, both of which played such a significant role in his rise to literary prominence and eventual celebrity status.
Hemingway’s life has been exhaustively examined by biographers, yet it is still oddly difficult to establish the essence of his personality. Hemingway, the hard-drinking, pugilistic braggart is well-known, but how do we square that man with the Hemingway some friends insist was essentially shy, sensitive and quite gentle, and who could be spontaneously generous? As Dr Martin notes
[Biographer Carlos] Baker pointed out that Hemingway was a man of many contradictions who was capable of alternately appearing shy or conceited, sensitive or aggressive, warm and generous, or ruthless and overbearing. It may have been that certain borderline personality traits caused him to appear erratic and dramatic.Perhaps to get a better comprehension of that personality, we might emulate how the Tao suggests a hole might be described: it is essentially nothing but empty space defined by what delimits it. And two aspects of Hemingway’s life which most certainly came to define him were his physical and mental health. We should, though, tread carefully.
. . .
Physicians sometimes joke that ‘there’s no such thing as a healthy person: there are only those who have been insufficiently investigated’. That observation might also be made of our mental health. How would any of us fare if we were subjected to in-depth psychiatric examination? What is ‘normal’? To behave ‘normally’ merely indicates that our behaviour is close to ‘a norm’ and adheres to an average standard of behaviour accepted, prescribed and tolerated in any given society.
Even if behaviour veers too far from ‘the norm’, it is often still tolerated, as eccentricity perhaps, although when such ‘abnormal’ behaviour begins to affect and impact on the lives of others in society, it is increasingly frowned upon. Furthermore, it would be misleading to try to set up some kind of equivalence between an individual’s mental health and their personality. We don’t even know how ‘mental health’ and ‘personality’ correlate, or whether they even do so to any significant degree.
Mental health can vary over a lifetime and, as with Hemingway, worsen (or, indeed, improve); and although different aspects of an individual’s personality might be exhibited at different times, in different circumstances and in different company, the essence of that individual’s personality might remain constant, though it might also over time evolve.
Hemingway’s mental health had a definite impact on him — he suffered from regular, often severe, bouts of depression all his life and went through a particularly deep depression in the mid-1930s – and it began to deteriorate earlier in his life than is hitherto accepted. But the various instances of his odd behaviour will have more to do with his distinct personality.
Anyone familiar with the details of Hemingway’s life will know of the many instances of that behaviour. One might shy away from describing him as ever behaving ‘abnormally’, at least not until he showed clinical symptoms of psychosis and paranoia, and in 1961, a few months short of his eventual suicide, he was twice admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; yet throughout his life and as he got older in his dealings with others, he increasingly behaved in what might charitably he described as a ‘singular’ manner.
His admissions to the Mayo Clinic were ostensibly to be treated for high blood pressure and a lingering case of hepatitis. In fact, he was admitted to the clinic’s psychiatric ward, and in retrospect it seems likely he had been suffering from poor mental health ever since he survived two plane crashes in as many days seven years earlier in January 1954 while on his second African safari. He was certainly in poor physical shape in his last decade.
Those crashes, although the most serious, were only two in a number of major and minor accidents he suffered throughout his life, many of which caused injuries to his head. His first severe injuries came in the last year of World War I when he was 19 and was blown up by a mortar shell and machine-gunned on the frontline in Italy. He received another, though far less serious, head injury in 1928 in Paris when he went to the bathroom during the night, mistook the skylight chain for the lavatory cistern chain and brought the defective skylight crashing down. In a car crash near Billings, Montana, in October 1930, he almost lost his right arm and spent two months in hospital. Five years later in accidentally, while out fishing, Hemingway shot himself in the leg — he was trying to shoot a shark and was probably drunk.
More serious was the concussion he suffered nine year later, in May 1944, in London. Returning to his hotel in the wartime blackout after yet another late-night party, the car in which he was travelling crashed headlong into a parked water tanker, and Hemingway was thrown through the windscreen. His head wound needed almost 60 stitches, but despite doctors insisting he should spend several months recuperating, he discharged himself from hospital after just three days (and had spent those three days knocking back bottles of champagne and spirits with all the well-wishers who dropped in).
