  I Homing To The Stream :  Ernest Hemingway and Cuba Born and reared in the suburbs of Chicago,  Ernest Hemingway was a product of the American heartland who,  once he got out of it,  never wanted to have much to do with the American heartland again.  Aside from a few of his earliest short stories,
 which in any case are set in upper Michigan rather than suburban Illinois,  Hemingway never published a word about where he came from,  nor did he ever go back for long.  There are as many possible explanations for this as there are biographies of Hemingway.  Some have suggested that Hemingway,  like others of his generation who lived as expatriates in Europe after World War I,
 found the provincialism and narrow- mindedness of middle America stultifying.  Unlike most of his fellow expats,  however,  Hemingway never went home.  After leaving his birthplace of Oak Park,
 Illinois in the fall of 1921 with his new bride,  Elizabeth Hadley Richardson,  Hemingway spent the rest of his life either outside the United States or on the periphery of its life,  in places like the Florida Keys,  the upper plains states,  (
he enjoyed Montana and Wyoming for their hunting)  the Pacific northwest,  specifically Idaho,  where he ended his life in 1961. and Cuba.  Given the enormously complex relationship that Hemingway had with his family,
 particularly with his demanding and overbearing mother,  whom he repeatedly and for years denounced as a " bitch"  to anyone who would listen,  it's possible that Hemingway simply wanted to give the midwest a " wide berth"
 because that was where his mother was until her own death in 1951.  Shortly before Ernest and Hadley were married in September,  1921,  Hadley had said to Ernest,  " The world's a jail and we're gonna break it together.
 They were young- he was 22 on their wedding day;  she was not quite 30- and deeply in love;  in later years,  after later marriages,
 Hemingway would suggest that Hadley was the only woman whom he had ever truly loved.  But,  although he was at heart a romantic,  and conventional enough a midwesterner in his heart to feel that any time he fell in love with a woman,  he ought to marry her,  Hemingway couldn't be monogamous.
 His friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald ( who managed to remain married to the same woman until he died,  even though his wife,  Zelda Sayre,  was mentally unstable,  Fitzgerald himself was an alcoholic and their marriage was a long,
 stormy melodrama)  predicted quite early on that Hemingway was going to require " a new wife for each book,  a remark which turned out to be quite prescient,  and the course of Hemingway's four marriages also took him to Cuba and lodged him there- he ultimately made Cuba the most permanent home he would ever make of any place.
 Hemingway's trek south began in 1927,  when he and Hadley divorced over his affair with wealthy Arkansas socialite and magazine journalist Pauline Pfeiffer,  who promptly became the second Mrs.  Hemingway.  One thing Hemingway would never do with his wives,  until his fourth and last one anyway,
 was to subject the new wife to living in the venue of the old.  Ernest and Hadley's marriage had centered upon Paris,  where he struggled in the early- to- mid 1920s to get his writing career started.  With the end of his first marriage,
 Hemingway's affection for Paris declined temporarily,  and another friend and fellow novelist,  John Dos Passos,  suggested to him that Key West,  Florida might be a good place for him to relocate.  In 1928,
 when Hemingway and Pauline went to live there in a house that her wealthy Uncle Gus had given them as a wedding present,  Key West was a sleepy,  run- down fishing village at the end of the Keys southwest of Miami.  Prohibition was still in effect,  and among Key West's attractions for the notoriously-
bibulous Hemingway may well have been that its very position on the periphery of America made prohibition little more than a word there.  Smuggled liquor from Cuba was easy to get,  and the island had plenty of its own sources of bathtub booze as well.  Key West was popular with the artistic and literary crowd already;  poet Wallace Stevens was among those who spent time there.  Pauline and Ernest set up housekeeping in Key West and Ernest,
 who already had one son from his marriage with Hadley,  soon had two more.  Every tourist who's ever gone to Key West to take pictures of Hemingway's house there knows that Sloppy Joe's Bar was his favorite Key West hangout.  He quickly made friends with its owner,  Joe Russell,  described by Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds as "
a salty,  red- faced bootlegger who was the real thing.  Russell had a boat for fishing,  the “ Anita,
 and he and Hemingway often went out on fishing expeditions in it,  some of which lasted for days.  One such expedition took place in the spring of 1932.  Pauline had given birth to Hemingway's third and final son the previous November.  Hemingway wasn't happy about becoming a father again,  and the birth put further strain on what was already a strained relationship-
Pauline's family's money had been largely responsible for freeing Ernest from the necessity to write journalism for a living,  enabling him to devote himself exclusively to fiction,  and he was not a man to be comfortable with owing anyone anything.  Partly to get away from the strained relationship and partly to get away from the sound of a crying baby,  Hemingway went off with Russell in April of that year on another fishing trip.  They sailed to Havana for what was supposed to be a two-
day stay.  In the end,  they stayed four months.  Hemingway had seen Havana once before,  when he and Pauline had made a stop- off there on their way to Key West from France in 1928.
 But Havana had new attractions for him now,  not the least of which was 22 year- old Jane Mason,  the wife of the head of Pan American Airways in Cuba.  They began an affair as Hemingway took up extended residence at what would be his base in Havana for the next several years,  the Hotel Ambos Mundos.
 In the spring of the following year,  as his second marriage continued to unravel,  Hemingway was in Havana for another extended stay,  and once again Jane Mason was in the picture.  Pauline,  sensing trouble,
 used the excuse of the annual visit of Hemingway's son from his first marriage,  Jack,  ( known as Bumby)  to come over from Key West as she brought the boy to Havana to spend time with his father.  But Hemingway made it plain that he didn't want her around,
 and she soon went back to Key West alone.  Hemingway and Mason talked of getting married,  but it never happened.  Instead,  back in Key West in 1936,  he met Martha Gellhorn,
 a vivacious and attractive blonde and fellow author/ journalist with whom he would soon share a hotel room in Madrid while they were both covering the Spanish Civil War as correspondents,  and who would become the third Mrs.  Hemingway in 1940.  Pauline was a devout Catholic who did not take divorce lightly,  but after much wrangling,
 she finally agreed to divorce Ernest so he could marry Martha.  The divorce became final in November,  1940,  and Hemingway and Gellhorn were married that same month.  The house in Key West had been a gift from Pauline's family;  obviously Ernest and Martha weren't going to live there,
 although he remained generally on good terms with Pauline and they did sometimes visit.  The logical place for the newlyweds to settle after their Hawaiian honeymoon was the city that had virtually been Ernest's home away from home for about eight years already:  Havana.  Aside from the fact that he had already established in Havana what's known in the world of bullfighting as a “ querencia” the part of the ring where the bull feels at home—
there were other reasons for Hemingway to like Havana.  During the years of the Grau and Batista regimes that preceded the rule of Fidel Castro,  Havana was something of a playground for the wealthy of America's east coast ( some have called it " America's brothel.  Havana was a good place to have a good time,
 and Hemingway liked a good time.  His years in Key West had already given him a taste for tropical ambience.  Naturally sloppy in his personal habits,  ( Martha Gellhorn casually nicknamed him " Pig"
 he liked a place where he could go around in shorts and loose- fitting shirts all the time.  His outings aboard the “ Anita”  with Joe Russell had given Hemingway a passion for deep- sea fishing,
 and the Gulf Stream,  adjacent to Cuba,  offered the best marlin fishing in the world.  Always fond of blood sports,  Hemingway discovered and became an enthusiastic follower of cockfighting in Havana,  and there was also the less-
bloody,  if for its human participants more dangerous,  sport of Jai Alai,  another amusement of which Hemingway became a devoted aficionado.  Martha had joined Hemingway in Havana the year before they were married,  but she was not about to share a small,
 dirty room at the Hotel Ambos Mundos with him.  Looking in a newspaper,  she found a 15- acre estate about 15 miles from downtown Havana called the " Finca Vigia"  (
Lookout Farm.  The place was badly dilapidated and Hemingway thought it not even worth trying to renovate,  but Martha saw it as a challenge and hired workers at her own expense to get the place into liveable shape.  At first they rented the farm for $ 100 a month,  but in December,
 1940 after they were married,  Hemingway bought the Finca Vigia for $ 18, 500.  It was the first home he had ever owned that hadn't been given to him by someone else,  and he "
settled"  there to the extent that a man as restless as Ernest Hemingway could settle anywhere.  The Finca provided a spacious,  quiet place for him to work.  It had a swimming pool and tennis court,  and Hemingway's myriad cats and dogs wandered freely about the place.
