Mediated ideology persists to such an extent that the myth becomes absorbed as legend, and thus the realism behind the figures becomes distorted. This is particularly evident in the case of American author Ernest Hemingway, whose celebrity image eclipsed the man and thereby created a culturally fruitful myth.
Siobhan Lyons, Remembering Hemingway:
The Endurance of the Hemingway Myth.
. . . 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.
Leonard Leff, Hemingway and his Co-conspirators.
Far from being either the unwitting or unwilling recipient of this personal attention as he liked to intimate he was, Hemingway was the architect of his public reputation. Early in his career, he began to shape a public personality which quickly became one of his most famous creations, during his lifetime perhaps the most famous one.’
John Raeburn, Fame Became Him.
THE ‘Hemingway enigma’ is simple to define: he was neither ‘a genius’ and nor were his works ‘masterpieces’. Yet to this day that is the view of many around the world, and Hemingway is still routinely described as ‘America’s greatest writer’ and ‘a leading modernist’. So the question is: how were ‘the facts’ of his ‘genius’ and his ‘masterpieces’ so comprehensively established and why was it so widely accepted? How did he achieve a global literary and public prominence that was, especially for a writer, extraordinary?
I suggest it was essentially a concatenation of various disparate forces, of which not the least were Hemingway’s overweening, ruthless ambition, his bulldozing personality and his unstinting efforts to publicise himself
.
Hemingway worked hard to become famous, and eventually a great many identified — and still identify — his literary reputation with his status as a celebrity. His work was viewed through the prism of his global fame, and the equation is simplistically straightforward: ‘this work is by the world-famous Nobel Prize winner Hemingway, so it must be good’.
Those of his champions who will acknowledge that his talent and work did decline in the last 30 years of his life might insist that his status as ‘a great writer’ was based on the works with which he made his name — his first two novels and the first two volumes of short stories. These were completed, they will say, before he embarked on his campaign to ‘become famous’ and lost his way. Possibly.
But one might also argue those early works were notable because in style and subject matter they stood out from what else was being produced at the time, and that almost a century on only a few of the short stories and neither of the two novels have stood the test of time as ‘literature’.
. . .
There is no denying that Hemingway had a facility with words, but it was no greater or even as great as that of many other writers (and journalists) past and present; and after bursting onto the literary scene in 1925 with In Our Time, his first — commercially published — book of short stories, he did not develop in any significant way as a writer.
Because of its — for the age — ‘shocking’ content and distinctive style, In Our Time attracted considerable interest: Hemingway’s work was notably ‘different’, although he was not quite the original he thought he was and was irritated by suggestions that he owed a great deal to the style of his one-time mentor, Sherwood Anderson.
In Our Time received excellent reviews. The, then newly founded, Time magazine told its readers — thereby substantiating the persona Hemingway went on to adopt — that
[Hemingway] is that rare bird, an intelligent man who is not introspective on paper . . . Make no mistake, Ernest Hemingway is somebody; a new, honest, un-‘literary’ transcriber of life — a writer.
In New York’s The Sun, Herbert Seligman’s commented — and demonstrated just how distressingly airy and arcane many book reviews can be — that
The flat even banal declarations in the paragraphs alternating with Mr Hemingway’s longer sketches are a criticism of the conventional dishonesty of literature. Here is neither literary inflation nor elevation, but a passionately bare telling of what happened.
Mr Seligman’s contribution does rather beg the question as to why stouthearted book lovers such as he seem hitherto to have tolerated literature’s ‘conventional dishonesty’. It would also help if we knew just how that ‘conventional dishonesty’ had been expressing itself.
The New York Times enthused that Hemingway’s
language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean . . . his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.
Like Mr Seligman, the New York Herald Tribune reviewer was also not shy of indulging in hyperbole. He wrote
I know no American writer with a more startling ear for colloquial conversation, or a more poetic sensitiveness for the woods and hills. In Our Time has perhaps not enough energy to be a great book, but Ernest Hemingway has promises of genius.
