Gawker
Ernest Hemingway was a great writer, maybe the greatest writer of the last century—well who the hell did you think it was?—and he was an enormous bitch. And he was at his bitchiest best after he blew his brains out. First there was his posthumously published A Moveable Feast, in which he made famously made fun of Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis. Ever since, his biographers have churned out volumes about his life, his technique, and his mean streak. Now, A.E. Hotchner, who's been dining out on Hemingway for a lifetime, is coming out with The Good Life According to Hemingway, in which he recalls how much the Old Man hated Hollywood.
"When producer David O. Selznick crowed that his wife, Jennifer Jones, was starring in "A Farewell to Arms" and he'd pay Hemingway a $50,000 bonus from any profits, the novelist wrote back: 'If by some miracle, your movie, which stars 41-year-old Mrs. Selznick portraying 24-year-old Catherine Barkley, does earn $50,000, you should have all $50,000 changed into nickels at your local bank and shove them up your [bleep] until they came out of your ears.'
The rest of these chestnuts have been showing up in Hemingway biographies forever, but, hey, Hotchner's gotta eat.
"Darryl F. Zanuck, the boss of 20th Century Fox, was trashed when he asked Hemingway to shorten the title of 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,' which starred Gregory Peck. Hotchner quotes Hemingway, 'I said, you want something short and exciting that will catch the eye of both sexes, right?' He then reeled off the first letters of Hollywood studio names that together spelled out the F-word. 'That should fit all the marquees and you can't beat it as a sex symbol.' Zanuck titled the film 'The Macomber Affair.'
"Of 'The Sun Also Rises,' Hemingway raged: 'Any picture in which Errol Flynn is the best actor is its own worst enemy.' As for 'The Old Man and the Sea,' 'I sat through all of that movie, numb. Spencer Tracy looked like a fat, very rich actor playing a fisherman.'"
"Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1961, snarked that in a love scene in 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' Gary Cooper 'didn't take off his coat. That's one hell of a way for a guy to make love, with his coat on - in a sleeping bag.'" [P6]
Comments
i love papa.
Hotchner also helped create the spaghetti sauce that became the first Newman's Own product with his neighbor Paul.
greatest writer of the last century? surely, ian, you haven't forgotten about dave eggers?
Gertrude and F. Scott shared a penis? Who knew?
I knew a Hemingway once. No relation, but he was quite the prick. As for Spencer Tracy in Old Man and the Sea, don't you have to be fat and very rich nowadays to afford fishing?
@mydeadgayson: I think you meant Clive Cussler.
It's likely hard for people to understand there was a time when writers actually went out and did things before they wrote about them.
@In Other News...: my bad, did i accidentally say dave eggers? what i meant was wahida clark, author of the award-winning 'thug matrimony' and time-honored classic 'payback is a mutha'. watch out, america, hip-hop literature's coming to take you by storm!
My favorite Hemingway anecdote:
Hemingway boasted(in a letter to Sara Murphy)that, in a boxing match at his home in Key West, he had knocked Wallace Stevens down quite handily: "... for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs and ... when he hits the ground it is highly spectaculous."
Also, Stevens was 20 years older than Hemingway.
@minou: Stevens was also an insurance company executive which would be reason enough to thrash him.
@minou:
And when Wallace came to he had a new idea of order at Key West.
@Seeräuber Jenny:
One of my all-time favorites:
[www.cscs.umich.edu]
@Seeräuber Jenny: Marvelous poem. I read it and pretend it is by William Carlos Williams.
What do you call someone who uses initials as their first name? Do you call him A? Or E? Or A-E? Or a combination vowel sound like AhhEeee?
@belltolls: This is one of my favorites also. But I like it as Stevens's. Somehow, it uncovers him.
@Seeräuber Jenny: Ha! Now I'm going to reread the poem and look for the punch.
@minou: It is a swell poem. I just got a problem with that guy.
@With Love and Squalor: Ha! I totes don't remember Hemingway snarking about Fitz's cock in A Moveable Feast. I'm just not quite sure it's worth re-reading for that passage.
@GraniteInMyVeins:It's not worth looking up. Here is the skinny: Fitz is bitching to Hem that Zelda says it is Fitz's small dinky that keeps her sexually unsatisfied and so Hem takes him in the bathroom and looks at his dinky and says, "It's your average dinky." But Fitz will not believe Hem, so Hem takes him to some museum in Paris (Paris is lousy with museums) and shows Fitz some Greek statues of men and says, "See, normal dinky." But Fitz does not believe him and goes on to drink and work in Hollywood and then die.
See, I could never find much fun in Hemingway's antics and thought Proust was like the all-time greatest 20C writer. But that's quite possibly just the GUHEIGH in me.
I don't know who it was, but it certainly wasn't Mr. drunken, run-on sentences H.
@In Other News...: Not exactly, but it helps.
Farewell to Arms was on TV the other night, and what an epic bit of miscasting that woman was. For a supposed 24-year-old, she looked positively matronly. Gave the whole romance an unintentional and very jarring Harold & Maude vibe.
@belltolls: That was awesome. Can you do other Hemingway novels too? Or maybe Remembrance of Things Past?
@Hez: Is it you that's always posting broken links, or is it the gin?
Why is it that every time I read Hemm anecdotes, I always hear the Sean Connery voice from celebrity jeopardy? Maybe its the beard. Or the gruff pomposity.
