Based On (A Work By) Ernest Hemingway:

The Author as Fictionalized Celebrity

By

Timothy Penner

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of

The University of Manitoba

In partial fulfilment of the requirements of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media

University of Manitoba

Winnipeg

Copyright © 2020 by Timothy Penner

ii ABSTRACT

Ernest Hemingway – bestselling author, journalist, winner of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes

for literature – is a famous person; however, like so many famous people, Hemingway’s celebrity

allure is derived from much more than his work. It is for this reason that today Hemingway is better

known for his associations with macho pursuits like fishing, big game hunting, bullfighting, war, and

womanizing, and as a spokesperson for an amorphous lifestyle brand based on authenticity and

nostalgia for some imagined golden age of masculinity.

The aim of this dissertation is to trace the influence cinema, and later television, have had on

the development of Hemingway’s celebrity persona as it changed from scrappy literary modernist to

near-mythological figure. By employing the insights of celebrity studies, this study explores the ways

Hollywood continually drew from both Hemingway’s work and life as it attempted to translate

something of his charismatic personal appeal to the screen. As the twentieth century progressed,

adaptations became central to what Richard Dyer would call Hemingway’s “structured polysemy.”

Films like The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, for instance,

saw a blurring of the lines between Hemingway’s literature and his life that meant that the narratives

were as much about him as they were adaptations of his stories.

In the years since his death, a number of movies and TV series have dramatized Hemingway

as a character. In these media texts, Hemingway appears as a pugnacious, and adventurous exemplar

of masculinity rather than as a hard-working creative writer. Midnight in Paris (2011) has, in

particular, established an influential image of Hemingway, one that is part of a continuum of

characterizations. The result of these characterizations is that over time, Hemingway has become

a fictionalized celebrity, what I call a fictocel. Aided by the processes of cinema and television

appropriation and adaptation, the Hemingway fictocel, I argue, eventually replaces the historical

person and author in the popular imagination.

iii Acknowledgements

Although this project has only my name as author, its completion would have been

impossible without the generous support of a number of people. First and foremost, I must thank my

advisor Dr. Brenda Austin-Smith whose wise advice, academic guidance, seemingly bottomless well

of patience through many, many, many drafts, and impeccable ability to encourage and challenge my

ideas are the reason this dissertation exists today. I would also like to thank Dr. George Toles for his

honesty when my work needed improvement, and for the generous encouragement that drove me to

make it better. As well, I want to thank Dr. Sarah Elvins and Dr. Michael Nowlin for their insightful

and constructive recommendations, and for the challenging questions that pushed me to think in

different ways.

I would also like to acknowledge the support staff and faculty of the Department of English,

Theatre, Film & Media, especially Ms. Anita King, who never failed to offer advice and solve

problems related to the everyday challenges of graduate school, for myself and countless others; and

to Dr. Lucas Tromly whose encouragement through each phase of the PhD program, and his

friendship has meant so much. See you at IKEA, Luke!

I also want to thank FGS, GSA, the Faculty of Arts, The Affect Project, and The Hemingway

Society for their generous financial support.

Thanks, as well, to my friends and family for their support and encouragement, and for

actually listening and caring when I would reply to that not always welcomed inquiry: “How’s your

thesis going?”

Finally, none of this would be possible without the love and support of Katherine Penner, my

partner in every sense of the word. Her dedication to our family has meant that she has done more

than her fair share in raising our children these past few years, even as she has continued to do great

things in her own career.

iv

For Atticus and Rosalita A man alone ain’t got no chance

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1:

Selling Hemingway on Screen ...................................................................................................... 29

Chapter 2:

Cinematic Constructions of the Hemingway Persona .................................................................. 91

Chapter 3:

Putting the Prestige in the Pictures ............................................................................................. 130

Chapter 4:

The Rise of the Fictocel .............................................................................................................. 176

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 235

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 244

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 ...................................................................................................................................... 29

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3 ...... .….. ........................................................................................................................ 36

Figure 1.4 ...................................................................................................................................... 71

Figure 1.5 ...................................................................................................................................... 78

Figure 1.6

Figure 1.7

Figure 1.8 ...... …. .......................................................................................................................... 81

Figure 1.9 ...................................................................................................................................... 82

Figure 1.10 .................................................................................................................................... 83

Figure 3.1 .................................................................................................................................... 164

Figure 3.2

Figure 3.3 ...... … ......................................................................................................................... 166

Figure 3.4 .................................................................................................................................... 171

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2 ...... … ......................................................................................................................... 227

1

Introduction

In March of 1957 Ernest Hemingway sat to have his portrait taken by famed

photographer Yousuf Karsh. The stunning photograph that resulted remains, in a perfect

monochromatic luminosity, the definitive image of the author in late middle age. The lower half

of his weathered face – liver spotted, wrinkled, and on full display via the perfectly placed

lighting and the unerring lens – is framed by the white tufts of his Moses-like beard. A knitted

pattern runs along the thick collar of the Christian Dior turtleneck sweater that has become a

nearly metonymic item for the author. Below his thinning hair, carefully combed over the bald

patches, we can see a protruding mound near his hairline, a lipoma that developed after an

unfortunate run in with a skylight some thirty years prior. The lines in Hemingway’s forehead

run deep and seem to bow toward his broken nose, directing our view down to his eyes. It is

these eyes – pitch black save the slightest glimmer of light in the upper corners, looking past the

camera to some unknown horizon, appearing as weary as they are searching – that force a

continual re-consideration of this image. Is this face, as the tightly closed lips would attest, the

face of resolute genius, firm in his footing no matter the situation? Is this face, as the weathered

skin would tell us, the face of an exhausted old man, his body run down by a life lived too hard?

Or is this the face, as his enigmatic gaze would suggest, the face of a sojourner, aware that the

end of his journey is nearing, but resolute in his desire to see more, know more, and tell more?

The inscrutability is part of the reason this photograph remains iconic and emblematic of

its subject. This photograph is fundamental to the Hemingway myth, the legacy that has been

passed down through various stakeholders – both well-wishers and vicious attackers – beginning

with the man himself and evolving beyond his control to become, at various points, an essential

thread in the fabric of culture (literary and otherwise), a representation of outdated social values

2 and chauvinistic tendencies, the quintessential American author (despite having spent most of his

adult life as an expatriate), and, most recently, a reliable brand for selling a privileged life-style

through high-priced eye wear, furniture, and artisanal liquor. Hemingway, like the iconic

photograph of him, whether as parody or in sincerity, has become an ideal figure onto which one

can project a personality, ethos, and a set of values that can be reflected back at the gazer as an

affirmation greeted with the same enigmatic eyes that are central to Karsh’s photograph1.

The exaggerations of his persona (positive or negative), have been an important part of

Hemingway’s image for as long as he has been a public figure. For instance, in an article for the

Saturday Review in October of 1960 titled “Must Writers be Characters?” Harvey Swados argues

that the American fascination with celebrity and personality has overtaken the world of literary

fiction, and singles out Hemingway, in particular, as a prime example of a personality-driven

author, saying that his works have gained critical and commercial praise based, at least partially,

on the power of his personality. Two years later Daniel Boorstin picked up on Swados’ thread

when he published his book The Image, in which he bemoaned the state of American culture in

the early 1960s, and places much of the blame for the decline on the power of the media, and its

endless yearning for popular acceptance. “Popularity,” Boorstin writes, is “often bought at the

cost of the integrity of the individual work” (118). In discussing the influence of the star system

on American literature, Boorstin refers to Hemingway as “a kind of Douglas Fairbanks” (162), in

terms of the public understanding of his persona.

These two mentions of Hemingway in early discourses on celebrity culture are important

for what they tell us about the disconnect that already existed between Hemingway’s work and

his public persona around the time of his death. Both Swados and Boorstin, while expressing

admiration for some of Hemingway’s work, saw him, in the wake of his 1950s popularity, as

3 little more than a celebrity persona, whose literary success, including his Nobel and Pulitzer

prizes, should be attributed to his prominence as a public figure, rather than his authorial

acumen. While the Fairbanks comparison is Boorstin’s, Swados does refer to the reporting of

Hemingway’s chest size in gossip columns, thereby connecting back to the masculinity that has

so thoroughly dominated the discourse around him. The references emphasize Hemingway’s

popular reputation as an adventurer, manly lover, and macho he-man, rather than an

accomplished author. As Suzanne del Gizzo puts it, “Hemingway [around the time of his death]

was a writer known not for the significance of his literary contribution, but for his ‘well-

knownness’” (7).

Following Hemingway’s death from suicide on 2 July 1961, the availability of numerous

interpretive avenues concerning his persona and reputation resulted in a concerted effort to form

a definitive narrative of the author’s life. 1962 saw the release of a personal memoir by

Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester and a pulpy biography, The Private Hell of Hemingway

by Milt Machlin. In 1966, Hemingway’s personal friend, and sometime assistant, A.E. Hotchner

published his memoir, Papa Hemingway, and before long came weightier, heavily-researched,

and academically focused biographies. Hemingway even ostensibly told his own story through

his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), which was compiled from a

collection of manuscripts and collected notes into a book by his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway,

who also wrote a memoir, How it Was, published in 1973.