Mental health can vary over a lifetime and, as with Hemingway, worsen (or, indeed, improve); and although different aspects of an individual’s personality might be exhibited at different times, in different circumstances and in different company, the essence of that individual’s personality might remain constant, though it might also over time evolve.
Hemingway’s mental health had a definite impact on him — he suffered from regular, often severe, bouts of depression all his life and went through a particularly deep depression in the mid-1930s – and it began to deteriorate earlier in his life than is hitherto accepted. But the various instances of his odd behaviour will have more to do with his distinct personality.
Anyone familiar with the details of Hemingway’s life will know of the many instances of that behaviour. One might shy away from describing him as ever behaving ‘abnormally’, at least not until he showed clinical symptoms of psychosis and paranoia, and in 1961, a few months short of his eventual suicide, he was twice admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; yet throughout his life and as he got older in his dealings with others, he increasingly behaved in what might charitably he described as a ‘singular’ manner.
His admissions to the Mayo Clinic were ostensibly to be treated for high blood pressure and a lingering case of hepatitis. In fact, he was admitted to the clinic’s psychiatric ward, and in retrospect it seems likely he had been suffering from poor mental health ever since he survived two plane crashes in as many days seven years earlier in January 1954 while on his second African safari. He was certainly in poor physical shape in his last decade.
Those crashes, although the most serious, were only two in a number of major and minor accidents he suffered throughout his life, many of which caused injuries to his head. His first severe injuries came in the last year of World War I when he was 19 and was blown up by a mortar shell and machine-gunned on the frontline in Italy. He received another, though far less serious, head injury in 1928 in Paris when he went to the bathroom during the night, mistook the skylight chain for the lavatory cistern chain and brought the defective skylight crashing down. In a car crash near Billings, Montana, in October 1930, he almost lost his right arm and spent two months in hospital. Five years later in accidentally, while out fishing, Hemingway shot himself in the leg — he was trying to shoot a shark and was probably drunk.
More serious was the concussion he suffered nine year later, in May 1944, in London. Returning to his hotel in the wartime blackout after yet another late-night party, the car in which he was travelling crashed headlong into a parked water tanker, and Hemingway was thrown through the windscreen. His head wound needed almost 60 stitches, but despite doctors insisting he should spend several months recuperating, he discharged himself from hospital after just three days (and had spent those three days knocking back bottles of champagne and spirits with all the well-wishers who dropped in).
He was again concussed three months later in Normandy when he leapt from the pillion of a motorcycle into a ditch to avoid enemy gunfire. A year later, there was another car crash in Cuba in 1945, in which Mary Welsh, his fourth wife was thrown through the windscreen. In 1950 he injured his head when, again while drunk, he slipped on his boat. Then, in January 1954, were the two plane crashes East Africa.
Hemingway’s poor health was not, though, entirely the result of these accidents. At different times in his life he suffered from jaundice, malaria, kidney and liver problems, pneumonia, amoebic dysentery, an intestinal prolapse, hypertension, erysipelas, nephritis, hepatitis, diabetes and arteriosclerosis. His taste for drinking developed when he left teetotal Oak Park in Chicago and was sent to Italy by the Red Cross, but from his mid-twenties on he was drinking a great deal and around the time his marriage to Hadley was disintegrating, he began drink even more. By his mid-thirties he was an alcoholic who, his third son Gregory claimed, would drink a quart of whisky (almost a litre and more than a UK pint and a half) a day.
On the matter of Hemingway’s mental health, Dr Martin and Dieguez have both compiled profiles which make interesting reading. The Mayo clinic in Minnesota observed its undertaking never to release Hemingway’s medical notes, but both Martin and Dieguez say they worked only from information they found in biographies, memoirs and letters, and, of course, what they thought they might deduce from his published work.
