On The Altar of the Goddess: Ernest Hemingway and the Cult of the "Celebrity Artist"

By Kelley Dupuis

In 1970, when Ernest Hemingway had been in his grave for nine years, Norman Mailer published Of A Fire On The Moon, a long series of baroque ruminations centering upon the July, 1969 mission of Apollo 11, the space flight in which men set foot for the first time on the moon.

What does this have to do with Hemingway, who had committed suicide just a few months after Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard had become the first men to venture into space?

Well, Mailer thought Hemingway germane enough to the discussion of moon missions to open his book with the following sentence: "Norman, born sign of Aquarius, had been in Mexico when the news came about Hemingway." The chapter that begins with this sentence bears an epigram from one of Hemingway's ghastly poems: "Now he sleeps with that old whore death...Do thee take this old whore death for thy lawful wedded wife?" And Mailer proceeds to explain why he chose to open a discussion of one of technology's most spectacular triumphs with a reminiscence about Hemingway's death: "Now the greatest living romantic was dead. Dread was loose. The giant had not paid his dues, and something awful was in the air. Technology would fill the pause. Into the silences static would enter..."

You would have to go back to Tolstoy to find a writer who towered over his age the way Hemingway towered over his. But Hemingway's stature was of a different nature than Tolstoy's, necessarily, because it was a phenomenon that took place in a wholly different context-an American one. In the Russian tradition, writers whose celebrity grows to a certain degree tend to take on the mantle of the sage. Certainly Tolstoy did this, and more recently, Solzhenitsyn has tried to. But America is not a country that generally takes to sages. America takes to successes. Become successful enough at something in America and you might become a celebrity, especially if there are large sums of money involved.

Before the invention of cinema, American celebrities tended to be statesmen, captains of industry or characters who had distinguished themselves in some way directly connected with public life-Jane Addams setting up Hull House, Carrie Nation and her crusade against the saloons. The late 19th century in America did have its literary celebrities, but they tended to be imports, like Oscar Wilde, or exports, like Henry James. Huckleberry Finn aside, (a book that Hemingway loved, by the way) Mark Twain's fame rested chiefly on his being a funny guy.

But the rise of the movie industry and its consolidation in Hollywood during the years after World War I created a new breed of celebrity in America. Celebrity was no longer chiefly the province of the mighty and the wealthy-they had to move over now and make room for the beautiful and the glamorous.

I have noted elsewhere in discussing Hemingway that one of the most remarkable things about his remarkable life was his timing. It was as flawless as that of the best vaudeville comedian. Hemingway always somehow managed to be right where he had to be. For example he was in Chicago in 1921 at just the right time to meet Sherwood Anderson, who dissuaded him from his plans to return to Italy, where he had served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and talked him instead, as an aspiring young writer, into going to Paris, where the author of Winesburg, Ohio used his influence to get Hemingway introduced to both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. It's not often that an aspiring writer gets a string of "good breaks" like that, but for Hemingway this was a "natural."

And so it could be observed (and argued endlessly whether this was a good thing for Hemingway or a bad one) that his career as a writer was "taking off" at the very moment when America was in the midst of the last long party it would enjoy until the economic boom of the post-Reagan era: the fabled "Jazz age," as Hemingway's on-again, off-again friend Scott Fitzgerald named it, that dizzy decade the 1920s. As the twenties progressed, Hollywood was remaking and redefining Americans' very notion of celebrity in an endless cavalcade of the glamorous and the more glamorous: Rudolf Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Clara Bow, Charlie Chaplin...the list goes on and on.

Between the two of them, Hemingway and Fitzgerald did much to capture the tone and spirit of that era. The Great Gatsby could be part of a social study of the 1920s, and so could The Sun Also Rises. In fact I would recommend that any historian or sociologist preparing to write about that decade in America be sure and read these two novels. But Hemingway managed to transcend the era in a way that Fitzgerald didn't. Fitzgerald became identified in the public mind with the age that he had given a name to, and when it was over, Fitzgerald's career faded with the memory of it and his reputation would not revive until his works underwent a critical re-evaluation following his death in 1940.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Hemingway transcended the age in a way Fitzgerald would not be perceived as having done until after he was dead is because, while Fitzgerald obviously mirrored the era in his writings, Hemingway mirrored an attitude toward it. He created a persona, the "Hemingway hero," that tight-lipped, tough-talking stoic guy who struck such a resounding chord with the generation of males that was coming of age between the two world wars. Young men in America now had a choice: they could ape their favorite Hollywood movie star, or they could imitate a Hemingway character. Many did-the wisecracking dialogue of The Sun Also Rises became a generation's way of talking to itself, and the romantic tragedy of A Farewell to Arms reflected that same generation's more sentimental side.

Add to this what his public knew about Hemingway the man-the sojourns in Europe; the passion for marlin fishing in the Florida keys and for bullfights in Spain; following his first safari in 1934, the passion for hunting "big game" in Africa...is it any wonder that in this age of "stars," Hemingway managed to become one?