The powerful mythology cultivated during Hemingway’s lifetime has hardly diminished

in the half-century since his death. If anything, the mythology around Hemingway as a figure of

toughness and hyper-masculinity has only gained strength through an increase in fictionalized

representations and a decrease in attention being paid to his actual literary output in popular

4 culture. It is that persona, its growth, its shape, its influence, and its inter-medial importance that

has allowed Hemingway to achieve a level of ubiquity in popular culture that very few authors

have managed, pushing him beyond his role as an author into something of a mythic figure of

strength from some imagined golden age of masculinity. The infrastructure that facilitated

Hemingway’s rise as a figure of pop cultural importance has been explored by several theorists

and historians. For instance, Catherine Turner, in her book Marketing Modernism, has examined

the way Hemingway’s early persona was constructed by the marketing department at Scribner’s

as they sought ways to sell his books; David M. Earle’s All Man!, is a study of the symbiotic

relationship between Hemingway and mid-century men’s magazines like Modern Man, Man’s

Illustrated, and MALE, that shows how much of the hyper-masculine persona so closely

associated with Hemingway was propagated through lowbrow pulp publications; Leonard J.

Leff’s Hemingway and his Conspirators, focuses on Hemingway’s early publishing ambitions as

indicators of his later celebrity proliferation; and John Raeburn’s Fame Became of Him, traces

the growth of Hemingway’s persona through non-literary and often autobiographical writing in

magazines like Esquire, as well as newspapers via his war-correspondence.

There are also several books and articles by critics like Frank Laurence, Gene Phillips,

Bruce Kawin, and Candace Ursula Grissom which deal with the many adaptations of

Hemingway’s works into films, each with an eye toward notions of fidelity, and the ability or

inability to interpret for the screen what makes Hemingway’s literature effective. It is also

important to mention Ron McFarland’s book Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a

Fictional Character, which studies the uses of Hemingway as a character primarily in literature.

McFarland refers to these fictive characterizations as “appropriations” and studies their many

manifestations via theories related to fan fiction. Throughout his study, McFarland engages with

5 appropriations to discover what fictive representations can tells us about Hemingway or his

writing, as he questions whether Hemingway’s being synthesized through the minds of fans or

detractors can provide important insights into such a well-studied public figure.

What remains underexplored, however, is the role visual media like cinema and

television played in shaping the understanding of Hemingway as a celebrity. I assert that the

movies primarily, but also, more recently, television, as both art forms and industries, play as

important a role in Hemingway’s celebrity construction as the other media which Hemingway

employed (and which employed Hemingway) on his journey from scrappy Modernist author to

one of the twentieth century’s earliest and most pervasive multi-media personality brands. In the

twenty-first century, the Hemingway mythos has developed in such a way that “Hemingway” as

a collection of disconnected ephemera (quotes [and misquotes], images, caricatures, parodies)

has become far better known than anything he wrote. The development of Hemingway’s persona

from celebrated author to a figure defined by mediated engagements created by others, reflects

the trajectory of the celebrity figure in the twenty-first century, wherein fans, or even casual

observers, often feel confident in their assessments of a public figure via mediated interactions

such as films, magazine profiles, interviews, gossip columns, or social media.

To trace and account for this process I draw on a theoretical approach used to study the

role of the celebrity as a cultural and commercial phenomenon. The roots of this academic

discipline can be traced to the mid-twentieth century when theorists like the aforementioned

Boorstin and Leo Lowenthal wrote disparagingly about the forces behind personality-driven

popularity. The greater fixation on what were considered superficial figures (entertainers,

athletes), or at least the superficial aspects of professional figures (politicians, captains of

industry), was viewed by Lowenthal and Boorstin, taking their cue from Frankfurt School

6 cultural theorists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as an indicator of the decline of

western culture2.

Later theorists disassociated the field of celebrity from the sort of idealistic golden age

thinking of the earlier theorists, preferring instead to read the phenomenon on its own terms. In

establishing the parameters of celebrity studies, P. David Marshall writes, “The concept of the

celebrity is best defined as a system for valorizing meaning and communication. As a system, the

condition of celebrity status is convertible to a wide variety of domains and conditions within

contemporary culture” (x). The concern of more recent scholars like Leo Braudy, Su Holmes,

Barry King, Chris Rojek, Graeme Turner, Susan Douglas, Andrea McDonnell, Sean Redmond,

and many more, has been focused on how “the celebrity sign,” as Marshall describes it,

“effectively contains this tension between authentic and false cultural value” (xi). Marshall goes

on to say that “in its simultaneous embodiment of media construction, audience construction, and

the real, living and breathing human being, the celebrity sign negotiates the competing and

contradictory definitions of its own significance” (xi).

Although Lowenthal and Boorstin were worried that undeserving people were becoming

celebrities, or that the achievement of celebrity would adversely affect the work an artist

produced, later theorists do not tend to worry about such dilemmas, and instead recognize that

celebrity is a pervasive phenomenon closely associated with our current age, and therefore

requires study and understanding. Graeme Turner writes,

The contemporary celebrity will usually have emerged from the sports or entertainment

industries, they will be highly visible through the media, and their private life will attract

greater public interest than their professional life. Unlike that of, say, public officials, the

celebrity’s fame does not necessarily depend on the position or achievements that gave

7 them their prominence in the first instance. Rather, once they are established, their fame

is likely to have outstripped the claims to prominence developed within that initial

location. Indeed, the modern celebrity may claim no special achievements other than the

attraction of public attention. (3)

The hallmark of celebrity is the fascination with the life of the person rather than the work,

talent, or event that brought the celebrity to prominence. The reading of celebrity Turner

identifies can be traced back to Lowenthal, who studied the development of biographies in

popular magazines from 1901 to 1941, a time coinciding with the rise of the movie industry and

the star system. Lowenthal concludes that there was a definite shift over that period from what he

calls “idols of production,” whom he identifies as “people from the serious and important

professions” (111) such as those in business, bankers, politicians, or inventors, to “idols of

consumption.” Lowenthal describes ‘idols of consumption’ as “directly, or indirectly, related to

the sphere of leisure time … eg. the heroes of the world of entertainment and sport” (115).

Interest in the extra-textual aspects of celebrity personalities in our time has only intensified with

the proliferation of social media where celebrities (or their public relations teams), with varying

degrees of tact, share (sometimes) carefully curated versions of their private lives, as a way of

building their brands. It is clear that both then and now a celebrity’s work, be it a film, a TV

show, a record, or a baseball game, is merely one part of a larger persona. Even though certain

types of celebrities become famous as ‘idols of production’ – it is their ‘work’ that brings them

popular awareness – once they have reached celebrity status they become ‘idols of consumption’

because what is interesting about them shifts from what they do to who they are and how they

live.

8 Susan Douglas and Andrea McDonnell in their book Celebrity: A History of Fame, echo

this definition of celebrity and emphasize its importance for female celebrities. “The primary

focus of [media coverage]” Douglas and McDonnell write, “is not the famous female’s latest

professional accomplishment, but rather her personal life, her appearance, emotions, and

relationships: her life events” (55). Their assessment that “the central beat of celebrity journalism

is emotion: love, hate, heartbreak, despair, joy” (55) is based on McDonnell’s 2014 book

Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, in which she found that the thirteen3 most frequently

returned to topics for celebrity profiles in gossip magazines were all focused on the personal,

rather than the professional. The fascination with the “real” person at the heart of a celebrity

construction leads fans to the impression that they know the celebrity, resulting in a “parasocial

interaction (PSI)”4, which is described as “feeling empathy for that individual as though he or

she were a personal acquaintance” (50). Douglas and McDonnell acknowledge that there has

been a great deal of debate about the nature of PSIs in the psychology community, but ultimately

recognize its importance as a part of the process of identification that bolsters a celebrity’s

popular appeal. “Physical similarities, taste in dress, or shared hobbies and passions,” Douglas

and McDonnell write, “can make audiences feel that famous figures really are ‘like us’” (51). It

is the impression that a celebrity is similar to those people in one’s social circle that helps to

sustain the “parasocial relationship” (51) for the fan.

The key aspect of a parasocial interaction or relationship is that it does not represent the

traditional understanding of either an interaction or a relationship. A fan, except in rare

circumstances, is not making a connection with the physical embodiment of a celebrity, not

hearing, or being heard by that person, but rather, is interacting with what has been called by

9 theorist Richard deCordova a “symbolic identity” (112). The symbolic identity is central to

celebrity studies, and the field out of which it grew, star studies.

In Stars, his influential study of the Hollywood star system, Richard Dyer sets out to

define what he means by the term ‘star’ which he claims is closely related to the idea of image;

however, by image he does not refer to an “exclusively visual sign, but rather a complex

configuration of visual, verbal and aural signs” (34). The distinction is important in recognizing

the complexity of one’s reaction to seeing an actor on screen, and can be extended by careful

analogy to the larger field of celebrity inhabited by other famous people, including Hemingway,

who achieve a degree of cultural recognition and influence similar to that of film stars. Dyer goes

on to say that a star’s image is “manifest not only in films but in all kinds of media texts” (34).

This means that when we watch a performance of Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Brad Pitt or Emma

Stone, our understanding of the character is not developed in a vacuum, but is informed by our

knowledge of other performances, talk show appearances, knowledge of biographical

information, rumours culled from tabloid magazines, and the opinions of critics, columnists, and

social media content creators. All of this information creates what Dyer calls a “structured

polysemy” which he defines as the “multiplicity of meanings and affects [celebrities] embody

and the attempt so to structure them that some meanings and affects are foregrounded and others

are masked or displaced” (3). We can hear echoes of this in Douglas and McDonnell’s writing

about PSIs, as well as in Turner and Marshall’s assessment of what constitutes a celebrity

persona. Whether someone is active in movies, television, sports, or something more amorphous

like social media, it is the public interest in celebrities’ lives beyond their work that creates,

according to Dyer, et al., the attraction.

