At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety — or so one would have thought — and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?
John Banville, The Nation, Oct 2017.
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what Amercian writers were able to write about and the words they use.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame.
A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth.
Greg Clark, features editor of the Toronto Star
.
Tough talk is only talk, a product of Hemingway’s imagined version of himself, the man he wanted to be. He went to many wars, but was never a soldier; saw so many bullfights, but never killed a single bull. If he ever fathered an illegitimate child, neither mother nor child has ever pressed claims.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming.
Yet Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.
Matthew J. Brucolli, in Scott and Ernest:
The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.
The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success.
Early in his career, Hemingway began revising and editing what would become his longest and most well-known work: the legend of his own life, where there was never a clear line between fiction and reality.
Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years,.
Your attitude to Hemingway depends on how early you reach him on your reading map. It’s difficult for your feelings to stay unsoiled by the bumptious parody of the personality.
N.J. McGarrigle, the Irish Times.
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, the son of one of Hemingway’s
Cuban friends.
Hemingway had come from nowhere to nascent prominence in a period defined not only by the sort of American journalism that Time [magazine] advocated, but also by the final stage of the conversion of ‘readers’ into ‘markets’. Like cosmetics, automobiles or motion pictures publishing was an industry whose future depended on turning out a product for mass audience. The author was part of the product, the more promotable the better.
Leonard J Leff, Hemingway And His Conspirators.
After 1930, he just didn’t have it any more. His legs began to go and his syntax became boring and the critics began to ask why he didn’t put in a few subordinate clauses just to make it look good. But the bar-tenders still liked him and the tourists liked him too. He got more and more famous and the big picture magazines photographed him shooting a lion and catching a tuna and interviewing a Spanish Republican militiaman and fraternising with bullfighters and helping liberate Paris and always smiling bushily and his stuff got worse and worse. Mr Hemingway the writer was running out of gas, but no one noticed it because Mr Hemingway the celebrity was such good copy.
Dwight Macdonald, Encounter.
In today’s age when becoming and being a ‘celebrity’ in whatever field, though usually in showbiz and television, is a legitimate ‘career path’, those under 30 might find it difficult to accept that in his time Hemingway’s fame was exceptional. Yes, there had been celebrities throughout the ages: the violinist Paganini, who was said (probably by an astute concert promoter) to have sold his soul to the Devil, was one; national and military heroes such as Garibaldi and Wellington were celebrities as were sporting heroes such as W G Grace.
The poet Lord Byron became a celebrity, although he was ‘celebrated’ as much for the scandal he created as his poetry. Later, after World War I (or the Great War as it was then known) when substantial cultural and social changes were underway, stars of the silver screen such as Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow and Mary Pickford, aviators such as Charles Lindburgh and sportsmen such as ‘Babe’ Ruth also became celebrities. But poets and novelists did not.
Certainly, every year, to boost sales, publishers would trumpet their latest bestselling writer, and his or her name is then on everyone’s lips for a year or two, but their fame is restricted to those who read books. Hemingway was an exception to that routine: many other writers sold well, often better than he did when he burst on to the scene — Sinclair Lewis, F Scott Fitzgerald, Zane Grey, Booth Tarkington, John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Thornton Wilder, Hugh Walpole, John Erskine, Kathleen Norris — all regularly made the bestsellers’ list. Yet none became ‘a personality’ and a fixture in the news and gossip pages as Hemingway did.
Yet there is one aspect to Hemingway which cannot be gainsaid and which even we apostates must concede. It is succinctly summed up by Matthew Bruccoli in his introduction to Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame:Certainly, every year, to boost sales, publishers would trumpet their latest bestselling writer, and his or her name is then on everyone’s lips for a year or two, but their fame is restricted to those who read books. Hemingway was an exception to that routine: many other writers sold well, often better than he did when he burst on to the scene — Sinclair Lewis, F Scott Fitzgerald, Zane Grey, Booth Tarkington, John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Thornton Wilder, Hugh Walpole, John Erskine, Kathleen Norris — all regularly made the bestsellers’ list. Yet none became ‘a personality’ and a fixture in the news and gossip pages as Hemingway did.
His fame and name-recognition were unusual simply because quite soon they transcended books and ‘literature’. From the late 1920s until after his death in 1961, men and women who would have been hard-pressed to name just one novelist or poet, had most certainly heard of Ernest Hemingway. And that was not just in the English-speaking world. Hemingway’s fame became truly global, and eventually pictures of the grizzled and bearded veteran ‘Papa’ Hemingway he became were recognisable the world over.
