Hemingway’s Man: A Reconsideration

Author’s note… I still remember what the book smelled like. If ‘tattered’ and ‘worn’ had a smell, my copy of The Old Man and the Sea was it. It smelled of trunks and attics and long journeys, all of which it had survived, to be passed down and read by an eleven-year-old, somewhere between summer ball and lawn cuttings. I was mesmerized by the prose and by something else, something I gleaned between the lines, something which stung me. I would remain stung by the man who wrote that novella for the rest of my life. This essay is an ode to tattered books everywhere, and to the pangs which echo long after those books are read….  

__________

At this point, it’s more than trite to point out that Ernest Hemingway is complicated. Of course, he is complicated. Complicated seems rather the point. But in fairness to Papa, if not also to tropes, clichés, and archetypes everywhere, there are two very good reasons why Hemingway’s complexities remain worth our time and attention:  

First, we’ve just surpassed the centennial of his expatriating to Paris. And in a culture obsessed with empty anniversaries (i.e., we seem to publish think pieces at the five, fifteen, and twenty-year mark for every middling movie or T.V. program), this seems a genuine moment for worthwhile reflection, one which begs us to ask: what is American literature today and how did we get here?

Second, those who are, either naturally or by circumstance, conditioned to conserve, are all too often too quick to celebrate the man who has been framed, sometimes by his own tongue, as an impelling figure of the American Century despite epitomizing everything that went wrong during its tenure. 

Our focus, infra, is with the latter question, which is treacherous ground in an age of cancelation and critical theory and revisionist history and whatever else the snowflakes and the levelers have cooked up. Rest assured, cancellation is not herein the goal, not that this essay could accomplish such a feat. Quite the opposite is in play here. One must confront the devil to dispense with him. And it’s high time that conservatives did so with Hemingway vis-à-vis whatever Pazuzu spun his head.

Not so easy a feat this – for, the conservative mind is malleable on Papa, susceptible to a love-hate relationship in which the hate takes cultivation and thought while the love comes a little too easily. This is because the pugilistic, bullfight-loving, hard-drinking, hard-romancing, deep-sea fishing troubadour is every bit the man’s man many conservatives – prone as we are to patriotism and tradition, and loath as we are to patricide – wish we could be.   Even the writing itself is at times comfort food for traditionalists. There is still some Oak Park guilt in The Sun Also Rises. And it does not take much squinting to see the inherent conservatism in The Old Man and the Sea, where the eponymous fisherman simply goes out too far; he takes too much risk; he loses sight of his moorings; and the sharks take his prize.

Yes, Hemingway acclaim is easy. Meanwhile, the hate takes work. But come by it we must. It is not enough to simply say that Hemingway’s writing is imbued with the self-loathing of the decadent, as if that somehow excuses everything. And it is not enough to point out the many instances in which Hemingway’s myth is but façade, nor is it enough to declare his masculinity a faux masculinity or observe that his virility is a thin veneer for crippling insecurities. As conservatives, we must be more brutal. We must be more honest. Otherwise, the seduction wins out. And, my, what seductive powers Papa still commands…

At this juncture, it is worth noting, despite the risk of tangents, that if the conservative has a rough intellectual go of it with Hemingway, liberals do not. They love to deconstruct Hemingway, his myth, his legacy, his influence. Deconstruction, we must remember, is inherently a progressive practice. In some cases, it is used to tear down and raze; in others, as with Hemingway, it is a means for reclamation. This is why liberals – and others, too; scholars in general – never really seem to consider whether to “cancel” Papa even though other artists have been canceled for lesser sins than his.  Hemingway the libertine was, of course, the very man who wrote “Hills Like White Elephants.” For that alone he will be given an eternal resting place in the mausoleum of the modern experiment. But there are other notches:

Papa supported progressive policies his entire life. His life-long lone vote for President was cast for Eugene V. Debs in 1920. As anecdotal and insignificant as that may seem, it at least foreshadows a life of progressive misguidance. His approach to marriage (and sex) wasn’t anything save cavalier and sad. His friendship with Gertrude Stein – or, more fairly, the extent of his friendship with Stein, before their falling out – reflects a willingness to embrace a far too-tolerant stance on sexual openness. His support of communism is infamous, even if quickly discarded by critics as insignificant (his daughter-in-law, Valerie, wrote that communism, and political ideology generally, didn’t really interest him, only struggle did). But his support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War was, and is, hard to ignore. The Soviets certainly didn’t ignore it; the KGB for years considered recruiting him “on ideological grounds.” And even if we accept the excuse that, despite his initial romanticizing, Hemingway grew indifferent and then wary about the distinctions between fascism and communism, his leveling roots are still there to be seen by all. And, despite his own, life-ruining vices, he thought the world was perfectible – “a fine place and worth fighting for.”  This is the prose of a misguided political mind.

Yet, it is the sex and virility, not the politics, if politics he had, which have most often obsessed me. This seems to be the case for other writers as well. A non-exhaustive list of such obsessives include: those who draw connecting dots between the bevvy of his female entanglements and his mother; those who wish to write laboriously about his fetishes, the impotence of Jake Barnes, the pegging, and “Up in Michigan”; and those who either wish to show the hollowness of toxic masculinity or defend the ethos of the Great White Hunter. To be fair, these obsessions are all there on the page. Hence, though we may have missed the crux of the matter, we should be forgiven our myopia because the sex and the virility are so prevalent in the writing itself. One mustn’t pretend that the observations of Mary Dearborn aren’t supported by the literature simply because one disagrees with her. It’s all there, for all to read.

This prevalence of sex and sexuality (i.e., virility) on the page has allowed the contemporary progressive, in light of his attempts to sunder traditional sexual roles, to easily deconstruct the Hemingway myth in an effort to rebuild him in their own mold. Liberals, in other words, are able to essentially say, He was really one of us, you know. Thus, the Hemingway they hate is easily remolded into the Hemingway they love.

For traditionalists, it is different. We owe it to the wisdom of the ages to be honest with our art, not to retcon it and certainly not to capitulate to it, which in the long run erodes our traditions. The art may survive, but it does not have to survive without objection. We owe it to our forbearers to take our great artists and tear away at the margins until we see the devil inside. In Hemingway’s case, it is tempting, while seeking this devil, to ask where Hemingway’s devil originated and perhaps finding myriad theories.

Oak Park is just such a germ. His mother was, doubtlessly, overbearing and the spring for many of Papa’s fetishistic flourishes. Momma Hemingway liked to dress Ernest and his sister Marlowe identically, pretending they were twins, which is the sort of tidbit that arrests those who think like Dearborn. Ken Burns’s recent documentary, in fact, comments thusly: “The world saw [Hemingway] as a man’s man, but all his life, he would privately be intrigued by blurred lines between male and female, man and woman…” This is perhaps so. More fascinating is the idea that it was momma who Hemingway always blamed, at least in part, for his father’s suicide. “He saw his father,” Burns tells us, “as weak and submissive; and he hated himself and was drawn to this submissiveness and hated himself for it.” It was also his momma who wrote him saying, “Unless… you come into your manhood, there is nothing before you but bankruptcy.” One might say he invented his own manhood, a bastardized and fallen variant decidedly apart from and inapposite to his mother’s Oak Park and Protestant vision.

But there are other germs, too. There is, obviously, the war. The Great War. The war to end all wars. The war that badly injured him, almost killing him; the war which left him helpless and guilt-ridden and foggy; the war in which he participated and, yet, stayed away from. It looms large in every retelling of the Hemingway myth. It spawned his first real heartbreak. It took his courage. It scared him. It defined him as much as any damn thing else.