 Soon he was a regular fixture at Havana's Floridita bar,  where he could be seen downing ice- cold dacquiris in his own reserved seat at the end of the bar.  But the Hemingway- Gellhorn marriage was as doomed as his two previous ones.  Indeed,
 Martha had expressed misgivings to a friend before her marriage to Ernest as to how things would work out between them.  Both of Hemingway's first two wives had been older than he was,  she pointed out,  while she was nine years his junior.  Martha was less than enthusiastic about assuming the role of housekeeper,  and Hemingway's mercurial temper,
 often exacerbated by drinking,  increased tensions.  Martha later decried her husband's " ceaseless,  crazy bullying"  of her.
 There is also some evidence,  perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that Martha was the first of Ernest's wives to be younger than he,  that they were sexually incompatible.  Then World War II came along and invaded what was already less than Eden.  Hemingway had already been directly or indirectly involved in four wars:  World War I;
 the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey;  the Spanish Civil War and,  most recently,  the Japanese war in China,  which he and Martha had gone off to cover as correspondents shortly after their marriage.  He was inclined to sit this one out,
 although in 1943 German U- boats were slipping into the Gulf of Mexico to torpedo American and Venezuelan shipping,  and Hemingway saw an opportunity to participate in war without having to stray too far from home.  By now he had his own fishing boat,  the “ Pilar,
 and with the connivance of the American ambassador in Havana,  Spruille Braden,  Hemingway embarked on a slightly- crackpot " U- boat hunting"
 scheme- he had the “ Pilar”  outfitted with machine guns and ammunition,  rounded up a crew and made a number of patrols in the Gulf Stream looking for German subs.  (
They never found one.  Beyond such Huck Finn shenanigans,  Hemingway inclined toward staying home in Cuba as the war in Europe raged.  Martha had no such inclination.  She was an ambitious writer who loved her work,  and was not going to be content with sitting around the Finca Vigia being Mrs.
 Hemingway when the whole world was at war.  She went off to cover the war as a correspondent for Collier's magazine,  and Hemingway was eventually cajoled into doing likewise.  In 1944 he went to London,  his first stop toward becoming Colliers' front- line correspondent after the Normandy invasion,
 at which he was present.  His marriage to Martha was already in trouble,  and the war finished it off— in London he met yet another woman journalist,  Mary Welsh,  who would become the fourth and last Mrs.
 Hemingway.  In 1946 he brought her to the Finca Vigia,  where she became the somewhat- uneasy but increasingly confident mistress of the place.  Mary did,  unlike her predecessor Martha,
 go to great lengths to make the Finca a " home,  although for the footloose Hemingway " home"  seldom meant much more than a base for periods between arrivals and departures.  Mary put in a great deal of work maintaining flower and vegetable gardens on the property and went to great pains with the upkeep of the decaying house while also having to work around her husband's less-
than- fastidious personal habits and coexisting with a menagerie of cats,  dogs and other animals on the property.  Years earlier,  Pauline Pfeiffer had tried to keep Hemingway close by giving him a decent home in Key West;  Mary Welsh in the 1940s and '50s made similar efforts in Cuba for a man now in his fifties and aging quickly,
 with a list of physical and mental ailments that would mount and mount over the years,  making their life together on the island as stormy as the previous Hemingway marriages.  Hemingway would make Cuba his base of operations for the remaining years of his life,  although,  because he craved both audiences and excitement,  he and Mary would often leave their somewhat-
remote tropical outpost for sojourns in the United States,  Europe and Africa.  Then,  in 1959,  Fidel Castro came to power.  For most Americans living in Havana,
 the Communist takeover amounted to a klaxon horn sounding Abandon Ship.  But Hemingway chose to stay on.  He had been fully aware of the corruption and abuses of the previous regimes and,  naive about Communism,  felt he had no reason not to accept Castro as a welcome reformer.  He went so far as to wish Castro "
all luck"  with running the country,  an attitude which didn't do much to endear Hemingway to either the U. S.  government or to the FBI.  In fact,
 FBI director J.  Edgar Hoover had been " keeping an eye"  on Hemingway ever since the sub- hunting adventure of the early forties,  and Hemingway's mounting paranoia in his later years about FBI surveillance was not entirely without basis in fact.
 ( Castro returned Hemingway's compliment,  by the way- since Hemingway's death,  the author has been a much- honored cultural hero in Cuba,
 the government maintaining his house as a museum and even having the “ Pilar”  transported overland to be the museum's chief attraction.  People did sometimes ask Hemingway why he chose to live in Cuba.  Late in 1948 he wrote an article for Holiday magazine in which he talked about his life there,  offering his readers verbal snapshots of cool mornings at the Finca,
 cockfights and pigeon shoots,  but most importantly the incomparable marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream,  which he lovingly called " the Great Blue River.  It was not only in journalism,  but in his often less-
than- successful later fictions that Hemingway's attractions toward this part of the world are apparent.  In his 1937 " proletarian"  novel “ To Have And Have Not”
 Hemingway displayed his affection for the seamy side of Havana life,  and on one level his late novella “ The Old Man And The Sea”  could be read as a lyrical tribute to the Gulf Stream.  His posthumous novel “ Islands In The Stream,
 cobbled together in 1970 from a huge pile of manuscript that he churned out between 1946 and 1950,  while it may be unbearably talky in places,  is in other places a moving tribute to the Caribbean world- and to Cuba.  Hear Hemingway in that novel use his unmatched gift for evoking topography to share with his readers what was,  unquestionably,
 a longstanding love- of- place:  “ He got into the car and told the chauffeur to go up O'Reilly to the Floridita.  Before the car circled the plaza in front of the embassy building and the Ayuntamiento and then turned into O'Reilly he saw the size of the waves in the mouth of the harbor and the heavy rise and fall of the channel buoy.
 In the mouth of the harbor the sea was very wild and confused and clear green water was breaking over the rock at the base of the Morro,  the tops of the seas blowing white in the sun.  It looks wonderful,  he said to himself.  It not only looks wonderful,  it is wonderful.
 II Hemingway and Turgenev:  A Brief Introduction One has to be very careful taking Ernest Hemingway at his word.  Fiction was his metier,  and one of the dictionary definitions of fiction is " something invented or imagined.  The impulse to embellish was powerful in him.
 Hemingway seldom let facts get in the way of a good story,  either on paper or while entertaining a crowd at lunch.  Add mental breakdown,  alcoholism,  repeated head injuries and depression to that tendency,  and you have some of the reasons why “
A Moveable Feast,  Hemingway's memoir of his life in Paris with his first wife during the early 1920s,  is undeniably a wonderful " read,  ( I fell in love with this book,
 and with Hemingway's art,  when I was 16)  but it's also a book that has to be taken not just with any grain of salt,  but with a grain of the kind of salt they use to de- ice freeways.  And not only did Hemingway love to embroider around facts,
 but like many self- educated men,  he wore his erudition on his sleeve.  We sometimes forget that before the end of World War II and the advent of the G. I.  bill,
 a college education was not considered a universal entitlement in America,  nor was it necessarily something that everyone felt they had to have.  Hemingway was offered the chance to go to college- his father had wanted him to attend Oberlin- but he decided he'd rather go out and get educated in the business of life instead,  first as an ambulance driver in the First World War,
 and then as a reporter on the Kansas City and Toronto Star newspapers.  ( In the early 20th Century a young man could still walk in off the street with a personal recommendation and begin working as a reporter on a big- city newspaper,  but the age of the " cub reporter"
 is as long gone now as is the age of the volunteer ambulance driver.  Hemingway educated himself in literature not by attending seminars and writing research papers,  but by reading,  and throughout his life he loved to list the authors he had read,  or claimed to have read,  for the commiseration of the reading public,
 although he always got very touchy when anyone dared whisper the word " influence.  He had sufficient perspective to generously acknowledge his admiration for the " big guns" his near- reverence for Shakespeare and Tolstoy was never alloyed with irony—
but when it came to lesser,  or God forbid,  contemporary influences,  friends and associates had to step carefully around him.  With his enormous ego and extreme competitiveness,  Hemingway was not one to be generous to colleagues,
 and the surest way to get him to turn on you,  as Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson found out the hard way,  was to help him out.  Hemingway simply wasn't comfortable with owing anyone anything,  and most certainly not with anything having to do with style.  Perhaps that's not surprising in view of the way Hemingway's style co-
opted his personality,  ( or perhaps it was the other way around.  In any case,  identifying the influences on Hemingway has amounted to a full- time job for scholars and critics for decades.
 Nevertheless,  when he began assembling the sketches for “ A Moveable Feast”  circa 1957,  Hemingway's need to show the world the breadth of his youthful reading centered largely around the great Russians:  Tolstoy,
 Dostoevski,  Turgenev,  and also Gogol and Chekhov.  Hemingway stood in awe of Tolstoy and was fascinated by the emotional battering- rams in Dostoevski,  but ultimately it was Turgenev,
 among the Russians anyway,  who played a role in shaping Hemingway's famous style.  Tolstoy's impact on Hemingway is as hard to ignore as an iceberg- after all,  no one has ever written on the subject of war with anything close to the sweep and depth of Tolstoy,  and war was a subject that Hemingway found endlessly fascinating.