Broadly speaking, Hemingway’s career and his first steps to becoming that famous figure worldwide began in the mid-1920s with the publication of his novel The Sun Also Rises. After that, it was more or less just a question of, metaphorically, staying ‘in the headlines’, a strategy he followed enthusiastically despite his persistent pious claims that he had no interest in fame whatsoever and only wanted to write. This was, though, just a convenient fiction he employed to bolster his status as ‘a serious artist’. As Matthew J. Bruccoli observes in his introduction to Conversations With Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway became well-known in the close-knit English-speaking artistic ex-patriate community which had based itself in the Montparnasse district, and he evolved into an assiduous networker. Word of the young writer with a new and unusual style got back to the commercial publishers in New York, and one, Boni & Liveright, after initially rejecting the work, was persuaded to publish a collection of his short stories. That collection, In Our Time — confusingly he had already published in a limited edition a slim volume of very short stories in Paris which he also called ‘in our time’ (a title distinguished only by all being in lower case) — received remarkable reviews and boosted his profile, but it did not sell well.
. . .
‘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.Hemingway had set his heart on becoming a writer in his late teens, much like many others in their late teens. Initially the stories he wrote were conventional and derivative, and none of them was accepted by the magazines to whom they were submitted. Then in 1922, now married to a woman almost eight years older and newly settled in Paris, he came under the influence of the writer and poet Ezra Pound and the art collector, some-time writer and self-declared genius Gertrude Stein. Both counted themselves firmly as ‘modernists’ and took Hemingway in hand to help shape his writing in keeping with their principles.
Hemingway became well-known in the close-knit English-speaking artistic ex-patriate community which had based itself in the Montparnasse district, and he evolved into an assiduous networker. Word of the young writer with a new and unusual style got back to the commercial publishers in New York, and one, Boni & Liveright, after initially rejecting the work, was persuaded to publish a collection of his short stories. That collection, In Our Time — confusingly he had already published in a limited edition a slim volume of very short stories in Paris which he also called ‘in our time’ (a title distinguished only by all being in lower case) — received remarkable reviews and boosted his profile, but it did not sell well.
There then followed a distinctly murky to-do — which even involved Hemingway dashing off a short novel in just ten days — in which he managed to engineer escaping his contract with Boni & Liveright and signing with the more prestigious Charles Scribner’s Sons (usually referred to as Scribner’s) with whom he remained for the rest of his life.
At Scribner’s Hemingway was taken under the wing of Maxwell Perkins, who had previously discovered and championed F Scott Fitzgerald. At 32, Perkins was one of the house’s young Turks who argued that Scribner’s, widely regarded as a tad fusty and fuddy-duddy, needed authors such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway if it hoped to attract younger readers. Perkins had originally joined Scribner’s in its advertising department, and he was firmly in tune with the era’s new marketing and advertising techniques. Knowing of Hemingway’s fondness for hunting, fishing and bullfighting, he decided to market his new young author as a different kind of writer, an outdoor action man and the antithesis of the sensitive soul buried away in his garret room. His strategy worked. In her account Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, Lesley M M Blume records that
. . .
It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway [the man] was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald.Most of the reviews of The Sun Also Rises were positive and full of praise. A few were dismissive, but that did not matter. Initial sales were not extravagant, but they were brisk and steady, and though the novel and its pre-marital sex and excessive drinking had thoroughly shocked older, respectable America, it delighted young America. In the early years of the 1920s younger Americans had taken their cue from F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘jazz age’ — portrayed in is debut novel, This Side Of Paradise, published in 1920, and especially in The Beautiful And The Damned in 1922 — and they had become ‘sheiks’ and ‘flappers’ and given themselves over to illicit booze and hedonism.
