Some Thoughts on Hemingway & Friendship

Few literary friendships have ever been entered into with such ravenous appetite, or exited with such gleeful brutality, as those of Ernest Hemingway, a man who acquired companions the way other people acquire tapeworms — by ingesting whatever was nourishing and then expelling the desiccated remainder with a grimace of relief. To the casual reader he is the great bard of male fellowship, the laureate of fishing buddies and trench brothers and comrades sharing a wineskin beneath the Spanish sun; yet behind this hairy-chested pageant of loyalty stood a man who treated actual living friends as a butcher treats livestock, fattening them on his attention before the inevitable visit to the abattoir. The famous Hemingway code — grace under pressure, the dignity of the wounded — somehow never extended to the people who had been foolish enough to lend him a sofa, a contact, or a kind word.

Consider the grisly procession. Sherwood Anderson, who all but carried the young oaf to Paris and pressed him warm into Gertrude Stein’s salon, was repaid with The Torrents of Spring, a parody so spitefully calibrated that its real purpose was to detonate Hemingway’s publishing contract while urinating on his benefactor in passing — two birds, one stream. Stein herself, having spent years patiently teaching him that prose could have rhythm, was later embalmed in the venomous formaldehyde of his memoirs as a deluded old woman. And poor Scott Fitzgerald, who edited The Sun Also Rises into something resembling a novel, received as his thank-you note an immortal anecdote about the alleged dimensions of his genitals, inspected in a restaurant lavatory and broadcast to posterity with the tender solicitude of a man reviewing a disappointing sausage. To be loved by Hemingway, one rapidly grasped, was merely to be issued a number in the queue for the knife.

What festered beneath all this, one suspects, was the squalid arithmetic of a man who could not bear to owe anybody anything, and who therefore had to destroy each creditor before the bill came due — a perpetual settling of accounts conducted with the moral sophistication of a saloon brawl. Like the bullfighter he so worshipped, he required an opponent to feel alive, and since genuine enemies are scarce and friends so conveniently to hand, he simply promoted the latter into the former and charged the ring. The pity of it is that the loneliness this engineered was entirely his own handiwork, a self-inflicted wound dressed up as stoic solitude, so that by the end the great connoisseur of comradeship sat in Ketchum surrounded by the ghosts of everyone he had gaffed, photographed, and left to rot on the dock — and found, too late, that the score he had spent a lifetime keeping had been kept, all along, against himself.