On company time: American modernism in the big magazines

Hemingway’s reputation, as well as the reputation of his famously terse style, suffers something of a recurring death in the critical literature. There are several possible reasons for this, the most prominent being the sheer quantity of material that he put in circulation during his lifetime. Beginning in the 1930s, his reputation as an author had become inextricable from a more general celebrity status. He had begun selling his outsized personality, what Michael North calls “a signboard for himself,” as part and parcel with his literary achievements.³ As we saw in the previous chapter, in the late 1940s the popular press reverses its consensus about T. S. Eliot’s poetry from the 1920s, that his difficult poetry provides a smokescreen for his easily discernible literary motivations, to claim his poetry as straightforward but his persona as inscrutable. Something similar happens to Hemingway in the 1930s, as critics begin to treat the author as interchangeable with the characters in his fiction, with the assumption that Hemingway himself is the unstated subject of all his writing.⁴ This transubstantiation of art into biography was exacerbated by his relationships with magazine publishers and editors hoping to take advantage of his name. For example, when Arnold Gingrich decided to complement his successful trade-oriented quarterly magazine Apparel Arts with another aimed at consumers, one of the first things he did was buy a boat for Hemingway. It was meant to seal a deal between Esquire, as Gingrich’s fashion magazine for men would be called, and Hemingway, whom Gingrich had been courting for a series of columns he hoped would set the tone of his new magazine: refined, stylish, evocative of cosmopolitan artistic circles, but with “ample hair on its chest and adequate cojones.”⁵ When Hemingway explained his fee policy to Gingrich—“Make all commercial magazines pay the top rate they have ever paid anybody. This makes them love and appreciate your stuff and realize what a fine writer you are”—Gingrich obliged.⁶ Along with sending Hemingway some of the sample clothes from Apparel Arts, Gingrich contributed $3,000 toward the purchase of the Pilar, which would provide a vessel on which Hemingway could craft adventures and Esquire columns.

At least in part, the gesture sought to reassure Esquire’s biggest contributor that it would be around long enough to publish his letters from Cuba and the African savannah. After all, this was the heart of the Great Depression, which meant Gingrich would be marketing fashionable leisure activities like hunting, shooting, and alpine skiing to untold numbers of the unemployed, who probably would not refer to their copious free time as “leisure.” Paying for Pilar was a sign of Gingrich’s confidence in his ability to bridge the imaginative, if not economic, divide between the upper class and those that aspired to it, but it was something else, too: an investment in Hemingway’s brand. It provided his star writer with the means to undertake the deep-sea fishing and adventure stories Gingrich hired him for; likewise, the stories themselves reframed the relatively passive acts of reading and writing as homologous to the masculine efforts that Hemingway took part in. All told, Hemingway contributed twenty-five columns and six short stories to Esquire between its first issue and February 1939, which helped bring Esquire into the national spotlight as the decade’s premier men’s magazine. Hemingway’s participation assisted Gingrich in attracting an almost entirely male cast of contributors: cultural critics such as H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Gilbert Seldes; European intellectuals including Bertrand Russell, Knut Hamsun, and Thomas Mann; and American writers such as John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and, significantly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose three-part series “The Crack-Up,” published in the spring of 1936, helped resuscitate Fitzgerald’s reputation. Between Hemingway’s first column in the fall of 1933 and Fitzgerald’s last installment of “The Crack-Up,” Esquire’s circulation exploded from one hundred thousand to 550,000 copies per month. Esquire was the periodical embodiment of fashionable masculine culture, and it struck its mold from Hemingway’s reputation in more ways than one. Along with paying top dollar for his contributions, the journal’s mascot, “Esky,” created by the cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, bore a striking resemblance to the author.7 Esky, a barrel-chested and mustachioed clay figure, appeared on every cover from the 1930s except the very first, and from month to month he was shown taking part in all those feats of stylized manliness that the magazine valorized: fishing, drinking, hunting, flying a plane, piloting a boat, wooing women. Though Esky was supposed to be the source of the magazine’s editorial voice, he only ever appeared in still images, making it hard to hear what, exactly, he had to say. For that, one could simply turn to Hemingway’s travel stories and fiction, which represented the same type of experiences depicted on the cover in the terse, descriptive prose that Gingrich hired Hemingway to write.

Esquire ended up with Hemingway and a Hemingwayesque mascot, but the relationship paid dividends for the author, too. It gave him reliable access to one of the largest, most sustained readerships of any American author in the twentieth century. And his willingness to contribute frequently and unashamedly to a big magazine was one source for the critical backlash he experienced in the 1940s.8 Pairing with Esquire alters his reputation, but it also indelibly marks the content of his later fiction. His “Letters from the Gulf Stream” romanticized the quiet integrity of hunters and fishermen whose solitary, expertly executed work was noble and underpaid. The first, “Marlin off the Morro: A Cuban Letter,” was sent from Havana and published in the inaugural issue. Along with explaining how to choose a hotel and whether to eat breakfast (there’s two schools of thought on the issue, he explains), he introduces Carlos Gutierrez, the old fisherman from whom he “first heard about the big marlin that run off Cuba,” and describes the migratory patterns of marlin and how to catch them in extraordinary detail.⁹ After incubating for twenty years, Gutierrez would become the model for Santiago, the old man of The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, the prize committee cited the strength of Hemingway’s most recent novel and his impact on “contemporary style.”¹⁰