After such glowing reviews, much was expected of Hemingway’s ‘breakthrough novel’, The Sun Also Rises, when it was published the following year, and indeed many of the critics were impressed. The New York Times extravagantly insisted that
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of the Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame . . . This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature
and New York’s The Sun informed its readers that
Every sentence that [Hemingway] writes is fresh and alive. There is no one writing whose prose has more of the force and vibrancy of good, direct, natural, colloquial speech. . . It seems to me that Hemingway is highly successful in presenting the effect that a sensual love for the same woman might have on the temperaments of three men who are utterly different in this position and training.
Yet in hindsight and from a different perspective, perhaps The Sun Also Rises seems to be more of a sad and sardonic romantic potboiler than the ground-breaking modernist work it was long said to be. Although the majority of the critics praised it, it did leave other critics less impressed than they had hoped to be after Hemingway’s startling debut. The Observer in London commented that
Mr Hemingway began brilliantly, with a set of short stories called In Our Times. But Fiesta [as The Sun Also Rises was entitled in Britain]
gives us neither people nor atmosphere; the maudlin, staccato conversations — evidently meant to be realistic in their brokenness and boringness — convey no impression of reality.
The Times Literary Supplement observed
Now comes Fiesta . . . more obviously an experiment in story-making [than In Our Time], and in which he abandons his vivid impressionism for something less interesting. There are moments of sudden illumination in the story, and throughout it displays a determined reticence; but it is frankly tedious after one has read the first hundred pages and ceased to hope for something different . . .
Even Dorothy Parker, who had been much taken with Hemingway when she first met him in New York in early 1925 and whose profile of him in the New Yorker two years later gushed about the writer unashamedly, had hoped for more. Reviewing the novel in the New Yorker she wrote
Why [The Sun Also Rises] should have been taken to the slightly damp bosom of the public while the (as it seems to me) superb In Our Time should have been disregarded will always be a puzzle to me. As I see it . . . Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.
. . .
Like In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises also ‘shocked’ a great many in America, and in Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds reminds us of why:
Those were the days when Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple MacPherson led Bible thumpers down the fundamentalist trail that Americans periodically seemed compelled to travel. We remember the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee, but forget that the school teacher lost, that the law forbidding Darwin’s presence in the classroom was upheld. We forget . . . that the meanest sort of reactionary spirit resulted in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan . . . We all remember Lindbergh's daring 1927 flight across the Atlantic, but forget that he later admired Hitler’s well-oiled military machine.
Equally as ‘different’, according to the publicity material disseminated by his publisher Scribner’s in the run-up to the publication in 1926 of The Sun Also Rises, was the writer himself. Hemingway was, Scribner’s marketing department informed would-be readers, as much an ‘action man’ as ‘a writer’ and was as unlike the stereotype of the sensitive artist beavering away alone in his garret as it was possible to be. In Everybody Behaved Badly, Lesley M M Blume’s account of the genesis of The Sun Also Rises, she writes that Scribner’s managed to convey that Hemingway was
a new breed of writer — brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald
and, crucially, the line the marketing department took in its strategy to build up and distinguish Hemingway from contemporary authors set the tone of what was to come over the next 35 years.
Hemingway’s first novel (which, confusingly, was actually his second) was well-received, the younger reading public loved it and it sold well, as did his second volume of short stories, Men Without Women, when it was published a year later. But it was A Farewell To Arms, published in 1929, which cemented his position as a leading young American writer and placed him firmly in the public eye.