10 Leo Braudy restates Dyer’s assessment when he writes about celebrity. In defining the

extra-textual material Dyer discussed, Braudy calls these experiences the “surround,” which he

describes as “everything else that the audience pays attention to, in addition to the somewhat

circumscribed and formalized performance” (1073). Braudy writes that the surround “includes

the material culture of books, visual images, and previous performances, as well as the more

immaterial culture of gossip, personal psychological inclinations, and inchoate cultural attitudes”

(1073). Most importantly, the surround is the means through which “audiences are created, and

they in turn help create the parameters of celebrity that will influence future audiences” (1073).

Therefore, according to Braudy, the surround not only draws fans toward a celebrity but also

shapes the understanding of that celebrity in ways that performances alone cannot, as all of the

attributes and events connected with the person of a celebrity become part of the “symbolic

identity.” While John F. Kennedy, Babe Ruth, Hillary Clinton, T.E. Lawrence, and Marilyn

Monroe were, and are, historical and physical beings, in the public imagination, they became,

and continue to be reconfigured as, assemblages of their appearances, their roles, their quotes,

biographical and fictionalized medial treatments, the aspects of their private lives that have been

made public, and the specific actions they might have undertaken in any given public interaction.

It is also important to note, given the nature of my particular study, the unique attributes

of literary celebrity. Joe Moran and Loren Glass both work hard in their respective studies to

dissociate the idea of a celebrity author from the disparaging terms attached to it by Boorstin.

Moran, in particular, draws connections to Dyer and Marshall by making a distinction between

“bestselling authors” whom he says are “famous people certainly, but writers more read than

read about” (6) and “celebrity authors,” “those who are reviewed and discussed in the media at

length, who win literary prizes, [and] whose books are studied in universities” (6). In the case of

11 the author, the performance aspect of their celebrity persona is the literary works they produce.

Turner writes, “the literary celebrity is at least partly produced by their own writing, as it

intersects with other discourses” (21). By way of example, he points to Salman Rushdie, who

Turner states, “is going to be read through a complex set of intertextual references, to which each

successive book makes its own particular contribution” (21). Much like the movie star, or the

reality television personality, literary celebrities construct meaning through performative acts,

even as those performances lose importance within the overall construction of their public

personae. According to Moran, the difference between a famous author and a literary celebrity is

about where the attention is focussed, on the performance or the performer.

The mass fascination with a specific persona that catapults it to the status of a celebrity is,

Dyer suggests, driven by the elusive, and difficult to quantify, attribute he refers to as charisma.

Dyer borrows from political theorist Max Weber, who defines charisma as “a certain quality of

an individual personality by virtue of which he(she) is set apart from ordinary [people] and

treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least superficially exceptional qualities”

(329). Dyer also points out that, like so many other things in life, timing is vital to the reception

of a celebrity’s charisma since “charismatic appeal is effective especially when the social order is

uncertain, unstable and ambiguous and when the charismatic figure or group offers a value, order

or stability to counterpoise this” (31). Dyer references Douglas Fairbanks, who rose to fame

when America was on the verge of entering World War I. Drawing from Alistair Cooke’s study

of Fairbanks, Dyer argues that Fairbanks’ ability to seem like the guy who knew “all the

answers” despite just being an ordinary guy, assuaged the fears of American audiences at a time

of uncertainty. Marilyn Monroe is another example Dyer offers up to explain the way her

charisma seemed to embody the social, sexual, economic, and political uncertainty that defined

12 post-war America. Dyer writes of Monroe that “she seemed to ‘be’ the very tensions that ran

through the ideological life of 50s America” (31). It is the projected charismatic confidence of

these celebrities that drew in audiences and curbed their fears. Similar charismatic figures

became major personalities in other eras, such as in the action heroes of the 1980s whose films

simplify complex geopolitical entanglements like the Cold War into narratives of good vs. evil.

Or consider the current crop of superhero movies, with their fascistic undertones about characters

with charismatic and supernatural powers always being on the side of unimpeachable good. Both

examples assure audiences, in a world of increasingly moral relativity, that solutions to

impossible situations are available to the right sort of leaders. The presidential campaigns of both

Barack Obama and Donald Trump, despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, were

predicated on each man’s singular charismatic personalities containing an ability to rise above

the political status quo. We can also consider television personalities such as Oprah Winfrey or

Ellen DeGeneres as figures that embody the marginalized groups to which they belong, while

simultaneously seeming unconstrained by the typical cultural prejudices associated with those

groups; thus, providing hope for a more equitable future. Or, think of Olympic athletes that

manage to set records that were once thought beyond human capability, thereby seeming to

confirm the myth of perpetual human improvement. In each case, the persona at play offers some

promise of a better, or at least more stable, existence, thus making each celebrity a figure of

stabilizing charisma.

Hemingway, as a major literary celebrity, and a prominent journalistic figure, was often

sought out by movie producers as a source of stabilizing charisma, and the use of his name in

promotional material was regularly used as a guarantee of cultural quality. This was in part

because much of his public persona was wrapped up in his ability, at least in the published

13 material about his various adventures and exploits, to appear calm in the face of danger. A key

aspect of the ‘Hemingway code hero’ pertained to the hero’s ability to display “grace under

pressure.” It was this attribute that Hemingway presented himself as having in his frequently

autobiographical journalistic writing5, and that was often ascribed to him in profiles published in

an array of magazines6. Additionally, Hemingway’s popular appeal was such that he managed to

be a literary author that maintained a great deal of commercial success, success he sustained over

a considerable period of time. Hence, many film producers of the 1950s, a time of great tumult

for Hollywood, not only saw Hemingway’s work as a source from which quality films could be

made, but also saw Hemingway as a means of achieving success and prestige in their medium.

According to Peter Decherney, the drive for prestige was not only about the ego of the studio

moguls but was also seen as sound business. Decherney writes, “film didn’t become art until

Hollywood moguls decided it was good business for film to become art” (3), meaning that the

ascension of cinema in America as a central artform was part of a calculation to boost business.

Decherney focuses mostly on the synergistic relationships between Hollywood, universities, and

art museums, designed to bolster the identity of American film as art, and therefore ensconce it

in American and world culture. Yet we can extend his analysis to the world of literature as well,

especially when we consider the long history of literary adaptation as a way for the film industry

to increase its cultural significance7. Attempts to draw on Hemingway’s persona can be

considered in the same vein as studios wooing writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,

Dorothy Parker, and John Steinbeck to write screenplays. This is not to say that each of these

figures are charismatic people; however, each had garnered enough fame and prestige in the

literary world, that it was assumed they could be just as successful in the movie business. If

nothing else, prestige writers, it was thought, could lend the movies more cultural esteem. This

14 urge is similar to the contemporary phenomenon of streaming services like Netflix or Amazon

Prime wooing highly regarded, if not always commercially important filmmakers like Noah

Baumbach, Joe Swanberg, Woody Allen, or the Coen Brothers to produce exclusive films and

series for their platforms.

Attempting to define charisma, especially when applied to figures created through the

entertainment industry, has resulted in the term ‘It Factor,’ an amorphous catchphrase first used

by Elinor Glyn in the early twentieth century. Joseph Roach’s book-length study of this

phenomenon, called, simply, It, explores the notion of the ‘It Factor’ over multiple centuries and

considers many types of celebrities. Roach contends that having ‘It’ creates an illusion of viewer

intimacy with the object of adoration, despite no actual interaction between a celebrity and

audience taking place; a PSI with the “symbolic identity.” In explaining the appeal of ‘It,’ Roach

describes three embodiments of celebrity:

Public intimacy describes the illusion of proximity to the tantalizing apparition; synthetic

experience, the consumption of its spun-off products such as plays, magazines, or

movies; and the It-Effect, its deifying reception. The It-Effect, in turn, intensifies the

craving for greater intimacy with the ultimately unavailable icon. Constructed both

through the publicity manipulated by celebrities themselves or their acolytes and through

the imaginative contribution of their fans, It patches together a specter more ragtag than

any saintly relic: assorted features and body parts, bits of clothes and accessories, briefly

glimpsed gestures and expressions – all cohering only in the mass hallucination that

everyone either wants to touch or be touched by and no one can either find or forget. (44)

While Roach refers mostly to the affective response of the audience to the celebrity

persona, he also alludes to the materialist mechanisms that are a vital part of bringing that

15 persona to the attention of the general public. Those mechanisms are the focus of Paul

McDonald’s work, as he reads celebrity in terms of labour/capital exchanges for production and

profit. McDonald (speaking of commercial cinema in particular) writes, “Filmmaking is a high-

cost and high-risk enterprise. Stars are used by the film industry as a means to try and manage

audience demands for films (5),” since it is often believed that audiences “are attracted to films

with stars” (5). It is the cyclical nature of the star system (stars need movies, movies need stars)

that, according to McDonald, drives the celebrity industry because “in this circuit of commercial

exchange, the star […] becomes a form of capital, that is to say a form of asset deployment with

the intention of gaining advantage in the entertainment market and making profits” (5). While

McDonald is focused primarily on the role of stars within commercial cinema, his explanations

of labour/capital exchanges apply to celebrity transactions in other mediums. For instance,

bookstores bring in authors to do readings/signings to sell more books; companies hire social

media influencers to wear/promote their products; and television networks hire actors or

personalities to lure their fans to a new program. In each case, we are seeing the exploitation of a

celebrity image that will, as McDonald says, “create advantage in the market” and “secure

profits” (13).