Now, a few years on and ever keen for novelty, they had a new kind of hero and a heroine to emulate: hard-bitten, cynical, immoral and hard-drinking. Biographer Carlos Baker reports that Hemingway’s Paris acquaintance and later champion Malcolm Cowley (who was living in the US again when The Sun Also Rises was published)
In many ways Hemingway, with his personality and his often ruthless ambition, was the right man for the right time. In Hemingway And His Conspirators, Leonard J Leff sums it up well:
Greg Clark, the Toronto Star features editor who had remarked on the contradiction he had noticed in Hemingway between a
That odd juxtaposition of sensitivity and an interest in violence was not the only fundamental contradiction in Hemingway’s personality. His apparent distain for fame on the one hand and his assiduous pursuit of it was another, as was his practice of telling extraordinary lies about himself and his experiences while insisting that ‘a writer’s job is to tell the truth’. In the preface he wrote for Men At War, a 1942 collection of writings on war, Hemingway pontificated that
discovered that winter that Hemingway’s ‘influence’ was spreading far beyond the circle of those who had known him in Paris. Girls from Smith College, coming to New York, ‘were modelling themselves after Lady Brett . . . Hundreds of bright young men from the Middle West were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the one the side of their mouths’.Hemingway had finally arrived, but it was not just because of his new style and shocking stories.
. . .
In many ways Hemingway, with his personality and his often ruthless ambition, was the right man for the right time. In Hemingway And His Conspirators, Leonard J Leff sums it up well:
Hemingway had come from nowhere to nascent prominence in a period defined not only by the sort of American journalism that Time [magazine] advocated, but also by the final stage of the conversion of ‘readers’ into ‘markets’. Like cosmetics, automobiles or motion pictures publishing was an industry whose future depended on turning out a product for mass audience. The author was part of the product, the more promotable the better.As Maxwell Perkins had realised, Hemingway was certainly ‘promotable’. And Hemingway knew it, too. Though he ostensibly and ostentatiously eschewed the publicity game and proclaimed he wasn’t interested in fame, how he reacted when he was finally able to step into the limelight told a different story. Still based in Paris, he took a keen interest in sales figures, supplying Perkins on request with pictures of himself and biographical details, and subscribed to not one but two New York cuttings agencies to be kept informed whenever his name appeared in the paper. As Leonard Leff puts it
Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in photographs, Book of the Month club editions, and stage or movie adaptations that could bring an author fame and fortune; he wrote, in other words, ‘for the relief of [his] own mind and without thought of publication’. Certainly he wanted an audience to hear what he had to say about valour or love or the anatomy of fiction. And certainly he needed money to sustain the grand life he had after 1929. Beyond that, however, he radiated personality and cultivated publicity even as he pretended to scorn it. In his first letter to Perkins he mentioned — not wholly facetiously — that it would be ‘worthwhile to get into Who’s Who’. In short he wanted fame in both the Renaissance and the contemporary sense.
. . .
Greg Clark, the Toronto Star features editor who had remarked on the contradiction he had noticed in Hemingway between a
quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violencefirst met Hemingway in early 1920 when he had arrived in Canada to mentor the disabled son of a wealthy man and badgered the Star for work. Their acquaintance was renewed three years later when — from the beginning of October 1923 until the end of December — Hemingway was on the Star staff in Toronto.
That odd juxtaposition of sensitivity and an interest in violence was not the only fundamental contradiction in Hemingway’s personality. His apparent distain for fame on the one hand and his assiduous pursuit of it was another, as was his practice of telling extraordinary lies about himself and his experiences while insisting that ‘a writer’s job is to tell the truth’. In the preface he wrote for Men At War, a 1942 collection of writings on war, Hemingway pontificated that
a writer’s . . . 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.Leave aside that Hemingway’s dictum veers somewhat uncomfortably into pseudo metaphysics, it might be argued in his defence that the ‘truth’ he is talking about is not day-to-day, common or garden ‘truth’, but ‘artistic truth’, a concept that will be vague enough to satisfy some. Yet one cannot but ask why a man who claimed he valued ‘truth’ above all else told increasingly bigger and more incredible lies about himself, his achievements and his experiences (which all, crucially, contributed to forming the persona he wanted to construct for himself).
I shall be recounting many on other pages, but what is important is to ask: why did he do it? Why did he construct — and largely succeed in constructing — a fictional version of himself? For undoubtedly in achieving his eventual global fame the work he produced — to be frank there was not an awful lot given the status he achieved in the literary world and compared to what his peers were producing — was secondary to the image he manufactured. In Hemingway: The Homecoming Michael Reynolds reminds us that
After The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, Hemingway published another collection of short stories, Men Without Women, the following year, and his second novel, A Farewell To Arms in 1929. By then he had divorced his first wife, Hadley Richardson and married his second, Pauline Pfeiffer. Both the stories and the novel sold well, and consolidated his fame, especially when A Farewell To Arms was filmed with Gary Cooper in the title role. Then, however, Hemingway’s career began to stutter.
