Ernest Hemingway

Man is What He Hides

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In “We Are What We Hide,” a piece about the (seemingly) double lives of Norman Rockwell, Ernest Hemingway, and J.D. Salinger, Lee Siegel concludes with, what I think, one of the best paragraphs I’ve read this week:

The miserable, repressed, cheerily idealizing Norman Rockwell is not so strange, after all. Rather, the law of opposites is a universal condition. The psyche is a clock with at least four hands that move in different directions simultaneously. We live amid the riot of our own secret counterpoints, some of which complete and fulfill our human promise, some of which betray it. As Malraux, the Resistance hero, adventurer, diplomat, and novelist, who is said to have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, once wrote: “Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.”

I agree with this:

But the law of opposites is too rich, too weird, too universal to be classified and dismissed as a character defect.

Worth reading.

Ernest Hemingway: The Finest Life

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Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite novelists. I’ve read all his major works, though I have yet to read Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon. And so it was with great pleasure that I’ve read this James Salter review of Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.

A brief glimpse into Hemingway’s personality. If you got along with him, great. But if you didn’t, he said some mean things (that bit about F. Scott Fitzgerald is especially caustic):

Hemingway was generous with affection and money, but he had a mean streak. “I’m tearing those bastards apart,” he told Kitty Cannell. He was fine if he liked you but murder if he didn’t. Michael Arlen was “some little Armenian sucker after London names”; Archibald MacLeish, once his close friend and champion, was a nose-picking poet and a coward. As for Scott Fitzgerald, who was a couple of years older, successful before Hemingway, and had recommended him to Scribner’s, Hemingway said he wrote “Christmas tree novels,” was “a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.”

I’ve never encountered this criticism of Hemingway, provided in the column by the critic Edmund Wilson:

For reasons which I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.

Ernest Hemingway loved fishing and his boat. A great description of him going after the marlin:

The deep, primal fears, the great fish fighting ferociously against the steel hook in its mouth, hour after hour, sounding, bursting from the water, struggling to be free and being slowly exhausted, the fisherman pumping and reeling in until the fish is gaffed alongside or even in the boat. In his first two years Hemingway caught ninety-one of them. One had jumped three times toward the boat and then thirty-three times against the current. That fish or another, gotten on board alive, had jumped twenty times or more in the cockpit.

On Hemingway’s diligence:

He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” 

If you remember my earlier post this year, Hemingway thought he was being followed by the FBI. There is a mention of that in this profile as well.

But what of this conclusion? I guess I need to read Hendrickson’s book to have a stronger opinion about Hemingway’s suicide:

The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.

Ernest Hemingway and the Feds

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Today is the fiftieth anniversary since Ernest Hemingway’s death. Hemingway is one of my favourite authors, having read The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and A Moveable Feast.

There is a really great op-ed piece in The New York Times, written by A.E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway’s friend for many years. In the piece, he recounts the last years of Hemingway’s life, during which he suffered from depression and paranoia. It is a quite sad read, but a necessary one.

What was the cause of Ernest Hemingway’s death (suicide)?

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

A.E. Hotchman, the author of the op-ed, reveals his relationship with Hemingway:

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

After their annual pheasant shoot, Ernest Hemingway did not stop at a bar opposite the station, as he usually did. The exchange follows, revealing his paranoia:

Ernest was anxious to get on the road. I asked why the hurry.

“The feds.”

“What?”

“They tailed us all the way. Ask Duke.”

“Well … there was a car back of us out of Hailey.”

“Why are F.B.I. agents pursuing you?” I asked.

“It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell. They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

This was a disturbing revelation, given by Hemingway’s wife Mary to the author of the op-ed:

He often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window.

The following exchange is revealing:

I visited him in June. He had been given a new series of shock treatments, but it was as before: the car bugged, his room bugged. I said it very gently: “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?”

“What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?”

“But how can you say that? You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write.”

“The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.”

But the best paragraph from the op-ed is this response from Ernest Hemingway, after A.E. Hotchner suggested Ernest Hemingway retire:

“Retire?” he [Hemingway] said. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?”

A conclusive stance by the author:

This man, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the F.B.I. was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.

But as it turns out, Ernest Hemingway’s fears weren’t for naught. His suspicions were spot-on. It is regrettable that he chose to end his life the way he did.

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

If you’re a fan of Hemingway and his writing, this piece is a must-read.