Readers were primed on what to expect from the work in a publicity piece the novelist Owen Wister offered to write for Scribner’s after reading the manuscript. Wister, who had made his name with his novel The Virginian and had been sought out by Hemingway at his home in Shell, Wyoming, on the younger man’s hunting trip in 1928, wrote that in Hemingway’s ‘astonishing’ new novel
landscapes, persons and events are brought to such vividness as to make the reader become a participating witness. This astonishing book is in places so poignant and moving as to touch the limit that human nature can stand when love and parting are the point . . . [Hemingway] like Defoe, is lucky to be writing in an age that will not stop its ears at the unmuted resonance of a masculine voice.
Privately, however (according to Michael Reynolds), Wister told Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, that the novel’s two themes — the war and the love affair the story portrays — never came together. Perkins, says Reynolds, agreed that was the novel’s flaw. These were, though, aesthetic and technical concerns by two professionals and had no bearing on how A Farewell To Arms was received: it was a huge success.
The first print run of 30,000 copies sold out within three weeks and within three months another 50,000 copies had been sold. No writer might hope for a better start to his career — two best-selling novels and two well-received collections of short stories: Hemingway had arrived and became a household name. Yet ironically even as his prominence took off, his writing career was peaking.
. . .
The critics increasingly began to have their doubts that Hemingway was not quite the writer they once thought he was with the publication of Death In The Afternoon in 1932. Winner Take Nothing, his third — and last — collection of original short stories, which appeared in 1933 didn’t win them over, either. In the New York Times, John Chamberlain noted that
[Hemingway] has evidently reached a point in writing where the sterile, the hollow, the desiccated emotions of the post-war generation cannot make him feel disgusted; he is simply weary of contemplation . . . . he has lost something of the old urgency which impelled him to tell the world about it in good prose.
In 1935, Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway’s account of going on safari in East Africa made many critics wonder out aloud what made Hemingway think that a country in the depths of the Great Depression in which one in five of the potential labour force was out of work would be interested in hearing about the exploits of a rich man out hunting big game. A few years later (in 1939) an inimpressed Edmund Wilson, one of Hemingway’s high-profile champions not many years earlier, commented that in Green Hills Of Africa Hemingway had
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 Scott And Ernest: The Authority of Failure And The Authority Of Success, Matthew J. Brucolli brutally and succinctly describes that
Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty [in 1929] and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success.
Crucially, Brucolli adds (and neatly highlights the central irony of the enigma of Hemingway’s fame)
everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.
The critics — Hemingway always hated the critics — didn’t much like To Have And Have Not, which he published in 1937, either. But the public did, and it sold well, although when today we hear the title To Have And Have Not, we are more likely to be recalling the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film of that name, which was ‘based’ on the novel but had very little in common with Hemingway’s work.
His only play, The Fifth Column, written while he was in Spain covering the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, was directed by the celebrated Lee Strassberg (although the script had first to be rewritten by a screenwriter). It’s Broadway run lasted for only 87 performances and a planned national tour was cancelled.
The publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 undoubtedly saved Hemingway’s literary career, and it did so spectacularly. Broadly, the critics liked and praised it — the New York Times called it ‘a tremendous piece of work’ in which the ‘superb’ story
was packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy.
Yet the praise was not universal, and even the gushing New York Times review, which stated that
Mr. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The dialogue, handled as though in translation from the Spanish, is incomparable
also observed that although
A few of the scenes are perfect . . . others [are] gentle and almost pastoral, if here and there a trifle sweet-noted.
The attitude of those critics who were not entirely bowled over by Hemingway’s new novel was summed up by Maxwell Geismar when he re-evaluated it for the New York Times in 1962. He described For Whom The Bell Tolls as
a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbable or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development.
Yet where it counted for Scribner’s — with the readers — For Whom The Bell Tolls was a runaway success. Being chosen as a Book of the Month substantially boosted sales and helped make Hemingway a very wealthy man, although, ironically, as a younger man Hemingway had mocked the institution and despised — or claimed to despise — writers who chose to allow their work to be thus promoted.
. . .