In recent years there have been some challenges to the application of star studies to the

study of celebrity. Much of this has to do with the ever-shifting terrain of media, especially in the

twenty-first century with the rise of social media. Postmodern and post-structuralist theorists like

Alan Lovell and Barry King have challenged Dyer’s notions of the truth of an inner self, arguing

that stars, with their superficial renderings, are, as Lovell writes, “improbable candidates for

carrying out the ideological task [Dyer] assigned to them … [because] … in the popular

imagination stars are the polar opposite of the solid bourgeois citizen … [since] … actors as a

16 group are traditionally regarded as frivolous people without a stable identity” (261). King

challenges Dyer’s theory when he writes about the changed “existential parameters of stardom…

Today’s stars … epitomise the post-modern self, a decentered subject, deeply reflexive and

disdainful of claims to identity” (45). Of course, Dyer himself pointed out these very

contradictions in his book Heavenly Bodies, writing that “Stars might … be the ultimate example

of media hype, foisted on us by the media’s constant need to manipulate our attention. We all

know how the studios build up star images … we all know we are being sold stars” (14). Dyer

then accents this acknowledgment of the artificiality of celebrity images by pointing out that

audiences tend to accept that artificiality because “those privileged moments, those biographies,

those qualities of sincerity and authenticity, those images of the private and the natural can work

for us” (13). These moments of sincerity, Dyer also points out, are manufactured, and therefore

obfuscate any actual knowledge of the celebrity, meaning that Dyer is already addressing the

issues for which he would later be criticized. Clearly, Dyer’s search for the ‘truth’ of the inner-

self is not the search for the actual truth of the person behind the image, but rather the ‘truth’ of

the manufactured object, be it the onscreen character or the celebrity figure. Therefore, it is the

attempt to derive meaning from the obviously ‘decentered subject’ that Dyer sees as the end goal

of celebrity worship.

In her article “‘Starring… Dyer?’: Re-visiting Star Studies and Contemporary Celebrity

Culture,” Su Holmes examines many of these challenges to Dyer, and ultimately comes to his

defense, writing that Dyer’s theory “takes as given that there is performance, construction and

mediation, as this is what prompts such self-conscious debates about the status of the self. In

short, it was because of the apparatus of manipulation and ‘hype’ that stars could operate as a site

for the working through of discourses on the construction of identity” (14). Holmes also

17 acknowledges that considerations must be made for the vastly different media landscape that

theorists are operating in today versus the times that Dyer is writing about, but that ultimately it

is a search for ‘authenticity’ that drives cultural obsession with celebrity. Hence, Dyer’s

fundamental theory remains salient even within an ever-shifting media landscape. As Holmes

concludes, “As any field expands, it is crucial to respond to apparent innovation not simply by

developing ‘new’ theoretical and methodological approaches, but also by reconsidering the

relevance and dynamics of existing models” (18).

This notion is important in my consideration of Hemingway as a celebrity persona. As

recent biographies (Kale, Dearborn), and the release of posthumous work (The Garden of Eden,

especially) have shown, Hemingway was not as one dimensional as representations of his

persona have made him seem. The purpose of my study is not to defend, or even try to present

some accurate portrayal of the man, but I feel it is worth noting his ability to upset common

conceptions of who he was, and what he did. It serves as a reminder of just how much the

Hemingway persona that has been passed down is assembled out of the many forms of media

Hemingway actively engaged with (novels, short stories, publicity and advertising, journalism,

documentary film, activism), and the media that consistently drew from his work for material

(film, television, radio, magazine profiles). As Siobhan Lyons points out in her article

“Remembering Hemingway: The Endurance of the Hemingway Myth:”

His myth endures, whether ironically or not, through filmic mediums eager to elevate his

image to the status of a genius by playing up to formulaic representation of him. In turn

this creates not a faithful reproduction of his character but a creative interpretation of the

author, a cultural memory that is sustained by the mutual contract set up between artistic

18 creators and dedicated audiences and consumers, in which the myth is created,

disseminated, and then absorbed, continuously fuelling the myth. (151)

The considerable attention that Hemingway’s persona commanded in the mid-twentieth

century especially, made it an important selling feature, which resulted in his name not only

appearing in advertising for film adaptations of his work, but also often appearing more

prominently than the names of the films’ stars. This phenomenon forces us to consider whether

the bigger draw for those movies was the celebrity version of Hemingway, or the actual movie

stars appearing on screen. Hemingway is hardly the only author whose name and persona has

been employed as a selling feature for film adaptations. We can consider the emphasis placed on

Edna Ferber in advertisements for adaptations of her novels; there are numerous anthology films

based on short works by specific authors such as O. Henry’s Full House (1952), Meet Me

Tonight (1952), based on three plays by Noel Coward, and three omnibus films based on, and

featuring, W. Somerset Maugham (Quartet [1948], Trio [1950], Encore [1951]); as well we can

consider narratives constructed from multiple stories by a single author such as Robert Altman’s

Short Cuts (1993) based on stories by Raymond Carver. Throughout the history of cinema

authors have played important roles in reimaginings of their works; and yet, Hemingway remains

unique. Although Hemingway never acted8 in a film, and so cannot be considered a movie star in

any typical sense, it is clear that he regularly operated as both cinematic labour and capital in a

way consonant with McDonald’s description of the role of a movie star. In fact, theorists such as

David Earle (127), Leonard Leff (xviii), Daniel Boorstin (162), and John Raeburn (1), have each

offered arguments for why it is fair to consider Hemingway a “star” in the Hollywood mold.

Also, producers such as Jerry Wald and David O. Selznick explicitly referred to Hemingway as

the star of their respective adaptations. For these reasons I read Hemingway’s influence through

19 the theoretical framework of celebrity studies, as his persona encompasses various medial

iterations, each seeking to be imbued with some of what made the author such an influential and

successful figure. The cinematic interactions I will consider also display the larger shifts taking

place in mid-century American media, as films began to supplant novels as the dominant cultural

narrative form, not merely for entertainment, but also as a location of high-brow aspirations.

Hemingway’s position at the nexus of those two trajectories exemplifies how the studios sought

the prestige of literature by borrowing his cultural cachet and charisma by turning his works into

prestige pictures.

As the personal aspects of his persona have continued to overshadow his work,

Hemingway, as a cultural figure, has morphed into a nearly fictional character, and certainly a

brand more than an author. Hemingway’s popular reputation in the twenty-first century is based

on his having become a fictionalized celebrity, or as I put it in this study, a fictocel, which is the

result of content creators appropriating, remediating, and fictionalizing an historical figure9 to the

point where popular understanding of the individual is as a fictional character. The fictocel

phenomenon is related to, but critically different from, Chris Rojek’s notion of the fictional

celebrity, what he calls a celeactor. According to Rojek, a celeactor is “a fictional character who

is either momentarily ubiquitous or becomes an institutionalized feature of popular culture” (23).

We can consider any number of characters from James Bond to Borat, as examples of fictional

characters that have taken on such cultural importance that they seem to exist. But Hemingway is

a real, historical person, and yet the frequent medial iterations of him in both biographical, and

fictional settings have resulted in a popular understanding of him that is more fictional than

historical. Hemingway is, in the contemporary cultural landscape, if not a wholly fictional

20 celebrity, then at least a fictionalized celebrity. This is why I have coined the term fictocel in

order to describe the transformation of a real celebrity into a fictional mediated character.

A consideration of the development of the fictocel Hemingway is important because the

overarching purpose of this project is to investigate how one of the most celebrated and

influential authors of the twentieth century, a writer who was awarded both the Nobel and the

Pulitzer prize, has become, in the twenty-first century, little more than a one-dimensional

caricature, trotted out whenever filmmakers need a punchline built around outdated modes of

masculinity, a way to sell high-end sunglasses and mattresses, and an effigy on to which the

worst crimes of chauvinism and toxic masculinity can be foisted. Cinema, and later TV, although

only two of the media responsible for this change, are key to understanding this transition.

To trace the development of the fictocel Hemingway persona through visual media, I use

Chapter One to consider the development of Hemingway as a celebrity figure through various

media over several decades from the 1920s to the 1950s. I argue that it was Hemingway’s broad

appeal as a simultaneous hero of low, middle, and highbrow culture via his association with pulp

magazines, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and rarified literary prestige, that attracted

Hollywood’s attention. Gathering together the many aspects of Hemingway’s celebrity persona

allows me to examine their employments as pillars of the promotional strategies for the various

adaptations of his works. I employ theorists like Joe Moran and Loren Glass to consider the

shape of literary celebrity, in general, to show how Hemingway was both exemplary and

exceptional as a literary figure. It is Hemingway’s exceptionality that is particularly important

when considering his role in what Lisa Kernan calls the “rhetoric of stardom” (62) employed in

the promotional campaigns for the adaptations of his films. This analysis and synthesis provides

a picture of Hemingway’s celebrity in mid-century popular culture and shows how his lasting

21 public persona was continually reconfigured through various attempts to sell movies to which he

was sometimes only tangentially connected.

In Chapter Two I investigate more specifically the medial relationship between

Hemingway and Hollywood by exploring the development of Hemingway’s celebrity image

through cinematic adaptations of his literary work. Hemingway was not an actor, and so it is not

his physical image or performance that shapes these medial interactions, but rather his literary

works, which, as Moran argues, can be read as a form of performance (67). Many of the films

discussed in this chapter are either based on short stories or make use of only small portions of

their source novels, and so require a large amount of original material to fill out the running time

of a feature-length film. This process involves a lot of borrowing from cinematic genre

conventions, which become, for Hemingway, a version of Braudy’s “surround,” and therefore

facilitate a shift in the popular understanding of Hemingway as an author based on his being

associated with narratives and styles to which his actual writing has little connection. That is, his

author persona was credited as having composed script materials that were actually the product

of the Hollywood studio machine. Reading these films through their interactions with textual,

intertextual, and personal aspects of Hemingway’s public persona reveals a great deal about how

Hollywood, as one of the major medial forces shaping mid-century public personae,

foregrounded a version of Hemingway for mass audiences, one that has remained significant in

the configuration of Hemingway’s celebrity as it is understood in the twenty-first century.