So Old Man originates in an Esquire column, the popular context that sullied Hemingway’s critical reputation in the first place, and then its publication twenty years later overturns that assessment, both in critical and popular circles. Hemingway called the novel an “epilogue to all his writing and to all he had learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live.”11 For the rest of this chapter, I’d like be hard-headedly literal about the Old Man as an epilogue to Hemingway’s writing and to “all he had learned”; that is, I take the novel, the last published during his lifetime, as both an endpoint and a self-conscious summary of his biography as a writer. It is hard not to read Santiago’s plight—his long dry spell, his noble battle with the big fish, his quiet integrity in defeat—as, on one level, an allegory of Hemingway’s own tempestuous career and the mercurial reception of his work. At the same time, Old Man exemplifies the final transformation in what we might call the biography of his literary style: the development and codification of verbal patterns and themes that make a sentence recognizable as Hemingway’s. By the early 1950s, this was increasingly hard to do. Hemingway’s writing was so popular, so abundant, and so often imitated that it became hard to distinguish where the real thing stopped and the “Hemingwayesque”—or the tendency for the “contemporary style” to imitate Hemingway’s prose—began. Along with the enormous amount of text published under his own name, there were “bad Hemingway” writing contests that amplified his terseness and bravado into caricature, advertisements written in his style to sell international travel and luxury goods, and any number of literary followers influenced by his early writing. Contemplating the depth and reach of Hemingway’s cultural influence, one critic surmises, “it was as if Hemingway’s inimitable style had been so long under the gaze that there was little left of it beyond its imitability.”¹² This problem reaches a peak in the publication of Old Man, or, to be more accurate, in its double publication in Life and as a standalone novella by Scribners. Hemingway and his critics imagined these print forms in competition, and the respective affordances of periodicals and books that turn up in the discussions of Old Man map onto the competing interpretations of his legacy during the last stage of his working career. And, finally, they highlight the changing relationship between modernism and popular print culture in the 1950s.

In this way the early reception of Old Man in the back pages of magazines and books pages of newspapers resonates with the evaluative criteria of the New Critics, especially Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) helped codify a reading method attuned to formal closure and aesthetic unity. This is not to say that periodical pages were full of New Critics; in fact, academia and professors repeatedly turn up in these essays as the exemplars of bad—which is to say biographical—reading. Maybe for good reason: Hemingway’s disagreements with Philip Young’s and Max Geismer’s psychobiographical approaches to his work were well known. Finding correlations between the surface story and deeper meanings, what Hemingway will famously denounce as untoward “symbolysm,”15 is a task “better left to the professors,” according to one reviewer. “The wiser reader,” he goes on, “must take it on its own spare terms and let its meanings become as large and as manifold as he can sense them.”¹⁶ This insistence at the moment of first publication on the novel’s referential self-enclosure, that its meaning must be taken on its own terms, can sound a little odd for a number of reasons: Old Man’s long prehistory in magazine columns; its author’s devotion to real-life adventures and, at least up until this point, the near conflation of his autobiography and literary work; and its status as a monument of the middlebrow, inaugurated by Dwight Macdonald’s critique of its flabby prose and “constant editorializing.”¹⁷ Most strikingly, these statements about formal closure surface in popular periodicals, not in academic articles, and their authors are mostly book reviewers and journalists, not professors.

This inversion of the evaluative methods usually associated with academic and journalistic venues looks even odder when one considers that most of these early reviewers first read Old Man as “an extra dividend” in Life rather than in its book format. Life sent out over six hundred review copies in advance of its publication of the novel, and the magazine version came out one week before the Scribners hardcover edition. Many critics timed their reviews to coincide with the Life issue rather than the book release, and several even explicitly mention that they are reviewing the Life version rather than the Scribners one.¹⁸ For example, Publisher’s Weekly devotes more space to explaining what Old Man does for the relationship between magazine and book readerships than to the novel’s content or its relationship to Hemingway’s career.

Hemingway’s stories and novels circulated in magazines throughout his career—Across the River and Into the Trees had been serialized in Collier’s just two years before Old Man—and the format specificity of periodical and book informs his early struggles with Max Perkins over censorship in his first novels.21 Perkins hoped to convince Hemingway that removing the “dirty words” would help him gain a foothold in the literary market without altering the spirit of the text, so he argued that the revision was not really censorship because it was for a magazine serialization and not “the real thing”:

Now this serialization is not the real thing, as the book is. If we considered “A Farewell to Arms” only in respect to its intrinsic quality, and refused to regard the question from any practical point of view, we would all be dead against serialization. It is an incidental and outside thing, and the best reason for it, to my mind, was on account of the practical aspects of it in widening your public, and in making you understandable to a great many more people, and generally in helping you to gain complete recognition. It is in view of all this that I think—as I judge you do by your letter today—that cuts can be philosophically made, for if we can keep people from being diverted from the qualities of the material itself, by words and passages which have on account of conventions, an astonishingly exaggerated importance to them, a great thing will have been done.²²

Selling a novel to Life, though, was a special coup both for Hemingway and for the status of modernism in popular culture. Before Old Man, the magazine had never published short stories or poetry, let alone a full novel. At the time, it was one of the most widely circulated magazines in the world, part of the largest print-media corporation ever to exist, and its editorial mission was roundly antilinguistic. Its goal was to present a continuous, pictorial experience of the world, making words—especially fictional words—largely obsolete in its representational mission. Despite its lack of literature, though, Life often published photo essays about authors, and it took a Hemingwayesque approach to the mot juste, claiming “a photograph, supplemented by exactly the right words, can often communicate a situation to the reader faster, more accurately and more vividly than any other means.”24 Hemingway frequently showed up as the content of these captioned photographs: he either contributed to or was the subject of at least sixteen Life photo essays over the course of his career. The magazine published everything from a review of The Fifth Column (1940) to a biographical article by Malcolm Cowley to Hemingway’s schmaltzy paean to Marlene Dietrich, “A Tribute to Mamma, from Papa.” The tone of such coverage varies widely, but it is at its strangest in a 1941 piece on For Whom the Bell Tolls when it attempts to rewrite Hemingway prose as a Life photo essay. The article was part of a longer, multipage spread devoted to all things Ernest: his recent marriage to Martha Gellhorn, hunting and bird shooting in Idaho, sales figures for the novel (over four hundred thousand copies in the United States, moving at a rate of fifty thousand copies a week), and, last but certainly not least, “his style, so terse and clean, yet vivid and rich.” The absence of a literary-specific modifier before “style” suggests that the marriage, honeymoon in Idaho, and sales figures are just as much a part of Hemingway’s style as anything written in his most recent novel. In this vein, the section on For Whom the Bell Tolls ends up being more about the production of Paramount Pictures’ adaptation than about the novel itself, particularly how the company could translate his prose into images. To get at that problem, the Life photographer Robert Capa, the cofounder with Henri Cartier-Bresson of the news photo agency Magnum Photos, followed Hemingway around Spain and photographed places named in the novel. One photo shows Hemingway and Capa sitting together with a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls between them as they choose photographs for the Life article. The novel only shows up in the second half of the article: excerpts serve as photo captions for eighteen portraits that attempt “to outline for Paramount the type of country, the type of people” to be found in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s and Capa’s photo text produces something like a storyboard for the studio, complete with headshot-style photographs of locals that could be used to cast the novel’s main characters.²⁵

