{"id":177,"date":"2014-09-16T05:58:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T12:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hollywood-nobody.com\/blog\/?p=177"},"modified":"2014-09-30T22:55:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T05:55:50","slug":"the-importance-of-being-ernest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hollywood-nobody.com\/blog\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the age of seventeen, I\u2014not unlike the patients in the brilliant Robin Williams\/Robert De Niro film\u2014experienced an awakening.\u00a0 It was an awakening to the wonders of literary fiction, an awakening brought about by my reading of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s A Farewell To Arms<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I read it, and then I read about<\/em> it\u2026in a book by someone named Carlos Baker, a book called Hemingway:\u00a0 The Writer as Artist.<\/em>\u00a0 This led to more Hemingway, to Steinbeck, to Fitzgerald, to Faulkner, and eventually to graduate work at Princeton University, where one of my teachers was none other than\u2026Carlos Baker!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Charlie Scribner, one of Baker\u2019s classmates when he himself had been a student at Princeton, had recently invited Carlos to write the official biography of Hemingway, and Carlos, in his turn, had invited me and three or four other graduate students to join him in his researches\u2014in a course called \u201cHemingway Biography.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t believe my great good luck.\u00a0 First hand contact with the raw materials of the life of America\u2019s great sportsman\/adventurer\/writer\u2014the man, perhaps more than any other, I\u2019d liked to have been!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It began well.\u00a0 Carlos handed each of us one of the scrapbooks that Ernest\u2019s mother Grace Hemingway had prepared to chronicle the early life of her son\u2014photos, letters, souvenirs.\u00a0 Our assignment?\u00a0 To write a chapter of the biography based upon the materials preserved in each scrapbook.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was beyond excited\u2026and nervous as could be.\u00a0 I told no one, not my closest friend, that I had in my possession one of these priceless artifacts\u2014in my mind, as precious as the Dead Sea Scrolls.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was the first of many assignments and led to extensive work with letters to and from Hemingway, transcribed interviews, and much, much more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was also the beginning of the end of my infatuation with the man and the myth he had created about himself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I learned that he was dreadful, destructive, a devil of a human being.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first evidence turned up in a letter he\u2019d written to a friend named Ernest Walsh.\u00a0 Walsh was the editor one of those little magazines that flourished in Paris in the twenties and had been, as I recall, the first to publish anything Hemingway had written.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In other words, he\u2019d made the mistake of trying to help Hemingway, and Hemingway was determined to punish him for it.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 To show that he, hard-boiled, hairy-chested Ernest Hemingway had made it on his own.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Walsh was dying of tuberculosis and knew it.\u00a0 Hemingway knew it too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The letter in question begins this way:\u00a0 \u201cDear Ernest\u2026Isn\u2019t life wonderful?\u00a0 I want to live to be a hundred, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This became the pattern of the writer\u2019s life.\u00a0 He would go after anyone who helped him, anyone who befriended him, anyone whose literary reputation threatened to rival his own.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There was, of course, Scott Fitzgerald, who helped him edit The Sun Also Rises<\/em> into the ground-breaking work it became, who recommended him to his own editor Max Perkins and thereby secured him a deal with Scribners, the deal that led to his meteoric career.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

His public attacks on Fitzgerald began in the magazine version of \u201cThe Snows of Kilimanjaro,\u201d where the dying writer\/protagonist is meditating on the rich:\u00a0 \u201cHe remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, \u2018The rich are different from you and me.\u2019\u00a0 And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money.\u00a0 But that was not humorous to Scott.\u00a0 He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren\u2019t it wrecked him just as much as any other things that wrecked him.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hemingway continued his attack on his former friend long after Fitzgerald\u2019s death, in A Moveable Feast<\/em>, his memoir of his days in Paris.\u00a0 The chapter in question, \u201cA Matter of Measurements,\u201d purports to be a account of Fitzgerald\u2019s sexual anxieties.\u00a0 If true, it is beneath contempt\u2014a shocking, inexcusable betrayal of a confidence.\u00a0 If false, it is nothing short of libelous.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And so it went.\u00a0 John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Gertrude Stein, and many, many others.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

His destructive behavior was not, however, directed solely at other writers.\u00a0 He was non-discriminatory.\u00a0 In fact, he saved many of his best shots for members of his own family, inviting a teenaged prostitute whose services he enjoyed to meet his fourth wife Mary at the Finca in Cuba, bringing his African mistress into the tent he shared with Mary during one of his safaris to the then Dark Continent, or telling the youngest and most troubled of his three sons that the boy was responsible for the death of his own mother.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Hemingway\u2019s best work, the most important human value is emotional discipline\u2014the ability to maintain a tight, if tiny, island of order in the midst of the meaningless chaos of life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He called it \u201cgrace under pressure.\u201d\u00a0 But he himself was utterly incapable of it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My point?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Never confuse the art and the artist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For me, it\u2019s been a lesson hard learned, for like Holden Caufield, if a book knocks me out, I wish its author were a terrific friend of mine and that I could call him up on the phone whenever I felt like it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Don\u2019t do it!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

AN AFTERWARD:\u00a0 Some of you may be wondering what this post about a literary figure is doing on a website devoted to movies.\u00a0 My defense?\u00a0 Art of all kinds and artists of every sort share many things in common. \u00a0Observations about literature or painting or music often apply to the other arts as well, especially in the case of film, which is an amalgam of all the arts.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

So\u2026get used to these tangents.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

And be prepared for another diatribe against Hemingway, this one to do with the dialogue for which he is famous, dialogue that has influenced not just subsequent writers of fiction but screenwriters as well.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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