In Chapter Three I consider cinematic adaptions that draw heavily from Hemingway’s

persona as an author of prestigious literature. Unlike the films in Chapter Two, wherein

Hemingway’s work was merely a starting point from which to create mostly original

screenplays, the films in this chapter display an often detrimental measure of fealty to

22 Hemingway’s persona. I employ Dyer’s consideration of charisma and Roach’s reading of ‘It’ as

drivers for producers hungry for the sort of success and prestige Hemingway enjoyed, especially

in the 1950s. I contend that while the films range in quality, they are all excellent demonstrations

of the symbiotic relationship between Hemingway and Hollywood. As well, I explore how

literature, long considered a pinnacle of cultural expression, was losing significant ground to

cinema, especially as increasingly sophisticated and experimental films from Europe and Asia

gained popularity in America and all over the world. Hemingway, as an author and cultural

figure, stands at the intersection of these trajectories as Hollywood, aspiring to greater artistic

credibility, borrowed heavily from literature in its attempt to create films that went beyond mere

entertainment. As Hemingway was not only a respected author but, more importantly, a popular

one, the adaptations of his works were part of the vanguard of the artistic respectability offensive

Hollywood was mounting. As I show through a reading of The Old Man and the Sea (1958),

Hollywood’s obsession with only the superficial aspects of Hemingway’s persona meant that the

adaptations of his works did not become venerable works of art as their production teams had

hoped. As well, the reliance on Hemingway’s physical image had the side effect of further

elevating the visual aspects of Hemingway’s persona, especially in the years after his death. I

conclude my third chapter by examining the way Hemingway’s importance as a celebrity figure

in popular culture largely shifted away from his creative content as demonstrated by the film

adaptations’ increased focused on his visual presence.

Chapter Four focuses on the shift in public interest from Hemingway’s work to his

popular persona. While his reputation rose and fell over the years, a version of his persona

continued to gain prominence, resulting in far more medial renderings of Hemingway as a

character than adaptations of his work. These appropriations of Hemingway’s persona illuminate

23 how the fascination with Hemingway has evolved into a cult of personality, with the author’s

work becoming less important than his life within the structured polysemy of his celebrity

persona. As well, I will show that this trajectory epitomizes the parameters of Rojek’s theories of

twenty-first century celebrity, which he breaks down into “ascribed, achieved and attributed

celebrity” (17), by investigating Hemingway’s transition from being a public figure celebrated

for his achievements, to being a person famous for being famous. Hemingway’s celebrity in the

twenty-first century, I argue, is largely the product of cinematic and, more recently, television

representations of him as an historical figure. These depictions are the bridge that has seen

Hemingway evolve from celebrity to what he is today, a fictocel, a fictionalized version of the

historical figure, who is now the dominate version of the author in popular culture.

Much has been written about the unique and revolutionary literary style that brought

Hemingway a great deal of critical attention and propelled his popularity. Critics such as H.R.

Stoneback, Mark Cirino, Verna Kale, Gail Sinclair, Carlos Baker, Kirk Curnutt, and Nancy W.

Sindelar (to name just a few) have written extensively about his stripped-down, spacious,

seemingly simplistic, driving literary style, which has been celebrated and derided for its overt

masculinity and cold, distant delivery. In his early novels and short stories, Hemingway’s

technique worked to express a great deal of existential fear, post-war angst, and youthful ennui

that defined his generation. The stories he created were never revolutionary in their narrative

originality, but his gift came through his ability to tell those stories with a vitality that captured

the attention of both readers and critics.

Even before Hemingway became a recognizable celebrity figure, many of the attributes

that make celebrities popular were already present in his literary work. For example, he had a

unique and consistent voice that was not only attractive to readers but also easily recognizable.

24 The consistency of approach across works contributed to the intertextual image that readers

derived from interactions with his various works. The much-publicized connection his narratives

had to his own life gave readers the impression that Hemingway wrote autobiographically, and

therefore with a sense of authenticity which offered a view into the truth behind his image. Thus,

Hemingway was promoted as a figure more “real” than authors who just made up stories. Most

important to the construction of his macho persona, was how his literary style offered

charismatic appeal to his readers. While Hemingway never shied away from difficult and

morally ambiguous narrative subjects such as war, relationships, social inequality, racial divides,

etc., his stoic approach allows him to relate his narratives with a cool distance, one that connotes

control and objectivity. For example, even though the world is falling apart in A Farewell to

Arms, Frederick Henry’s first-person narration, with its methodical descriptions, keeps the

narrative from falling into abject despair. Henry seems like a depressed character (for obvious

reasons), but his ascetic telling of the story gives us the impression that he will continue to live

until things get better. He is Europe after the war: bruised, devastated, and broken in many ways,

but also persistent. Frederick Henry embodies the famous line in Chapter 34: “The world breaks

every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places” (239). In this moment Henry is

talking about Catherine and their relationship, but the line can also be read as him talking about

himself, the enduring figure somehow stronger in the places that have been broken, more able to

deal with what comes next. Henry is the charismatic figure that is aware of the worst but seems

better equipped to deal with tragedy, and so offers solace and a way forward for the readers.

What I have come to recognize through careful and prolonged study of every cinematic

adaptation and biographical treatment is that, despite the considerable power and influence of

Hemingway’s writing, filmmakers had, and continue to have, far less interest in the work

25 Hemingway produced than in the persona he represents. For Hollywood producers looking to

either cash in on Hemingway’s popularity or glean some of his prestige, the author’s work likely

seemed easy to translate to the screen. There are, after all, long sections of dialogue in many of

his novels that read like a screenplay. Yet, as has been pointed out by Laurence, et al., no

cinematic adaptation has managed to replicate the power of Hemingway’s prose, perhaps

because none has even tried. Many critics have commented on the “masculine” nature of

Hemingway’s prose as being a significant part of his appeal. Glass writes that “the terse

minimalism that originally established Hemingway’s literary reputation has been widely

understood as a specifically masculine response to feminine genteel literary conventions” (139).

Hemingway’s writing, Glass asserts, made “literature safe for real men” (139). Hemingway’s

“masculine” literature was certainly appealing to filmmakers, especially in the 1940s. It seems,

however, from the resulting films that finding Hemingway’s style so intrinsically linked to its

medium that transference, reproduction, appropriation, or adaptation is at best unlikely, and at

worst so impossible that it would be foolish to attempt to manifest Hemingway’s prose style on

screen. Instead, the filmmakers drew from his “surround” – bullfighting, boxing, horseracing,

war, hunting, fishing – to make movies that contained things Hemingway was associated with

even if they were not present in the particular work at hand. Thus, the very process of bringing

his literature to the screen resulted in the writing becoming less significant. Since the earliest

adaptations, there has been a consistent and concerted effort, across the studios and production

teams, to prioritize bringing Hemingway, the persona, to the screen, via the work he created,

over any attempt to create films that capture the nature of the actual work itself.

Therefore, the focus of my project has less to do with how the films adapted or translated

his works to the medium of film, than the way the Hemingway persona became the key factor in

26 the construction of the films adapted from his works, and the way those films reconfigured

Hemingway for mass audiences. As the twentieth century progressed into the twenty-first, the

importance of Hemingway’s writing decreased steadily as the importance of his image, for

movie producers, became paramount. It is for this reason that my analysis will consider the

nature of his writing far less than I consider the shape of his persona, to emphasize the

diminished importance production teams ascribed to the literature he created, despite paying

frequent lip-service to Hemingway’s literary greatness. Close readings, therefore, of both

Hemingway’s writing and the cinematic adaptations, are employed whenever necessary to

emphasize my larger argument about how cinematic interactions reshaped the image of

Hemingway in the public imagination.

Like the Karsh portrait, in which Hemingway’s image is at once instantly recognizable

and infinitely unknowable, Hemingway’s persona is an ever-shifting amalgam of his prismatic

identity, constantly available to new interpretations and reorganizations. What constitutes a

Hemingway work, character, film adaptation, or appropriation depends so much on what version

of his persona one happens to be engaging with. Since filmmakers show no signs of waning

enthusiasm for rendering the Hemingway persona on screens (large or small), I feel it is an

important time to investigate the role of filmic media in shaping what has become such an

enduring and dominant public figure.

27 Notes

1 Karsh commented on the contradictions at the heart of Hemingway’s image in his book

Portraits of Greatness, where he describes his meeting Hemingway in the late 1950s: “I

expected to meet in the author a composite image of his creations. Instead … I found a man of

peculiar gentleness, the shyest man I ever photographed” (96).

2 The sub-title to the first edition of Boorstin’s influential 1961 work The Image was: Or,

What Happened to the American Dream. Later edition changed the subtitle to: A Guide to

Pseudo-Events in America.

3 The 13 topics McDonnell identified are: Relationship troubles or breakups; pregnancy;

weight, body, or plastic surgery; weddings or engagements; dating or romance; childbirth or

children; infidelity; fashion; feuds; physical or mental abuse; illness or death; debt or finances;

and drug abuse (48).

