OPINION:HEMINGWAY COULD be hard on women. And women could be hard on Hemingway.
I have always been a Fitzgerald girl. What could be more gorgeous than The Great Gatsby? If you perused Hemingway in college in the first flush of feminism, he seemed like a relic. As F Scott Fitzgerald noted, Hemingway needed a new wife for every big book. And even when he was cheating on a wife with her friend, he painted himself as a victim of predatory and trusting women.
Writing in A Moveable Feastabout dumping his older first wife, Hadley, for his older second wife, Pauline, he whinged that "the oldest trick" is "that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband". But Hemingway is enjoying a renaissance this year, the 50th anniversary of his suicide by shotgun, so it is time to give that most self-consciously masculine American writer another look.
Papa is popping. There's a new volume of his lusty letters. He was the funniest character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. A staging of The Sun Also Risesis playing off-Broadway. The Paris Wife,a novel about Hadley Hemingway by Paula McLain, was a bestseller. And the bittersweet biography of Hadley by my friend Gioia Diliberto, which inspired McLain, has just been reissued under the title Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife. Paul Hendrickson has written a captivating book called Hemingway's Boat, about Ernest's 27-year love affair with Pilar, his mahogany cabin cruiser that outlasted three of his wives "and all his ruin." Papa played Fats Waller records on a scratchy phonograph on the boat, where he "dominated" marlins, propositioned women, hunted German subs, saved guests from shark attacks and drank daiquiris, trying not to fall off the flying bridge.
“He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat,” Hendrickson writes.
Diliberto recalled that when her Hadley bio was first published in 1992, she was surprised to find her book readings filled with men “who looked like stage-three Hemingways with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies. They all wanted to be Hemingway, to live his outdoorsy, action-packed life.
"No woman wants to be a Hemingway heroine who totally submerges her identity to her lover. As Catherine Barkley said in A Farewell To Arms, 'I want you so much I want to be you too'. We'd much rather be dressed in floaty silk, sipping Champagne on Jay Gatsby's terrace."
But Diliberto says women are wrong to think Hemingway has nothing to offer them. Especially now that women are rising and men are declining, as the Atlantic has noted in two cover stories, women can feel secure enough to “relax and enjoy him,” as Diliberto puts it.
“Much of Hemingway’s work, particularly the stories he wrote during his marriage to Hadley,” she said, “brilliantly chart the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women”. Hendrickson notes that after Hemingway’s death, “it was very fashionable to put him down for his misogyny. But now scholars, ironically including great female scholars, have burrowed down into him and found this sly and deceptive sensitivity toward women. He understood there was something about himself so sensitive, a tuning-fork tremulousness, that it was almost as though it shamed him, and he put on the he-man act.” That “Kansas City-boy brutality,” as Gertrude Stein called it, was an authentic part of him.
But Hendrickson believes it was also a mask covering up “a tortured sexual ambiguity”. The loathed mother, Grace, who raised her little boy for a few years as his older sister’s “twin”, dressing him in frilly bonnets, frocks and Mary Janes, imbued him with sexual confusion.
Following up on interviews with the author's sons that he did 24 years ago for the Washington Post, Hendrickson explores the bond between Hemingway and his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who was a manic depressive, transsexual and heterosexual and who sometimes called himself Gloria Hemingway. He married four times, had eight children and died in the women's annex of a Miami jail cell after being picked up for exposing himself.
“I believe that the son was acting out in some ways the tortured sexual ambiguities that the father felt,” Hendrickson said, suggesting that it created a deep, dark bond between them.
In his posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway writes about a beautiful, unstable woman on her honeymoon in France who keeps cropping her hair shorter, sleeps with a woman and does "devil" things in bed to her writer husband, pretending she's the man and he's the woman.
Hendrickson says that women should give Hemingway a chance: "You just have to fight past the misperceptions and stereotypes." – ( New York Times)