Hemingway’s poor health was not, though, entirely the result of these accidents. At different times in his life he suffered from jaundice, malaria, kidney and liver problems, pneumonia, amoebic dysentery, an intestinal prolapse, hypertension, erysipelas, nephritis, hepatitis, diabetes and arteriosclerosis. His taste for drinking developed when he left teetotal Oak Park in Chicago and was sent to Italy by the Red Cross, but from his mid-twenties on he was drinking a great deal and around the time his marriage to Hadley was disintegrating, he began drink even more. By his mid-thirties he was an alcoholic who, his third son Gregory claimed, would drink a quart of whisky (almost a litre and more than a UK pint and a half) a day.
. . .
On the matter of Hemingway’s mental health, Dr Martin and Dieguez have both compiled profiles which make interesting reading. The Mayo clinic in Minnesota observed its undertaking never to release Hemingway’s medical notes, but both Martin and Dieguez say they worked only from information they found in biographies, memoirs and letters, and, of course, what they thought they might deduce from his published work.
Both cover much the same ground, although Martin focuses on Hemingway’s suicide, while Dieguez considers how the course of Hemingway’s life was affected by being blown up on the Italian front in July 1918, just 13 days short of his 19th birthday.
In the Winter, 2006, issue of Psychiatry, Martin writes (in part)
In one sense Hemingway had only himself to blame for almost being killed in Italy: he had most certainly put himself in harm’s way. When the US joined the war, he volunteered, in turn, to serve in the US army, the marines and the navy but was turned down by all three because of his defective left eye. Hearing that the Red Cross was recruiting ambulance drivers and it’s physical requirements were lower, he applied and was accepted. How, though, did he progress from being employed to drive an ambulance several miles behind the front to being blown up on the Italian front line? In the Winter, 2006, issue of Psychiatry, Martin writes (in part)
Significant evidence exists to support the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable borderline and narcissistic personality traits. Late in life, Hemingway also developed symptoms of psychosis likely related to his underlying affective illness and superimposed alcoholism and traumatic brain injury. Hemingway utilized a variety of defense mechanisms, including self-medication with alcohol, a lifestyle of aggressive, risk-taking sportsmanship, and writing, in order to cope with the suffering caused by the complex co-morbidity of his interrelated psychiatric disorders. Ultimately, Hemingway’s defense mechanisms failed, overwhelmed by the burden of his complex co-morbid illness, resulting in his suicide.In Frontiers Of Neurology And Neuroscience in April, 2010, Dieguez discusses the trauma Hemingway suffered when he was blown up in Italy just before his 19th birthday and the possibility that he might have undergone a possible ‘near-death experience’ (NDE). He cautions on the difficulty of analysing NDEs because accounts are always subjective, and it is impossible, not least ethically, to construct controlled experiments to investigate them. But he suggests that
It is incontrovertible that Hemingway’s war wound, if not his ‘NDE’, occupied a central part of his work and his outlook on life. In this respect, Hemingway seems comparable to other subjects who survived a life-threatening event and who sometimes report a new outlook on life, feelings of immortality and invincibility, a sense of personal importance and a loss of the fear of death.He then adds the pertinent warning that
Nevertheless, both the ‘NDE’ and the [post-traumatic stress disorder] approach, though probably correctly underlying major themes of Hemingway’s works (including some explicit references to war and wounds), should be more accurately perceived as additional factors to a pre-existing personality pattern. Such a pre-existing temperament might underlie both the selected literary topics and the very near-death experience.Dieguez pointedly suggests that whatever effect being blown-up had on Hemingway’s personality (and thus his behaviour in later years)
. . . it was certainly no happenstance that Hemingway would find himself on a battlefield in the first place.
Once in Italy, the Red Cross volunteers were sent to different stations behind the front line, but Hemingway found driving too mundane and volunteered to run one of the rest stations located some distance behind the front where cigarettes, coffee and chocolate were dispensed. Yet even that wasn’t exciting enough, so he began — unofficially — delivering the cigarettes and chocolates to the men in the trenches.
Shortly before midnight on July 8 he was blown up when an Austrian mortar shell landed nearby. The episode demonstrates, perhaps, that he was responsible for the accident: it occurred as a result of a young man’s unthinking craving for excitement. Yet whatever incidents and influences had shaped his character and personality, both had been defined long before he was blown up.
