There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida. Bizarre? Perhaps not. It’s 50 years since he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, but he remains the most famous and widely recognised American writer of the 20th century, indeed of all time. Sadly, however, the lookalikes all take after the bearded bust-up Papa of his last miserable years, not the handsome young author of the great short stories where every word does its work and there are never too many of them. That Hemingway created an American type — lean, rangy, debonair — last example, Gregory Peck as the journalist in Roman Holiday.
Papa on the other hand is a sad case, was a sad case well before they took him off to the Mayo Clinic and gave him the electric shock treatment which finally scrambled his brains. It’s impossible to read accounts of his last years without feeling miserable. The man who knew the virtue of leaving things out now went on and on repetitively in The Dangerous Summer. Garrulity replaced the laconic, and his own conversation was littered with weary catchphrases — ‘how do you like it now, gentlemen?’ He couldn’t finish his books and of those which have been published posthumously, after much editing, only A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden stand up. His biography is a true American tragedy.
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