Frequent Gunfire: What Was It Like to Be Ernest Hemingway? (2017)

Have only read a few of his books, but can't help but think he was more of a great man who wrote than a great writer independent of his persona. He was an artifact of a time in need of stories. Criticism of him by lesser writers through modern eyes falls into the category of, "no man is a hero to his valet," but there is some truth in looking back now at what we thought of novelists even just 20 years ago and wondering how much of what we idealized about them could have been true.

The particular criticisms in the article are dismissable, an attempt to fold old icons into a current critical theory, with the familiar clunk and rattle of grinding his memory through the cogs of an ideology, but the question of why a man of any physical substance would write fiction today seems still to be with us. The Hemmingway mystique of masculinity is completely absent from pop culture now, where even news anchors and world leaders aren't the sort of men anyone would call in an emergency.

The upside for writers is to compete for attention with pictures of others' butts on instagram. I happen to know more than a few men who would meet the description of great or Hemmingway'esque and none of them are writing. Maybe this signals the opportunity, as it's obvious to anyone who looks that the authors critical theory of writers and men represents a nadir in the culture, and the guy who gets people to use instagram "for the articles," will become a literary king?

Slightly nsfw language, but this reminds me of a stand up bit summarizing Hemingway's life in about 3 1/2 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlxEKOscu0M

I do not care what kind of man he was. I enjoyed and continue to enjoy his books tremendously.

Most people are disappointed when they meet their hero, whether that’s a musician, writer, athlete, etc.

That does not have to dilute the thing about which you admire them.

You can sense the petty jealousy seething between the lines of this piece.

At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety—or so one would have thought—and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?

Two things we can say about Hemingway - he wrote fairly prolifically from his teens until the end of his life, although some of his later work was only published posthumously; and his life was eventful, filled with first hand experiences of primal human activities like war and hunting and physical suffering and philandering, excellent fuel for a writer, fuel that most writers simply lack. It's not hard to 'account' for the legend of Hemingway, between his actual life and the quality and influence of his works.

Hemingway also served as a spy in Cuba:

https://vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway

And was a “target” of the FBI:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/03/fbi-and-ernest...

I liked his books. That's all that matters to me. I do not give a flying hoot about what kind of a man he was in real life nor am I interested to know.

Similar example - L. Ron Hubbard. I like his Mission Earth and I really do not need to know about the rest of his life.