The page design here positions Hemingway as something like a coauthor of the photographic version of his novel, and it aligns with John Raeburn’s claim that Hemingway “authored” his celebrity as much as his fiction from the 1930s forward in mass print media.26 For Raeburn, this is endemic of Hemingway’s decline into artifice, but it can also look like the natural extension of a feature that was always part of his prose. Hugh Kenner early on claimed that Hemingway’s paratactic style was “cinematic in principle,” and the best passages stick with the reader primarily because they “would be intelligible and exciting in a sequence of movie shots.”²⁷ Life’s coverage, from this perspective, simply makes explicit that Hemingway’s best work is a series of screenplays masquerading as novels. However, the article’s explicit reference to “his style, so terse and clean, yet vivid and rich,” and the felt need to anchor its coverage of film rights and honeymoons with a pictorialization of the novel, also makes it clear that Hemingway’s fiction—the settings, verbal patterns, and themes that make it identifiable as Hemingway’s—is crucial to the interpretation of the larger cultural persona.²⁸ In the end, Life offers a telling caveat to the representational clarity of its photo essay. “Paramount is warned that [the photographs] must be checked against the precision of Hemingway’s book,” it concludes. While it demotes For Whom the Bell Tolls from novel to photo caption, it also suggests Hemingway’s “right words” are more accurate than any pictures.

This insistence on the supraphotographic quality of Hemingway’s prose carries over into Life’s presentation of Old Man. It assures readers “it will be one of the most pictorial experiences” they will ever have, as it “photograph[s] the poignant paintings of the human spirit.”29 Unlike the words in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which perfectly capture specific moments of the Spanish Civil War, Old Man is a photograph doubly removed from the real world: it captures one medium of representation, painting, in yet another, language. Add to that its rather abstract content, “the human spirit,” and it becomes clear that if Life is trying to translate Hemingway’s late-career prose into its own photojournalistic style, it does so with an enormous amount of strain. The editorial headnote to the Life issue containing Old Man explains the magazine’s decision to break with its photographic journalism by publishing prose fiction: “once in a while words alone can paint pictures in the reader’s mind that the camera cannot capture,” which, in its conflation of writing and painting, does not so much separate the visual from the literary as cordon off two modes of representation (writing and painting) from a third—the camera. This becomes even more evident with the presentation of Old Man in the magazine: it has no photographs, and it unfolds completely uninterrupted by advertisements, photographs, or content breaks (when a magazine continues an article after other, unrelated content). Though Life sent Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba so that it could have accompanying photographs, it chose not to run them and instead included several simple, hand-drawn illustrations. The only photographs are of Hemingway himself, one on the cover and one directly before the novel begins. The decision to present Old Man in Life but not to make it look like Life was not lost on the reviewers. “Life has every reason to be proud of the excellence of its presentation of the novel,” one critic wrote, because the layout was “achieved with imagination and good taste, and disappointing only to those who predicted that readers would be put off by having to stalk the story along a circuitous paperchase between columns of advertising.”³⁰ “Imagination and good taste,” here, seem to be synonymous with attempting to make the novel look as much like a book shoehorned into the middle of a magazine as possible. The other contents of Life do not intrude into the literary space of Old Man, allowing it to maintain the illusion of being an aesthetic object unto itself. By borrowing the aesthetic of a book, Life brings together the serialized popularity of magazines with the prestige of literature—and because of Hemingway, of a retrofitted version of literary modernism that is defined by its stubborn refusal of informational clarity. Thus, Old Man is “an extra dividend” in more ways than one. Most obviously, Life’s publication of the novel, and its decision to present it as if it were a book, lend the intellectual heft of literature to the biggest of big magazines. It melds the chosen print media of serious authors and those that write for work, but it does not flatten them. Instead, it insists on an epistemological difference between Hemingway’s approach to representation and its own, and then it isolates that difference in its presentation of Old Man.

Of course, other writers of the 1920s, such as T. S. Eliot, surfaced in postwar magazines as the face of a newly domesticated expatriate modernism as well as the vessel through which a postwar “American internationalism” would be exported to an expanding print market. Certainly, by this point in the century, and by this point in these writers’ careers, it seems fair to ask if we are still talking about modernism at all. John Dos Passos worked as a war correspondent for Life in 1945 and 1946, where he wrote on the effects of the war in the United States and abroad.31 Gertrude Stein serialized The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in The Atlantic in 1933 and then, after World War II, wrote a German travelogue for Life. A callout box assures “Stein’s admirers…that both her literary style and her shrewd insight have survived the war undamaged,” even if Paris, her adopted hometown, did not. Stein’s experience talking to the recently defeated German nationals taught her “Germans should learn to be disobedient.”³² These examples attest to the expanded name recognition of modernists, but even more they signal a change in the late style of modernist writers. The straightforward prose of Old Man, the verse drama of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, or even Stein’s travelogue from Germany are so much less alienating than In Our Time, The Waste Land, or Tender Buttons. Eliot’s, Hemingway’s, and Stein’s midcentury work seems fundamentally different from their 1920s writing. Hemingway accounts for this change by claiming that Old Man is free from the “inevitable awkwardness” of his earlier fiction, which recasts the difficulty of his earlier work as unintentional—the growing pains of a young writer unsure of what he wanted of his prose. In this way, the style of and expanded audience for Old Man are linked by its very lateness both in Hemingway’s individual career and in relation to literary modernism more generally. Along with Eliot, who migrated to the center of mainstream American culture in the late 1940s, these authors underwent what Loren Glass refers to as “the signature career arc” of modernist writers “from the restricted elite audience of urban bohemia and ‘little magazines’ to the mass audience of the U.S. Middlebrow,”³³ which the combination of Life and The Old Man and the Sea epitomizes.

