By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
Ernest Hemingway has been called many things. Dull isn't one of them.
By Loomis Dean, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
This photo of Ernest Hemingway was taken in Malaga, Spain, where he wrote The Dangerous Summer, a non-fiction account of the brutal 1959 bullfighting season and a rivalry between two bullfighters.
By Loomis Dean, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
This photo of Ernest Hemingway was taken in Malaga, Spain, where he wrote The Dangerous Summer, a non-fiction account of the brutal 1959 bullfighting season and a rivalry between two bullfighters.
The Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author died 50 years ago this weekend, killing himself at 61 (on July 2, 1961) with a gunshot, a violent end to what can only be described as a turbulent, hard-driving and over-the-top life. Four wives, seven novels, six short-story collections and enough booze to float his beloved boat, Pilar. Throw in a few bullfights for good measure.
Not that he's really dead.
This summer he's "co-starring" in a hit movie, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris; plays a major role in a best-selling novel, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain; and is the subject a number of other new books, including Hemingway's Boat, which follows the writer's life on his 38-foot motor yacht, out in September. There's even a laugh-out-loud parody, just published, called The Heming Way.
"I think Hemingway still captures people's imaginations for different reasons," says Corey Stoll, who plays the writer in Midnight in Paris. Three, to be exact.
"On the level of style, it seems like he's pretty much unequaled in his influence on 20th-century American writing," Stoll says. "In terms of speaking to our celebrity culture, he was a master of shaping and spreading the larger-than-life image he projected. And in terms of masculinity, I think some men are nostalgic for his apologetically macho stance. And some women, even ones smart enough to know better, find that attractive."
Ernest Hemingway published 15 books in his lifetime and six books posthumously. In Our Time marked his American debut. He had published two books before this in Paris: Three Stories and Ten Poems (Contact Publishing Co., 1923) and In Our Time (Three Mountains Press, 1924).
In Our Time (1925)
Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Men Without Women (1927)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (1999)
Stoll's Hemingway character is exaggerated in the movie, speaking in terse minimalistic staccato sentences. Hemingway style.
Hemingway became famous for his distinctive delivery, a style that influenced other writers of 20th-century fiction. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, became an instant classic. It was followed by A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and, posthumously, A Moveable Feast, the tale of his life in 1920s Paris among what Gertrude Stein called "The Lost Generation."
McLain, whose The Paris Wife is based on Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and their life during that much-romanticized period in Paris, realizes Woody Allen's film is a comedy, but she says the real Hemingway is lost in the process.
"The simplest version of Hemingway is definitely the funniest," McLain concedes. "'Who wants to fight?' he barks (in the movie) to everyone and no one at one point. But the real man was infinitely complex, with 'more sides to him than any geometry book could ever chart,' as Hadley once said."
Was he misunderstood?
Hence the never-ending intrigue that still follows the man's man. Books about "Papa" abound, and scholars continue to analyze Hemingway's literary treatment of women, gays, blacks and Jews. And what was all that violence about?
Was he a first-class jerk? Or just misunderstood? Maybe a bit of both.
Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, out this fall, thinks much of our view of who Hemingway was has more to do with us than with the man. Hemingway makes us uneasy.
"Namely, that his life, which is to say the way he lived it, or our perception of the way he lived it, has always had the capacity to stir up complex things, to make us uneasy, defensive, secretly troubled about our own far less glamorous and more sedentary selves," Hendrickson writes.
Hemingway remains misunderstood, Hendrickson says in an interview. "Under all that bravado was a very tortured writer, and that makes him far more compelling. Things were not necessarily as they seemed."
Hendrickson credits Hemingway scholars for enlightening him about the writer's treatment of women. Many of those scholars are women.
"He had a much more sensitive appreciation for women than we've ever given him credit for. If you burrow down into the prose, you find it," says Hendrickson, a former Washington Post reporter.
Sandra Spanier, a professor of English at Penn State University in State College, Pa., and in charge of the Hemingway Letters Project there, is one of those scholars. (The first volume of the Hemingway letters housed at Penn State will be published this fall by Cambridge University Press, covering his early years from 1907 to 1922. There will be 16 volumes in all.)
"Hemingway's public persona can get in the way of understanding his work," Spanier says. "But many of his women characters show grace under pressure, they seize the day, they teach us on how to survive in a violent world."
Does Hemingway resonate anymore? Depends whom you ask. Craig Warren, president of the College English Association, contends Hemingway isn't as widely included in introductory English courses today as he was a few decades ago, perhaps because of his treatment of women and Jews.
A writer to emulate, in style
Warren says, however, that Hemingway remains popular in writing classes.
"Creative-writing instructors still prize Hemingway's work for what it can teach students about the craft of fiction," says Warren, chairman of the English department at Penn State University-Erie. "Hemingway showed that sparse prose can convey a great depth of emotion and meaning beneath the surface of the page."
And he's still selling. In 2010, Hemingway's publisher, Scribner, sold well over 350,000 copies of his works in North America alone. In addition, no author in the publishing house's hardcover Scribner Classics line has more titles in print. Some 24.
"While we don't have an overall sales number to provide, what's more important to us is the consistent strength and vitality of his sales we see year after year," says Brian Belfiglio, director of publicity for Scribner.
Susan Wrynn, curator of the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, just returned from a Hemingway colloquium at Hemingway's Cuban retreat, Finca Vigia, and believes Hemingway is still relevant.
"And one of the reasons is that he continues to be taught in high schools," says Wrynn, countering Warren's argument.
"Students continue to have an interest in him, read him and then look further," she says, adding that the JFK library hosts dozens of high school classes who want to know more about Hemingway. She also says both John McCain and President Obama cited Hemingway as their favorite writer during the last presidential campaign. They even agreed on the book: For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Josh Silverstein, webmaster of TimelessHemingway.com, a site he founded in 1998, was seduced by Hemingway's style early on. But not immediately.
"I was a junior in college when I first heard the closing line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises," he says on his website blog. "A charismatic literature professor holding a Diet Coke in one hand and a piece of literary Americana in the other stood in front of a class of 30 students and said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?? perhaps the greatest closing line in all of literature.' I remember being more taken by his seemingly sweeping statement than by the sentence itself."
What makes him great
He told the professor he thought an 8-year-old could have written it. The professor said that was precisely why it was so great. Silverstein soon asked the same professor to be his senior honors adviser. "And I began work on The Importance of Being Ernest: Hemingway's Truth in Fiction and His Fiction in Truth," he says.
All this Hemingway analysis aside, the writer has also turned into a cottage industry since his death. The Soviets named a minor planet after him. There are a number of Hemingway restaurants, plus a proliferation of bars called Harry's, homage to the bar in Across the River and Into the Trees. The most famous is in Venice, Italy.
There is also a line of Hemingway furniture, safari clothes, vests, hats and eyeglasses. There are even Hemingway fountain pens, from Mont Blanc. And, of course, cigars.
Appropriately, there is no Hemingway soap. The man who favored T-shirts and baggy shorts held up with rope was not known for good hygiene. "Ernest was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I've ever known," said his third wife, Martha, who took to calling him "the pig."
It's all just part of the Hemingway package.
Marty Beckerman, who wrote the parody The Heming Way, thinks today's politically correct crowd should relax and enjoy life. Just as his hero Hemingway did.
"Most of us can't fish, hunt, start a fire or build shelter. We know less than the average Cub Scout," says Beckerman. "Men are going to yoga studios and cupcake shops instead of butchering animals and drinking ourselves into comas. It's pathetic, and it's time for us to study the manly lessons that Hemingway taught."
One can see Hemingway raising a glass.
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