With Hemingway there is no such thing as non-fiction; there are simply degrees of fiction, some events more fictional than others.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway The Paris Years.
A writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make it of an absolute truth.
Ernest Hemingway, intro to Men At War, 1942, edited 1955.
As old and easygoing friends [John Dos Passos] and [his wife] Katy did their best to keep him “kidded down to size”. In their eyes he had become a shade too conspicuously ‘the famous author, the great sports-fisherman, the mighty African hunter’. Yet they willingly played up to his special brand of princeliness.
Carlos Baker, Hemingway, A Life.
No one was more conscious than Ernest of the figure and image he possessed in the minds of the American press and reading public. He felt (I am sure) that this was an important matter to him in terms of dollars and cents in book sales or fees for articles. He deliberately set out to keep the legend and image alive in the form he wanted it.
Mario Menocal Jr, in a letter to biographer Jeffrey
Meyers
quoted in Hemingway: A Biography, 1975.
You are to remember that in Paris I have lived for many years buried under mountains of Middle-Westerners who there find it necessary to assume the aspects, voices, accents and behaviours of cow-boys crossed with liberal strains of prize-fighters and old-time Bowery toughs. They may have been born in Oak Park, that suburb of Chicago that is the mildest suburb in the world; but they are determined to make you and Paris think them devils of fellows who have only left Oklahoma of the movies ten months before.
Ford Madox Ford, quoted by Bernard J. Poli,
Ford Madox Ford And The Transatlantic Review.
Ford Madox Ford And The Transatlantic Review.
OH, WHAT a piece of work was Ernest Hemingway. Everywhere you land when you scour the internet you will mainly come across adulation of the man and his work. Dissent from such adulation and suggestions that at the end of the day and in hindsight both Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the man were not quite the real deal are considerably rarer, though instances of it are increasing by the year.
Scouring the internet you will also find interpretations of his fictions, in-depth exegeses, annotations to his non-fiction, and any number of commentaries, readings, learned essays and papers, dissertations, glossaries, analyses and a great many short nostalgic memoirs and blogs. The internet used bookstore, Abebooks, lists almost 27,500 books volumes with ‘Hemingway’ in the title.
Scouring the internet you will also find interpretations of his fictions, in-depth exegeses, annotations to his non-fiction, and any number of commentaries, readings, learned essays and papers, dissertations, glossaries, analyses and a great many short nostalgic memoirs and blogs. The internet used bookstore, Abebooks, lists almost 27,500 books volumes with ‘Hemingway’ in the title.
You will also find at least one Hemingway cookbook and a Hemingway range of furniture, Hemingway spectacle frames, Hemingway spirits (US liquors), Hemingway bedding, Hemingway sauces and Hemingway skincare, though these tell us far more about the commercial world we live in and our unremitting desire to impress friends and neighbours than can say anything at all useful about the man and writer and his work.
The nostalgic memoirs and blogs are largely from men who are now — in 2020 — in their sixties, seventies and eighties and recalling the thrill of a moment in their salad days when they first came across the work of Hemingway and, pertinently, when his larger-than-life persona as an ‘action man and writer’ still commanded awe. Reading those memoirs you begin to understand what the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov meant when he agreed with ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 in an interview published in Playboy that he had indeed described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’. Nabokov had added:
The nostalgic memoirs and blogs are largely from men who are now — in 2020 — in their sixties, seventies and eighties and recalling the thrill of a moment in their salad days when they first came across the work of Hemingway and, pertinently, when his larger-than-life persona as an ‘action man and writer’ still commanded awe. Reading those memoirs you begin to understand what the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov meant when he agreed with ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 in an interview published in Playboy that he had indeed described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’. Nabokov had added:
In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile . . .and in the Irish Times N. J. McGarrigle notes pertinently that
your attitude to Hemingway depends on how early you reach him on your reading map.
As you scour the internet, you might also come across the less laudatory, more sceptical views of those who, like me, are less impressed by Hemingway and his work, and who are, at best, bemused and often baffled by the adulation.
We dissenters certainly acknowledge that his, in its time unusual, style had an undoubted influence on the development of literature; but with the best will in the world we cannot budge from our suspicion that at the end of the day there was less to Hemingway than met the eye and, as he grew older and more famous, considerably less. Perhaps those other sceptics would agree with me — though as far as I know I am the first to say so — that his work was, despite the Nobel Prize For Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, his global celebrity and, ironically, his literary influence on a new generation, at best ‘in the top rank of the second-rate’.