 Admiration for Tolstoy was a " natural"  for him.  Dostoevski,  too,  deeply interested him,
 if only because he reports himself wondering aloud to the poet Evan Shipman how Dostoevski could " write… so unbelievably badly,  and make you feel so deeply.  In the Paris sketch in which he describes his first visit to Sylvia Beach's famous bookstore,  Shakespeare and Company,
 Hemingway lists Dostoevski's “ The Gambler and Other Stories"  as one of the volumes he first borrowed,  along with “ War and Peace,  some D.
H.  Lawrence and “ A Sportsman's Sketches”  by Ivan Turgenev.  Another name might be mentioned in this context,  that of Henry James.
 Hemingway's admiration for Henry James was equivocal;  according to " A Moveable Feast,  James was the favorite author of Hemingway's first wife,  Hadley,  and Hemingway had sufficient taste and intelligence,
 self- educated or not,  to acknowledge James as a classic.  But James' highly stylized,  mannered prose was worlds away from what Hemingway would soon be trying to do with short sentences,  and James' world of elegant drawing rooms,
 English lawns and upper- class parlors was continents away from Hemingway's world of battlegrounds,  bullrings and African hills.  When it came to subject matter,  Joseph Conrad was more to Hemingway's taste.  But perhaps most importantly,
 when it came to style,  James was a practitioner,  in fact the very epitome,  of the late 19th- century's idea of good writing:  the highly-
polished " polite prose"  that Hemingway decided he had to get away from.  So,  ironically,  was Turgenev,
 whom Hemingway embraced as a master.  And indeed,  Turgenev and James are similar writers in some ways:  although Turgenev wrote in Russian and James in English,  both men spent much of their adult lives living outside their country of birth,  and both wrote in an elegant,
 consciously literary style that doesn't appeal to everyone.  Oscar Wilde once remarked that James wrote prose " as if it were a painful duty,  and to this day it is fashionable among bookish Russians to deride Turgenev as " feminine"  owing chiefly to the elegance and grace of what many regard as overpolished prose.
 And because I have heard Turgenev accused of being " feminine"  more than once,  I find it ironic that he should have influenced the machismo- obsessed Hemingway,  with his laconic tough-
guy characters who speak in tight- lipped bursts.  And yet,  if you take a look at that very book of Turgenev's that Hemingway reports having borrowed from Sylvia Beach in 1922,  “ A Sportsman's Sketches”
 and then glance through Hemingway's first widely- read book of short fiction,  “ In Our Time,  a few of Turgenev's fingerprints do indeed seem to appear on Hemingway's pages.  The most powerful influences on the style that Hemingway evolved in the early 1920s may well have been,
 as has been often pointed out,  the Kansas City Star's stylebook,  with its emphasis on keeping things short,  clipped and free of adjectives,  and Gertrude Stein,  whose mammoth novel “
The Making of Americans”  Hemingway helped to type and whose " cubistic"  approach to prose,  repeating phrases over and over with slightly different wordings,  doubtlessly influenced Hemingway's sense of prose rhythm.
 But Turgenev,  too,  is part of the mix,  and Hemingway certainly never made his admiration for Turgenev a secret.  In 1925 he told Archibald MacLeish that he thought Turgenev " the greatest writer there ever was,
 and then added " War and Peace’  is the best book I know,  but imagine what a book it would have been if Turgenev had written it.  Tolstoy had dazzled Hemingway by writing dazzlingly about war.  Joseph Conrad,
 like Herman Melville before him,  had been a sailor,  and many of his tales center around the adventurous and- at least in those days,  manly- world of the sea.
 Turgenev,  in “ A Sportsman's Sketches,  creates a world— albeit a peculiarly Russian one- around a man who spends all of his time indulging his greatest passion,
 which also happened to be one of Hemingway's:  hunting.  I think that,  with regard to Turgenev,  this was the hook that drew Hemingway in.  But once he was there,
 within Turgenev's world,  Hemingway took something else away with him besides the enjoyment of a string of vignettes about a man out hunting and communing with his land and people along the way.  “ A Sportsman's Sketches”  was an unusual book for the middle of the 19th century.  Perhaps it could have been written nowhere except Russia,
 where there wasn't much in the way of a literary " tradition"  circa 1850.  At the same time that Dickens,  Thackaray and their contemporaries in England were building on the foundations laid by the great 18th- century English novelists such as Richardson and Fielding,
 and writers in France like Hugo and Flaubert were doing the same with the traditions of Rousseau,  Chateaubriand and Stendhal,  Russian writers were still trying to create a tradition for themselves.  Russian literature is often said to have begun with Pushkin and Gogol,  both of whom flourished in the 1830s.  Mikhail Lermontov's highly idiosyncratic novel “
A Hero of Our Time”  had appeared in 1840,  when Pushkin had only been dead three years.  Lermontov himself was killed in a duel,  ( the same fate that had befallen Pushkin)
 just a year after his novel came out.  Russian authors of the 1840s and 50s may have had to contend with the tyranny of the czar's government,  but they were working relatively free of the tyranny of a literary tradition.  Turgenev didn't bother writing " stories"  in the accepted sense of the word when he wrote “
A Sportsman's Sketches”  ( I'm using the title Hemingway knew;  in more recent translations the book has been called “ A Sportsman's Notebook.  There is no conventional "
plot"  or schematic narrative anywhere to be seen.  The stories are snapshots of places,  characters,  situations.  Much of Hemingway's “
In Our Time,  a product of " modernism"  written not long after he had been reading Turgenev in Paris,  works in much the same way.  It was an uncommon technique for a writer of the mid-
19th century to be using,  to understate rather than overstate,  use simple observation rather than rhetoric,  and as often as not,  to end on a " dying fall"
 rather than a crashing chord,  as at the end of the sketch called " Raspberry Water:  " Styopushka started up.  The peasant sat down beside us.
 We fell silent again.  On the other bank someone started singing,  but such a melancholy song… My poor friend Vlas grew sadder and sadder.  Half an hour later,  we parted.
 Now hear Hemingway at the end of " The Battler:  " Nick climbed the embankment and started up the track.  He found he had a ham sandwich in his hand and put it in his pocket.  Looking back from the mounting grade before the track curved into the hills he could see the firelight in the clearing.
 The dying fall,  the laconic understatement.  Two of Hemingway's trademarks.  And yet as I re- read “ A Sportsman's Sketches”
 a few years ago,  I found example after example of the same sort of thing in Turgenev that later made Hemingway's reputation.  Listen to this bit of dialogue from " Bezhin Meadow:  " Well,
 Vanya,  began Fedya tenderly,  " is your sister Anyutka well?  " Very well,
 answered Vanya,  slightly slurring the " r.  " Tell her to come and see us.  Why doesn't she come?
 " I don't know.  " Tell her to come.  " I will.
 " Tell her that I'll give her a present.  " And me too?  " Yes,
 you too.  Take out just one word,  the adverb " tenderly,  and that snatch of dialogue could be Hemingway.  Or,
 perhaps it might be more appropriate to say,  the following exchange from The Sun Also Rises could be Turgenev:  " What's the matter with the old one?  I asked.  "
He hasn't got any passport.  I offered the guard a cigarette.  He took it and thanked me.  " What will he do?  I asked.
 The guard spat in the dust.  " Oh,  he'll just wade across the stream.  " Do you have much smuggling?
 " Oh,  he said,  " they go through.  Yes,
 between Turgenev and Hemingway came Chekhov,  another master of emotional tautness and the restrained phrase.  And Hemingway greatly admired Chekhov too.  But there can be little doubt that Turgenev's evocation,  a generation before Chekhov,  of the lovely,
 vast and brutal Russian countryside and its characters,  in prose all the more effective for its restraint,  gave Hemingway the cue for some of his own efforts,  three- quarters of a century later,  to evoke his own landscapes and characters,
 lovely and brutal,  in prose all the more effective for its restraint.  III Dubious Battles:  Ernest Hemingway’ s Journeys to War In the movie “ Patton,
 George C.  Scott,  playing the role of the legendary- infamous World War II general,  surveys a column of tanks advancing over rough terrain and says exultantly,  "
Compared to war,  all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance!  That statement might have been taken directly from the mouth of Ernest Hemingway.  While it would be wrong to say that Hemingway approved of war as a thing- in- itself the way Patton seems to have,
 ( and by the way,  Hemingway spent part of World War II with one of Patton's armored divisions and thought little enough of the general to have one of his later fictional characters all but call Patton a pathological liar)  the fact remains that violent death was one of Hemingway's lifelong fascinations,  and if contemplating violent death is what you're after,  war is as good as it gets.