4 Douglas and McDonnell borrow this term from Donald Horton and Richard Wohl’s

article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction.”

5 Hemingway’s first dispatch for Collier’s, entitled “Voyage to Victory,” concerned the

Normandy Invasion. Released nearly a month after D-Day, the article reveals that it was not

Hemingway’s job to provide up-to-the-minute reporting, but rather to provide colourful

commentary based on points of interest that would engage readers. Raeburn writes that

Hemingway’s “comportment under fire and his military expertise were the subjects he felt his

readers would be most interested in, and these he emphasized” (113). Hemingway also carefully

chose his pronouns to maximize his role as a heroic figure. In many of his dispatches, he opted

for the pronoun “we” in place of “the soldiers,” “the allies,” or even “they.” Although

28 Hemingway never claims actions for himself, the use of the pronoun gives the impression that he

was integral to the mission’s success.

6 For example, a 1949 Life article by Malcolm Cowley claims that Hemingway and his

group of nearly 200 irregular soldiers, during the liberation of Paris, having separated from the

rest of the battalions, were “fighting a skirmish at the Arc de Triomphe when the main [army]

was still on the south bank of the Seine” (88-89). By the time the regular army showed up, they

found Hemingway at the Hotel Ritz, drinking at the bar he had just “liberated.” Stories like this,

which “were perfectly suited for journalists who wanted to convey the flavor of his personality”

(Raeburn 117) were common, especially in the years after the war.

7 Joss Marsh, James Naremore, Greg M. Colon Semenza, Bob Hasenfratz, Thomas Leitch,

and Kamilla Elliot have all made arguments for the popularity of literary adaptations being

related to the sense, on the part of producers and studios, that a connection with literature will

result in greater cultural relevance and prestige for not only the film at hand, but the industry as a

whole.

8 While he never acted, he did a short cameo toward the end of The Old Man and the Sea

(1958), and he both wrote and recited the narration for The Spanish Earth (1937).

9 These figures are typically diseased, or no longer have agency in their persona

construction.

29

Chapter 1 Selling Hemingway on Screen

Vanity Fair’s March 1934 issue featured Hemingway as a part of its paper doll series

(Figure 1.1). The copy describes Hemingway as “America’s literary cave man, hard-drinking,

hard-fighting, hard-loving – all for art’s sake.” He is dressed in a loincloth and is carrying a club

in a centrally placed image, surrounded by outfits that denote his various roles as Paris

bohemian, fisherman, injured Red Cross worker, and matador, representing the most popular

aspects of his public persona.

Figure 1.1

30

The image works perfectly to express the multifarious nature of Hemingway’s celebrity

persona in the 1930s, a persona that continued to gain prominence as it was continually

reconfigured throughout his life and beyond. Hemingway, as a celebrity figure, managed to

embody numerous roles, from literary genius to macho adventurer, to paragon of middlebrow

culture, to sexually aggressive womanizer. This broad appeal allowed him to represent and

satisfy the interests of high, middle, and low-brow culture, without alienating fans from any set.

This is not to say that everyone loved Hemingway, or loved him all the time; rather, it is to point

out that his celebrity drew fans from every demographic, even if for different reasons. In this

chapter, I set out to trace Hemingway’s rise over several decades (from the late 1920s to the

1950s) from author, to literary celebrity, to multimedia celebrity, while examining the ways his

persona was used in promotional strategies for cinematic adaptations of his work. It is, I argue,

the fame he achieved, more so than the work he produced, that drove Hollywood producers to

bring his stories to the screen. This reading of Hemingway’s celebrity, and Hollywood’s

promotional strategies, easily the most surface-level example of the extrapolation of his persona,

sets up an understanding of Hemingway’s celebrity image that I use in the following chapters to

explore Hollywood’s role in expanding, reconfiguring, and eventually creating a fictionalized

version of Hemingway. Or, to put in Roach’s terms, Hollywood facilitated a “mass

hallucination” of who and what Hemingway came to represent in popular culture.

It is important to begin any exploration of Hemingway’s persona with the recognition

that a celebrity is never a singular, universally accepted expression of the person at the centre of

the celebrity profile, but is rather a persona assembled from various medial iterations of that

celebrity. An actor, athlete, politician, or social media influencer who attains a substantial level

of fame inevitably becomes more like a character, one who exists in the real world while

31

simultaneously apart from it. This is because what defines a celebrity is the general public’s

interest in that person’s life beyond the work he or she does, or the event that brought the

celebrity to public attention. This aspect of celebrity illustrates the observations made by Leo

Lowenthal about the shifting interest of popular culture from what he calls ‘idols of production’

– bankers, politicians, bankers, inventors – to ‘idols of consumption,’ those he describes as

“directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time … eg. the heroes of the world of

entertainment and sport” (115). Lowenthal’s observations were based on early twentieth century

biographies that appeared in popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s,

which he argues provided far more biographical treatments of ‘idols of consumption’ as the first

half of the twentieth century went on.

The distinctions Lowenthal makes have become less important than they were in the mid-

twentieth century, since any figure who becomes famous as an ‘idol of production’ often

becomes, through medial dissemination and public interest, an ‘idol of consumption.’ Consider

how important the personal lives of politicians have become over the course of the twentieth

century. It is not enough for politicians to present appealing policies, and to accomplish

meaningful change. They must also live lives that are, if not appealing, at least not distasteful to

the majority of the electorate. The same shift is observable with athletes, musicians, and actors.

With a certain amount of professional success come the profiles and think pieces that inevitably

shed light on the life of the person behind the work. It is through these ostensibly non-

performative contacts that a celebrity persona can come to be seen as relatable to fans, and it is

that relatability that is necessary to establish the “parasocial interaction” that Douglas and

McDonnell describe.

32

Returning to the Vanity Fair paper doll, we can see by way of this small item the

importance of Hemingway’s celebrity persona as early as 1934. Even though he had achieved an

impressive amount of critical and commercial success as a literary author after the publication of

his first two novels, The Sun also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), as well as many

short stories in magazines and collections, his work as an author is only one aspect of his persona

in the image. His being a writer is merely a subset of his role as Paris bohemian, a representative

of the lost generation. His role as an author does not garner as much attention as his reputation

for being a fisherman, matador (something he never was), or wounded Red Cross worker. The

presentation of Hemingway’s paper doll has everything to do with the reality that, by the mid-

1930s, Hemingway had become a celebrity, as defined by Turner. In the shape of his celebrity

profile, the overall collection of ephemera and information that defined his public persona, his

work is only a minor aspect.

Despite the lack of attention Vanity Fair pays to his work, it was through literature that

Hemingway first gained prominence; hence, it is important to consider the unique attributes of

literary celebrity. In his book Authors Inc. Loren Glass discusses the nature of celebrity as it has

been explored specifically by Dyer and Marshall (both of whom he cites), as focused on the

structure around the persona which renders irrelevant the actual individual behind the image.

Glass writes, “the enormous scale and scope of the corporate culture industries in relation to any

discrete individual makes it easy to conceive of the ‘celebrity’ as the product of an impersonal

system that responds to the needs of an equally vast and amorphous audience” (3-4). Literary

celebrities, he argues are different from celebrities created by other media because writers “have

sustained an ethos of individual creative production over and against the rise of these cultural

industries in which they nevertheless have to participate” (4). This claim is somewhat dubious;

33

after all, any number of celebrities, from famous screenwriters/directors like Pablo Picasso to

YouTube personalities, are both performative and creative; however, he is convincing in his

assessment of the public reception of celebrity authors being different from the reception of

creatives from other fields. For authors, there remains an aura of individual genius, despite the

numerous attempts by Barthes, et al. to expose the author figure as a cultural construct.

Joe Moran, in his book Star Authors, addresses the academic trend to lessen the

importance of the author, but points out that “in the literary sphere … the figure of the author …

is still very much alive” (61). Moran is quick to point out, with regard to what he calls ‘star

authors,’ that the author figure is not simply a person who writes novels, but also, as we have

seen with more general notions of celebrity, something more amorphous and disassociated from

the individual writer. Moran writes that “literary celebrity can only be understood as the effect of

a whole range of discourses, from publicity material to literary text, which authors themselves

are not merely produced by but also help to produce” (79). So, while academic readings have

moved away from considering the personality and biography of authors in studies of their works,

in the popular realm, cultivating popular public personae is an important part of establishing the

brand that will inform readings, and – more important to the publishing industry – sell books.

Moran draws a line between bestselling authors, “writers more read than read about” (6), and

celebrity authors, “those who are reviewed and discussed in the media at length (6). It is the

gravitas of “importance” that for Glass and Moran differentiates a literary celebrity from

celebrities from other realms of public life.

Critics like Leff, Raeburn, Laurence, and Earle have pointed out the exceptionality of

Hemingway as a literary figure and have argued that he is best understood outside the parameters

of literary fame. Earle writes, “Hemingway’s reputation was based on both authorship and image

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… it seems more appropriate to look at him through the lens of Hollywood stardom, especially in

regards to how he was often identified with the characters in his novels” (127). Thus, for this

study, it is important to consider multiple avenues for the development of his fame. To start, I

will consider his rise in the world of literature, where the multiple facets of his appeal began to

take shape. Most of Hemingway’s early persona construction came through the efforts of Max

Perkins, Hemingway’s editor, and the marketing department at Scribner’s, who used their

advertisements to construct Hemingway as a dual personality: both a voice for the so-called

‘Lost Generation’ and an author worthy of being a part of the pantheon of established writers.