There’s also the drinking, which is of a lore of its own. Guy Clark, Jimmy Buffett, Brad Paisley, and others, have all sung about it. It has been romanticized in book and on film. In fact, actors from Sterling Hayden to Darren McGavin have played some tropish version of the Hard Drinking Turtlenecked Bearded Writer, in productions as varied as they are numerous. The wry and recurring protagonist of Gregory Mcdonald’s I.M. Fletcher series once very wittily quipped that Hemingway didn’t have a sense of humor. In the same novel, Key West locals pine for Papa to return from the undiscovered country. In both instances, it is the hard drinking trope who Mcdonald is referencing. 

Lest we forget, there is another germ: the women. Edna O’brien says, “I like that he fell in love, and he fell in love quite a few times.” He probably fell in love with himself, or, more properly, with the character he created for himself, harder than he ever fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky or Lady Duff Twysden or Martha Gellhorn. All in all, there were many lovers, four marriages, and many more lusts.

But the women, the booze, the war – these, really, are symptoms, not diseases. Hemingway’s disease – in this writer’s mind, at least – is guilt. Catholic guilt. Of an acute measure. A guilt untended. A guilt unreconciled.

We forget – gloss over? – Hemingway’s Catholicism. Burns does likewise in his documentary. But the facts speak for themselves: Papa was baptized twice. Once on the battlefield when he was wounded, whereupon a priest baptized him and then read last rites. And once before his second marriage.

Admittedly, one should not presuppose he was a good Catholic. Or even a practicing Catholic. He was very obviously neither. But he was Catholic, just like he was raised a Congregationalist in Oak Park. And there seems to be an acknowledgment of the grace of God throughout Hemingway’s works, even as there exists ample evidence – “ All thinking men are atheists” – that he was a nonbeliever, his attitudes and vices chief among them.

Case in point: he once wrote to an acquaintance, “I have always had more faith than intelligence or knowledge and I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example — and I have never set a good example.” I recently read a thoughtful piece by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell on this score. Others have written well on it, too. Hemingway’s Catholicism deserves to be written about more often. It is itself a question worth exploring. 

But how do we reconcile this question with everything else that we know about Papa? How do we reconcile the man who wrote I have always had more faith than intelligence with the same man who wrote All thinking men are atheists? For starters, we don’t. There is no need to reconcile. The incongruity is the point, i.e., it is the undergirding of the guilt which explains much, writ large and small by an un-diagnosable desire toward damnation and depravity, despite knowing better, despite having seen death on a battlefield where, in his own words, he “…died then. I felt my soul or something come right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.  It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.” He had seen and felt divine evidence of a world beyond this one, and yet he spent his literary career capitulating to anti-religious impulses, just like he spent his personal life purposefully failing to, as he put it, “set a good example.” The purposeful here is doing a lot of work, I will grant. But that’s the point.

Was he angry at God? Was he angry at Him for being wounded? At losing his innocence? At failing to be a real hero (he took to embellishing his exploits when he returned home after the war, evoking, for this writer at least, Dr. Johnson’s quip about men thinking meanly of themselves for never having served)? Or was he mad at God for something else? Maybe all these things are true. But he certainly was not an atheist. With this in mind, does his characters’ piousness toward worldly causes (think Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls) and his often atheistic prose not suddenly betray a certain wrangling? A guilt? A defiance? If a defiance, then also a damnation, a damnation he never repented but rather doubled down on. That, really, is the crux of the matter – the doubling down. The closest we ever come to a confession is with the Old Man and his marlin. His other works portend repentance or grace or hopefulness but end up as justification (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”).

This doubling down on damnation, despite knowing better, suggests that the devil himself was Hemingway’s devil.  