 Throughout Hemingway's life,  timing was to be a key factor in what happened to him and in how he reacted.  Hemingway's timing was always very good,  whether with regard to external events or to his own endeavors first at becoming a writer and then at promulgating his career as one.  With regard to timing,  war was one of the areas in which history accomodated Hemingway-
his lifetime spanned four major wars,  three of which he saw close- up,  though never as a soldier,  and he often embroidered his war experiences for presentation to the home audience to make them look as " soldierly"
 as he possibly could.  In his youth this would take the form of getting himself seriously wounded and then playing a form of " dress- up;  on a later occasion the play- acting almost got out of hand.
 But young or old,  " playing soldier,  whether in real- life or vicariously,  through his fictional characters,
 was something Hemingway found nearly irresistible.  When he was young,  it was part and parcel of his natural desire to be where the action was.  Contemporaries who worked with the teenage Hemingway during his days as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star reported that he would dash around the city compulsively,  wanting always to know where the ambulance went,  where the crime had occured,
 and to get there quickly.  His tenure at the Star was to be a short one for precisely this reason.  He had graduated from high school in 1917 and,  turning down the chance to go to college,  proceeded directly into newspaper work after an uncle pulled some strings and helped him get the job in Kansas City.  But 1917 was also the year that America entered World War I.
 Hemingway,  like many young American males at the time,  heard the stories coming back from Europe and was determined to get into the war somehow.  He would have liked to enlist as a soldier,  but his father was opposed to that idea and in any case Hemingway's famously poor vision in his left eye probably would have gotten him a 4- F.
 But while working on the Star,  he struck up a friendship with 22 year- old Ted Brumback,  who just the previous summer had enlisted in the American Field Service and spent four months in France as an ambulance driver.  Since it was unlikely that he would get into the war as a combatant,  Hemingway decided to go this route,
 and after persuading his father to drop his objections,  he,  Brumback and another friend,  Wilson Hicks,  signed on with the Red Cross and by the following spring were on their way to the war.  They ultimately served in northern Italy,
 not far from Milan.  The world knows the rest of this story.  On the night of July 8,  1918,  while he was passing out chocolate bars,  cigarettes and magazines to Italian soldiers on the Piave River near Fossalta,
 Hemingway's dream of being where the action was came true in nightmarish fashion.  The Austrians launched a mortar attack and Hemingway was badly wounded by shrapnel.  His later recuperation in a Red Cross hospital would include a brief romance with a nurse several years his senior,  Agnes von Kurowski.  This romance,  in turn,
 would result a decade later in his novel " A Farewell to Arms,  and many decades later,  in 1996,  in the movie " In Love and War,
 although to the end of her life Kurowski kept denying that it ever happened.  Hemingway's natural flair for self- dramatization never had a better opportunity than this one.  The relative gullibility of Americans on the home front during the First World War gave him a clear playing field for his love of pose.  It was after all an era in which there was no CNN to bring the horrors of war right into everyone's living room.  Even newsreels were in the future.
 The war was an ocean away,  and the domestic attitude toward it was shaped by patriotic songs,  jingoistic slogans and romantic stories of faraway Europe.  Nineteen year- old Ernest Hemingway wasted no time in creating the image for the folks back home of himself as Warrior.  He wrote extravagant letters claiming,
 among other things,  that his wounds had been caused by machine- gun bullets as well as shrapnel.  ( This is still being argued.  He got himself all dolled up in a tailor-
made uniform and had his picture taken wearing military insignia that he was not entitled to,  and when he returned to Oak Park,  Illinois the following winter,  hobbling on a cane,  his romantic tales of war were made more plausible by the soldier's cap and boots that he wore,  not to mention the custom-
made Italian cape.  Hemingway's next trip to war was a short one.  In 1922 he was Paris correspondent for the Toronto Star and that newspaper sent him to Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey.  He was there only for a few weeks,  but the result was two striking pages of fiction,  "
On The Quai at Smyrna,  the " opening note"  in his first book of short stories,  " In Our Time.
 He would not see war again for 14 years.  To outline the byzantine political and military machinations that brought about the Spanish Civil War ( 1936- 38)  would be beyond my purposes here,  not to mention my space.
 Although this is a gross oversimplification,  the war between those who supported the left- wing Popular Front in Spain and those who supported the right- wing National Front is often seen as having been a " dress rehearsal"  for World War II,
 with Hitler backing one side and Stalin backing the other.  Stalin's side lost the actual war,  but won the propaganda war,  not least because it was supported by a solid international phalanx of writers and intellectuals,  not the least of whom was Ernest Hemingway.  In 1937-
38,  Hemingway went to Spain four times,  the first three as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance ( NANA.  By now an international celebrity with a hairy- chested image to maintain,
 he sent back reports from Madrid and from the countryside filled with details suggesting that he was constantly in danger from artillery bombardments as well as machine- gun and automatic rifle- fire.  He was indeed in harm's way his share of times,  and the evidence suggests that he always kept his composure in such situations.  But as usual,
 his embroidering is never far away.  He boasted that he was even in danger when he went to bed in his room at the Hotel Florida in Madrid,  because as he explained to his readers,  his room was on the front side of the building,  facing the Nationalist guns two miles away.  Here we find two of Hemingway's biographers offering different stories.
 In his groundbreaking 1969 biography,  Carlos Baker tells us that Hemingway's roommate at the Hotel Florida was his old friend the American bullfighter Sidney Franklin.  Franklin was indeed there,  but Kenneth S.  Lynn,  in another biography published 17 years after Baker's,
 reveals that Hemingway's roommate at the Florida was actually his fellow journalist and soon- to- be third wife Martha Gellhorn,  adding that he probably would not have been living there under those circumstances if it were as dangerous as he claimed.  Hemingway's involvement in the Spanish Civil War ended certain of his friendships,  notably with fellow novelist John Dos Passos.
 Dos Passos was among those intellectuals who were initially sympathetic to the Loyalist cause,  ( another was George Orwell)  but who,  upon observing that the Communists and the anarchists were murdering people with no less alacrity than the fascists,  became disillusioned with the cause (
and in Dos Passos' case,  with left- wing politics generally.  The politically- naive Hemingway,  whose pride moreover dictated that he always seem to have more and better information than anyone else,
 refused to acknowledge the atrocities being commited on the Loyalist side and reported the war in a one- dimensional,  one- sided manner.  ( Happy to the point of lionizing Hemingway at first,
 the political left would eventually turn against him when he recovered enough equanimity to write " For Whom the Bell Tolls,  in which he not only maligned such loyalist icons as Andre Marty,  commander of the International Brigades,  but also,  in the book's "
massacre"  chapter,  committed the heresy of depicting fascists as victims.  But if his first two major wars had served as canvases on which Hemingway drew sketches of what he wanted his own legend to look like,  his third and last war was to be the biggest such,  and this time he pulled out all the stops as promoter of his own image,
 to the point where he came very close to getting into serious trouble.  Shortly before D- Day in 1944,  Hemingway arrived in London as a correspondent for Collier's magazine.  He was to cover the invasion of Normandy,  and he accompanied a number of armored and infantry battalions as they moved across France.
 He was present on D- Day,  was in fact aboard an LCVP landing craft as it advanced on Omaha Beach.  Having dropped off its troops,  the LCVP then returned to its ship with Hemingway still sitting astern.  But what Hemingway subsequently wrote not only implied that he had gone ashore with the troops,
 but that he had played a vital role in helping to locate the beach.  The Hemingway legend being what it was by then,  few questioned his assertions.  And he was only warming up.  Later came his claim to have entered Paris with the first troops,  which led to the still-
persisting myth that he personally liberated the Ritz Hotel.  ( Neither is true.  And in fact this time Hemingway's military play- acting caught up with him.  Other reporters resented his flamboyant showboating,
 which included travelling around to all appearances in command of a group of French Resistance irregulars and keeping firearms,  bazookas,  grenades and other ordnance in his Rambouillet hotel room.  A complaint was filed that his activities were violating the Geneva Convention's rules regarding the conduct of news correspondents.  In what must have been a particularly galling moment for him,  Hemingway,
 at the risk of losing his reporter's credentials and being expelled from France,  had to appear before a military panel and deny ever having taken part in any actual fighting himself.  He offered deft excuses for some of the other things he was accused of,  claiming for instance that weapons and ammunition had been kept in his hotel room only because storage space was in short supply.  But such was the Hemingway myth by 1944 that few concerned themselves with such niggling details.  Hemingway had done such a good job for so many years as his own press agent,
 inflating his public persona to gargantuan proportions,  that much of the world was prepared to accept his tall tales of war at face value.  What few realized at the time was that Hemingway's real war,  the one between his desire to go on living and his deep- seated desire not to,  was even then being lost.