Although Hemingway says he was writing regularly after he returned from Europe to Cuba in 1945 — throughout his life he liked to purvey an image of the consummate professional writer by stressing how ‘hard’ he was always toiling on ‘difficult’ work — he did not publish any original fiction until Across The River And Into The Trees appeared in 1950. That novel’s reception by the critics on the one hand and the coverage its publication was given in the media on the other confirmed how much his literary reputation and his public prominence had markedly diverged. It spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list, but the critics loathed it. Apart from the odd claim by writer and journalist John O’Hara in his New York Times review in September 1950 that Hemingway was
the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare
almost every other critic thought the book was awful. Their attitude is best summed up by John Dos Passos in a letter to a friend. Dos Passos, Hemingway’s one-time close confidant, wondered
how can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?
In his regular New York Times column, Speaking of Books, J Donald Adams declared that Across The River And Into The Trees was
one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end.
The public disagreed and the novel sold well, again underling the widening discrepancy between Hemingway’s literary standing and his status as what by then could only be described as ‘a celebrity’.
The critics, though not the public, were also divided on the worth of final piece of original work published by Hemingway during his lifetime. The Old Man And The Sea, more a novella or a long short story than a full-length novel, had an initial print run of 50,000 and sold well. Its sales were substantially boosted after it was chosen as a Book Of The Month and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But crucially the complete story was published in the September 1, 1952, edition of Life Magazine, and all five million copies sold out in just two days.
Some critics praised The Old Man And The Sea as a return to form for Hemingway. In the New York Times Robert Gorham Davie described it as
a tale superbly told and in the telling Ernest Hemingway uses all the craft his hard, disciplined trying over so many years has given him
and he declared that Hemingway had
got back to something good and true in himself, that has always been there.
He detected
new indications of humility and maturity and a deeper sense of being at home in life which promise well for the novel in the making.
and added that Hemingway was
still a great writer, with the strength and craft and courage to go far out, and perhaps even far down, for the truly big ones.
Other critics, though, were not entirely convinced by the work. In the New York Times Orville Prescott confirmed that
The Old Man and the Sea . . . is much simpler and enormously better than Mr. Hemingway’s last book, Across the River And Into the Trees
and that
within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.
But he added that as
good as The Old Man and the Sea is, it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially.
Some critics were harsher and felt there was something artificial in the prose Hemingway was now producing. In the Spring 1953 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review John Aldridge wrote that
In the best of the early Hemingway, one always felt that the prose had been forced out under great pressure through a tight screen of opposing psychic tensions; and one read it with the same taut apprehensiveness, the same premonition of hugely impending catastrophe, as that with which it was written . . . But now the prose [in The Old Man And The Sea] — to change the figure once again — has a fabricated quality, as if it had been shipped into the book by some manufacturer of standardized Hemingway parts.
Thirty years later in an Atlantic Monthly retrospective of Hemingway’s work James Atlas was equally unimpressed by that final work. He declared that
The end of Hemingway’s career was a sad business. The last novels were self-parodies, none more so than The Old Man And The Sea. The internal monologues of Hemingway’s crusty fisherman are unwittingly comical (‘My head is not that clear. But I think the great Dimaggio would be proud of me today’); and the message, that fish are ‘more noble and more able‘ than men, is fine if you’re a seventh grader.
. . .
When Hemingway was an unknown trying to make his mark, his gradual advance in the world of literature proceeded essentially because of his fierce ambition, his talent for what we would now call ‘networking’ and his bulldozing personality. He certainly impressed many, could be very charming, talked a good game and, crucially, his work was new and different. But as Michael Reynolds comments in Hemingway: The Paris Years
As Hemingway was obviously learning, writing well was only half the game; making sure that influential people knew you were writing well was the other half. Before another year was out his game would be impeccable, the two complementing each other perfectly.
As for his ‘networking’, F Scott Fitzgerald, who was close to Hemingway in the mid-1920s and had actively promoted his new friend before he found success, later remarked that
Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.