Such talk about the metaphorical razing of the Church brings into focus the centrality of the Spanish struggle in understanding Papa, not that this helps us clarify things too much because the Spanish struggle, and its literal razing, remain largely ignored or misunderstood by so very many. Franco, for example, has long been villainized by the West, so much so that, eventually, conservative minds, so often quick to lost causes and contrarianism, were bound to reconsider both Franco’s place in history and the cause of the war he won. Peter Hitchens has cautioned those of us on the right to be reticent in praise of Franco. Perhaps he is right. But perhaps he is wrong, too, not because Franco is a hero but because Franco’s cause was noble. We often hear people say things like, “There were no good guys in the Spanish Civil War.” This is true. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a right side of things. Franco, not unlike De Gaule with France, had a question about Spain. Could Spain be Spain? The Republicans, when they burned the churches, were not just destroying emblems of (in their mind) oppression. They were destroying their history and the soul of their people and the thing which gave their world meaning. They believed, pridefully, that equality could replace the transcendent (this is the same idolatry of the modern liberal). They traded one God for a lesser one. Hemingway could gloss over this atrocity and blindly worship – that is the word: worship – the iconoclasts’ cause, waged as it was against his own religion, because of the defiance raging within him about God and about the things which reminded him of God, like station, obligation, and duty, all things which his mother had chastised him about in Oak Park. That’s the bit about liberals – it’s not just God they rage against. It’s everything that reminds them of God, of Christendom, damn the benefits that Christendom wrought and could still reap.  

Hence, when Pablo’s woman says to Robert Jordan that there is no God, she does not believe what she is saying; she is merely projecting her author’s own defiance. And when Robert Jordan can’t take a joke, his piousness for the communist cause displaces the humility that a man of God – a man of God who has seen war – would prioritize. In many ways Robert Jordan is precisely who Fletch is making fun of, supra, when he quips that Hemingway didn’t have a sense of humor.

Hemingway’s irreligious choices – literarily and in life – as nevertheless a religious man destroyed him. It taints works that portend religious themes; and it explains the passion he undertook in questionable causes, a la the Republican effort in Spain.

Other writers are more sympathetic to Hemingway’s struggle with God. Maybe I should be, too. But the praise we heap on Hemingway’s demons, which are seemingly an endorsement of his rage against God, should give everyone pause, as should our praise of his writing style, about which we have devoted few lines, and perhaps too few; hence a quick digression seems defensible: 

About his prose, the man himself once wrote, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

But it is also true that minimalism is a pretentious way to say that a writer can’t elaborate. John Irving put it in more acerbic terms:

“I thought, I surely don’t want to become a writer to write sentences as simplistic and short as this guy does … If you want to be an ad writer and write ad copy, OK, short sentences are appealing. But it seemed to me to be a dictum and dulling.”

Count me with Irving on this score...

Getting back to the matter at hand, we have surmised, thus far, that a religious man volitionally chose the irreligious in his writings as elsewhere. Thus, conservative minds should at the very least display reticence in heaping praise upon so belligerent an iconoclast… They should, but often don’t, which is why I never could get onboard with the John McCain bandwagon. McCain was shameless in his praise for Papa and particularly for For Whom the Bell Tolls. “There are times,” he says in the Burns doc, “when I don’t agree with it but it is understandable that [Hemingway] decided to end his life when his talent had left him... He had lots of vices. He was a human being and that, my friend, erases a whole lot of other what may be failings in life.”

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not true. Not true at all. McCain’s unabashed love for For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals a great deal about what conservatism – or, more aptly, what passes as conservatism – lacks in today’s minds. There is a systemic failure to understand what we are trying to conserve. There is nothing to preserve in the works of Hemingway. There is only to lament. That is why his stories should survive. That is why we should keep reading The Old Man and the Sea. That is why we must get to the last line in The Sun Also Rises – “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” – because regret must be real. Regret is the only thing that survives. Regret teaches us something. Regret can be poetic. It can be soulful. Very soulful. But should it be the goal? Should we want to sin?

Make no mistake about it. Robert Jordan was a tragic figure, not a hero, just like his creator. There is nothing romantic about burning churches. And there is nothing romantic about Hemingway, not really.

But isn’t it pretty to think so?