20th Century Man
Posted: July 21, 2025 Filed under: Hemingway Leave a comment
from Archibald MacLeish’s tribute poem after he died:
Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:
Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master –
Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick
In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April city.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. Thus it’s easy to match his life against the century. Whatever year it is, he’s roughly that age.
At 17 he’s a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, covering police stuff, murders, the morgue:
The clichés in Hemingway’s news stories-under “the glare of the surgeon’s light, he dangles on a little thread of life, while the physicians struggle grimly”-were redeemed by a passage on the forms of violence in a big city: “It’s razor wounds in the African belt and slugging in the wet block. In Little Italy they prefer the sawed-off shotgun. We can almost tell what part of the city a man is from just by seeing how they did him up”
At 18 he’s close up to the Great War:
Hemingway’s experience at Fossalta led him to divide men into those who had been wounded and those who had not. … Though he was never a soldier (Proust spent more time in the army than Hemingway), he had the combatant’s hatred of the safe staff officer and believed you could not judge a man until you had seen him in action
(didn’t Proust spend infinitely more time in the army? Hemingway wasn’t in the army, he was a volunteer with the American Red Cross)
Giovanni Cecchin speculates that despite Gamble’s favorable report of 1918, Hemingway’s heroism was not mentioned in Charles Bakewell’s Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (1920) because the authorities felt he had unnecessarily exposed himself to danger.
He grew up fast:
As Charles Fenton has pointed out, Hemingway was exceptionally precocious in his personal and professional life. He was a reporter and a wounded war hero at nineteen; had an unhappy love affair at twenty; married at twenty-two; became a European correspondent at twentythree; was a father at twenty-four. His first, thin book, Three Stories and Ten Poems-which included the “unprintable” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man” and “Out of Season” (all of which had been sent out to editors when Hadley lost the manuscripts)-was dedicated to Hadley and published in August 1923, when he was twenty-four. When he left.Toronto his apprenticeship was over, and he was now a professional if not a widely recognized author.
At 25, a nightmare group trip:
But when Duff told Hemingway that his sexual magnetism tested her self-control, he could scarcely control himself in the wild atmosphere of Pamplona. Hadley stopped talking to Duff, and wept with jealousy and humiliation when Hemingway courted her rival. But Duff, despite her notorious promiscuity and her strong attraction to Hemingway, had her own standards of morality. “We can’t do it,” she told him. “You can’t hurt people.” She would not run off with him, even if she wanted to, because of Hadley and the baby
Here’s Edmund Wilson in The Wound and The Bow:
At 26-27 he set the style in New York and Paris. Around then he became a father and got a divorce.
Hemingway’s adult life was characterized by emotional turmoil, constant travel, frequent illness and accidents. The timid and nearsighted Dos Passos, who often accompanied Hemingway on skiing and fishing trips, observed: “I never knew an athletic vigorous man who spent so much time in bed as Ernest did.” There were both physical and psychological reasons for Hemingway’s numerous accidents. He was a huge, clumsy man with defective vision in one eye and very slow reflexes. He had a bad temper, behaved recklessly and irrationally, drank heavily and was frequently out of control. He deliberately placed himself in risky situations in driving, boxing, skiing, fishing, hunting and war.
By his early 30s he’s moving to Key West, where he could write half the day and fish and hang out the other half. The money from his first hit book went to his ex, but his new wife was very rich. The $8,000 house a wedding gift from her Uncle Gus:
His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humor that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them.
He felt he could write only about what he had actually experienced and his literary credo was to tell it as it was. But he combined scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life
At 34:
after Hemingway completed Winner Take Nothing he fulfilled his ambition, expressed in The Sun Also Rises, of “going to British East Africa to shoot.” In 1933 Uncle Gus gave him $25,000 to pay for the African safari, and Hemingway asked MacLeish and Strater to be his guests. Both refused the invitation, fearing that Hemingway’s fierce competitiveness would turn the holiday into a daily struggle for superiority. They agreed with Damon Runyon’s remark about Hemingway:
“Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.”
During the Depression, Jeffrey Meyers tells us, 80% of the people in Key West were on relief and the county itself went bankrupt.
At 35 Hemingway boated a bunch of supplies up to help after the Labor Day Hurricane, which killed maybe 400 plus people, many of them laborers. The dead bodies were a health hazard.