That Hemingway’s career took off was also partly because he was the right man in right place. World War I (or the Great War as it was then known) had been a watershed in many ways, not least culturally and technologically. In the 1920s silent films evolved into ‘talkies’; jazz was evolving and gaining an audience, and the sales of records were soaring; radio stations were being established throughout the United States; Prohibition and illegal drinking in speakeasies made life exciting for the young and, growing in self-consciousness, they were demanding a new kind of celebrity.
According to Leonard J. Leff in Hemingway And His Conspirators, the young writer benefited from the demands of an age that was ripe for novelty, novelty of all and every kind:
The 1920s, the decade of the ascent of Ernest Hemingway, the decade of In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, was also the era of modern advertising — bold and noisy and professionalised. Anything could be sold, even books, if only they were marketed well.
Hemingway was lucky to have Scribner’s as his publisher — with Fitzgerald’s connivance, he had jumped ship from Boni & Liveright, a livelier, more avant-garde, but less respected house. Scribner’s was well-established and eminently respectable, which as biographers point out, will have been an attraction for the young writer from middle-class Oak Park, who despite his avant garde ‘modernist’ style and shocking content was essentially quite conservative (he kept a strict and detailed account of his income and expenditure all his life).
But the house was under increasing pressure from its younger staff, notably Maxwell Perkins, who became Hemingway’s editor, to attract a younger readers by shaking off its fusty and old-fashioned image. Hemingway, with his unusual style and subject matter, fitted the bill and was their man, and its marketing campaign for The Sun Also Rises, emphasising Hemingway the hard-boiled ‘action man’ who boxed, fought bulls and was a sportsman worked well. As Carlos Baker observed in the first full-length biography of Hemingway of the impact The Sun Also Rises had
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 on the side of their mouths.
That Hemingway’s fame carried on growing in the 1930s, despite his disappointing literary output and the public’s reaction to it, was down to that fierce ambition and bulldozing personality: he worked hard at becoming well-known. In the introduction to his book Conversations With Ernest Hemingway, Matthew J. Bruccoli gives us a good insight into what went on:
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 skilfully nurtured an heroic public image until the vainglorious role took over the man and it became necessary for him to live up to it.
It wasn’t even that simple: Hemingway, in fact, adopted two, distinct roles. The first was that of the dedicated writer as artist who cared nothing for fame and was purely interested in his art, the pure artist who scorned publicity and would as soon write for nothing as long as he was able to carry on writing. And although he carried on playing the role of the ‘pure artist’ until he died, it became ever more ludicrous and dishonest.
But he also revelled in ‘being Ernest Hemingway’: even as he was peddling the notion of ‘the pure artist’ at the beginning of his career, he subscribed to press cuttings services to be kept informed of what the newspapers and magazines were saying about him; he asked for regular updates from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, on sales figures and how much money he was making; he enjoyed hobnobbing with the rich (though he still liked to be seen as ‘a man of the people’). None of this is in itself at all reprehensible, but it is wholly at odds with the role of ‘pure artist’ Hemingway also chose. Leonard Leff sums it up well:
Again and again Hemingway professed that he hated the traffic in [publicity] 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. Certainly he needed money to sustain the grand life he lad 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.
It would be wrong to accuse Hemingway of simple hypocrisy. Both roles — the private artist who just wanted to be left alone to get on with his writing, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway, the roistering, hard-drinking, all-action man who would fight anyone and would gladly have a drink with you — were certainly mutually exclusive, but such was the complexity of his personality he sincerely believed he was both.
. . .
The accepted view is that the prominence Ernest Hemingway acquired as ‘a great writer’ did not just endure but had grew during his lifetime. But as John Raeburn makes clear in his book Fame Became Him, that was simply not the case.