 Much of what passed for combat-  zone bravery on Hemingway's part was in fact suicidal behavior,  a point he would drive home at the end of a shotgun barrel 17 years later.  IV The Death of Max Perkins and the Decline of Hemingway On July 21,  1940,  Ernest Hemingway turned 41 years old.
 He was just finishing “ For Whom the Bell Tolls,  which was published to great acclaim a few months later.  In fact by the time Max Perkins,  who was both Hemingway's and Scott Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's,  had returned from Fitzgerald's funeral late that year,
 “ For Whom the Bell Tolls”  had already sold 189, 000 copies.  Three days after the book was published,  a deal for nearly $
150, 000 was signed with Paramount for the film rights.  The film was duly made in 1943,  with Gary Cooper in the role of Robert Jordan and Ingrid Bergman,  just a year off her appearance opposite Humphrey Bogart in “ Casablanca,
 as Maria.  In terms of his success as a writer,  1940 was in some ways the apotheosis of Ernest Hemingway.  Critics and the reading public,  who had been tracking and for the most part admiring his work since the publication of his first novel,  “
The Sun Also Rises,  in 1926,  felt they had every reason to expect only further triumphs from the man who had become by then the most famous,  and in the eyes of many,  the greatest living American writer.  It didn't happen.
 In fact,  in many ways and for a stew of reasons mixing everything from married life to geopolitics,  the decade of the 1940s became Hemingway's version of the Lost Weekend.  Though busy with a number of projects which included not only covering the war in Europe as a journalist,  but also work on a massive,  unfinished novel to be called “
The Garden of Eden”  ( published in a heavily- edited edition in 1986)  Hemingway produced no significant work of fiction between 1940 and 1950,  and when he finally did,
 he might well have wished he hadn't.  As the decade began he was living in Cuba with his third wife,  celebrated journalist Martha Gellhorn.  However,  not content to stay home in Cuba and be Mrs.  Ernest Hemingway with a war raging in Europe,
 Gellhorn went off to cover the war as a correspondent for Colliers magazine,  and Hemingway somewhat- reluctantly followed suit after a Huck Finn- like stint of hunting for German submarines in the Gulf Stream aboard his fishing boat,  the " Pilar.
 Hemingway had been an ambulance driver in World War I and a news correspondent in the Spanish Civil War.  World War II would be the third and last war he would witness ( and once again,  ironically,  Hemingway,  who was so fascinated with war and all of its trappings,
 would participate only as a non- combatant.  Hemingway's marriage to Gellhorn became one of the war's casualties.  By the spring of 1946 he was married to his fourth and final wife,  journalist Mary Welsh.  With the war over,
 Hemingway went back to Cuba and resumed the life of writing,  boozing and marlin- fishing that it had interrupted.  Without a doubt he felt that he had earned the right to " kick back"  and enjoy himself for while after working hard in Europe as a war correspondent,
 and certainly he returned to Cuba more famous than ever.  That was part of the problem.  From the late '40s onward,  Hemingway and the media " worked"  each other increasingly,
 and energies that he should have devoted to writing were devoted instead to " playing the role of Ernest Hemingway"  for a cavalcade of reporters and photographers.  Two separate,  highly significant and not necessarily unrelated catastrophes struck Hemingway in the years immediately following World War II.  The first was the death in 1947 of his beloved and trusted editor Max Perkins.
 The second,  three years later,  was the publication of his first full- length novel since “ For Whom The Bell Tolls,  the much-
panned “ Across The River And Into The Trees.  Shortly after the publication of " Across The River"  in 1950,  E.
B.  White,  in the New Yorker magazine,  published a satire of it called " Across The Street and into the Grill.  I don't know how funny I would find it now,
 but when I read it at age 19 I nearly suffocated with laughter.  ( When told of White's satire,  Hemingway growled that the next step up from writing parodies was scribbling on latrine walls,  conveniently forgetting that one of his own early efforts,  "
The Torrents Of Spring,  had been a savage parody of Hemingway's mentor,  Sherwood Anderson.  Max Perkins had been Hemingway's editor since 1929,  when he had worked with Hemingway on A Farewell to Arms.  Hemingway's father had committed suicide not long before Hemingway first met Perkins,
 and from the earliest days of their association,  Perkins took on something of a fatherly role with Hemingway,  much the same role he assumed about the same time for an ungainly young man from North Carolina named Thomas Wolfe,  who had recently dumped an avalanche of manuscript on Perkins' desk which Perkins would eventually hew and carve into “ Look Homeward,  Angel.
 Over the nearly 20 years of their association,  Perkins acquired the reputation of being the editor at Scribner's best qualified to handle the man who was well known as the touchiest author in the firm's stable.  Perkins knew how to deal diplomatically with the vain,  moody and mercurial Hemingway,  could guage when it was " safe"
 to offer him honest criticisms of his work and when it was a better idea to soft- pedal.  It was with Perkins' editorial " ruddering"  that Hemingway brought out all of his fiction from “ A Farewell to Arms"
 to “ For Whom the Bell Tolls,  a decade which also included Death in the Afternoon,  “ Green Hills of Africa,  “
To Have and Have Not,  the short- story collections “ Men Without Women”  and “ Winner Take Nothing”
 and a play about the Spanish Civil War,  “ The Fifth Column.  The 1930s had been a busy and productive time for both men.  But when Perkins died,  Hemingway had not published a novel in seven years.
 For many who pursue it,  writing is very much like playing a musical instrument.  You have to stay in practice or you get rusty.  Hemingway loved to apply sports metaphors to writing- his remarks about having " outboxed"
 de Maupassant,  Stendhal and Turgenev have been repeated ad nauseam- and indeed he seemed to have been one of those writers who needs to stay " in training"  to keep his writing sharp,  not surprising perhaps in view of the heavy emphasis Hemingway's writing always did put on pure sensory experience-
seeing,  smelling,  tasting,  touching and hearing.  ( Although he drank a lot throughout his life,
 Hemingway never smoked again after his early twenties- he didn't like the way it dulled his sense of smell.  With all of this in mind,  Perkins' death couldn't have come at a worse time for Hemingway.  He was physically out of shape,  overweight and soaked in liquor,
 ( though he did often cut back on his drinking for one reason or another)  and his body,  including his head,  was battered and tired from a long history of injuries and accidents.  Journalism had taken up a lot of his time during the war years,
 and despite continued work on such projects as the ultimately- tabled “ The Garden of Eden,  Hemingway hadn't publicly strutted his fictional talents in a long time.  It was in this atmosphere that Hemingway decided to make his " comeback.
 Perkins was gone,  and between being both out- of- shape and increasingly worried that after all these years he might not be able to perform like he used to,  ( and hence,
 disappoint a world that,  even without People magazine or eight- second sound bites,  had turned him into a superstar)  Hemingway was in no condition to be his own best editor.  And so,
 in 1949- 50,  Hemingway labored away on his new tale,  set in Venice,  through a haze of booze shot through with the piercing stage lights of global adulation.  Caught up in the work,
 he managed to persuade himself that he was writing a masterpiece,  his best book yet.  And there was no Max Perkins around any more to gently rein him in and persuade him to cut here,  condense there.  The result was an unqualified disaster,  and what underlay the book's plot had much to do with it.
 A hopeless romantic despite his tough- guy posturing,  Hemingway throughout his life was constantly falling in and out of love with one woman after another.  He married four of them,  but there were plenty of other " infatuations"
 along the way,  and the older he got,  the younger the infatuations got.  In the late 1940s,  the overweight,  booze-
bloated,  celebrity- inflated Hemingway,  pushing 50,  began mooning over a beautiful young Italian woman,  Adriana Ivancich.
 Hemingway's romantic stories often had their foundations in his own fantasising,  and the character Renata in “ Across the River and Into the Trees”  is based on Ivancich;  Renata's doomed love affair in Venice with a dying American army colonel,  Richard Cantwell,
 plays out Hemingway's fantasy about himself and Adriana in much the same way that,  20 years earlier,  the fate of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in " A Farewell to Arms"  had played out his wishful embroidering upon his disappointing relationship with 26 year- old hospital nurse Agnes von Kurowski.
 It is not my purpose here to write a review of a book that was published more than 50 years ago,  but let me just mention the point at which “ Across the River and Into the Trees”  starts to " go wrong"  for me.
 The book starts out well enough.  The duck- shooting scene in Ch.  1 has all of the old Hemingway magic.  You hear that ice crack.  You see those boats moving in the canal.