Late 30s, early 40s:
Leicester said that during the late 1930s in Key West, his brother was drinking about seventeen Scotch and sodas a day. Hemingway always made the adolescent association between heavy drinking and masculinity, and boasted in February 1940: “Started out on absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town before the pelota game and then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3 a.m.” While fishing in Cuba, he would take a bottle of champagne to bed and empty it by morning. During World War Two, according to Buck Lanham, he was a “massive drinker. Bottle at bedside, drank all day.
In his late 30s he’s a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, having an affair with the woman that would become wife #3. From his Spanish experience by age 40 he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, a book that sold like gangbusters. Before this time, I don’t think he could’ve afforded his lifestyle on his writing alone. Hadley (wife #1) had a trust fund and Pauline (wife #2) was very rich.
He seemed to mature in reverse. Early 40s:
Yet even Durán could not tolerate the boorish behavior that tested the limits of their friendship. … At Durán’s birthday party in Havana, he behaved as Fitzgerald had done at the Murphys’ party in 1926. He got drunk, pushed salad down the back of an embassy nonentity and threw steak across the table (which inspired friends to follow his example).
At 42 he’s avoiding going to the war in Europe, instead he has this plan for his fishing boat:
Hemingway’s idea was that the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed, but disguised as a fishing boat, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside (as they frequently did in 1942) in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a jai alai player threw a small bomb into the conning tower. The Marine colonel John Thomason, who had advised Hemingway on his Men at War anthology and was Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America, realistically objected: “‘Suppose he stands off and blows you and the Pilar out of the water?’
… ‘If he does that,’ replied Ernest, ‘then we’ve had it. But there’s a good chance he won’t shoot. Why should a submarine risk attracting attention when the skipper can send sailors aboard and scuttle us by opening the seacocks? He’ll be curious about fishermen in wartime. He’ll want to know what kind of profiteers are trying to tag a marlin in the Gulf Stream with a war on.”
Hemingway managed to convince Thomason and Braden that this was a serious project and they gave him what he wanted: a radio, a collapsible rubber boat, machine guns, grenades, bombs and Don Saxon, a volunteer Marine master sergeant
finally he did get over to Europe, possibly because wife #3 Martha Gellhorn was outshining him. There the war was like a frolic to him:
Hemingway claimed to have killed a great many Germans and certainly killed a few of them. On August 3, 1944, at Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, he threw grenades down a cellar where Nazi troops were supposed to be hiding, but did not check to see if they were actually there. He may have wanted to take credit for this doubtful enterprise without confronting the fragmented remains of his victims. On November 22, armed with a machine gun, he definitely killed some Germans who attacked Lanham’s headquarters in the Hürtgenwald.
In 1950 he’s bragging to Lillian Ross:
He mentioned a war writer who, he said, was apparently thinking of himself as Tolstoy, but who’d be able to play Tolstoy only on the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. “He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him—bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
Reviewers did not agree:
Across the River was condemned by all serious critics when it first appeared, in September 1950, and is still considered Hemingway’s worst novel. A few writers, like John O’Hara, praised the book out of loyalty to Hemingway or his past reputation; but Cyril Connolly, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Northrop Frye, Joseph Warren Beach, Alfred Kazin, Evelyn Waugh and Isaac Rosenfeld all agreed with Maxwell Geismar’s critique of Hemingway’s ideas and his negative evaluation in the Saturday Review of Literature:
This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future
At 52 he has another success, but is it even good?:
In the highly acclaimed Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art or expressed his contempt for Life, Scribner’s, the reading public, the critics and religion by writing an ironic and mock-serious fable that gave them exactly what they wanted and expected. The story offered moral uplift, provided a pretense of culture, was admired by everyone-and earned him a fortune. In May 1952
The last really good thing he wrote was a memoir of his youth in Paris that would only be published after his death. It’s full of lies, brags, and gossip about famous writers and artists of the time. This is where he claims Scott Fitzgerald had him check his penis for size. The best parts of it are so good.
He might’ve lived to 1968, seen the moon landing, hippies, LSD. He could’ve made further, into the 70s, even the 80s, he might’ve heard disco music. Seen Ronald Reagan get inaugurated. But that’s not what happened.
Meyers has an appendix that’s a list of Hemingway’s injuries that’s almost comic?
The most chilling part of the excellent Ken Burns documentary might be this clip of Hemingway giving an interview for NBC after he won the Nobel Prize. This is after he used his head to batter open the stuck door of a burning plane in Butiaba in 1954. The second of his two plane crashes that week.
What an artist. After Meyers I read Mary Dearborn’s which is also great.
Helytimes 