Hemingway provides a somewhat unique case of this crossover, if only because his artistic production and print circulation falls into both the camp of poet-reporters and into that of postwar symbols of mainstream culture. Here, it’s worth acknowledging that the more obvious place for Hemingway to fit in my book would be much earlier, say, between the chapters on Willa Cather at McClure’s and W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset at The Crisis or as prelude to Time Inc.’s perfection of corporate voice. More than any other writer in the first half of the twentieth century—and unlike Cather, Du Bois, Fauset, or Agee—Hemingway’s style is commonly attributed to his time as a reporter. As the story goes, Hemingway’s short sentences, simple words, and general lack of adjectival fluff can be traced back to his internalization of the now-legendary 110 rules of writing that he encountered in 1917 at the Kansas City Star and, later, the forced compression that resulted from sending stories from Europe to the Toronto newsroom via telegraph. These stylistic and technological constraints exert at least as much influence on Hemingway’s terseness as does Ezra Pound’s imagism.34 Nesting Hemingway’s modernism within the editorial offices of Kansas City and the technological innovations of telegraphed composition would combine my attention to Cather’s office life in chapter 1 and Du Bois’s interest in printing and copying machines in chapter 2. There’s even a preexisting term that alludes to this connection: cablese, a language that erupts from the staccato bursts of electronic communication. Hemingway is full of stories about its influence on him. “Cablese,” Hemingway apparently told Lincoln Steffens after covering the Genoa Conference, “is a new language.”³⁵ In a 1934 Esquire column, “Old Newsman Writes,” he contrasts his recent move to the column format, where “columnists were allowed to write about themselves,” with his origins as “an old newspaper man” whose work was “copyrighted by Monumental News Service” and whose “output would be something on this order: KEMAL INSWARDS UNBURNED SMYRNA GUILTY GREEKS.”³⁶ Hemingway’s prose, here, is modernist insofar as it emerges out of this organizational and technological depersonalization of writing—not just the cable but also the news service, which smothers the reporter’s individual voice with its own “monumental” corporate style. Thus, by way of Hemingway’s cablese, another strand of modernist experimentation can be traced to innovations in editorial practice.

But that isn’t where Hemingway fits in this book because that story falls apart in at least two places. First, the technological shock of the telegraph and commentary on its “new language” was quite old by the 1920s. Steffens’s response to Hemingway’s thoughts on cablese does not survive, but it is hard to imagine he would agree. Telegraphed news had been around for at least a generation: both Steffens and Willa Cather, who worked together at McClure’s, got their start in periodicals in the 1890s and had been either writing or receiving cabled stories for at least twenty years. In fact, one of Cather’s first jobs when she moved to Pittsburgh from Nebraska in 1896 was at the telegraph desk of the Pittsburgh Leader, where she translated the electronic pulses of that “new language” back into newspaper English, twenty years before Hemingway set foot in an editorial office. Second, it is hard to square the developmental narrative of Hemingway’s “cablese” with the tone of his early journalism, which is surprisingly chatty. It is certainly possible that examples like the one he invents for Esquire might exist somewhere, unattributed to Hemingway and puffed out by a rewrite man. However, the pieces that can be linked to him are already quite puffy in their own right. Take, for instance, the opening of “A Free Shave,” from a 1920 issue of the Toronto Star Weekly, which repurposes the closing lines of “The Star Spangled Banner” to discuss a haircut: “The true home of the free and the brave is the barber college. Everything is free there. And you have to be brave. If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and hair cuts go to the barber college, but take your courage with you.”37 Or this one, which appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly a month before Hemingway would begin covering the Genoa Conference, the site of his conversation about cablese with Lincoln Steffens:

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture…. The fashionable hotels of Switzerland are scattered over the country, like bill-boards along the right of way of a railroad and in winter are filled with utterly charming young men, with rolling white sweaters and smoothly brushed hair, who make a good living playing bridge…. The Swiss make no distinction between Canadians and citizens of the United States. I wondered about this, and asked a hotelkeeper if he didn’t notice any difference between the people from the two countries.

“Monsieur,” he said, “Canadians speak English and always stay two days longer at any place than Americans do.” So there you are.³⁸

The full article dedicates more than six hundred words to the interaction rituals of bridge-playing bachelors, wealthy dowagers, and visiting French aristocrats—content, if not style, more at home in Henry James than in a Nick Adams story. More to the point, neither this nor “A Free Shave” is the kind of material that the Toronto Daily Star would have paid three dollars a word to telegraph for the morning edition, and they certainly are not written in the hypercompressed prose that Hemingway remembers adopting for his dispatches. Yet, in the morgue of his early journalism, this is the norm, and for good reason: it was the norm of weekly supplements like the Toronto Star Weekly, which were far more like magazines than newspapers. Thus, his breezy prose style suits the place that it was published. Which isn’t to say Hemingway was a bad journalist, only that he is not quite the kind of journalist that he is often assumed to be.39

Perhaps even more striking than the content of these early articles, though, is the mode of address. They routinely invoke the same colloquial, inclusive “you” as his Esquire columns from the 1930s and, as we’ll see later, the advertisements from the 1950s for beer and airlines that will use both Hemingway’s face and signature literary style to market an updated version of modernist iconoclasm in magazines like Life and Holiday. Rather than delimiting the objective world into imagistic bursts of cablese, like he says the “old newsman” does, or even providing something like a precursor to the experiential or immersive New Journalism of the 1960s, which would at crucial moments adopt second-person address, Hemingway’s knowing “you” finds his early journalism striking the tone of a casual companion; he’s a fellow commuter passing the time, giving you his unbidden opinion. Or, to keep this within the world of print publication, he comes close to the tone of 1920s advertising, which as Roland Marchand has convincingly shown, was beginning to take the form of novelistic “socio-dramas.”⁴⁰

