Maureen Dowd of the New York Times recently wrote an interesting article, "A Farewell to Macho," on our shifting viewpoints of Ernest Hemingway. I was instantly drawn in by her article as she quickly identifies herself as "a Fitzgerald girl." I, as my pen name should reveal, am also a Fitzgerald girl. So, I felt a bit of kinship to Dowd, especially as she went on to rhetorically muse, "What could be more gorgeous than 'The Great Gatsby'?" Right?! Her main thesis is that female readers have long viewed Hemingway, in contrast to Fitzgerald, as the man's man of the literary world and therefore possessing little to offer them. She states, however, that Hemingway has experienced something of a revival in popular culture, a revival that could prove successful at sparking his feminist reevaluation. To materialize this supposed revolution, Dowd offers many examples of Hemingway's current presence, my favorite of which being his appearance as "the funniest character in Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris.'" Dowd mentions this portrayal in mere passing; however, I think there is much more to be said about Allen's take on old Ernest.
If Hemingway has in fact been viewed for decades as the ultimate- let's just say it- asshole, utterly unsuited to the tastes of female readers, then what has Midnight in Paris done to this impression? Allen has taken the asshole and made him into such a charming cad. He's slightly misanthropic and brooding, yet jovial and friendly, he drinks too much but never seems to lose control, only harmlessly hinting at the violence that could erupt at any moment. He pursues the beautiful female lead (played by Marion Coutillard, so who can blame him? He'd be an asshole if he didn't) and we see nothing of his wife who, in real life, was at home raising their offspring. All we see is the Hemingway that we'd all want to be friends with and it doesn't hurt that the actor is not only charming and interesting, but pretty sexy. In a word, Allen has made his Hemingway harmless. Harmless and likable. For fans of the iconic director, it is pretty easy to see how Allen has "Woody Allen-ized" Hemingway. He is, essentially, making fun of an individual who most of us have come to see as a serious man; Allen has certainly identified the humor in Hemingway's ruse of off-putting manliness (Dowd has much more to say on this concept) and certainly is familiar with his syntax as his character Hemingway emulates it at every turn. And by making fun of Hemingway, Allen makes him significantly easier to swallow especially for the less-than-completely initiated.
I have been a fan of a few of Hemingway's short stories for a least a couple of years, but before that, I utterly hated him. Many years ago, I ended an arduous on-again off-again relationship with Ernest after reading A Movable Feast. How could I, a lover of all-things Parisian, hate this book? Well, in it, he speaks ill of one of my other aforementioned loves, F. Scott. For those of you who aren’t familiar, in a section titled "A Matter of Measurements," Hemingway details an encounter in which Fitzgerald confides in him that his wife had "said that the way [he] was built [he] could never make any woman happy…" (188). Fitzgerald then tells Hemingway to take a look and let him know "truly." When I first read this novel, and didn't know that it had been published posthumously, I thought, "what kind of a bastard prints something like this?" Hence, my personal affront to the bravado of Ernest Hemingway.
This all had to be reevaluated, however, when I finally read "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." I found that I was more than pleasantly able to stomach Hemingway when he was not present in his novels. [And that's putting my reaction quite lightly- I adore this story and all that it has revealed to me about the genius of Hemingway's style.] I guess I felt about him the way that some feel about Woody Allen- they like his movies, but they just can't stand when he's in them.
As Allen's personality can be somewhat off-putting, Hemingway's can certainly be abrasive and rather Russell "Fightin' Round the World" Crow exasperating, at least, as Dowd contends, for female readers. But, back to my other point about Woody Allen- he has managed to make that macho, misogynistic revealer of other men's shortcomings into someone we actually would want to hang out with. He's taken all of the positive potency he possessed and put it into an appealing and attractive, not abrasive and off-putting, package.
Thanks to Woody, I have returned to Hemingway, not with the image of the man alone with that shotgun and some bitingly revealing words to say about his closest confidants, but rather with one of a man I might find charming were I to happen upon him- or he upon me- in a bar. The Hemingway I thought I knew is not one I cared to chat with. But, the Hemingway I met in Midnight in Paris, coupled with the narrative voice I recalled from "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," was one I wanted to spend more time with, one I wanted to tell me more stories. And it is one I have found as I've continued to read his writing. I am once again tackling A Farewell to Arms. And I'm noticing the effects of Allen's re-imagining. I don't take offense or get overly annoyed when his narrator, Henry, makes rather misogynistic remarks about the relationships between men and women, rather I hear them as utterings of a young callous man, someone very human. They are not comments to be taken, as some women have, as philosophy.
I have been enjoying my time with Ernest, and if you've been shunning him to the dusty corner of your bookshelf for his seeming rudeness and sour demeanor, I encourage you to spend some time with him and see what you find.
Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the inspiration for this tangent at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html?_r=1&ref=ernesthemingway
Until next time,
Leena Fitzgerald
Work Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Bantam, 1964. Print.
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