The release of The Sun also Rises in October 1926 cemented Hemingway as a serious,

exciting, vital, and important author, unafraid to be blunt about topics like war, death, and sex.

The book’s release also established Hemingway as a figure of controversy, as more conservative

critics and cultural commentators started sounding alarms. According to Catherine Turner in her

book Marketing Modernism, there were fears that Hemingway’s stories of youthful debauchery

would lead young people, who would read the novel as an exciting new way to live, to fall into a

life of vice and ruin (151). The marketing of The Sun also Rises was very deliberate in its

attempts to exploit Hemingway’s dangerous reputation while simultaneously emphasizing the

classical prestige of this new style of literature. Turner writes that Perkins devised a four-point

strategy for promoting his risky acquisition. The first portrayed Hemingway “as an artist of

integrity” (151), who therefore had “moral value” (151) that went beyond the use of bad

language. Second, Perkins furthered Hemingway’s role as a serious artist who was “not overly

literary or intellectual” (151). Third, Perkins “used images that recalled ancient Greece and

Rome to connect Hemingway with a long tradition of Western literature” (152). Finally, Perkins

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attempted to soften Hemingway’s image by having him publish in establishment journals like

Scribner’s to “validate Hemingway’s subject matter and style” (152).

The print advertisements for The Sun also Rises, which employ phrases like “raw

reality,” “sense of life,” and “tinged with horror” in an attempt to sell Hemingway’s writing as

somehow more realistic, or honest, than that of other authors. One ad also boldly states that the

characters are so realistically drawn “that one, after reading, would recognize them upon the

street” (Turner 153). In these ads, it is Hemingway’s relentless and fearless drive to capture

reality, no matter how unsettling, rather than his use of wholesome stories or clean language, that

makes him not only an important writer but one whose honesty gives him moral authority.

We see Perkin’s attempt to associate Hemingway’s novel with the legacy of western

literature most clearly in the first edition cover art for The Sun Also Rises (Figure 1.2) designed

by the artist Cleon. In the image, we can see the confluence of Modernist minimalism and

classical Greek imagery through an impressionistic rather than realistic representation of

classical style. Additionally, Cleon rejects any overt attempt to be ultra-modern, as if to say that

this story of dissolution, sexual frustration, competition, and hopelessness, while set in the

present time, is actually ancient. In this way, the images reinforce themes from the book of

Ecclesiastes, the source of the title, which famously proclaims “there is nothing new under the

sun.” For his part, Hemingway was never enthusiastic about the cover art for this book or A

Farewell to Arms (Figure 1.3), another Cleon design. In a letter to Perkins, Hemingway nitpicked

about the “lousy and completely unattractive decadence” (112) on the covers of both of his first

two novels. Despite his objections, the covers mark first steps in casting Hemingway as a figure

with broad appeal, at once classical and modern.

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Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3

The back of The Sun also Rises was equally important in promoting the novel and its

writer; as Verna Kale writes, “Hemingway proved an attractive spokesmodel for modernism, an

authentic yet accessible Paris bohemian with a handsome face” (72). These images of

Hemingway’s handsome face, always pensive and serious, were also a major part of Scribner’s

ad campaign. In some ads, according to Lesley Blume, the image of Hemingway’s face “loomed

larger than the text extolling his virtues as a writer” (198). Even in the promotion of his first

novel, there was already a foregrounding of his image, a hallmark of celebrity engagement, as

described by Dyer, Turner, et al.

The critical reception to The Sun also Rises was overwhelmingly positive, and sales,

while slow at first, picked up to a respectable level in 1927. Yet, Perkins still felt that

Hemingway’s reputation as a difficult writer alienated those readers not willing to take on

experimental authors. To rectify this problem, Perkins encouraged Hemingway to publish his

short stories in establishment journals and magazines. Hemingway’s newfound literary

prominence meant that the editors were far more open to his work, allowing his short stories to

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appear in The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s, which elevated his profile, making him an author

with mainstream appeal.

A significant aspect of celebrity is what Dyer calls the increased public desire for “the

specific personality” of a celebrity, as media and fans seek “the details and events of [a public

figure’s] life” (35). In the late 1920s, as Hemingway’s work became more prominent, so too did

the public fascination with his “specific personality;” however, Hemingway’s reluctance to

provide biographical information meant that the need for stories that would establish the

parameters of his identity was being filled by increasingly obscure acquaintances, and sometimes

just being fabricated by the media (Raeburn 23). At first, Hemingway was content to allow these

stories to stand without correction. When Perkins had written to ask for a biographical sketch,

saying that the “papers are glad to print almost anything we send about you,” Hemingway wrote

back, “I would rather not have any biography and let the readers and critics make up their own

lies” (206). Blume has hypothesized that “this reticence may have been genuine, or it may have

been strategic. As a master of a less-is-more approach to literature, perhaps Hemingway felt that

a little mystery might serve to augment his allure” (195). If Blume’s theory is correct, and

Hemingway was being strategic in his obfuscation, then this reveals a great deal about the power

of his early charisma and the power of the media in the formation of his persona. After all, even

Hemingway’s resistance to becoming a celebrity could not stop it from happening. If he would

not play along by constructing his own identity, then the media would create it for him. Stephen

Hantke, in discussing reclusive authors and their uses of media silence to avoid becoming

celebrities, writes,

Silence as a viable strategy becomes self-defeating when its agent is not in control of the

circumstances under which he functions as a signifier or as a signified; that is, when “his”

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discourse ceases to be private property by virtue of some notion of metaphysical presence

and becomes public property. As long as he does not fill the space his silence has opened

with specific content, his own intentions are overridden as soon as he himself becomes

the product. (235)

This early phase of Hemingway’s career, full of requests for access to his private life, and the

proliferation of his physical image across various media, reveals just how quickly he was

becoming an ‘idol of consumption.’ While Hemingway was fixed on his work, his growing

fanbase, and the media that fed it information, was far more fixated on him.

The respectability plank of Perkins’ plan paid its largest dividend in 1929 when

Scribner’s Magazine gave Hemingway $16,000 – the highest fee it had ever paid to an author

(Berg 142) – to serialize his upcoming novel, A Farewell to Arms. While The Sun also Rises

represented Hemingway’s arrival as a startling new voice, it was A Farewell to Arms that would

ensconce him in the upper echelons of American literature. The novel also represents the first

inter-medial interaction between Hemingway and Hollywood, which came in the form of a major

cinematic adaptation in 1932. This interaction is fascinating for how it exposes the bifurcated

nature of Hemingway’s early celebrity as public interest was shifting from his work to his private

life. The negotiations over the film rights reveal that despite his growing profile as a public

figure, Hemingway remained the proverbial small fish swimming in Hollywood’s very large

pond. Paul Reynolds, a literary agent Hemingway had hired, shopped A Farewell to Arms to the

major studios. Most of them passed, except for MGM, but Reynolds advised Hemingway to pass

on their offer of $10,000, saying he could get more. In an attempt to do just that, Reynolds hired

Laurence Stallings to create a stage version of the novel, with the hope that a successful

Broadway run would up the purchase price for the film rights. The play was not a major success,

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running for just under a month in the fall of 1930, but it garnered enough attention to get

Paramount Pictures interested in the work they had recently rejected. This roundabout approach,

while successful at getting Hemingway more money (Paramount paid $80,000), ultimately meant

that it was the play rights that were purchased, rather than the novel, resulting in Hemingway

having to split the money with both Stallings and the play’s producer, A.H. Woods.

It is important to consider what this production history tells us about the status of

Hemingway as a public figure in the early 1930s. Despite two successful novels, and a great deal

of public interest in his celebrity persona, his work and his reputation were not enough to attract

much interest from Hollywood, as evidenced by the multiple rejections, the lowball offer from

MGM, and the fact that it took a “trial run” in another medium before the novel could bring in

any substantial money. From a business perspective, at least, Hemingway was just another author

whose work had to go through the typical channels of production established in the studio system

era. Hemingway had not yet reached the echelons where the power of his public persona exerted

substantial influence over the production of his work in either theatre or cinema. In the early

1930s the aspect of Hemingway’s identity that was most important to Hollywood producers and

the massive audiences they created content for, was his role as a content creator. Like one of

Lowenthal’s “idols of production,” it was Hemingway’s work that constituted his most important

contribution to the movie, rather than his life; it is what he did that mattered, not who he was.

The publicity and advertising for A Farewell to Arms from 1932 reinforces Hemingway’s

position as an “idol of production,” even while it suggests a rising interest in his private life and

personal opinions. Press releases from Paramount for A Farewell to Arms often emphasized the

film’s faithfulness to the novel, saying things like, “The film follows the Hemingway novel with

remarkable fidelity,” “To the thousands who have read A Farewell to Arms, the sensitive,

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intelligent film version cannot be other than a fulfillment,” and “As you read it in the novel,

you’ll see it on the screen” (Laurence 42). Furthermore, in a press release with the headline

“Hemingway Fans Spur Film Makers to Follow Novel,” screenwriter Benjamin Glazer is quoted

as saying, “The country is filled with avid Hemingway fans who would resent any great liberties

being taken with this book or with the dialogue.” Whether or not Glazer ever made this statement

is not clear, and not as interesting as the fact that the marketing department at Paramount would

go to such lengths to assure a segment of moviegoers they call “Hemingway fans.” On the one

hand, this insistence on fidelity reinforces what Decherney writes about Hollywood’s desire for

association with literature, often viewed as being on a higher cultural plane than movies;

however, the fixation on Hemingway (Glazer is quoted as wanting to appease “Hemingway

fans,” not A Farewell to Arms fans) gestures toward his rise in prominence as a celebrity. So,

while A Farewell to Arms is still paramount, it is not just fans of the specific book that the

producers are so invested in pleasing, but also fans of Hemingway. This subtle difference marks

the rising importance, in 1932, of the inter-textual and extra-textual aspects of Hemingway’s

persona.