Both Martin and Dieguez subscribe to the notion that Hemingway was bipolar. In on account of a manic episode quoted by Martin
Dieguez also writes of Hemingway’s haemochromatosis, a genetic condition which prevents the body from ridding itself of the iron it accumulates from food and drink. In time that accumulation can lead to kidney and liver damage, diabetes, joint pain, depression and high blood pressure, and Hemingway suffered from all these conditions. Haemochromatosis is treatable, but unfortunately the conditions it causes are usually treated first, masking the fact that haemochromatosis is the root cause so it can go unnoticed until it is too late.
A different account of Hemingway’s health problems is given by psychiatrist Dr Andrew Farah in his book Hemingway’s Brain, and he disputes that Hemingway was bipolar. According to Dr Farah, of the University of North Carolina, Hemingway’s mental problems stemmed from the repeated instances of the concussion he suffered in the nine head injuries during his life all going untreated.
. . .
Both Martin and Dieguez subscribe to the notion that Hemingway was bipolar. In on account of a manic episode quoted by Martin
Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, found her husband ‘sky-high, emotionally intense, and ready to explode’. His company was so difficult to tolerate that she sent him off on a trip alone. The episodic irritability that drove his father away from his own family was also manifested in the son.The mammoth writing sessions Hemingway boasted of are seen as instances of his manic phases.
Dieguez also writes of Hemingway’s haemochromatosis, a genetic condition which prevents the body from ridding itself of the iron it accumulates from food and drink. In time that accumulation can lead to kidney and liver damage, diabetes, joint pain, depression and high blood pressure, and Hemingway suffered from all these conditions. Haemochromatosis is treatable, but unfortunately the conditions it causes are usually treated first, masking the fact that haemochromatosis is the root cause so it can go unnoticed until it is too late.
A different account of Hemingway’s health problems is given by psychiatrist Dr Andrew Farah in his book Hemingway’s Brain, and he disputes that Hemingway was bipolar. According to Dr Farah, of the University of North Carolina, Hemingway’s mental problems stemmed from the repeated instances of the concussion he suffered in the nine head injuries during his life all going untreated.
Dr Farah also suggests that although the electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) given to Hemingway in the Mayo Clinic benefits nine out of ten patients, in his case it did not. In fact, he says, as a result of the untreated concussion over the years Hemingway suffered from undiagnosed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (brain damage) and the ECT sessions simply extended the damage.
Hemingway was renown throughout his life for his ostentatious demonstrations of hyper-masculinity and machismo. His macho posturing, it is suggested, betrayed self-doubt about his sexual identity, and much is made of his mother, Grace, dressing him in girls’ clothes when he was very young. In fact, we are assured, it was not an unusual in the late 19th century for very young boys to be dressed in more feminine clothes.
Such enthusiasms and the occasions when he had, as he described it, the ‘juice’ might well have been a manifestation of the manic phase of the bipolar condition some believed he suffered. The Torrents Of Spring (though it was only 30,000 words long) was written in just ten days, and he later told the journalist Lillian Ross in her celebrated 1950 New Yorker profile of Hemingway that he
. . .
Hemingway was renown throughout his life for his ostentatious demonstrations of hyper-masculinity and machismo. His macho posturing, it is suggested, betrayed self-doubt about his sexual identity, and much is made of his mother, Grace, dressing him in girls’ clothes when he was very young. In fact, we are assured, it was not an unusual in the late 19th century for very young boys to be dressed in more feminine clothes.
Furthermore, depending on what he and his sister were up to, both Ernest and Marcelline were also dressed in boys clothes. Yet it might not be too much of a stretch to suggest the bravado, the showing off and the desire to be best at everything betray something of an inferiority complex, though what might have led to it is impossible to know. In her book The Hemingway Women, author Bernice Kert writes
James Joyce once remarked that the two men [Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, an acquaintance in the Paris years who published Hemingway’s first book, in our time] were confused about each other. “Hemingway posing as tough and McAlmon as sensitive should swap poses and be true to life.” Joyce was noticing what Hadley and others had observed — that much of Ernest’s swagger was a protective cover for a deeply anxious nature.The suggestion might be that Hemingway was somehow ashamed of his sensitivity and tried to hide it. But however interesting and possibly informative speculation about Hemingway’s psychological state might be (and Martin and Dieguez are, perhaps, better qualified to speculate than others), one should be wary of treading the path of what has become known as ‘psycho-biography’.
