I WAS thinking of Ernest Hemingway’s last years when I was moving slowly over the frozen grass towards the cinema cameras, which had been set up in Ketchum Cemetery near his tomb. We were making a television film on Hemingway, and it was not to honour his literary achievement, not primarily. It was to titillate the television audience with an image of a man who succeeded as a writer (which means he became rich) but ultimately failed as a human being. The great unrich, untalented, unsuccessful public loves to hear of the failure of great men. It justifies their doing nothing with their lives except watching the fall of great men on television.
Hemingway had been a very handsome human being, gigantic, strong, a fine boxer and huntsman, a drinker, a bull-fight aficionado a writer of genius. Suddenly, in middle age, he became petulant, a worrier about money and excess air baggage. He developed persecution mania: those two men in the bar were from the FBI, watching him; don’t let Bill drive the car, he’s trying to kill me; I’m not making enough money this year (despite the annual hundred thousand dollars in royalties, the stock, the property). But even the decade or so before Hemingway’s suicide, while he was sailing, swimming, shooting, following corridas all over Spain, there was an odour of approaching nemesis. He was living more and more on his past and, as writers will, effortlessly inventing some of it, or at least giving some of it a more satisfactory shape. Perhaps the gods of true enactment are always at war with the muses of fiction and, when they inhere in the one being, that being has to fall apart. It was in keeping with his persona for Hemingway to say that he slept with Mata Hari and enjoyed it, though she was a bit heavy in the thigh. Cold historical dates show that she was shot as a spy while Hemingway was still a young reporter on the Kansas City Star. The long streams of reminiscence over wine, running far into the night, had to be taken on a plane where the imagined and the actual became acceptable as the same thing. No reason why not? Pontius Pilate asked one of the great questions of all time, though his choice of occasion was infelicitous. Take Hemingway as one of his own fictional creations, as he himself began to do, and we shall all be happy with Hemingway. But life is life and fiction is fiction, and it is sometimes dangerous for them to touch. One of the troubles with America is that it expects reality to behave like fiction. Hemingway was a victim of that failure to categorise. His readers thought that the author should be at least as virile as his own creations. Hemingway obliged them with the Hemingway myth. This myth helped to kill him.
The Hemingway myth made great play with the Spanish term cojones. Hemingway told the world that he had cojones. He did not, being fundamentally prudish, exhibit these cojones in public, but he was always ready to show the hair on his chest. When one of his critics, Max Eastman, wrote a scathing review of his Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway responded by asking Eastman to show the hair on his chest. Eastman had little; Hemingway had much. This proved satisfactorily to Hemingway that he, Hemingway, was a good writer and Eastman a lousy critic. Hair on the chest meant that you had cojones. Hemingway’s logic was always obscure.
Cojones meant the ability to catch big fish and shoot tigers. It ought to have meant the ability to make love satisfactorily. Of Hemingway’s amorous life we know little, but we can guess that he lacked the skills, and even the appetites of Casanova. At school he chased balls – on the football field, in the water-polo pool – and did not chase girls. He was meant for outdoor, not indoor, games. This is always the way. The greatest sexual potency is to be found among timid poets, not big-chested football-players. But Hemingway, turning himself into a Hemingway hero, ought to have been a great lover. He was not. There is an interesting passage in his posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream, where the ageing weary hero dreams of making love with a gun. The gun was, as so often, a substitute for a phallus.
This is one of the possible reasons for Hemingway’s end – disgust with a failing body that, at its best, had only given him the secondary pleasures of sport and drink, not the primary pleasure of sexual vigour or tenderness. But there are other reasons, and here we have to invoke that great explicatrix, Unreason. Unreason tells us that a man is put into the world to perform a function. An artist is born to do something for art that no artist has ever done before. Hemingway did the unique thing he was called on to do, and he did it early. In his first novel, Fiesta, he presented a mode of writing that had not been seen before. It was a prose style that belonged to the twentieth century and did not look back nostalgically – as did the styles of so many novelists – to an Age of Reason or an Age of Feeling. Hemingway’s style was exactly fitted to expressing the life of the nerves and the muscles: it by-passed the brain and the heart. When he had shown that such a style was possible, a whole generation of writers was quick to learn it. But Hemingway himself had learnt it with pain and difficulty, slowly and in poverty. When he had given this style to the world, and with it the tough Hemingway hero – all trigger-finger and no cerebrum – his function in the world was finished. His life could consist only in repeating or imitating himself. He did this, but he also yielded to the great American public’s desire that he shout enact in life what his characters enacted in print. He did his best, but he reckoned without nature’s sad logic – the existence of time and decay, the fragility of the kidneys and livers, the terrible truth that living is never as satisfactory as creating. When an artist ceases to create, he is a tree that must be felled to make way for younger trees.
If Hemingway had been a European writer, he would have been content to let his characters do his strenuous living for him. But he was an American, and Americans have a dim sense of the boundary between what can be done and what cannot be done. Hemingway the creator submitted to the fallacy that the creator must be greater than his creations. It is, of course, a very blasphemous fallacy.
I had all this in my mind as I walked over the frozen grass of Ketchum, Idaho, to the camera and the microphone. But all I could say was: ‘The worst failure is always success. When you reach the plateau of achievement, you have arrived. You cannot move any more. You are paralysed. Paralysis is death. Hemingway was dead while he was still alive. That suicide was a mere act of confirmation.’ That’s what the great public wants to hear. How can you explain to the great public that one of the most important things in the world is to invent a new way of saying things? But nobody cares about style, language, the power of the word. They prefer to hear about failure really being success, about a great writer killing himself at the early age (my age) of 62.
Previously unpublished and untitled; dated 1979