Hemingway Summed Up in a Nutshell by F.Scott Fitzgerald

Papa's got a gun

Hemingway was for a long time the writer that, as a teenage kid, I wanted to emulate. The tough-guy with a soft heart was what I remember when I first picked up Across The River and into The Trees as a kid of thirteen.

I and my tastes outgrew Hemingway, even though I was told by everyone in my forties that I was his spitting image and should engage in the Key West look-a-like contest, but found the more sensitive, nuanced Fitzgerald better represented my Midwestern roots trying to replant elsewhere.

Alan Massie's new book on Hemingway brings Hemingway's offhand braggadocio and trickiness hiding a more tormented individual to the surface. I'd read Colette and Byron's Travels and now want to read the Hemingway bio. I'm also looking forward to his massive history of the Stuarts.

Like Anthony Burgess, Massie is an admirer of Hemingway with a keen appreciation of just how far short this over-hyped hyper-American stole the stage from better, if less self-promoting writers like Fitzgerald. Hemingway supposedly converted to Catholicism twice and then abjured that faith twice, surely a sign of the deeper struggles raging inside his soul.

Fitzgerald, whose book Tender in the Night, which I read during my honeymoon, according to Massie sums up Hemingway better in two sentences than anyone else ever did. The tormented Dick Driver could have been talking about F. Scott's former friend, who rose to prominence on Fitzgerald's fulsome praise in the early twenties, by this quote of Massie's:

"The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks."

Read the excellent review by the WSJ at the link above. I've read several books about Hemingway and most of his novels and short stories, but Massie's keen insights are among the best I've ever come across.