 Cantwell is thirsty;  you're thirsty.  It's at the beginning of Ch.  2 that I detect the first warning signs of Ernest Miller Hemingway fading into the wings and the huffing and puffing " Papa"  taking center stage.
 Twice on the same page he refers to Cantwell not as an " army colonel"  or a " colonel in the army"  as anyone else might,  but as a "
Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States.  This is affectation,  and the older Hemingway got,  the more he swam in it.  And from that point in the book,  things just get windily worse.
 In his controversial 1986 " psychobiography"  of Hemingway,  Kenneth Lynn raised the enticing question ( buttressed by like- minded speculation from Canadian critic Northrop Frye)
 that had Perkins not died when he did,  he might have tried to talk Hemingway into distilling this material into a short story.  Frye pointed out,  and Lynn agrees,  that there is much good in the story,  and had Hemingway boiled it down to say,
 100 pages,  it might have been his version of “ Death in Venice,  with all the lyricism and dark power of Thomas Mann's 1911 mini- masterpiece.  One can speculate forever on such "
fantasy baseball"  issues,  but the fact is that Hemingway's self- critical judgment had not deserted him entirely despite his catastrophic " bad call"  on “
Across the River.  Had Perkins still been around,  it might indeed have been a better book.  Surely Hemingway's ability to cut,  compress and keep it short,  always one of his strengths,
 was still there.  Having been knocked to the mat ( to use a metaphor he would have liked)  by the critics over “ Across the River,  he got back to his feet and two years later issued the short work that would clinch the Nobel Prize for him.
 Despite what you might think of “ The Old Man and the Sea,  ( and I have little use for its gooey sentimentality myself)  it showed that Hemingway could still control his material if he wanted to.  He would lose that ability within a few years as his physical and mental problems mounted.
 But it is tantalizing to wonder about what the quality of the work of Hemingway's final years might have looked like had not his good friend and most trusted editor died when Hemingway,  to judge from what he subsequently produced,  was just about to need him the most.  V Papa’ s “ Good Eats Café
 Hemingway and Food One of the first things you realize when you read Hemingway,  and this was in fact one of the boldest brushstrokes in the portrait of himself which he presented to the world,  is that the man loved to eat and drink.  His Rabelaisian appetite for life included,  ( and quite logically so)
 a concomitant appetite for the pleasures of the table ( not to mention the bar.  In fact,  it has occurred to me more than once that had Hemingway not taken up the writing of fiction as his life's work,  he might have had a brilliant career as a restaurant critic for the slicker magazines,  a sort of foul-
mouthed Duncan Hines.  I've mentioned in other places the fact that the self- educated Hemingway liked to boast about the breadth of his reading and his knowledge of books;  one of Hemingway's best- known affectations was in fact his claim to have " the inside dope"
 on just about everything,  and that went for food and wine as well as books,  baseball,  boxing,  battles,  bullfighters and trout-
fishing streams.  Yes,  Hemingway loved to eat and drink.  And of all the claims he made about himself which,  over the years,  various people have questioned,
 none succumbs to the pin- prick of evidence more quickly than his claim,  late in life,  that he and his first wife were going romantically hungry in Paris during the 1920s.  True,  they were living simply and economizing so that they could afford to go on ski trips and such,
 but starving?  I don't want to be catty about this,  but take a look at a photograph of Hemingway taken on his wedding day in 1921,  and then glance at a photo of him taken in 1924 in the courtyard of 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs in Paris,  where he and his wife Hadley were living at the time.  After less than three years in Paris,
 the slender bridegroom of 1921 is already getting a bit jowly,  and that suit he's wearing looks tight on him.  If " hunger was good discipline,  as he boasted in his late- life memoir “
A Moveable Feast,  Hemingway was getting his discipline somewhere else.  I won't stoop so low as to point out the irony in the book's title.  ( In fairness to Hemingway,  I've been to Paris,
 and you can't not eat there.  Those travel brochures which tout Paris as the world's capital of good food are only stating an objective fact:  it is that.  I confess that I once ate something pretty disgusting,  if not exactly on Hemingway's recommendation,  then at least because he made it sound so good.
 No,  it wasn't a thousand- legger,  but in the terms that any gourmet would understand,  it might as well have been.  I was 18 and had already been under Hemingway's spell for a couple of years.
 One fine Saturday afternoon I was re- reading one of my favorites among his early stories,  “ Big Two Hearted River,  Part I.  I read through the following passage.
 ( See if this doesn't make you hungry too,  even though we're clearly not talking here about anything you'd be served at Michaud's in Paris)  “ Nick was hungry.  He did not believe he had ever been hungrier.
 He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.  " I've got a right to eat this kind of stuff,  if I'm willing to carry it,  Nick said.  His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods.
 He did not speak again.  Then a little further on:  “ The beans and spaghetti warmed.  Nick stirred them and mixed them together.  They began to bubble,
 making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface.  There was a good smell.  Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread.  The little bubbles were coming faster now.  Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off.  He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate.
 It spread slowly on the plate.  Nick knew it was too hot.  He poured on some tomato catchup… He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread.  Nick finished the second plateful with the bread,  mopping the plate shiny…
While he waited for the coffee to boil,  he opened a can of apricots.  He liked to open cans.  He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup.  While he watched the coffee on the fire,  he drank the juice syrup of the apricots…
 By now,  depending on the sophistication of your palette,  you're probably either salivating or getting queasy.  But after reading this vivid passage,  I just had to find out what this mess actually tasted like.  I walked over to Safeway and bought a can of Chef Boy-
Ar- Dee spaghetti,  a can of Van Camp's pork and beans,  and a can of Del Monte apricots.  Then,  grossing my mother right out of the kitchen,
 I cooked it all up,  sliced some bread and dumped catchup over it,  just like in the story.  You know,  it actually wasn't bad,  and sipping apricot juice right out of the can while the coffee was perking was also kind of pleasant.
 Give me a break.  I was 18.  Hemingway wrote " Big Two- Hearted River"  in 1923,
 when he was on the verge of his first triumphs.  And although his powers waned with the passing years,  the victims of too many injuries and too much booze,  not to mention too much fame and adoration,  more than 30 years later he had lost none of his touch for making his readers hungry.  Check out this mouth-
watering passage from “ A Moveable Feast”  in which Hemingway walks into Lipp's,  a bistro on the left bank in Paris,  and orders himself a fine lunch:  “
I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer and I asked for a distingue,  the big glass mug that held a liter,  and for potato salad.  The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink.  The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious.  I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil.
 After the first heavy draft of beer I ate and drank very slowly.  When the pommes a l'huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas.  This was a sausage like a heavy,  wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.  I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a demi and watched it drawn.  It seemed colder than the distingue and I drank half of it.
 Are you hungry yet?  I had to go to the kitchen while I was typing that out and get myself a snack.  And by the way,  Lipp's,  like Pamplona,  is one of those places that Hemingway "
put on the map.  Some years ago I was in Paris and thought I'd drop in at Lipp's to sample some hemingwayesque ambience.  No way- the place was wall- to- wall tourists,
 all doing exactly what I was doing.  I ended up having my lunch at a tiny Greek grill ( not there in Hemingway's time,  I'm sure)  on a tiny side- street across from the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame.
 Or try this meal,  from an earlier sketch in the same collection:  “ I asked the waiter for a dozen Portugaises and a half- carafe of the dry white wine they had there… As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away,
 leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture,  and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine,  I. began to be happy and to make plans.  Yes,  after a meal like that,
 I probably would too.  As the short- story example cited above makes clear,  Hemingway didn't confine his culinary passages to memoirs.  I always loved this little scene from “ The Sun Also Rises”
 in which his two male characters,  who have left a couple of bottles of wine in an ice- cold stream to chill while they go off trout- fishing,  sit down to enjoy their picnic lunch and,  using the news of the recent death of William Jennings Bryan as the springboard for a bit of typical snappy jazz-
age repartee,  indulge in a little creative playing- with- their- food:  “
The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.  " That's not such a filthy wine,  Bill said.  " The cold helps it,
 I said.  We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.  " Chicken.  " There's hard-
boiled eggs.  " Find any salt?  " First the egg,  said Bill.
 " Then the chicken.  Even Bryan could see that.  " He's dead.  I read it in the paper yesterday.
 " No.  Not really?  " Yes.  Bryan's dead.
 Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.  " Gentlemen,  he said,  and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper,  "
I reverse the order.  For Bryan's sake.  As a tribute to the Great Commoner.  First the chicken,  then the egg.  "
Wonder what day God created the chicken?  " Oh,  said Bill,  sucking the drumstick,  "
how should we know?  In the much- criticized “ Across the River and Into the Trees”  ( 1950)
 Hemingway seems to spend half of what's purportedly a tragic love story going on and on about what his characters are sipping or digging into:  " Two very dry martinis,  the colonel said.  " Montgomerys.