To his editor Maxwell Perkins’s consternation, Hemingway insisted that his next book would be non-fiction, and he published Death In The Afternoon, his book on bullfighting and writing, in 1932. It was followed a year later by his third (and final collection) of original short stories, Winner Take Nothing, which did not find a great deal of favour. The New York Times review stated that Hemingway had
Hemingway was not only under pressure from Scribner’s to submit more fiction after publishing two duds, but the literary left were now castigating him for not addressing social issues in his work in the depth of the Great Depression. His response, in 1937, was To Have And Have Not, although it was not quite the original work Scribner’s were hoping for. Hemingway had cobbled it together from two previously published short stories and written a third which he tacked on. Yet again the critics were unimpressed. The New York Times chief book reviewer, J Donald Adams, remarked
By 1937 what would today be called ‘the Hemingway brand’ was sustained by his fame as a ‘well-known’ personality. It was certainly not sustained by a, by then increasingly threadbare, literary reputation — but then came For Whom The Bells Toll, and it all started looking up. The novel not only made him a great deal of money, not least because a year or two later it was filmed with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in main roles, but did win back some, though not all of the critics. Hemingway was riding high again.
By then, though ‘Hemingway the personality’ rather than ‘Hemingway the writer’ was the man in the public eye. He featured more and more in the photo-spreads of middle-market magazines, he was profiled extensively in pieces which were able to recycle all the old, usually fictional, anecdotes about him. Hemingway became famous as a war hero, a bon vivant, a superb fisherman, a champion hunter, a womaniser, a hard man not averse to using his fists.
Some in Paris thought that [Hemingway] earned side-money giving boxing lessons; others were sure he was buried four days at the front before being rescued. Several were certain he ran away from home early, spending his teen years on the road. Tough talk is only talk, a product of Hemingway’s imagined version of himself, the man he wanted to be. He went to many wars, but was never a soldier; saw so many bullfights, but never killed a single bull. If he ever fathered an illegitimate child, neither mother nor child has ever pressed claims.The point to remember is that most, if not all these claims, originated with Hemingway.
. . .
After The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, Hemingway published another collection of short stories, Men Without Women, the following year, and his second novel, A Farewell To Arms in 1929. By then he had divorced his first wife, Hadley Richardson and married his second, Pauline Pfeiffer. Both the stories and the novel sold well, and consolidated his fame, especially when A Farewell To Arms was filmed with Gary Cooper in the title role. Then, however, Hemingway’s career began to stutter.
To his editor Maxwell Perkins’s consternation, Hemingway insisted that his next book would be non-fiction, and he published Death In The Afternoon, his book on bullfighting and writing, in 1932. It was followed a year later by his third (and final collection) of original short stories, Winner Take Nothing, which did not find a great deal of favour. The New York Times review stated that Hemingway had
lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.Sales were disappointing. Then, in 1935, came a second book of non-fiction, Green Hills Of Africa, an account of going on safari in East Africa. Neither the bullfighting book nor the safari book sold well and the critics, who had expected so much from the bright new talent of the late 1920s, were at best bemused. Writing a few years after Green Hills Of Africa appeared, Edmund Wilson, a one-time Hemingway champion, was scathing. He wrote
[Hemingway] has produced what must be one of the only books ever written which make Africa and it’s animals seem dull. Almost the only thing we learned about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them. And as for the natives . . . The principal impression we get of them is that they were simple and inferior people who enormously admired Hemingway.’In a piece for the New York Times in July, 1999, biographer Michael Reynolds noted that
The American reading public, in the midst of the Depression, was unenthusiastic about Hemingway’s non-fiction — Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa did not sell well, barely making back the money Hemingway had received as an advance. Both books seemed a bit precious: who could afford to go to Spain for the bull fights or to Africa for a ‘spot’ of lion hunting?It did not get better.