Raeburn distinguishes between Hemingway’s literary reputation and his status as what can only be described as ‘a celebrity’. His literary reputation, as gauged — possibly contentiously — by his standing with the critics, began a slow decline at the beginning of the 1930s and did not rally before his suicide in Ketchum, Wyoming, in July 1961, three weeks short of his 62nd birthday. Even the commercial success of For Whom The Bells Toll in 1940 and The Old Man And The Sea in 1952 and being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1954 did little to boost Hemingway’s literary reputation, however much they raised his public profile.
Furthermore, Raeburn points out that increasingly many of those who lapped up the latest gossip about Hemingway — and ‘gossip’ is the only possible word — had quite possibly not read a word of his fiction. And increasingly, as Hemingway featured in mid-market magazines of all kinds, quite often in photospreads in which pictures far outnumbered text, there was little if any mention of his literary work: by the last two decades of his life Hemingway became famous for being famous.
Raeburn writes that America had a long tradition of honouring ‘public writers’, men and women such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Beecher Stowe, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Wendell Holmes, Whitman, Dickinson and Mark Twain. These poets and writers were known for their work, not for their private lives. Even among Hemingway’s contemporaries and — as he saw them — ‘rivals’, there were ‘public writers’: Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser and Hemingway’s erstwhile friend John Dos Passos. But there was one important distinction between them and Hemingway: their lives were private. Hemingway’s was not.
After A Farewell To Arms appeared in 1929 and sold magnificently, Scribner’s and Maxwell Perkins were expecting more fiction from the man who was becoming one of their star writers. They did not expect Death In The Afternoon and cannot have been much surprised that it did not sell well. The public were simply not interested in learning all about bullfighting, and the critics were also unenthusiastic.
Some of them were particularly baffled that in the book Hemingway, who had hitherto been celebrated for his terse, punchy, hard style and who by now was convinced he was a master of writing prose, could write such woolly English. In its review the New York Times noted that
It may be said flatly that the famous Hemingway style is neither so clear nor so forceful in most passages of ‘Death in the Afternoon’ as it is in his novels and short stories. In this book Mr Hemingway is guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear
and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote
In his enthusiasm for the art of tauromachy, Mr Hemingway has departed, sadly, in places from his usually clear and forceful style. His earnestness in trying to put over his idea apparently has caused him to neglect pruning. The result is a surprising loss of conciseness, and occasionally a deplorably cluttered syntax.
What happened? Well, as both Raeburn and biographer Kenneth S Lynn note, Hemingway happened. Lynn says the Death In The Afternoon testified
. . . to the invasion of Hemingway’s serious writing by his myth. The hero of the book is not a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway.
It is Raeburn’s contention that putting himself centre-stage in Death In The Afternoon (and a few years later in Green Hills Of Africa) was a deliberate. Hemingway was consciously building up his public image, and Raeburn suggests this had been going on even before Hemingway was first published. Many of the pieces he filed when he was freelancing for the Toronto Star were about how he, Hemingway, saw the world and he was not shy of passing judgment (on, for examples, the ex-patriate ‘phonies’ who, unlike him, had moved to Montparnasse merely to pose as artists rather than engage in real artistic work). Raeburn also notes that the few editorial pieces he wrote for Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review [sic] are also a case in point
The transatlantic review articles are trivial in terms of Hemingway‘s literary career, but they are significant in terms of his career as public writer. They revealed that his public personality was incipient at the outset of his professional life, and that he was willing to use it for self-aggrandisement. They were a preview of the self-advertisements that would spread his fame in the next decade beyond the limited audience provided by an intellectual elite; and they foreshadowed that in his non-fiction his great subject was to be himself.
Raeburn identifies in Death In The Afternoon nine different aspects to the persona Hemingway offered for public consumption. There were ‘the sportsman, the manly man, the exposer of sham, the arbiter of taste, the world traveler, the bon vivant, the insider, the stoic and battle-scarred veteran and the heroic artist’. And to this day, even 60 years Hemingway’s death, it is accepted that he was all of these things. The irony is that we have only his word for it.