 Fifteen to one. The Martinis were icy cold and true Montgomerys,  and after touching the edges,  they felt them glow happily all through their upper bodies.  …  "
Just then the lobster was served.  It was tender,  with the peculiar slippery grace of that kicking muscle which is the tail,  and the claws were excellent,  neither too thin nor too fat.  "
A lobster fills with the moon,  the colonel told the girl.  " When the moon is dark he is not worth eating.  By the way,  calling the martinis "
Montgomerys"  was Hemingway's idea of a joke:  it was often said of the British WWII general Montgomery that he would not launch an attack unless he had at least a 15 to 1 advantage over the enemy.  Hence:  martinis made with a recipe of 15 parts gin to one part vermouth were " Montgomerys.
 This kind of heavy- handed,  not very funny humor was typical of Hemingway.  It's been speculated that if Hemingway's editor Max Perkins had still been alive when Hemingway wrote this novel,  he might have tried to persuade the touchy Hemingway to cut it down to novella- length.
 It would have been easy to do,  actually- cut out all the talk about eating and drinking and " Across the River"  would have been a novella by default.  In truth,
 Hemingway was anything but a gourmet.  To the chagrin of anyone who had to live with him,  in fact,  one of his favorite taste- treats was raw onion sandwiches with plenty of ketchup.  And although he boasted throughout his life of his supposedly great knowledge of wines,
 true wine connoisseurs who either knew him or have read his works assure us all that much of it was pose.  No,  Hemingway's value to us as a " food writer"  does not lie in any claim he can make to directing his readers toward the most exquisite and the best- prepared.
 Rather,  it lies where the rest of his value lies,  in an art so deeply involved in the world of sense- experience,  an art in which the five sensory organs are virtually instruments of thought and expression,  that we share in that world,
 which Hemingway made to come alive at his fingertips.  Just as Hemingway's chiseled prose brings us to breathe the air his characters breathe and feel their emotions at a remove,  so that same prose makes us taste the meals they eat and savor the wines they sip in a world as three- dimensional as good writing can make it.  Hemingway wrote well about everything he loved,  and he loved a good meal.
 We're all a little richer ( and maybe a little fatter)  for his having done so.  VI Scott and Ernest:  A Logical Friendship The most famous friendship in American literature is also,  beyond almost any doubt,
 the most exasperating to write about.  Matthew J.  Bruccoli,  author and editor of a number of works on F.  Scott Fitzgerald ( 1896-
1940)  bravely set out a few years ago to write a book about the relationship between Fitzgerald and his younger contemporary Ernest Hemingway ( 1899- 1961)  Bruccoli's 1994 book “ Fitzgerald and Hemingway,
 A Dangerous Friendship”  opens on a note that will set the tone for the rest of it:  Bruccoli cites Hemingway's famous account in “ A Moveable Feast”  of the first time he met Fitzgerald,  a meeting that according to Hemingway took place at the Dingo bar in Paris in 1925,
 and at which Duncan Chaplin,  who had pitched for Princeton's baseball team when Fitzgerald was a student there,  was present.  Then Bruccoli goes on to write that Chaplin was not,  in fact,  at the Dingo bar that day.
 In fact Chaplin was not in Paris in 1925.  In fact Chaplin was not in Europe in 1925.  In fact,  Chaplin never met Hemingway.  In fact,  as Bruccoli proceeds to show his readers,
 most anecdotes about Fitzgerald and Hemingway,  and there are dozens of them,  tend to evaporate under the light of investigation.  Like a mariner hugging the shore,  Bruccoli tries as best as he can to stick to the provable.  As a result,
 the text of Fitzgerald and Hemingway consists largely of letters written by the two authors to or about one another.  After slugging it out with the evidence for 196 pages,  Bruccoli comes very close to throwing up his hands in despair.  On p.  197,  writing of Hemingway's appearance in Hollywood in 1937,
 when Fitzgerald was there doing film work and Hemingway was in town to show and discuss “ The Spanish Earth,  a propaganda film about the Spanish Civil War which he had worked on,  Bruccoli writes:  " A researcher working on Fitzgerald and Hemingway is forced to conclude that there may not be such a thing as a reliable eyewitness for events involving them.
 It should come as no surprise.  Whatever else they were,  Fitzgerald and Hemingway were legends,  each in his own way.  And legends have a curious effect on facts,  somewhat analogous perhaps to the way in which physicists tell us that light itself begins to bend near a black hole in space.
 To put it less esoterically,  both men were celebrities.  Celebrities generate " buzz,  and " buzz"
 is famously unreliable.  Also,  despite the obvious differences between the two,  they were in some ways astonishingly alike,  as we shall see.  One of those ways is that they both ultimately self-
destructed,  although at different speeds.  “ A Moveable Feast,  famous for its chapters on Fitzgerald,  was written well into Hemingway's own journey down,
 and those chapters cannot be taken at face value as an appraisal of Fitzgerald's character or his fate,  although they do contain much truth.  Fitzgerald and Hemingway did indeed meet in Paris in 1925.  At the time of their first meeting,  Fitzgerald,  the older of the two by three years,
 was an established novelist.  He had already published the flawed but highly popular “ This Side Of Paradise”  ( 1920)  and the also-
uneven but acclaimed “ The Beautiful And Damned”  ( 1922)  His third novel and first acknowledged masterpiece,  “
The Great Gatsby,  was published the year the two met.  Hemingway,  at the time of their first meeting,  was almost unknown outside the literary " little mags"
 of Paris- his first American book,  the short story collection “ In Our Time”  ( not to be confused with its earlier,
 Parisian incarnation,  “ in our time”  was published in October of that year by the firm of Boni and Liveright in an edition of slightly more than 1, 300 copies.  But meeting Fitzgerald was just another example of the flawless timing that characterized the young Hemingway's career.
 Meeting Sherwood Anderson in Chicago in 1921 had resulted in his being given letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound in Paris;  now,  Fitzgerald,  having met Hemingway,  was deeply impressed with his talent and wrote to his own editor,  Max Perkins,
 suggesting that Hemingway would be a good " catch"  for Scribner's,  Fitzgerald's own publisher and a much bigger,  higher- profile company than Boni and Liveright.
 If Fitzgerald didn't exactly " launch"  Hemingway,  at the very least he gave him a big boost.  The following year Scribner's published Hemingway's first novel,  “
The Sun Also Rises,  and he was on his way to world fame.  The relationship between the two authors was an odd one.  Although the older of the two,  and the more successful as a novelist when they first met,  (
this was about to change)  Fitzgerald accepted something of a " younger brother"  role in his relationship with the more robust and overbearing Hemingway.  The reasons lay in the two men's similar backgrounds and very different characters.  Both came from the midwest;
 Fitzgerald was born in St.  Paul,  Minnesota and Hemingway in the suburbs of Chicago.  Each had a weak father and a strong mother.  Scott had two older sisters who died while his mother was pregnant with him.  Later another son was born,
 but lived only an hour.  Hemingway grew up in a house full of sisters and throughout his childhood and youth longed for a little brother.  But when his brother Leicester finally did come along,  Hemingway was well into his teens and it was too late for the big- brother- little-
brother relationship he had longed for.  Fitzgerald grew up craving heroes just as strongly as Hemingway longed to be one.  At Princeton,  for example,  from which he did not graduate,  Fitzgerald idolized the burly,
 bloodied- up football players whom he couldn't match in gridiron prowess.  Hemingway positively relished being burly and bloodied- up in a whole series of roles that he played during his lifetime,  and he basked in attention.  In this respect they were a perfect match:
 Fitzgerald needed a hero,  and Hemingway fit the bill.  A key element that helped determine the shape of Hemingway and Fitzgerald's friendship was the striking divergence in their respective writing careers,  which in turn were shaped largely by the circumstances of their personal lives.  Fitzgerald actually made very little money during his lifetime from his novels.  On the other hand,
 he made enormous amounts of money,  until the early 1930s when this source of money dried up for him,  by writing short stories,  chiefly for The Saturday Evening Post.  He needed the money badly.  In 1920 Fitzgerald had married the glamorous but unstable Zelda Sayre,
 and the two of them became living symbols of that age of extravagance.  In Europe and in the United States they lived lavishly,  and Fitzgerald,  who wanted to write novels,  found himself forced by his and Zelda's spendthrift lifestyle to write the more lucrative short stories,  many of them second and third rate,
 even in his own eyes.  ( In fact,  the more second- and- third rate they were,
 the easier they sold and the better they paid,  to Fitzgerald's own disgust.  His finest stories,  such as “ Babylon Revisited”  and “
The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”  either paid less well or were in some cases rejected altogether.  Ironically,  Fitzgerald's career as a novelist ran into a brick wall in the very year he met Hemingway.  For whatever reasons,  (
Hemingway's theory was that critical praise of “ The Great Gatsby”  paralyzed Fitzgerald into being terrified that he might not be able to equal that performance)  Fitzgerald would not manage to finish another novel until “ Tender Is The Night”  some nine years later,
 and it was both a critical and a commercial failure.  Fitzgerald's life after 1925 was a three- way struggle:  he struggled with alcoholism,  with his increasingly out- of-
control wife ( Zelda would be repeatedly hospitalized for mental illness during the 1930s)  and with his attempts to get on with a novel while at the same time being forced to churn out magazine fiction to pay his bills.  Later,  during the Depression,  with the magazine-
fiction market no longer there for him,  he would make a couple of disastrous sojourns to Hollywood to write film scripts that were never filmed,  trying to make enough money to stay alive,  to pay Zelda's hospital bills and to put his daughter Scottie through school.  Hemingway's story couldn't have made a sharper contrast.  Just as Fitzgerald's writing career was flaming out,
 Hemingway's was about to burst into full morning splendor.  After " The Sun Also Rises"  was published in 1926,  Hemingway divorced his first wife,  Hadley Richardson,
 and married his second,  the wealthy Arkansas socialite Pauline Pfeiffer.  “ A Farewell To Arms,  written mostly in Key West,  Florida,
 where he and Pauline had been given a house by her rich uncle Gus back in Arkansas,  cemented both Hemingway's reputation and his fame.  Freed from the constraints of having to write for a living both by the success of his first novel and by his second wife's wealth,  Hemingway could and did look down upon Fitzgerald's magazine- writing.  Later,
 during the '30s,  Hemingway would also be able to avoid Hollywood and the necessity to try and make money by writing for the movies,  a fate not even spared William Faulkner,  who among other things worked on the film version of Hemingway's “ To Have And Have Not.  (
Hollywood being Hollywood,  the end result had little to do with “ To Have And Have Not.  1940,  the year in which Fitzgerald died,  was the year in which Hemingway's career peaked with the publication of “
For Whom The Bell Tolls.  Clearly,  theirs was the friendship of a writer on his way up and a writer spectacularly on his way down.  But Fitzgerald made an ironic " comeback"  in the years after his death,
 and largely for that reason Hemingway's treatment of Fitzgerald in “ A Moveable Feast”  is a highly- suspect farrago of half- truths,  exaggerations and memories skewed by alcohol.