According to Arnold Gingrich, modernist prose and modern advertising could be quite similar in their approach to verbal compression. Gingrich had some experience connecting the two, because along with being an extraordinarily successful magazine editor, he also saw himself as a misunderstood artist. He wrote several novels while overseeing Esquire, the strangest and most interesting being Cast Down the Laurel (1935), which was published by Alfred Knopf, the same house that put out the works of Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, and Jack London. The book’s reflexive narrative structure conflates the intellectual work of writing and selling novels by breaking the story into three parts: the first a conversation between a bestselling author and a dejected ad man about an idea for a novel called Apollo’s Young Widow, the second the aforementioned novel, and the third the ad man’s response to the book within the book. The advertising writer positively links the “forty-wording” that he does in the office to the task of writing a novel, chastising his novelist friend for failing to “understand what a luxury it is to be able to rattle along at the rate of a hundred words where one, or none, would do as well.” He tells the novelist that the forced compression of advertising writing, where “you spend your days…trying to cram everything into forty words—including ten for a long company name and sales and factory address,” is the exact kind of lesson in writing that the overly wordy—and extraordinarily successful—novelist needs to regain his bearings.41

Gingrich’s conjecture that modernist compression might have some affinity with the “forty-wording” of commercial advertising can help highlight two different aspects of Hemingway’s relationship to the development of periodical culture. Hemingway is not modern for his terse cablese, but he is modern in the way that magazines are: overabundance. As much as his bibliography can make it look like there are long dry spells, he was prolific and ever-present from his earliest moment on the American literary scene. By the end of 1926, he had published three books in just over a year, all of which were reviewed in major journals. While Leslie Fiedler describes Hemingway’s style as “near-silence,” in fact, when one looks at his appearances in and contributions to magazines, it’s far more accurate to fault him for refusing to keep quiet.⁴² Yet he accomplishes this double feat—constantly talking about and publishing accounts of his own terseness—by playing off the changing environment of big magazines, which are becoming more visual, aggressively commercial, and interested in “culture,” a category in which literary modernism carves out a major role for itself. If Arnold Gingrich can justify paying Hemingway top dollar and at the same time publish his own fractured, self-reflexive novels about art and homosocial bonding and the market, then maybe we can rethink the decline narrative of midcentury middlebrow as something more akin to mass modernism, where modernist difficulty is no longer difficult because it is everywhere. Perhaps Hemingway’s later style is not a slide into the commercial—it was always commercial—but a response to his own widespread influence, maybe even its obviousness. It’s not that Hemingway reads like an advertisement (or not just that) but that advertisements read like Hemingway.

One of the many fascinating aspects about The Old Man and the Sea hinted at in this brief history of its origin in another magazine is how, despite Life’s presentation of the novel as a standalone book and critics’ assertion that it only refers to itself, its content seems to leak out in all directions. In the run-up to publishing Old Man, Life ran a series of ads claiming that the novel is “so compellingly good,” so full of “wonder and excitement,” that it “bursts out of Hemingway’s letters to us…and fills the mind of everyone who has seen the manuscript.” In an accompanying puff piece, Hemingway attests to the quality not just of the novel but also of its appearance in Life, which he claims makes him “much happier than to have a Nobel Prize”—a statement that hindsight fills with dramatic irony.43 Life then writes a response to Hemingway’s letter, frankly stating that “we are not in the fiction business” but that Old Man is part of their mission to “publish a round account of what goes on in the world,” urging its audience to find “time to read it during the last long weekend of the summer.”⁴⁴ In the next issue, Hemingway writes his own introduction to Old Man, then writes an explanatory piece in the following issue ensuring that there are no symbols, then he gets a cover story and review in Time the next week. If, as Catherine Turner argues, in the 1920s Hemingway’s publisher allied the “monotonous style and penchant for profanity” of The Sun Also Rises with changing definitions of literary quality based on honesty and authentic experience, then the publication of Old Man may serve as signpost for another epoch, one in which modernism has saturated the print market and in which Hemingway’s “near-silence” floods out into any number of formats other than his own stories.⁴⁵

The style of the novel expands outward, too. It appears in a Ballantine Ale advertisement that Hemingway endorses in the issue of Life immediately after its publication of Old Man. Here, next to a photograph of the author, a letter teaches the reader the proper way to drink:

Gingrich’s co-location of modernist style and “forty wording” comes full circle here. Most clearly, this ad closes the already miniscule gap between Hemingway’s status as a courageous fisherman and his status as a novelist of folksy “big fish” stories. However, the advertisement also points to the uneasy fit between the plot of Hemingway writing Old Man and the plot actually contained within the text. To read the novel as “an allegory of its own history”47 is to erase the basic tone of the novel as well as the context of its reception. The Ballantine ad, intentionally or not, makes this apparent. That is, while the ad clearly invests in the correspondence between Santiago’s plight in the novel and Hemingway’s adventures on Pilar, it also differentiates Hemingway from his fictional character. Unlike Santiago, who returns home with a moral victory (but not a material one) over the sharks, in the advertisement Papa brings the marlin in “untouched.” And with this, the ad’s recasting of Old Man as self-referential allegory ends up undercutting itself. For the allegory to work—Santiago as author, fish as novel, etc.—Old Man could be a symbol of courage and stamina, but it could not also exist as an intact piece of successful writing. Santiago arrives back on shore with a carcass: if he’s an author, he does not reel in a pristine novel. Or, if the fish is supposed to be the novel, then Old Man is a totem of failed work. It broadcasts Hemingway’s inability to snag a fully realized, aesthetically pleasing, and financially successful novel.