Hemingway’s campaign of ‘self-advertisement’ took off in earnest when he was hired by Arnold Gingrich to write for Gingrich’s newly founded men’s magazine Esquire. Hemingway had an open brief to write ‘Letters’ about anything he liked.
So in the more than two dozen, often monthly, ‘Letters’ he submitted, he wrote about hunting, fishing, fine dining, good wine, travelling and whatever took his fancy, and on each subject he presented himself as an expert, passing on his knowledge of the subject. Hemingway also wrote for other magazines along the same lines and, says Raeburn, was always centre-stage.
Even the pieces he filed for Colliers magazine from Europe in 1944 about the fighting described ‘Hemingway’s experiences’ and ‘Hemingway’s activities’ rather than what was actually going on. And some of what he wrote was pure fiction: he did not take part in the Normandy landings as he intimated, and he did not take charge of a situation during the landings which had grown chaotic — he and other journalists never left the landing craft they were in.
. . .
Raeburn’s suggests there were many reasons why Hemingway chose to construct a public persona. For one thing, a high profile boosted the sales of his work: even To Have And Have Not which was not well-received by the critics, found favour with the book-buying public. And while most of America languished in the Great Depression, the lifestyle he lived was not cheap. But facilitating making more money was just one of many reasons. Raeburn also notes that
‘[Hemingway’s] distrust of critics, his long-standing suspicion – to become a conviction – that they were out to get him, is consistent with his seeking a public esteem independent of the literary establishment. This general audience would not be so susceptible as the intellectuals to critical opinion, and thus it could insulate the writer’s reputation from critical disfavour. His stature as a champion would be confirmed not by a few critics by a large heterogeneous audience which felt a personal loyalty to him.
Then there’s Hemingway’s lifelong competitive streak: he had to win, he had to be best, so it would seem obvious that of all the professional writers he had to be the most famous. But at the end of the day all this is just supposition, and it is perhaps not possible to establish quite why Hemingway put a lot of effort into building himself up in the eyes of the public. But the fact is that he did.
In the last two decades of Hemingway’s life, but especially in his last ten years, his celebrity fame as opposed to his literary reputation continued to grow and grow. He became a perennial favourite not only of Life and Time magazines, but all the other middle-market, supermarket checkout publications took to featuring him: Hemingway was great copy and he sold.
The point must be repeated: he was of interest to the readers of True (which ironically had carried his earlier quite fictional account of taking part in the D Day landings) of Look, of Fisherman, of Parade, of This Week, of Picture Week, of Focus, of See and all the other magazines not because of the quality of his writing or his take on life or the advice he could dispense — it was merely because he was Ernest Hemingway.
In each piece all the usual anecdotes, most of them fictional and originated by Hemingway himself, were trotted out — that he was war hero and a veteran of the Italian army’s prestigious Arditi regiment (and its youngest commissioned officer no less), that he had bedded Mata Hari and the girlfriend of the notorious gangster Legs Diamond, that he had led US troops ashore on D Day — so that continual repetition promoted them to the status of ‘fact’.
In 1933, the Key West Citizen wrote this about the man who was by then the town’s best-known inhabitant
Most modest of all American writers is Ernest Hemingway whose half-dozen published books have set a new style in contemporary literature, but who, nevertheless, shuns personal publicity as an owl shuns daylight. Hemingway does not even care to have any biographical material about himself made public . . . Though hundreds of thousands of persons know his works, however, very few know anything about the man himself. With what amounts almost to a mania, he avoids personal publicity of every kind.
Many years later, Mario Menocal Jr, the son of one of Hemingway’s Cuban friends who also knew the writer well, told one of his biographers
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.
As several biographers have noted, ‘Ernest Hemingway’ was most certainly Hemingway’s most famous and best creation. Even though old friends insisted that the private Hemingway they knew was nothing like that public Hemingway, it’s the public Hemingway who today is still revered as ‘one of America’s greatest writers’.