To the oft-made suggestion that Hemingway was a closet homosexual one can only retort that despite such claims from Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda — she and Hemingway disliked each other intensely — and the bisexual Robert McAlmon — nothing has ever come to light which might substantiate the claim.
Those who engage in ‘psycho-biography’ usually resort to digging up this or that ‘fact’ about their subject and making large assumptions based on the kind of bargain-basement psychology found in Sunday newspaper supplements. But such ‘psycho-biographies’ have a lot less to say — simply because they cannot know — what character and personality traits the subject might have inherited. In fact, the whole area of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ is so woolly that reducing it more or less to a series of psychological traits is itself questionable.
Those who engage in ‘psycho-biography’ usually resort to digging up this or that ‘fact’ about their subject and making large assumptions based on the kind of bargain-basement psychology found in Sunday newspaper supplements. But such ‘psycho-biographies’ have a lot less to say — simply because they cannot know — what character and personality traits the subject might have inherited. In fact, the whole area of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ is so woolly that reducing it more or less to a series of psychological traits is itself questionable.
So when one considers Hemingway’s character and personality, it might be best — or, at least, safest — to restrict oneself to reports from family, schoolmates, friends, colleagues and acquaintances of his habitual behaviour in their interactions with him.
Psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom and his wife Marilyn, who worked as a literature professor, also analysed Hemingway’s personality, and in June 1971 published a paper outlining their conclusions in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
. . .
Psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom and his wife Marilyn, who worked as a literature professor, also analysed Hemingway’s personality, and in June 1971 published a paper outlining their conclusions in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Unlike Martin, who takes a narrow clinical approach, and Dieguez whose investigation is even narrower, concentrating on ‘Hemingway’s near-death experience’ when he was blown up, the Yaloms conclusions seem rounder. They say they were attempting
to illuminate the underlying forces which shaped the content and structure of his workand want to consider
the major psycho-dynamic conflicts, apparent in his lifestyle and fiction, which led to that event.The balance between Irvin Yalom’s work in psychiatry and his wife’s in literature gells well, and their conclusions might well elucidate some of the startling contradictions in Hemingway’s personality. Adopting some of the ideas of the German-American psychoanalyst Karen Horney, especially those in her book Neurosis And Human Growth, the Yaloms postulate that the central conflict in Hemingway was between his ‘idealised self’ and his ‘real self’, and that the conflict was never resolved. They write that according to Horney a
child suffers from basic anxiety, an extremely dysphoric state of being, if he has parents whose own neurotic conflicts prevent them from providing the basic acceptance necessary for the development of the child’s autonomous being. During early life when the child regards the parents as omniscient and omnipotent, he can only conclude, in the face of parental disapproval and rejection, that there is something dreadfully wrong with him. To dispel basic anxiety, to obtain the acceptance, approval and love he requires for survival, the child perceives he must become something else; he channels his energies away from the realization of his real self, from his own personal potential, and develops a construct of an idealized image – a way he must become in order to survive and to avoid basic anxiety. The idealized image may take many forms, all of which are designed to cope with a primitive sense of badness, inadequacy or unlovability.They add that
Hemingway’s idealized image crystallized around a search for mastery, for a vindictive triumph which would lift him above others.As I point out elsewhere, none of this can be accepted as copper-bottomed fact, merely as informed speculation. But what the Yaloms suggest would account for Hemingway’s almost neurotic competitiveness to be the best at everything – not least that he was America’s best writer – and the inferiority complex from which his wife Hadley Richardson and his schoolboy crush Frances Coates believe he suffered. The Yaloms add