Old Man is not alone among Hemingway’s novels to receive this reworking by other print genres. A 1950 Time article, “ ‘Hemingway Is Bitter About Nobody’—But His Colonel Is,” consists of a series of questions the magazine posed to the writer about the tepid critical response to the recently serialized Across the River and Into the Trees. The Hemingway questionnaire was almost a genre of its own by this point, with Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, the New York Tribune, transition, an earlier Time article, and the Saturday Review, among others, making a game out of asking Hemingway questions about his writing and the world at large. Hemingway agreed to this specific interview, according to the article, on the condition that Time prints his response, which he cabled from Cuba, “in full or not at all”—a point he takes care to mention multiple times, along with explicitly putting a figure on the twenty-five dollars he spent sending the telegram. Throughout he refers to himself in the third person, as “Hemingway,” and organizes his letter in the terse “cablese” of a news report. He begins by laying out his bodily ailments as well as his bona fides as a world traveler attuned to the terminological differences that characterize America and Europe:

The marker of what constitutes the “Hemingway influence” has passed from a specific body of texts to a general style of writing and, lastly, to a general set of tropes and themes associated with the writer. For example, a 1956 Pan American World Airways ad in Holiday not only shows a picture of him; it also mimics the paratactic sentence structures found in his novels and interviews: “After the old Key West-Miami-Havana-Bahamas early days, there was the Pacific when you took a day to Midway—another to Wake—one more to Guam—one to Manila—and Hongkong.” The syntactical juxtaposition of place names mirrors the iterative path of the modernist exile, and it lets the reader follow in Hemingway’s hardscrabble journey from America to the Far East. “Flying in China you had to sweat out many things,” the advertisement informs the reader, but the one thing “you” don’t have to worry about is getting to Europe safely and cheaply. The headline of the two-page advertisement explicitly situates the postwar reader as a descendent of Hemingway’s Parisian past, stating that now any American can and should lay claim to the Lost Generation’s legacy. “Ernest Hemingway says: Each generation of Americans has to Re-Discover Europe…Why? Because you’ll see your own country’s destiny more clearly if you spend your next vacation abroad.”⁵⁰ The advertisement expands the range of what constitutes Hemingway’s influence to a cluster of topics: the glory of the “early days,” transnational travel, and the place of the United States in the world. Each of these concerns formerly marked Hemingway as exceptional in some way, but now they are normalized as the general experience of postwar American culture. Everyone now feels like an outsider or at least wants to have the option of self-exile—and cheap intercontinental transportation has made that dream possible. Both the Grand Tour and Caribbean adventure have descended from the rarified air of Boston Brahmins and bohemian writers and settled in the middle of an audience of popular magazines. It is now a national duty to take part in “your own country’s destiny” by spending time abroad: the middle class now models itself on the style of modernism.

What is intriguing about the reduction of Hemingway’s fiction to memoir and of Hemingway the novelist into Hemingway the celebrity is that there is something compellingly literary about its articulation in the pages of big magazines. Consider several instances of just how pervasive—but also vague—discussions of Hemingway’s style were in describing a wider cultural experience in the 1950s. And not just in advertisements but in Hemingway’s own comments. In a 1954 Time article he exhorted the importance of style:

Style as the “right way” to do something—anything, it seems—but also “simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done.” “Hemingway’s credo,” as the article calls it, applies equally to his own actions and those of the characters in his texts. The result is that Hemingway transforms into a literary character himself. As one reviewer put it, “From Paris bistros to Chicago saloons, he is known as a character—not the sallow, writing type with an indoor soul” but the kind of person other people want to imitate.⁵² In one of the first extended biographical treatments of Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley marvels at how anyone who spends any time around him “starts speaking in Hemingway’s style” and that his greatest contribution is that he “gave the young people attitudes to strike and patterns of conduct to follow.”⁵³ In all of this, literary style expands outside of its original print form—a magazine story or a book—and into other cultural registers: advertisements, of course, but also more generally an ethos, a way of carrying oneself. This slow slide of Hemingway’s style off the page offers a different path to popularity than the antiliterary decline narrative so often presented, as it isn’t the absence of the literary but instead its spread into all aspects of his “influence.” Hemingway is a character born out of his fiction, and the affectless monotone that characterizes Hemingway’s fiction—but not his journalism and nonfiction writing—becomes a widely circulating cultural style.

As the peculiarities of Hemingway’s prose begin to move out of his novels and into any number of other types of communication that no longer depend upon an actual Hemingway text, it can begin to feel like his literary style is at once everywhere and nowhere. Compare Cowley’s vision of total cultural saturation with his later description of Hemingway’s place in the canon, “Mr. Papa and the Parricides” (1967). The essay, first published in Esquire, offers something like a literature review of popular treatments of Hemingway, and it fears that no one actually reads the modernists, especially Hemingway, anymore. It tracks a gradual slimming down of what should be considered the author’s greatest hits. Quoting passages from Leslie Fiedler, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Dwight Macdonald, John Thompson, and Vance Bourjaily, Cowley finds that since Hemingway’s death the critical consensus keeps pushing more and more of his work out of circulation every year. First, Cowley says, Hemingway was admired for everything up to For Whom the Bell Tolls, then it was everything up to The Green Hills of Africa, then it was The Sun Also Rises and all of the short stories, then the novels are chopped all together. “The fact is Hemingway is a short-story writer and not a novelist,” he quotes from Dwight Macdonald. “In a novel he gets lost, wandering aimlessly in a circle as lost people are said to do, and the alive parts are really short stories.”54 Cowley realized just how dire the situation had become when he, along with a number of other critics, began putting together an anthology of American literature. As the group began discussing which Hemingway to include, Cowley relays a fellow anthologizer’s argument that they should “omit any reference to his novels” at all, focusing just on his stories. Over the course of the conversation, the group narrows even that criteria, referencing only “Hemingway’s two or three best stories.” Then they winnow the ever-shrinking list down to a single example, “Big Two-Hearted River,” which encapsulates all of Hemingway’s strongest features. Cowley, flummoxed, follows this out to its logical conclusion: “The next step would be to chip that story down to a single paragraph, presented by critics as the only true essence of his work, from which they could infer the rest of it much in the fashion that paleontologists reconstruct the skeleton of an extinct animal from a single bone” (25). “Does nothing survive of the work but a few short stories? Why not toss them out with the novels and finally reduce the Hemingway canon to a blank page?” he concludes (32). Ever mindful of his literary generation’s legacy, he predicts all of modernism being put out to pasture. “Of course,” he reasons, “the ultimate goal of the operation is the whole age group of which Hemingway was a member”: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Wolfe are all named as examples. Without buying into the Freudian, or maybe more accurately, Bloomian overtones of Cowley’s grand theory of generational slaughter—he calls it “the ritual murder of the literary fathers”—this article still indexes a feeling in the 1960s that something has irrevocably changed in Hemingway’s and modernism’s literary standings. Within ten years of Old Man in Life and Hemingway’s Nobel, and less than fifteen years after Cowley himself wrote that the entire nation was enraptured with “the Hemingway style,” it can now feel like the actual fiction that evidences that style is disappearing.

