The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?

The Hemingway Enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?

For many Ernest Hemingway was ‘one of the 21st century’s greatest authors’, a literary modernist and a writer without peer – or at least, that is what they were taught at school or college or have otherwise picked up. The ‘Papa’ Hemingway of legend was a boozer and a brawler, a seasoned traveller, a ‘fine’ fisherman and hunter, a ladies’ man, an expert on Spain, the Spanish and bullfighting, a linguist fluent in Spanish and French, a bon vivant, a fearless renegade who had fought in three wars, but also a major literary stylist and wrote like an angel. They might be surprised to be told that much of it wasn’t just shameless Hemingway hyperbole, but most of it was untrue. As for the ‘literary greatness’, they might also be surprised to hear that after his successful debut and his follow-up novel, his career over the following thirty years was decidedly bumpy. Of his third novel To Have And Have the New York Times’ leading critic wrote ‘ Mr. Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger if it had never been published. ’ Then came his best-known work For Whom The Bell Tolls. It was a runaway best-seller when it was published, yet just twenty years later another New York Times critic described it as ‘ a curious mixture of good and bad, of marvellous scenes and chapters which are balanced off by improbably or sentimental or melodramatic passages of adolescent fantasy development. ’ Hemingway published nothing for the next ten years until his next novel, Across The River And Into The Trees appeared – and it was universally panned by the critics. His friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote to a mutual acquaintance ‘ How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page? ’ The American writer, pundit and wit Gore Vidal wrote about his fellow countrymen ‘ What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke? ’ Yet in 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize ‘For his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,’ and the Pope, the Kremlin and the US President sent their condolences to his widow after he blew his head off. So how did the global literary fame of ‘Papa’ Hemingway come about? That is the enigma this book examines.