Hemingway was not only under pressure from Scribner’s to submit more fiction after publishing two duds, but the literary left were now castigating him for not addressing social issues in his work in the depth of the Great Depression. His response, in 1937, was To Have And Have Not, although it was not quite the original work Scribner’s were hoping for. Hemingway had cobbled it together from two previously published short stories and written a third which he tacked on. Yet again the critics were unimpressed. The New York Times chief book reviewer, J Donald Adams, remarked
[Hemingway] has moved steadily toward mastery of his technique, though that is by no means the perfect instrument it has been praised for being. Technique, however, is not enough to make a great writer, and that is what we have been asked to believe Mr. Hemingway was in process of becoming. The indications of such a growth are absent from this book, as they have been absent from everything Mr. Hemingway has written since A Farewell to Arms. There is evidence of no mental growth whatever; there is no better understanding of life, no increase in his power to illuminate it or even to present it. Essentially, this new novel is an empty book.Ironically, when most people hear the title To Have And Have Not they will recall the film of that name, nominally ‘the film of the book’, although the film and the novel have very little in common. The film, released in 1944 starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, became a classic, the novel did not.
. . .
By then, though ‘Hemingway the personality’ rather than ‘Hemingway the writer’ was the man in the public eye. He featured more and more in the photo-spreads of middle-market magazines, he was profiled extensively in pieces which were able to recycle all the old, usually fictional, anecdotes about him. Hemingway became famous as a war hero, a bon vivant, a superb fisherman, a champion hunter, a womaniser, a hard man not averse to using his fists.
What was less celebrated and often not even mentioned was his writing. Yet for those who read about Hemingway in their magazine of choice — but had not read necessarily read any of his work — the simple equation became that if he was good at all these tough-guy manly things, he must also be a great writer.
Rather to prove the point that Hemingway’s literary reputation was now sustained by his celebrity status more than respect for his work was the reaction to his fourth novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which appeared in 1950. It was a barely fictionalised fantasy about an affair between a 51-year-0ld former soldier — who closely resembled the 51-year-old author — and a 19-year-old beautiful Venetian aristocrat — who closely resembled a 19-year-old Italian woman the author had fallen for. It sold exceptionally well and topped the New York Times bestsellers’ list for seven weeks. On the other hand the critics, upon whose judgment — for better or worse — Hemingway’s literary reputation depended — ridiculed the novel. His former confidant, the novelist John Dos Passos, even wondered in a letter to friend
For some critics, Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man And The Sea, the last piece of original fiction he published in his lifetime, went some way toward redeeming the literary reputation he seemed to have squandered, but not for all. Some critics, perhaps tactlessly, pronounced that he was parodying himself. Then came the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ironically, Hemingway was both pleased and a little upset by being awarded the prize. He was pleased because it underlined his fame as ‘one of the world’s greatest writers’. He was a little upset because he suspected the prize was only being awarded because the Nobel committee felt it had better do so before he died: two years earlier he had almost been killed when he was involved in two plane crashes while on his second East African safari. Yet for the magazine-reading public, if not for the critics, getting the Nobel Prize was further proof that ‘Hemingway was a great writer, if not the greatest living writer’.
If his celebrity status rose ever higher as his literary reputation declined, over the next seven years it rose still higher still as his physical and mental health declined. A lifetime of heavy drinking, a series of head injuries sustained over the years and what some think was a bi-polar condition saw him suffer deep bouts of the depressions he had suffered all his life took their toll. Early on Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, just three weeks before his 62nd birthday, he stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.
At first and for several years, his widow Mary — his fourth wife — insisted the death had not been suicide but a tragic accident sustained as Hemingway was cleaning the shotgun. Finally, she did admit that he had indeed killed himself, but by then the public had long known it was a suicide. Their reaction was one of the final ironies of Hemingway’s life: they were disappointed that their ‘celebrity’, the man who had so long portrayed himself as strong enough to take whatever life threw at him and who had advocated stoicism, nobility and ‘grace in pressure’ had taken what he himself had always regarded as ‘the coward’s way out’.
Whether you belong to those who insist Hemingway was ‘a great writer’, possibly ‘one of America’s greatest writers’, and ‘a leading modernist’ or whether like me you suspect he was a man of narrow talent who achieved prominence — at first literary, then general — through an unusual combination of his various other gifts, an often unscrupulous ambition, the era he lived in and the many changes it saw, is neither here nor there.
Rather to prove the point that Hemingway’s literary reputation was now sustained by his celebrity status more than respect for his work was the reaction to his fourth novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which appeared in 1950. It was a barely fictionalised fantasy about an affair between a 51-year-0ld former soldier — who closely resembled the 51-year-old author — and a 19-year-old beautiful Venetian aristocrat — who closely resembled a 19-year-old Italian woman the author had fallen for. It sold exceptionally well and topped the New York Times bestsellers’ list for seven weeks. On the other hand the critics, upon whose judgment — for better or worse — Hemingway’s literary reputation depended — ridiculed the novel. His former confidant, the novelist John Dos Passos, even wondered in a letter to friend
How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?He could and he had, and his literary standing slumped even further, but it did not in the slightest affect his public standing: Hemingway was still one of America’s favourite celebrities: his latest novel was first serialised by Cosmopolitan and spent seven weeks in the US best-sellers list when it was published. Hemingway stood out because unlike the nation’s other favourite celebrities, he was not a film star or a sportsman or a politician — he was ‘a writer’!