What we are faced with, then, if we can keep this double picture of Hemingway Everywhere and Hemingway Nowhere in mind, is a situation in which modernism as a cultural signifier is so widely recognized that it is almost too obvious, and no one feels the need actually to read it. Rather than being cordoned off on the periphery of both literary and popular cultures, traveling through coterie circles in little magazines, modernism is now common, available to anyone with twenty cents and access to a newsstand. Hemingway seems to have anticipated this very moment of critical winnowing, though not with quite the same emphasis. In a letter from 1933, Hemingway explained that during his lifetime a writer is judged by the sum total and average of his work but that after he died only the best mattered.⁵⁵ In fact, the simultaneous outward expansion of the reading public’s knowledge of modernism and disappearance of actual texts can look inevitable from the point of view of Hemingway’s own philosophy of composition. It is exactly how he describes the logic of the “iceberg theory” when he explains how he wrote The Old Man and the Sea:

[The novel] could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children etc. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard….

I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.56

He describes a gradual shuttling of what one “knows” about the subject from the inside to the outside of the text, or from the surface of the page to below it, “the underwater part.” Once he has seen or experienced something, it no longer has a place in the novel. Because both the reader and writer know what has been “done excellently and well by other writers,” his own writing is limited to that which has not been accomplished or known before. Of course, he intends for these limitations to apply to the writer, who “should know too much”⁵⁷ about the subject so that the inevitable excisions do not leave any holes. But Hemingway intended his simple and straight style to stand up to multiple readings; he claims to have read Old Man “over 200 times, and everytime it does something to me.”⁵⁸ So we also might imagine a hypothetical version of the iceberg theory that applies not just to the writer but to the reader, too—not just to literary production but also to reception. As the story begins “conveying experience to the reader,” as it becomes “a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened,” the text’s shuttling of “the knowledge” it contains inevitably changes the text itself. As more of the narrative innovations contained in the story move from “unknown” to “known,” the content would be continuously emptied out.

The possibility of an all-encompassing readerly knowledge that would disperse the particulars of a text into the cultural “sub-surface” is hinted at not just in how Old Man travels outside of its own pages but also in the various identifications made in the novel between Santiago and his environment. Santiago is constantly trying, and failing to find, symbols that can make sense of what is happening below the surface of the world he inhabits. Throughout the story he is characterized by his knowledge of the sea and his acclimation to its patterns, but he repeatedly encounters phenomena that he doesn’t know how to interpret. He is confused by the general movement of fish around his boat: “They are working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast and to the north-east. Can that be the time of day? Or is it some sign of weather that I do not know?” As the old man fishes—“that which I was born for,” he says—he contemplates the same problems of surface and depth that readers of the story also face: how to make sense of what is going on below from the signs that are visible above the water. And the problem seems to be, both for the fisherman and the reader, that it’s hard to tell where the surface gives way to something else. Just below his description of “everything that shows on the surface,” he makes it clear that “surface” is a tricky thing to define: “The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.”59 The light is “in” the water, not “on” it; the “great deep prisms” seem to be both inside and on top of the ocean; his fishing lines, which also correspond to the repeated references to the lines on his face, distend from the boat through the surface to “a mile deep.” This single passage, which is not remarkable or particularly different from the rest of the novel, pushes against the idea that there is a knowable surface that can be separated out from beneath and above. The exposed part of the iceberg, the part that we don’t know yet, constantly keeps moving.

Not only this, but the surfaces described in the text seem endlessly to feed back into their surroundings, so that the difference between above, on, in, or below becomes less and less familiar. In other sections of the novel, this takes on an added interpretive weight because everything is described as exactly like everything else. The old man is repeatedly compared to the sea, to the fish, to the sharks, to an older version of the young boy, to the sky, and, like the lines that both cross his face and travel down into the water, to the tools of his trade. The “Hemingway style” of Old Man is one he says he “had been working for all [his] life,”⁶⁰ and what that seems to entail is a representational world so flat and homogenous that characters, objects, and landscape all dissolve into one another. In this way, it perfectly recreates what had been happening to his reputation since the 1930s. Old Man may be a booklike material artifact in the middle of Life, a totem to literary permanence in the center of mass print culture, but the “Hemingway influence” has also spread out over the cultural landscape, effacing the distinctions that previously marked Hemingway as unique.

