Hemingway
...n's writer. He speaks to men about the ideal and essence of manhood itself. That was his stock in trade. And he must have known it. Now the truth is that not even Ernest Hemingway was the Hemingway hero through and through and all of the time. The Hemingway hero is, if you like, Ernest with the bad bits removed and the good bits both isolated and magnified. He is a myth that is based upon truth. But only the best bits of the truth. And then the truth is magnified again and again to produce the Myth. And like all myths he sets us an impossibly high standard of what we at our best might be like. And that is both what attracts us to the myth and drives us - as men - to emulate it and to seek to better it. And perhaps the virtue in doing so is that we end up as better men than we would have done had we not. He gave us an ideal to aspire to through his work. An ideal of what a man should be like. And that is what makes his work improving to us, as men. And that must have been part of what he was aiming to do. The downside to this is that I get and have had a lot of Hemingwayesque posturing and mimicry amongst male fans and male writers. I have been guilty of this myself is. It is precisely because Hemingway so fundamentally challenges me as a man and as an artist. How brave are you? How tough are you? How good are you? How true are you? How deep are you? How knowing are you? How experienced are you? How wise are you?How talented are you? How well can you handle yourself in a fight? How much of a man are you? This is not a phenomenon that is limited to the United Stat...