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.