If this seems a strange proposition, consider how Hemingway treats a similar kind of literary departicularization in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which first appeared in Esquire in 1936. The narrator, a mildly successful writer who nevertheless sees himself as a failure, laments “all the stories that he meant to write” but never had the chance. The story cuts between his present situation, where he slowly succumbs to gangrene on an African safari, and italicized memories of his youth in bohemian Paris, witnessing the Greco-Turkish War, and visiting Constantinople. These are the previously untold stories that he should have devoted himself to, and he imagines how he would write it all down: “There wasn’t time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.”61 The well-lived life reworked as a well-written story can and should be reduced to a couple sentences, according to Harry. And even though Hemingway devotes one of his longest pieces of magazine fiction to Harry’s lyrical remembrances and regrets—which could sound a lot like Hemingway’s own: “he had never written of Paris!” Harry thinks to himself—in the story world none of it actually gets recorded. His wife cannot take dictation, so his one great paragraph dies with him. That the paragraph remains unknown is a minor tragedy, but if placed in the context of the iceberg theory, then to record it would have been redundant anyway: Harry already knew it, so he didn’t need to write it down. In this way, the paragraph’s lack of transcription and circulation is also presented, allegorically, as a moral triumph, as the one piece of artistry that cannot become common knowledge. As Harry’s disembodied consciousness looks down at its dying body on the mountain, the blinding white snow at the top of Kilimanjaro, like the sheet of paper that Harry left storyless, remains pure and chaste. More than that, the totalizing view from the top of the mountain, where Harry can place his tragedy in perspective, is only available in his hallucination after he stops worrying about writing it down and fades completely out of existence. Even that single, telescoped paragraph proves too much information to share.

The problem with the reader-centered version of the iceberg theory, in which the known part of a story would eventually recede into the unseen portions of the iceberg, is that the published story, in its very status as a published story, ossifies and cannot change in the same way as Harry’s projected writing or Hemingway’s twenty-year run-up to Old Man. But Hemingway does come close to projecting a situation in which it could. This happens during a little-known legal skirmish with Esquire in 1958. The fight entailed three stories that Hemingway published in Esquire in the 1930s, all of which were set during the Spanish Civil War and thematically linked via references to Chicote’s Café. Arnold Gingrich was compiling an anthology of Esquire pieces, to be called The Armchair Esquire (1958), and, as he had reprint rights for the stories, he planned to include them in the anthology. Hemingway objected to this reprinting, and the briefing that Hemingway’s lawyer submitted as part of his injunction makes it clear that the inside of literary texts, under certain pressures, are malleable. “The passage of time can affect the writings of authors either favorably or unfavorably,” the document asserts. Hemingway’s politics in the 1930s are the primary issue; the three stories are quite openly pro-Loyalist, which he feels makes for less-than-convincing literature outside of their original time period. However, he also attributes their ephemerality to their medium of publication. “Sometimes I correct a story forty or fifty times,” he explains. “I don’t consider something published unless it is in a book…. When I looked over those Esquire stories I told myself, ‘I can write better than that!’ ”62 What “better” means is condensation. Only “The Butterfly and the Tank” survives the transition from Esquire the magazine to The Armchair Esquire book, an excision that puts Hemingway in the same camp as those that Cowley despises for pruning his corpus of the works that are not absolutely necessary.

Gingrich attributes the stylistic conformity of midcentury magazines to “success patterns,” but something else was “killing off the hindmost” of periodicals, too. In 1948, when T. S. Eliot won the Nobel, less than 1 percent of American households owned televisions. When Hemingway wins in 1954, over 50 percent do, and by 1958, when The Armchair Esquire is published, that number is over 80 percent. Print had always competed with other media, especially film and radio. And Time Inc.’s newsreel business, as well as the use of the telegraph to dispatch quickly stories from the field to the editorial office, show that these other media could supplement just as much as impede upon print’s efficacy in reaching an audience. However, publishers, writers, and cultural critics see television as a completely different beast. Unlike film, it moved into people’s houses, occupying the domestic space that books and magazines formally dominated. Radios could live in the home, too, but they lacked the visual possibilities of print. Television was capable of showing moving pictures and, maybe worst of all, it had the potential always to be on. Though it would be decades until local stations actually developed round-the-clock programming, the low hum of electronic communication had no maximum page count and no monthly, weekly, or even daily lag between event and coverage. By the mid-1960s, Look, Holiday, and many other popular magazines closed up shop; even Life would fall in 1973.

The rise of television changes the relationship between modernist writers and American mass-market magazines, particularly the place of big magazines at the center of American mass culture.65 Yet there is a more subtle change that happens, too, as postwar novelists deeply indebted to modernist experimentation come under the purview of the newly shrunken magazines. For example, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in the same year that Old Man won the Pulitzer Prize, showed up in Life alongside Old Man, but it was represented in a much different style. The August 25 issue of Life contained an advertisement for Hemingway’s novel, which would appear in the next issue, but it displayed far more prominently a photo essay inspired by Ellison’s novel by Gordon Parks, Life’s first African American photographer, titled “The Man Becomes Invisible.” Parks’ photo essay gives the reader Ellison’s Invisible Man “translated into picture,” a project resembling that of Capa’s treatment of For Whom the Bell Tolls.⁶⁶ But the visual enactment of that translation is far more arresting: a man emerging from a sewer cover, his face submerged below the pavement; an extreme closeup of an eye floating in a mason jar, with the background blurred in harsh chiaroscuro; a man in shirtsleeves sitting in a chair between two turntables, surrounded by light bulbs that resemble a circuit board, with the New York skyline superimposed above it. Parks’s photographs imitate the disjointed plot of Invisible Man, much like Capa’s photographs took for granted the primacy of Hemingway’s words. But unlike Capa’s clearly photographed faces, framed like Hollywood headshots, or even Alfred Eisenstadt’s photo of Hemingway for Old Man, Parks either obstructs or blurs the faces in his photographs, undermining Life’s visual style and its mission of clearly representing the world. Parks would also contribute the photos for Hemingway’s “Paris Sketches” in 1964, creating another link, however tentative, between Ellison’s and Hemingway’s visual presentation in the magazines. The presence of Ellison’s first novel in the pages of Life alongside one of Hemingway’s last, and the African American photographer Gordon Parks as a mediator between the two, can help attune us to the overlap between an increasingly normalized modernism of the 1920s and the invigorating literary experiments that it influenced but that also will supersede it. While the title of Park’s photo essay, “A Man Becomes Invisible,” works in a number of ways, perhaps the most subtle, and certainly the farthest afield of the actual content of his remarkable photographs, is the disappearing Hemingway in the back pages of this issue.