Both publicly and privately Hemingway invested inordinate psychic energy into fulfilling his idealized image. The investment was not primarily a conscious, deliberate one, for many of Hemingway’s life activities were overdetermined; he acted often not through free choice but because he was driven by some dimly understood internal pressure whose murky persuasiveness only shammed choice.They suggest that
Hemingway’s anxiety and depression stemmed in large part from his failure to actualize his idealized self. Two factors were important in this failure: the image was so extreme that superhuman forces would have been required to satisfy it; secondly, a number of counterforces limited his available degree of adaptability. These secondary counterforces, e.g. dependency cravings and oedipal conflicts, were sources of anxiety in their own right and hampered the actualization of the idealized self.Interpreting his lifelong courtship of danger they write that
Throughout his life Hemingway attempted to abolish the discrepancy between his real and idealized selves. No alterations could be made upon the idealized self; there is no evidence that Hemingway ever compromised or attenuated his self-demands. All the work had to be done upon his real self; he pushed himself to face more intense danger, to attempt physical feats which exceed his capabilities, while at the same time he pruned and streamlined himself. All traces of traits not fitting his idealized image had to be eliminated or squelched. The softer feminine side, the fearful parts, the dependent cravings – all had to go.
. . .
Hemingway grew up the son of a strict father who often punished him physically in a god-fearing household, and notably he did not show any outright rebellious behaviour until he had returned from Italy.
There is, though, the curious story of how as a teenager when staying at the family summer cottage
at Walloon Lake, Michigan, he deliberately shot and killed a blue heron, a bird he knew to be a protected species; and did so — it is claimed — precisely because it was a protected species. He then, briefly, went on the run (apparently on his mother’s advice) when the local game wardens called at the cottage to investigate.
 |
Hemingway at the age when he would |
In later years and true to form Hemingway exaggerated the incident and claimed he had been lying low for a while. Yet he was only 16 at the time and the incident cannot really be spun into anything more significant than an extreme form of teenage devilment.
Hemingway was variously said by those who knew him at school and later when he was in his early twenties to be friendly and funny, and shy and sensitive; but he was also called a vindictive bully; he was known for his charm and his wit, and was regarded by many as very good company; yet he also had a sharp and hurtful tongue, and could turn on someone in an instant if he felt slighted, bested or somehow put out, an aspect of his personality which governed his behaviour ever more as he grew older (and drank more).
From an early age he was known as a braggart who told tall stories. When he was five, he insisted to his grandfather that singlehanded he had stopped a runaway horse. Such hyperbole is quite common among very young and imaginative children, and is not unusual among teenage boys, but Hemingway’s proclivity for telling such stories did not diminish as he became older. Instead it grew steadily. By the time he was in his 40s he was telling outright lies about himself, his life and his achievements, to the consternation of those friends who knew the truth.
Hemingway was variously said by those who knew him at school and later when he was in his early twenties to be friendly and funny, and shy and sensitive; but he was also called a vindictive bully; he was known for his charm and his wit, and was regarded by many as very good company; yet he also had a sharp and hurtful tongue, and could turn on someone in an instant if he felt slighted, bested or somehow put out, an aspect of his personality which governed his behaviour ever more as he grew older (and drank more).
From an early age he was known as a braggart who told tall stories. When he was five, he insisted to his grandfather that singlehanded he had stopped a runaway horse. Such hyperbole is quite common among very young and imaginative children, and is not unusual among teenage boys, but Hemingway’s proclivity for telling such stories did not diminish as he became older. Instead it grew steadily. By the time he was in his 40s he was telling outright lies about himself, his life and his achievements, to the consternation of those friends who knew the truth.
Others, though, were so bowled over by the force of his personality and the conviction with which he made his claims that they accepted everything he said. It is quite possible that many of the tall stories he told when he was younger were just expressions of a quirky sense of humour; but it would be far more difficult to explain away the outrageous claims he made 20 and 30 years later.