For some critics, Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man And The Sea, the last piece of original fiction he published in his lifetime, went some way toward redeeming the literary reputation he seemed to have squandered, but not for all. Some critics, perhaps tactlessly, pronounced that he was parodying himself. Then came the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ironically, Hemingway was both pleased and a little upset by being awarded the prize. He was pleased because it underlined his fame as ‘one of the world’s greatest writers’. He was a little upset because he suspected the prize was only being awarded because the Nobel committee felt it had better do so before he died: two years earlier he had almost been killed when he was involved in two plane crashes while on his second East African safari. Yet for the magazine-reading public, if not for the critics, getting the Nobel Prize was further proof that ‘Hemingway was a great writer, if not the greatest living writer’.
If his celebrity status rose ever higher as his literary reputation declined, over the next seven years it rose still higher still as his physical and mental health declined. A lifetime of heavy drinking, a series of head injuries sustained over the years and what some think was a bi-polar condition saw him suffer deep bouts of the depressions he had suffered all his life took their toll. Early on Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, just three weeks before his 62nd birthday, he stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.
At first and for several years, his widow Mary — his fourth wife — insisted the death had not been suicide but a tragic accident sustained as Hemingway was cleaning the shotgun. Finally, she did admit that he had indeed killed himself, but by then the public had long known it was a suicide. Their reaction was one of the final ironies of Hemingway’s life: they were disappointed that their ‘celebrity’, the man who had so long portrayed himself as strong enough to take whatever life threw at him and who had advocated stoicism, nobility and ‘grace in pressure’ had taken what he himself had always regarded as ‘the coward’s way out’.
. . .
At the end of the day such judgments are subjective, because they cannot be objective. You, for example, might believe that The Sun Also Rises is a ‘masterpiece’, though I suspect it is nothing of the kind. Irrespective of how ‘different’ it was when it was first published in 1926 and how ‘modern’ it then seemed, with rather clearer eyes it seems to me to be essentially just a sad, romantic potboiler with a great deal less significance and profound meaning than is still attributed to it as a matter of course.
There is also rather a lot of padding — why the descriptions of walking through Paris, meals taken and bus rides into the mountains, why the very detailed description of bullfights? Just how did they add to whatever theme Hemingway intended the work to have? Padding? a scholar might sniff, nonsense! At the end of the day, neither or us is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
True to form, however, academia will always have a plausible explanation. Hemingway’s eventual ‘official’ biographer, Carlos Baker, tries to persuade us in his book Hemingway: The Writer As Artist that ‘a sense of place’ (as well as ‘a sense of fact’ and a ‘sense of scene’) were important to him. That begs the question: for which writer, whether highbrow, lowbrow or somewhere in between, are they not important?
Baker does his best thereby to convince his reader that there is more to The Sun Also Rises than meets the eye and, for example, insists many of his short stories are ‘built with a different kind of precision — that of the poet-symbolist’; but for his view to be accepted, he must rely heavily on it being taken on trust by his readers (rather as we must take on trust that ‘God loves us’ as devout Christians insist when some misfortune or other inclines us more to believe that nothing or no one ‘loves us’ at all).
It is fair to ask: why, for example, did Hemingway, according to Baker, employ ‘poetic-symbolism’ in some of his short stories, but none at all in his verse? His verse is flat, obvious and almost adolescent in nature (and I have yet to come across any critic or academic who thought it amounted to more than a hill of beans). Surely, the verse he wrote — call it Hemingway’s poetry if you wish — would be just the form in which to apply the ‘precision’ of a ‘poet-symbolist’?
As for Hemingway’s much-quoted ‘theory of omission’, even a loyalist such as Philip Young admitted there was less to it than met the eye (and certainly less than Hemingway believed). Young concedes that it amounted to little more than allowing us to ‘read between the lines’ and was a literary technique well known to writers long before Hemingway ‘discovered’ it.