 One of Hemingway's biographers has even suggested that the whining,  impotent,  drunken hypochondriac depicted by Hemingway in his memoir was a deliberate attempt to cut his rival " down to size"  after Edmund Wilson and numerous other critics had re- appraised Fitzgerald's work following his death and found it on the whole much better than many had previously thought.
 But although the distortions and mis- rememberings are there,  Hemingway was far from alone in finding Fitzgerald a trial to be around.  Charming and witty when sober,  Fitzgerald became boorish,  rude,
 loud and maudlin when drunk,  and frequently humiliated himself in public.  One of American literature's most famous drunks,  Fitzgerald actually had a very low tolerance for alcohol.  His inability to " hold his liquor"
 diminished him in Hemingway's eyes because it was a failure of one of Hemingway's key tests of manliness.  Other friends of both writers,  notably the wealthy Gerald and Sara Murphy,  who frequented many of the same European locales,  also found themselves exasperated by Fitzgerald's outrageous behavior when drunk.  Hemingway even claimed that he had been kicked out of one of his Paris apartments owing to a raucous late-
night visit by a drunken Fitzgerald,  and for a time gave instructions that Fitzgerald was not to be given his Paris address,  he would meet him only in a cafe or some other neutral place.  After a particularly disastrous weekend at Fitzgerald's house near Wilmington,  Delaware in 1928,  Hemingway said he felt that bullfights were sedatives compared to weekends with Fitzgerald.
 For all of this,  and for the fact that Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald loathed each other,  ( Zelda called Hemingway " as bogus as a rubber check"  and Hemingway accused Zelda of encouraging Scott's drinking because she was jealous of his writing)
 the affection between the two men was strong if their relationship was at times a rocky one.  They kept up a regular correspondence,  for the most part very friendly in tone,  and Fitzgerald,  a keen critic and,  as John Dos Passos once observed,
 a thorough professional when it came to writing despite his shortcomings,  contributed some critical observations that helped shape Hemingway's conclusion of “ A Farewell To Arms.  Later,  things between the two weren't so rosy,  as when Fitzgerald published his famous series of essays about his own failure and how it came about,
 published later in book form as " The Crack- Up.  Hemingway was horrified by such a public de profundis;  his own credo was that one should do the manly thing,  deal with one's problems in private and not parade them around for public view.
 Subsequently he made a cruel direct reference in " Snows of Kilimanjaro"  to Fitzgerald's supposed " romantic awe for the rich"  and how it was one of the things that " wrecked"
 him.  Deeply stung,  Fitzgerald complained about this,  both to Hemingway directly and to their mutual editor Max Perkins.  In later editions of the story Fitzgerald's name is changed to " Julian.
 Actually,  though,  as biographer of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald Jeffrey Meyers pointed out,  Snows of Kilimanjaro isn't so very much different in theme from “ The Crack- Up.
 Both are about failed writers confronting their respective failures,  one in a fictionalized context,  the other in something more like what you might see nowadays on a daytime cable television talk show.  Fitzgerald was also hurt when he finally did publish “ Tender Is The Night”  in 1934 and Hemingway's comments-
which Fitzgerald had begged for- were generally negative.  A few years later,  however,  Hemingway read the book again,  saw its merits and changed his opinion.
 When reading about Fitzgerald and Hemingway,  one is tempted to think of Shem and Shaun,  the two archetypal brothers in Joyce's “ Finnegans Wake.  In Shem we have the man of contemplation and in Shaun the man of action,  and the relationship is a destructive one.
 Fitzgerald in fact made a kind of " Shaun"  character out of Hemingway in a lamentable series of stories about " Phillipe,  the Count of Darkness,  in which he attempted to envision Hemingway as an armor-
wearing,  horseback- riding character out of the Middle Ages.  But the contrast is really an illusion.  The chief difference between them was that Hemingway had a much better sense of public relations;  he saw to it that,
 as the public perceived it anyway,  everything he did was related to his work.  Fitzgerald,  on the other hand,  became identified in the public eye with dissipation and failure.  But Hemingway,
 too,  had his weaknesses,  and Fitzgerald didn't fail to notice them.  For example there was Fitzgerald's prediction about the women in Hemingway's life.  Fitzgerald remarked early on that Hemingway would " need a new wife for each book,
 and whether such were the case or not,  it was true that Hemingway tended to solve marital problems by running away from them:  he was married four times.  ( Despite Zelda's mental illness and several affairs of his own,  Fitzgerald remained married to her right down to the end.
 Also,  Fitzgerald noticed that Hemingway,  just like himself,  had a psychological vulnerability.  " He's quite as nervously broken down as I am,
 Fitzgerald wrote,  " but it manifests itself in different ways.  His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.  True,  when Fitzgerald said it.
 But in December,  1940,  when Fitzgerald died nearly- forgotten and Hemingway was at the pinnacle of world fame,  neither of them could have known that Hemingway was on a track- albeit a slower one-
to an ending not so much different from Fitzgerald's.  True,  Hemingway never had to watch himself sinking into obscurity the way Fitzgerald did.  In 1937,  when Fitzgerald came to Hollywood to write for the movies,  he found that many people there thought he was already dead.
 But Hemingway's final years were haunted by some of the same ghosts that haunted Fitzgerald:  alcoholism,  mental illness ( in this case his own)  and a creeping sense of diminished self- worth,
 a growing suspicion that maybe he wasn't any good anymore.  Hemingway prefaced his chapters on Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with these words:  " His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings.  At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.  Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
 Hemingway wrote this passage around 1957,  and he might well have been talking about himself.  VII On The Altar Of The Goddess:  Ernest Hemingway and the Cult of the 'Celebrity Artist' 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- Twain was doing stand- up a hundred years before anyone had heard of Jerry Seinfeld.  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 which made a lasting impression on America.  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.
 ( Small wonder that the 1932 movie version starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper was such a hit.  Add to this what his public knew about Hemingway the man- the sojourns in Europe,  the marlin fishing in the Florida keys,  the bullfights in Spain,
 and,  following his first safari in 1934,  the big- game hunting in Africa. is it any wonder that in this age of " stars,
 Hemingway managed to become one?  He was in fact the first literary " star"  in 20th century America.  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,
 and Norman Mailer himself come to mind- 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 a voyage 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.  Closer to 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 mid- 1970's I watched 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,
 2001 