That rather cutting judgment was, in fact, made by William Somerset Maugham, and he was talking about himself, not Hemingway or anyone else. Maugham (below) was one of the few writers whose fame while he was still alive was as worldwide as Hemingway’s, yet he was as unalike Hemingway as I should think it
was possible to be. He had forged for himself a very successful career as a playwright, but after the end of World War I (then known as The Great War) he turned to writing novels and short stories when his kind of plays went out of fashion.
. . .
That rather cutting judgment was, in fact, made by William Somerset Maugham, and he was talking about himself, not Hemingway or anyone else. Maugham (below) was one of the few writers whose fame while he was still alive was as worldwide as Hemingway’s, yet he was as unalike Hemingway as I should think it
Like Hemingway, Maugham, a qualified physician, volunteered to drive Red Cross ambulances in World War I because, already 40 in 1914, he was considered to old to serve in the armed forces, but he served rather longer than Hemingway’s four weeks. Nor, unlike Hemingway, did he later in life make grand claims about having ‘gone to war’.
One essential difference between the two men — and there were many — was that Maugham’s output of 25 plays, 20 novels and 13 collections of short stories over a working life of 55 years was prodigious. Hemingway’s output was anything but prodigious.
One essential difference between the two men — and there were many — was that Maugham’s output of 25 plays, 20 novels and 13 collections of short stories over a working life of 55 years was prodigious. Hemingway’s output was anything but prodigious.
Another distinct difference is that despite his shortcomings Maugham seems to have been a far more self-aware, self-critical and, above all, a far more honest man than Hemingway; and although one suspects Maugham would have loved someone to have disagreed with him when he made that modest admission about his ranking as a writer, he knew it was partly true.
Hemingway, on the other hand, was a mythomaniac of the first order. Even while still alive he was caught out time and again telling outrageous fibs about himself, his experiences and his achievements, embellishing stories about his life which grew ever more extravagant with every telling. Since his suicide in 1961 more and more of his claims have been shown to be outright rubbish, yet such was the force of his personality and such was the awe with which he was regarded, that his stories and claims were accepted without question by many while he was alive.
Hemingway, on the other hand, was a mythomaniac of the first order. Even while still alive he was caught out time and again telling outrageous fibs about himself, his experiences and his achievements, embellishing stories about his life which grew ever more extravagant with every telling. Since his suicide in 1961 more and more of his claims have been shown to be outright rubbish, yet such was the force of his personality and such was the awe with which he was regarded, that his stories and claims were accepted without question by many while he was alive.
Many of his claims are still today accepted as ‘facts’ about Hemingway’s life — that he ran away from home at the age of 14 and lived the life of hobo, that he fought bulls and had boxed professionally, that he was a womaniser, that he was an expert on food and wine, that he was an unrivalled sportsman, that he landed on the Normandy beaches on D Day, that he ‘flew with the RAF’ (he implied that he had fought combat missions, when, in fact, he was taken up for publicity purposes and, biographer Michael Reynolds says, he accompanied a bombing mission as a correspondent), that he ‘liberated the Ritz in Paris’ — the list of claims about the ‘astonishing life of one of the world’s greatest authors’ is never ending.
It has been suggested by one biographer, Richard Bradford — who was, admittedly, oddly and distinctly hostile to Hemingway in his book The Man Who Wasn’t There — that despite an apparent initial reluctance when he was approached, Hemingway always agreed to assist those writing about him and his work. Bradford alleges that if some tall story Hemingway had concocted years before were finally discovered to be untrue, he made sure he was in a position to explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions.
Such pragmatism was also of a piece with his desire to be in charge always and call the shots, whatever the situation. Alluding to the nickname ‘Papa’ Hemingway had given himself while still in his mid-twenties and which he encouraged everyone to use, Michael Reynolds (in Homecoming, the third volume of his biography) writes that
It has been suggested by one biographer, Richard Bradford — who was, admittedly, oddly and distinctly hostile to Hemingway in his book The Man Who Wasn’t There — that despite an apparent initial reluctance when he was approached, Hemingway always agreed to assist those writing about him and his work. Bradford alleges that if some tall story Hemingway had concocted years before were finally discovered to be untrue, he made sure he was in a position to explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions.
Such pragmatism was also of a piece with his desire to be in charge always and call the shots, whatever the situation. Alluding to the nickname ‘Papa’ Hemingway had given himself while still in his mid-twenties and which he encouraged everyone to use, Michael Reynolds (in Homecoming, the third volume of his biography) writes that
[when the poet and Hemingway friend Archibald MacLeish] older and with two children to Hemingway’s one, was calling Ernest ‘Pappy’, a version of Hemingway’s latest, self-selected nickname ‘Papa’ [he] thought it referred to Ernest’s fatherhood, but he could not have been more wrong. To be ‘Papa’ was to have authority over whatever the game happened to be.One suggestion in Hemingway’s defence is that many of the claims he made as a very young man — that he had affairs with both the spy Mata Hari and with the girlfriend of the gangster Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond — were simply jokes and tall stories he told to amuse his friends. That might well have been the case.
