Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, on Ernest Hemingway)

“Hemingway’s style affected whole generations of us, the way a roomful of men is affected when a beautiful woman walks through ---their night is turned around, for better or for worse. Hemingway’s style had the ability to hit young writers in the gut, and they just weren't the same after that.” – Norman Mailer, quoted in Michiko Kakutani, The Poet at the Piano: Portraits Of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, And Other Artists At Work (1988)

Like future other images of aging Papa, the image accompanying this post attests to the darkness gathering force in his wounded psyche.

Fifty years ago today, 48 hours after returning from a second round of electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic, Ernest Hemingway picked up his favorite shotgun in his Ketchum, Idaho home and shot himself.

The act, committed while his increasingly anxious wife slept upstairs, shocked a world of readers who had encountered the Nobel laureate’s work on high school reading lists or in magazine profiles. They simply could not imagine that a man decorated for bravery in World War I, whose Byronic travels epitomized the rugged life and whose fiction consistently celebrated courage as “grace under pressure,” could have chosen this way out.

Little did they know about the all-consuming depression that brought him to this end. Hemingway’s intimates were alarmed, during his Mayo Clinic stay, by the sign he’d hung up outside his room: FORMER WRITER. And friend (later biographer) A.E. Hotchner would not soon forget what the “former writer” told him of his condition in his last days: “What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them."

(Hemingway’s suspicion that he was under surveillance by the FBI proved to be more true and less paranoid than any of his close friends could have guessed at the time, as ruefully acknowledged in Hotchner’s op-ed article in today’s New York Times.)

The surprise must have been especially palpable for men such as Norman Mailer in the 1950s, for whom Hemingway, like Frank Sinatra, represented an ideal of style—not just the celebrated modernist writing style, but of living life full-tilt and reaping the rewards. Characteristically, Mailer compares the older writer’s impact to that of a beautiful woman.

Indeed, those of the generation of The Naked and the Dead author, after World War II, saw much to admire in the older writer’s quest for wealth, wine and women, as well as his stoic code. Hemingway’s death, then, signaled the first crack in this cult of machismo. Within a generation, a “Me Decade” deeply antithetical to Hemingway’s suck-it-up ethic, as well as a feminist movement that eyed much of the novelist’s work as overgrown Boy’s Life adventures, had called into question the values by which Hemingway had lived. Inevitably, the search began for new idols.

The question now becomes whether Hemingway’s time may have come again. Abe Sauer, a contributor to the Web site www.brandchannel.com, lists several recent events that might signify the return of Hemingway as a “New Male Lifestyle Demo,” including:

* The writer’s appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, wherein the young Hemingway of the Twenties appears as a character, already in the process of creating his legend;
* Country star Kenny Chesney's 2010 album, called Hemingway's Whiskey:
* The Nicole Kidman-Clive Owen HBO biopic, Gellhorn and Hemingway.
* Even “the current popularity of full beards on men,” according to Sauer.

When myth collides with reality, however, all of this counterrevisionism becomes a bit harder to sustain.

If you want an idea of what the death of Hemingway signified in larger terms, focus on the opening credits of the Emmy-winning AMC drama series about advertising men in the 1960s, Mad Men. It shows an illustrated version of protagonist Don Draper falling from a great height.
But Draper represents far more than himself. Indeed, that image is symbolic of the cult of masculinity in free fall.

Watching Draper’s credits-sequence fall is like viewing a slow-motion series of quietly desperate acts—in much the same way that Hemingway’s family and closest associates beheld with mounting, powerless horror the writer’s increasingly troubled condition following two plane crashes on safari in Africa in 1954.

Nobody would have validated Draper’s lifestyle of heavy drinking and wenching as the rewards of a demanding job more than the novelist. But that’s not their only point in common..
One particular episode from the series’ first season, "The Hobo’s Code," hints at further affinities that the ad man might have felt for the bestselling novelist.

At one point, Don rushes over to the apartment of his mistress, freelance artist Midge Daniels, and urges her to run away with him for the weekend to Paris, the romantic dream city of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation writers who hoped to live cheaply and simply there without distractions.

But deeper connections bound the creator of commercial fantasy and the novelist-memoirist. Each grew up under circumstances they were anxious at all hazards to obscure and even lie about. Each found in the chaos of war an opportunity to become a fabulist about his military service and, later, his identity.

Aside from a father (also a suicide) who taught him about hunting and fishing, Hemingway found little about either his hometown (Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb filled with what he called “broad lawns and narrow minds”) or his family worth celebrating. His mother (whom he blamed for his father’s death because of what the writer regarded as spendthrift ways), an organist for local churches, took her adult son to task for his dissolute ways.

The young Hemingway took refuge in telling stories. That tendency didn’t end with the written page, however: he also took to spinning ever-more-creative visions of his background. Years later, after their divorce, third wife Martha Gellhorn was astonished, upon being driven through Oak Park, to find it was nothing like what he’d told her: “The son-of-a-bitch! He told me he grew up in a slum!”

Similarly, Draper (or, as he was known as a child, Dick Whitman) was at pains to camouflage his background, though this time because of a sense of shame. His is a tale of two mothers: one biological, a prostitute who died while giving birth to him, and a second adoptive—like Grace Hemingway, a “church lady” (albeit one with quiet but real generosity). A second parent, Don’s adoptive father, is far more problematic, leaving the boy abused in body and disabused of compassion, committed only to a “hobo’s code” that leaves him unburdened, footloose but empty.

Their creative lives give the two men an outlet for sexual impulses that older generations would have frowned upon. The astute critic-novelist (The Year of the French) Thomas Flanagan has much of value to say about Hemingway in an essay “The Best He Could Do” (collected in the posthumous collection, There You Are), but one sentence in particular sums up “Papa’s” increasingly fragile psychosexual state in the last two decades of his life: “Behind the marlin-fighting lay a different person, uneasily aware of the fragility of gender boundaries, sexually insecure, and aware of aspects of himself which created that insecurity.”

Two of Hemingway’s posthumous books, the novel Garden of Eden and the “memoir” True at First Light, would have jolted contemporary readers with the author’s descriptions of lesbianism, threesomes and his weird quasi-courtship (with his wife fully aware of it) of a young African girl while the fiftysomething novelist was on safari.

Not content with a wife whose blond beauty evokes comparisons to Grace Kelly, Draper takes up with an artist, a client, even a stewardess--and that doesn’t begin to exhaust the extent of his restless philandering.

Eventually, thrown off-kilter by what they saw in war--Hemingway in World War II, Whitman/Draper by the Korean conflict--they return home having created a new myth for themselves. Not content with his very real bravery as a wounded non-combatant ambulance driver in 1918, Hemingway, upon returning home the following year, told Oak Park audiences that he’d served as a lieutenant in the Brigata Ancona during the Monte Grappa offensive.
Draper’s change is even more dramatic. Like Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, he assumes the identity of a dead person--in this case, an officer he served under during Korea.

Draper would have agreed with Hemingway’s description of writers in True at First Light: “All a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.”

And Papa Hemingway would have nodded in agreement when the outwardly self-confident, inwardly anxious ad man says: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”