There might be more substance to Young’s claim that Hemingway’s short stories should be taken and read as ‘a whole’ in order to understand what he was trying to do with the character — pretty much his alter ego — Nick Adams; but it is hard to resist the response: ‘OK, but so what?’
We might also question exactly what might be going on when both Baker and, to a lesser extent, Young and many other scholars opt to find ‘significance’ or anything of much interest in such throwaway stories included in In Our Time as Mr And Mrs Elliot and A Very Short Story.
As for the various dicta on writing that Hemingway laid own in Death In The Afternoon and Green Hills Of Africa, they are simply too vague to stand tall in any self-respecting intellectual discussion — what might (to paraphrase) ‘truer than true’ mean outside a teenage sleepover party? What keen and budding young author has not boasted (or, more modestly, told himself) that he wanted to write to convey an experience in such a way that the reader felt it had happened to her or — more likely, given Hemingway’s studiedly masculine appeal — to him?
What assured Hemingway (and convinced his academic fans that he succeeded) that they also felt the emotion he had felt by how he had written his prose? When reading, say, his description of a bullfight or going trout-fishing, we might certainly — or not — ‘feel an emotion’; but it is beyond impossible either for Hemingway to know we had felt the emotion he intended us to feel or for us to know whether what we feel (or not) was what Hemingway intended.
Pertinently, these points are not in any way arcane or recherché, just simple observations (and might even have raised a cheer from Hemingway himself who was — publicly — remorselessly and proudly anti-intellectual). So, the question is: why does academia so wilfully mine for ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ merely because a story or a novel is ‘by Hemingway’?
. . .
I have not set out to ‘prove’ Hemingway was not a great but merely a middling writer. Such opinions, judgments, positions cannot be ‘proved’ one way or the other.
Those who will insist I am wrong, that I do not ‘understand’ the man and his work and so on might point to the huge body of academic work which has gone into analysing, interpreting and evaluating his work. These men and women are conventionally regarded as ‘the experts’ and, you might tell me, they wouldn’t waste their time on a merely middling writer.
Well, of course, they wouldn’t: they undertook and still undertake their work because they do believe Hemingway was ‘a great writer’, an outstanding ‘artist’, a leading ‘modernist’ and, no doubt that ‘he has something to tell us’.
Yet here the important point to remember — the essential point — is that such judgments, theirs as well as mine, are subjective. And, to be candid, it had occurred to me more than once when reading this and that academic account of Hemingway, his work and his ‘artistry’ that despite their reputed ‘expertise’ some academics were either talking through their hats, waffling or in grave danger of doing so.
They and their supporters might also care to reflect: why and how did one particular ‘great writer’ achieve such extraordinary public celebrity when other ‘great writers’ remained in comparative obscurity? Even for the academics that achievement must surely be something of an enigma. It is examining that ‘enigma’ which is the focus of these essays.
What we might agree on, however, is that a great deal about Hemingway — the bully loudmouth who got into fights but who was at heart said to be a generous and an essentially shy man; the reputed womaniser who quite likely didn’t sleep with more than six or seven women in his life; the hard man who made such a fetish of portraying full-blooded machismo but who identified with lesbians and enjoyed role-reversal sex games with his wives — was certainly something of an enigma.
What do we make of the man who preached stoical resilience in life but who finally — like his father, his brother and a sister — killed himself? As biographer Jeffery Meyers puts it in a piece he wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review in autumn 1984:
In the last decades of his life, the Papa legend undermined the literary reputation and exposed the underlying fissure between the two Hemingways: the private artist and the public spectacle. When his writing slacked off and he attempted to live up to and feed on the legend, his exploits seemed increasingly empty. His shotgun blast shattered the heroic myth — and led to a different persona.
More than any other writer Hemingway influenced what American writers were able to write about and the words they used.
That is undeniable and whether or not Hemingway was ‘a great writer’, his name does deserve to be recorded in the history books of literature.
There are thus three distinct elements to the ‘Hemingway enigma: was he ‘truly (his favourite word) a great writer? How did he achieve such global fame, whether or not he was a great or merely a middling writer? And what effect did he have on all those writing in English who came after him?
To a greater or lesser extent — my qualifications, literary, academic and personal are not as broad as they might be for such an undertaking — I shall attempt examine all three elements. Yet I must again stress, and shall be doing so throughout, that in these matters all judgments are subjective, including those of people who will profoundly disagree with my conclusions.