Hemingway could be irascible and had a ferocious temper, traits which also became far more pronounced as he got older and as he drank more; he was regarded by some as a generous and loyal friend, yet by the time he died he had long fallen out with all the friends from his Paris years, except James Joyce and Ezra Pound. He could be generous, but oddly, according to one biographer, his generosity was usually extended solely to his friends — he is said once to have sold stock so he could give John Dos Passos, who had been admitted to hospital with rheumatic fever, $1,000 (the equivalent of about $20,000 in 2020). And he made it clear to Dos Passos, that he did not expect to be repaid.
Hemingway could be irascible and had a ferocious temper, traits which also became far more pronounced as he got older and as he drank more; he was regarded by some as a generous and loyal friend, yet by the time he died he had long fallen out with all the friends from his Paris years, except James Joyce and Ezra Pound. He could be generous, but oddly, according to one biographer, his generosity was usually extended solely to his friends — he is said once to have sold stock so he could give John Dos Passos, who had been admitted to hospital with rheumatic fever, $1,000 (the equivalent of about $20,000 in 2020). And he made it clear to Dos Passos, that he did not expect to be repaid.
On the other hand he rarely gave any presents to his wives and immediate family. Martha Gelhorn reports that in all the time they were together, Hemingway gave her only two gifts: he handed her a pair of long johns and a shotgun just as they were about to embark on a hunting trip to the West — because he knew she would need them.
Hemingway never enjoyed being alone, and he thrived on having an audience. Some friends and acquaintances claimed he always had to be the centre of attention, while others testified that wasn’t necessarily true and that he could be a good and attentive listener. Some described Hemingway as ‘an intellectual’, although he did not like being thought one, and with increasingly boorish behaviour, to those friends’ consternation, he liked to prove them wrong.
Once central aspect of his personality which certainly helps to explain his quite sudden rise to fame as a writer was his extraordinary competitiveness. In the foreword to his biography of Hemingway, Carlos Baker describes
Hemingway was extremely, almost neurotically, competitive even as a child: he had to be the best at everything, whether fishing, hunting, boxing, playing tennis and, later in life, at being able to drink vast quantities of alcohol. In his memoir, Hemingway’s Bitterness, his Paris friend Harold Loeb, who became the lovelorn Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, recalls Hemingway on the tennis court:
He was no tennis player; a bad eye, damaged in a street brawl, and a weak leg injured by shrapnel, hampered his control. His back-court drives were erratic and his net game non-existent. Nevertheless, he put so much gusto into the play and got so much pleasure out of his good shots and such misery from his misses, that the games in which he participated were never lackadaisical. Also, we usually played doubles, and by assigning the best player to Hem, a close match could sometimes be achieved.
Notable is that even though the memoir was written over 30 years after Loeb had been ridiculed by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and he should have known better, he still innocently repeats his former friend’s explanation for the bad left eye: that it had been ‘damaged in street brawl’. It had not: his eye had been defective since he was very young (a condition probably inherited from his mother), but having people believe it had been ‘damaged in a street brawl’ was sexier, more macho and more in keeping with how Hemingway liked the world to see him, the hard and no-nonsense man.
Biographers report that if Hemingway met someone who knew about a subject of which he knew little, he quizzed them incessantly until he had extracted from them everything there was to know about the topic until he, too, was ‘an expert’. He liked to portray himself as very knowledgeable on most topics — another aspect of his competitiveness — and once he believed himself to be an authority on a subject, whether fishing, hunting, writing, food, wine and the ‘good life’ and travelling, he was likely to lecture those around him.
Hemingway never enjoyed being alone, and he thrived on having an audience. Some friends and acquaintances claimed he always had to be the centre of attention, while others testified that wasn’t necessarily true and that he could be a good and attentive listener. Some described Hemingway as ‘an intellectual’, although he did not like being thought one, and with increasingly boorish behaviour, to those friends’ consternation, he liked to prove them wrong.
. . .