He was in fact the first "creative-artist-as-star" in America. I say "creative" artist to distinguish his celebrity from that of "performing artists," a tradition that would include all those Hollywood celebrities, not to mention musical celebrities like Caruso and dozens of others. Hemingway was the first writer (discounting Fitzgerald, who "burned out") to carve out a place for himself in the gossip columns and the glossy magazines. There would be many creative artists after him-Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer himself-who would achieve the kind of celebrity that today we associate with People magazine, but it really did start with Hemingway, and the phenomenon has much to say about Hemingway's fate, both in the way his life turned out and in the way he came to dominate his age such that Mailer wanted to "tip his hat" to the great man before proceeding to talk about voyaging to the moon.

The difference between a major artist and a minor one is that a major artist "develops." Judged by that standard, Yeats would be considered a major artist because his late poetry is nothing like his early work. A.E. Housman, on the other hand, would have to be adjudged a "minor artist" according to that standard, because once he had down the "voice" he wanted to use, he stuck with it and never went any further. Quite often, part and parcel of that process of development is "the reinvention of the self." Yeats famously played with different masks. In our own time Bob Dylan-often to his audience's chagrin-has chosen to "reinvent" himself several times.

Hemingway went through discernable stages in his life as man and artist. Some time around the middle of the 1970's I remember watching a television drama called The Hemingway Play, in which four characters representing Hemingway at difference stages of his life met and interacted with each other. The outcome, as you might imagine, was violent, poignant and pitiful.

The fact is, "reinventing" yourself can be a two-edged sword. In Hemingway's case, the reinventing took the form, whether intentionally or not, of creating a Doppelgaenger version of himself, one which subsumed the "real" Ernest Hemingway as his ever upward-ratcheting celebrity kept raising the stakes on him. Hemingway repeatedly insisted that his fictions were fictions, and that they shouldn't be construed as anything other than that. But increasingly as time went on, particularly after World War II, when Hemingway's service as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine had given him the opportunity to inflate his legend to ever-more gargantuan proportions against the backdrop of that conflict, Hemingway and the media played each other like a couple of violins. Had he been content to remain simply a writer-or perhaps "allowed" would be a more charitable word-things might have turned out differently, both with his life and with his art. Who knows? But he was a star, and as a star he had an obligation to perform. The media were interested in the Doppelgaenger Hemingway-they assumed, a few dissenting voices notwithstanding, that he was the "real" Hemingway. Hemingway's ego was such that it would have been difficult if not impossible for him to admit that the "press release" version of himself, the barrel-chested he-man sipping a Dacquiri with one hand while landing a giant marlin with the other, had taken over center stage and sent the writer to his room.

Hemingway was a natural-born performer. It was part of his personal charm and a not-insignificant factor in what made him a writer. The flair for storytelling in a manner all the more vivid for its understatement had a counterpart in a flair for self-dramatization, whether it took the form of dressing up in a soldier's uniform to have his picture taken for the folks back home in 1918 or grinning ear-to-ear for the cameras after resurfacing from an African safari in 1953 when, after two consecutive plane crashes in Kenya, the press had mistakenly reported him dead. The second of these two plane crashes had in fact very nearly killed him, and what happened afterwards was a particularly grotesque example of the Doppelgaenger Hemingway in the spotlight. Hemingway, suffering from injuries to his liver, spleen, kidney and head, nevertheless met with reporters. An apocryphal version of that press conference got out in which Hemingway had reportedly showed up waving a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin and boasting that his luck was running good. The story reached the ears of Ogden Nash, who wrote a song about it which was subsequently recorded by Jose Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney: "A bunch of bananas and a bottle of jeen/Keeps the hunger out and the happiness een/A bunch of bananas and a bottle of jeen/My luck she is running very good."

His luck was in fact running out, even though he would win the Nobel Prize a few months later for "The Old Man and the Sea." But the world at large didn't know or, I daresay, even think much about how badly things were turning in the true life of its most celebrated author. Repeated head injuries combined with years of very heavy drinking had taken their toll, and Hemingway's health problems, both physical and mental, would double and redouble until the end finally came in 1961. Suicide ran in Hemingway's family, and the fear that he might commit suicide, as his father had, and as his brother and one of his granddaughters subsequently would, had haunted Hemingway for most of his life. But of course the media-generated version of Hemingway included nothing of this. When Hemingway did finally succeed in bringing about his own demise, many people saw the headline and couldn't believe their eyes. The larger-than-life novelist, the man who had done just about everything in the world you could do, the big-game hunter, bullfight-aficionado, fisherman, connoisseur of fine food and wine, the man who had been at Normandy on D-Day and who had also appeared in countless newspapers and magazines rubbing elbows with people like Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich, a man who, to all appearances, had every reason to go on living, had killed himself?

All the questions were asked. And for a long time, all of the answers were inadequate. Many of those questions would be asked again, just over a year later, when another of America's favorite celebrities decided to go for "the big out." In the nearly 40 years since Hemingway's death, writers, scholars and journalists have been going over the evidence, reconstructing their various versions of what went wrong. But that other celebrity's death is still shrouded in mystery, still being argued. Even Norman Mailer would find the story of Marilyn Monroe intriguing enough to write a book about her.

Kelley Dupuis June 2000

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

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