Almost 50 years after his death in 1961, Ernest Hemingway
remains an American icon. Schoolchildren continue to know (or at least I hope
they do) such masterworks as In Our Time
and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cineastes
revere films based on Hemingway novels, like To Have and Have Not, which gained fame as the first and sexiest
on-screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In various picturesque
parts of the globe there are Hemingway statues as well as watering holes named
after his favorite drinking spot, Harry’s Bar in Venice. I once made a pilgrimage to a Madrid restaurant called Botín
because Hemingway’s Jake Barnes had feasted on suckling pig there, washed down
with a nice rioja, in The Sun Also Rises.
Not only have many of Hemingway’s works been filmed (as far
back as 1932, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes starred in a screen version of A Farewell to Arms) but he himself has
appeared as a character in numerous Hollywood movies and TV series. Some were
intended as seriously biographical, but he has also shown up in several
fanciful projects. A Hemingway character was featured in TV’s Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. does
not actually materialize in an offbeat 1993 indie called Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, but I still treasure Corey Stoll’s
robust portrayal of the author in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
When Hemingway was just starting out, the talk of the
literary world was John Dos Passos, a Harvard graduate with an exotic
upbringing, a talent for art, and strong leftwing leanings. The two met in Paris
in the 1920s, and quickly bonded. One thing that drew them together, aside from
their literary interests, was that both had experienced the bloodshed of World
War I while serving as volunteer ambulance drivers on the battlefields of
Europe. The twists and turns of their relationship are chronicled by my friend
and colleague, James McGrath Morris, in a short but fascinating book called The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. The sad truth of the matter: Hemingway was not easy on his
friends. At the beginning, the chum and drinking companion he called “Dos”
performed an invaluable service by bringing Hemingway’s work to the attention
of New York publishers. But later, as the esoteric works of Dos Passos (who
experimented with using cinematic techniques like montage on the printed page) earned
more respect than money, Hemingway resented needing to make loans to keep Dos
and his wife afloat. Eventually, as he
came to do with all his (former) friends, he was cruelly lampooning Dos Passos
in print
Jamie Morris is at his most captivating when he compares Hemingway
and Dos Passos in terms of their feelings about war. Dos Passos, says Jamie,
“had come away from the experience with the belief that war was a macabre and
purposeless dance of death.” By contrast, Hemingway looked to war as a place
for a man to prove himself, as well as a prime opportunity for romance.
Hemingway’s own wartime experience of near-death followed by a passionate love
affair is the stuff that movies are made of. Hollywood heroes, like Hemingway himself, tend
to find that the closeness to death make them feel more alive, and the
vicarious excitement makes moviegoers feel alive too.
There are also a lot of famous Hollywood movies that
chronicle wartime friendships: see, for instance, the Vietnam era films The Deer Hunter and Platoon. From the example of these
movies and others, friendship in time of war doesn’t fare so well in the long
term.
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