@Hez: @skahammer: GAH! Must be time to start drinking.
[www.plightofthefisherman.com]
@Hez: Technically, dear, "time to start drinking" implies that there was a recent and generally identifiable period of time when you stopped drinking.
You're forgiven, though, as long as you keep doling out those lusty hugs. ::hint::
@skahammer: Sounds like it's time for mami's dresser! Woo!
@Hez: Actually I've grown quite accustomed to the way your mambozos will occasionally cascade out of your oversized pajama top when you're distractedly struggling with the Jumble(tm) -- it's quite fetching. But I understand your desire to look sharp -- the pool boy will be here in minutes, and last weekend I noticed he went home with lipstick on the drawstring of his board shorts.
Not that I judge, at all. I just think you'd enjoy it more if you mixed in some soda and ice rather than nipping straight from the bottle when you think I'm not looking. As always, it's your well-being I have uppermost in my mind.
@skahammer: That's me - always putting the board in bored shorts.
And I don't struggle with the Jumble(tm)... THE JUMBLE(tm) STRUGGLES WITH ME!
I believe that Joyce Carol Oates considers herself the greatest author of the twentieth century.
@Hez: As you like it, sweetest.
In fact, you're probably right. On those increasingly predictable midafternoon occasions when I've had to lift a forlorn, crying figure off the patio bricks, worry the oversized soft-lead pencil from her white-knuckled grip, and ease her into a warm, scented bath with her favorite Cat Stevens album playing softly in the background, all the while drying her tears of frustration with my fashionably untucked shirttail -- you're right, it's probably the Jumble(tm) itself that is the actual recipient of my ministrations as often as one-eighth of the time. I suppose I'd been overlooking that fact until you pointed it out just now. My bad.
@famousauthor: That is the most awful thing I have ever heard.
@famousauthor: Fox, Universal, Columbia, Keystone.
@belltolls: For my part, I have a huge problem with "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and would have give up on Stevens were it not for "The Idea of Order...". So I hear you.
@belltolls: I'm not picking on you, Bell, we just keep respectfully disagreeing.
It is worth looking up, Granite. The summary doesn't do the scene justice.If you can imagine, you'll find it in the chapter "A Matter of Measurements."
@minou: You mean he didn't say dinky?
@minou: Don't try to draw me into a serious discussion here. I have seen what happens when people try--it's ketch as ketch can if you know what I mean--but suffice it to say I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois and was made to recite Carlos Baker each night by the fire. A Moveable Feast wouldn't pass the Frey test but I love it still.
The fact that Papa looks like Sean Connery in that picture makes his awesomeness even more awesome. I can almost hear him mouthing the words "Suck it, Trebek!"
@minou: Hahaha - will do.
@belltolls: Much obliged!
@minou:
Shit, it's Hemingway's fault I even know about the Murpheys.
For that alone he deserved the shotgun up the mouth.
@belltolls:
I read that as Frey Fest. We should start one.
@belltolls:
"It's likely hard for people to understand there was a time when writers actually went out and did things before they wrote about them."
Flaubert was of course exemplary in this regard.
It wasn't easy, mind you, for a fat, prematurely balding epileptic man to pass himself off as a beautiful and dainty convent-educated provincial lass in order to marry a boorish but good-hearted officier de santé.
But Flaubert's devotion to his craft was such that he excelled at this masquerade, not only marrying a country doctor, but consummating the marriage and somehow from such congress became pregnant and successfully gave birth to a daughter.
Like all great writers, Flaubert disdained the dilettantish reveries worshipped by middle-brows as "imagination." Nothing less than hands-on flesh-and-blood personal experience would ever inform his work. And so Flaubert persisted in his lifeless provincial marriage with the dullard physician.
But gradually Flaubert, still magnificent in faultless imposture, grew restless and embarked on a number of doomed affairs with unavailable men, borrowing money lavishly for the gowns and bagatelles needed for nurturing and maintaining an inconstant lover's fancy.
Flaubert's ingenious ruse would likely have continued until his "fun money" ran out, had not one of Flaubert's overbearing lovers discovered that Flaubert had in fact an extraordinarly large and exquisitely functional penis.
With only minutes to spare, Flaubert managed to escape the crowd of vengeful philistines who ransacked the home he shared with his husband and daughter. Fully assuming his identity as a man, Flaubert made his way to his mother's home in Croisset where, armed with ample and highly vivid first-hand factual experience, he spent the next five years writing Madame Bovary.
@Hamud: Next you are going to tell me Proust wrote in a cork-lined room to keep the world out.
@Hamud: ...all of which was nothing compared to what he went through to write The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
@Hamud: Emily Dickinson transformed herself into a loaded gun and local hunters were amazed at what a good shot she was, especially considering that the bullets were projected from out of her taut virginal hymen. That is, until she met Death with whom she famously carried on a torrid love affair. At first she resisted but Death ardently pursued her, stopping outside her home in his tricked out carriage every Saturday night. She finally gave in to his entreaties. Many people insist their relationship was not physical but she once confessed in a letter to Col. Higginson that when Death climaxed he made the sound of buzzing flies.
@skahammer:
So you can keep up with the hipsters, these days the preferred English translation of that work's title is In Search of Lost Time.
The line from the Shakespeare sonnet used by the first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is considered too passive. I'm not sure, but I don't think Proust was crazy about it either.