. . . the immensely ambitious young man, unfailingly competitive, driven by an urge to excel in whatever he undertook, to be admired and looked up to, to assert his superiority by repeated example, to display for the benefit of others his strength and his endurance.’Being ‘driven by an urge to excel’ is one thing, but also being driven by an urge ‘to be admired’ adds a curious dimension. Baker’s take on the conflicting aspects of Hemingway’s character is also succinct. He speaks of
. . . the man of many contradictions: the shy diffident and the incredible braggart; the sentimentalist quick to tears and the bully who used his anger like a club; the warm and generous friend and the ruthless and overbearing enemy; the man who stayed loyal to some of his oldest friends while picking quarrels with others because he feared that they were beginning to assume a proprietary interest over him.Although one should be alert to the danger of conflating ‘mental health’ and ‘personality’, given the marked discrepancies in behaviour and attitudes Baker describes, we might still wonder just how much the bipolar condition from which Martin and Dieguez believe Hemingway suffered did influence the demonstration of the different aspects of his personality.
Hemingway was extremely, almost neurotically, competitive even as a child: he had to be the best at everything, whether fishing, hunting, boxing, playing tennis and, later in life, at being able to drink vast quantities of alcohol. In his memoir, Hemingway’s Bitterness, his Paris friend Harold Loeb, who became the lovelorn Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, recalls Hemingway on the tennis court:
He was no tennis player; a bad eye, damaged in a street brawl, and a weak leg injured by shrapnel, hampered his control. His back-court drives were erratic and his net game non-existent. Nevertheless, he put so much gusto into the play and got so much pleasure out of his good shots and such misery from his misses, that the games in which he participated were never lackadaisical. Also, we usually played doubles, and by assigning the best player to Hem, a close match could sometimes be achieved.
Notable is that even though the memoir was written over 30 years after Loeb had been ridiculed by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and he should have known better, he still innocently repeats his former friend’s explanation for the bad left eye: that it had been ‘damaged in street brawl’. It had not: his eye had been defective since he was very young (a condition probably inherited from his mother), but having people believe it had been ‘damaged in a street brawl’ was sexier, more macho and more in keeping with how Hemingway liked the world to see him, the hard and no-nonsense man.
Biographers report that if Hemingway met someone who knew about a subject of which he knew little, he quizzed them incessantly until he had extracted from them everything there was to know about the topic until he, too, was ‘an expert’. He liked to portray himself as very knowledgeable on most topics — another aspect of his competitiveness — and once he believed himself to be an authority on a subject, whether fishing, hunting, writing, food, wine and the ‘good life’ and travelling, he was likely to lecture those around him.
He prided himself as always having the ‘inside gen’ and being in the loop and liked to be seen as ‘insider’. If he developed a frenetic enthusiasm for an activity — and he often did — he cajoled everyone to join in the activity and took a dim view of anyone who tried to resist. It comes as no surprise to hear that the journalist and writer Damon Runyon quipped that
Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with [Hemingway] over an extended period.
. . . wrote The Sun’ when I was twenty-seven, and I wrote it in six weeks, starting on my birthday, July 21, in Valencia, and finishing it September 6, in Paris. But it was really lousy and the rewriting took nearly five months.His competitiveness extended to likening writing to a contest, and he even regarded dead writers as rivals. Talking about his writing career in the same profile — and adopting the metaphor of boxing — he tells Ross
I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.After the profile was published and many commented that it made Hemingway (who had inexplicably adopted a faux native-American way of speaking in all his conversations with Ross) look silly, he remarked that he had often been joking and had assumed Ross would have realised. But whether or not that and other comments Ross quoted were intended as light-hearted, it was not the only time when he described writers as being in competition with each other. Two of his contemporaries he treated as rivals whose achievements were always to be topped were Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner (who was equally as prickly and competitive. Faulkner said of Hemingway
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionaryto which Hemingway responded
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?Hemingway’s innate, one might same extreme, competitiveness might help to explain why he was not just content with making a name for himself among literary folk and ruthless in his ambition to reach, but was almost desperate to become famous. He did achieve fame, although as John Raeburn establishes, by the end of Hemingway’s life his status as ‘a celebrity’ bore scant relation to his standing as a writer; and as others have pointed out, in literary circles his standing as a writer declined, almost in proportion to how his public fame increased.
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