On the other hand his later claims — that he had fought on the Italian/Austrian front in World War I, for example, and had been commissioned and fought in the Italian army’s Arditi, that he had taken part in the mass execution by Spanish loyalists of more than 100 falangists in a basement, that he had grown up in poverty or as an orphan or had run away from home, that he had worked as a professional boxer when young — served merely to build up the image as a hard man he liked others to see and cast him in a better light.
His left eye was not, for example, damaged in a street fight as he led people to believe: he was born with it and it kept him, as some biographers claim, in turn out of the US Army, the US Navy and the US Marines when he tried to enlist after the US entered World War I. Other biographers tell us he applied to the Red Cross only because he knew army, navy and marines would not have him and his dodgy eye.
That Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing when he told his tall stories might be gathered from what he once wrote (on a fragment of paper so far not identified but catalogued in the Hemingway Collection in Boston’s JFK Library). In her book In The Mystery Of The Ritz-Hotel Papers Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin quotes him:
Modesty, humility and honesty, were never Hemingway traits, despite his pious pronouncement in 1942 in his preface to Men At War, an anthology he edited, that ‘a writer’s job is to tell the truth’. You could, of course, argue that the ‘truth’ he insisted a writer should tell was ‘artistic truth’, one which transcended the mundane details of daily life and attempted to get to the ‘essence of reality’ and ‘the human condition’.
That Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing when he told his tall stories might be gathered from what he once wrote (on a fragment of paper so far not identified but catalogued in the Hemingway Collection in Boston’s JFK Library). In her book In The Mystery Of The Ritz-Hotel Papers Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin quotes him:
It’s not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of the trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars too, it would cheer them up.Put aside the conceit Hemingway betrays, counting himself unquestioningly, though typically, among ‘the best writers’, what he writes is certainly odd: was Hemingway really asserting, apparently in all seriousness, that ‘writing’ can be equated with ‘lying’? Certainly, writing involves ‘invention’ and ‘fiction’, but would Hemingway enthusiasts really be content to accept such a bargain-basement analysis of the nature and art of creating fiction as ‘lying’? Doing so would certainly betray a complete lack of understanding of what lying is and why people lie.
Modesty, humility and honesty, were never Hemingway traits, despite his pious pronouncement in 1942 in his preface to Men At War, an anthology he edited, that ‘a writer’s job is to tell the truth’. You could, of course, argue that the ‘truth’ he insisted a writer should tell was ‘artistic truth’, one which transcended the mundane details of daily life and attempted to get to the ‘essence of reality’ and ‘the human condition’.
Such an explanation is certainly plausible, although when you start dealing in such middle-brow and vague metaphysics (and many do), you are very close to slipping into talking blank nonsense (also as many do). But it happens, as I have discovered time and again when reading commentaries and interpretations of Hemingway’s work. The point to remember is that for a man who re-invented his past and told increasingly outlandish lies about his achievements it is, at best, ironic that he should encourage the world’s writers ‘to tell the truth’.
Michael Reynolds — though certainly not uncritical but, unlike me, an avowed Hemingway enthusiast — sums up well Hemingway’s relationship with the truth in Hemingway The Paris Years, the second of his five-volume biography:
. . .
Michael Reynolds — though certainly not uncritical but, unlike me, an avowed Hemingway enthusiast — sums up well Hemingway’s relationship with the truth in Hemingway The Paris Years, the second of his five-volume biography:
With Hemingway there is no such thing as non-fiction; there are simply degrees of fiction, some events more fictional from others.Yet Hemingway’s mythomania and related aspects of his personality proved to be invaluable when he set about building, then consolidating his career. In the introduction to Conversations With Ernest Hemingway Matthew J. Bruccoli observes that
His fame was not accidentally acquired. Hemingway’s greatest character was Ernest Hemingway. From boyhood he assiduously fictionalised himself. He was a dedicated careerist who skillfully nurtured an heroic public image until the vainglorious role took over the man and it became necessary for him to live up to it. The public Papa and the private writer were eventually undifferentiable. His impersonation of Ernest Hemingway was so successful because he was having such a good time at it.It would certainly be regarded as heresy in academia, such is the enduring claim that Hemingway was ‘a great writer’, but time and again it strikes me that there was something of the Walter Mitty about him.
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