This fixation on Hemingway, and his work, in written publicity1, points to an interesting

contrast with visual advertising for the film. Of the nine posters and lobby cards included as

supplementary material on the Kino Classics Blu-ray release of the film, only the poster for the

1949 re-release of the film makes any reference to Hemingway. The majority of the advertising

moviegoers would have seen in newspapers, on billboards, and in theatre lobbies made no

reference whatsoever to the author of the film’s source material, or even to the fact that the

movie was an adaptation at all. The parallel marketing strategies point to a perceived difference

between movie-goers and readers, with longer form written pieces emphasizing the film’s

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fidelity to the novel, while visual advertising focused far less on the film’s literary pedigree.

There are also elements of class distinction that can be read into the choices made around the

film’s New York premiere, where a souvenir program included an image of Hemingway

alongside the stars of the film. Interestingly, unlike the stars, Hemingway’s image was a drawing

rather than a photograph. According to Leff, “The fact that he was the only one represented by a

drawing rather than a photograph lent him the ‘artistic treatment’ the studio hoped would transfer

to the film” (176). As well, that this strategy was used for the more expensive event (tickets were

$1.65 [roughly $30 in 2020] [Leff 176]) in a cultural centre like New York City, reveals that

Paramount, as per Decherney, saw prestige as an important selling feature for wealthier and more

erudite audiences, but not for the larger mass audiences for whom Hemingway, as an author, was

not yet a major draw.

Before that New York premier could occur, however, there was another publicity stunt

that was very much aimed at associating Hemingway with the film. Paramount pushed back the

New York Premiere of the film by one day so that they could hold the world premiere in the

Arkansas town where Hemingway was staying with the family of his wife, Pauline. A press

release claimed, “Ernest Hemingway wanted to invite the whole town of Piggott, Ark. to the

world premiere of his A Farewell to Arms” (Laurence 44). The wording of this release is

fascinating in the way that it not only gives credit to Hemingway for the idea of the premiere but

also employs a possessive pronoun, referring to A Farewell to Arms as “his” (Hemingway’s)

film. Here again, we can see the growing importance of Hemingway as author and public figure,

as the publicity department wants to assure readers that the movie is faithful to the book, and so

are interested in Hemingway as a person so far as he can confirm their claims.

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Even though Paramount’s use of Hemingway’s image and name was far more focused on

his role as prestige author, the media reaction to this publicity stunt reveals an increasing interest

in Hemingway’s opinions and the celebrity persona that would go on to define his life in the next

decade. According to reports, Hemingway was less than enthusiastic about the stunt, telling a

reporter that the Paramount executives could “use their imagination” when deciding where to put

the print of the film they were planning to send to Piggott. He added, according to a New York

Daily News article published on 6 December 1932, that although Paramount had bought the

movie rights, they did not buy “the right to my sanction of the picture version.” The level of

coverage this episode received is important to consider because, while Paramount was only

seeking Hemingway’s authorial blessing, the coverage of his reaction is squarely focused on

Hemingway’s feelings. In the article, Hemingway is portrayed as someone who has no interest in

the commercial or artistic ambitions of a movie studio; he is crass and dismissive in his response

to Paramount; and he is somewhat belligerent in his assertion that the studio did not, and cannot,

buy his approval.

The reputation Hemingway had earned by this point in his career is also apparent in one

particularly pointed review of the film from the New York Daily News on 9 December 1932,

where the reviewer went so far as to address Hemingway personally. The reviewer writes,

“please, Mr. Hemingway, don’t make yourself ridiculous by finding the slightest of faults with

Paramount’s production of your tale.” Hemingway, no doubt through his frequent, and often

public, attacks on reviewers who panned his novels, had already gained a reputation for being

combative about how others regarded and treated his work.

All of this points to the growing power and influence of ‘It’ as it pertains to

Hemingway’s celebrity persona. In Roach’s book, in which he traces the historical appeal of

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celebrity, the definition he adopts to describe It comes from author and Hollywood tastemaker

Elinor Glyn. As Glyn writes,

“To have ‘It,’ the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts

both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence,

indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others. There must be

physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary. Conceit or self-consciousness destroys ‘It’

immediately” (5-6).

While this is by no means a scientific definition, it does manage to describe an enigmatic

attribute which is recognizable, despite being difficult to cultivate. The ‘It factor’ is related to sex

appeal, but is, according to Glyn, connected to a certain aloofness of the appealing object, the

ability to be “entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence;” a sort of unforced

attractiveness. As an example, Roach describes the experience of seeing the image of Uma

Thurman on the cover of GQ magazine: “Even as her eyes meet mine as seductively as they must

in order to do their work, her countenance somehow keeps a modicum of privacy where none

seems possible, a discreet veil of solitude in a world brought into illusory fullness of being by the

general congregation of unaverted stares” (3). The power of ‘It’ lies in the space between

accessibility and unattainability.

Roach builds on Glyn with his definition of “It” as “the power of apparently effortless

embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and

experience, and singularity and typicality … The possessor of It keeps a precarious balance

between such mutually exclusive alternatives, suspended at the tipping point like a tightrope

dancer on one foot” (8). A celebrity’s It-ness, Roach purports, comes from his or her ability to

embody two seemingly contradictory ideals, and convince the public that both are true

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simultaneously. In the contemporary, social media driven era of celebrity, we see this

embodiment of opposites in celebrities that are at once far removed from the everyday life lived

by their fans, while at the same time providing their publics the illusion of connection via

“personal” posts to which fans can provide tangible reactions by offering “likes” or comments.

Whether or not the celebrity poster takes notice of the reactions, or reads the comments we

cannot always know, but the illusion that fans have direct access to their objects of worship

allows celebrities to seem present while being physically absent.

Roach goes on to break the power of It into three “character manifestations,” which he

defines as “public intimacy (the illusion of availability), synthetic experience (vicariousness),

and the It-Effect (personality-driven mass attraction)” (3). There are strong connections between

the idea of “public intimacy” and the “synthetic experience,” since it is interactions with the

“synthetic experiences” (plays, movies, novels, and so on) that provide opportunities to

experience “the illusion of proximity to the tantalizing apparition” (44). Yet, as Roach writes,

these interactions rarely result in satisfaction, as the power of the It factor “intensifies the craving

for greater intimacy with the ultimately unavailable icon” (44) that can no longer be sated

through interactions with the “synthetic experiences.” Hence, fans demand more information and

access to their object of fascination. In this situation the work of the celebrity author, artist, or

actor ceases to be enough for the audience or fan, as it is too synthetic an experience to provide

what feels like access to what Dyer calls the “truth about the person of the star” (125). Roach

goes on to describe the way disparate elements coalesce to create the idea of the icon in the

minds of the public. The icon is “constructed both through the publicity manipulated by

celebrities themselves or their acolytes and through the imaginative contribution of their fans”

(44). For Roach, the bearer of It is a fantasy formed by numerous creative stakeholders. Fans,

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publicity departments, magazine editors, content creators, and so on, are drawn in by aspects of

the persona, aspects which are then reconfigured repeatedly in the public articulation of the

persona. As Roach writes, “‘It’ patches together a specter more ragtag than any saintly relic:

assorted features and body parts, bits of clothes and accessories, briefly glimpsed gestures and

expressions – all cohering only in the mass hallucination that everyone either wants to touch or

be touched by and no one can either find or forget” (44).

For Hemingway, the initial “synthetic experience” is his work, a connection point

between the mind of the reader and the mind of the writer. This interaction creates a pleasurable

experience and can cultivate a desire for closeness to the “tantalizing apparition” behind the

work. In Hemingway’s case, the public desire for more information was cultivated and partially

sated from the 1930s through the 1950s via a variety of media interactions, some of which he

was responsible for (novels, memoirs, and Esquire letters) and many he had little control over

(interviews and profiles in magazines and newspapers, critical reviews, film, radio, and

television adaptations). Both Hemingway and multiple media stakeholders worked

simultaneously, although rarely in conjunction, on projects related to his work and life. The

result of these non-coordinated medial disseminations was the establishment of a “ragtag

specter” or a “tantalizing apparition” which created the “mass hallucination” of who Hemingway

was and what he represented. The lack of synchronization between the agents responsible for the

“mass hallucination” of Hemingway’s persona (like any celebrity personae) supported the image

of Hemingway as disinterested, or even frustrated by the celebrity version that was gaining

prominence, despite his active participation in the creation of some major aspects of his

celebrity. Hemingway’s ability to occupy seemingly contradictory positions – he is both literary

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and popular, mysterious and accessible, high, middle, and lowbrow all at once – fulfills Roach’s

condition that the bearer of “It” is the “effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities” (8).

The interest in Hemingway’s ‘It Factor’ grew quickly in the 1930s, a decade in which

Hemingway mostly abandoned the persona of mysterious and serious author that had been

cultivated by Perkins and Scribner’s as a way to sell his “synthetic experiences,” as he provided

more opportunities for his fans to experience the “illusion of proximity” Roach describes.

Hemingway largely moved away from fiction, focusing his attention on journalistic and

autobiographical projects. These persona-driven works created “parasocial interactions”

(Douglas and McDonnell 50) with his fans that resulted in the creation of what Matthew

Bruccoli has called Hemingway’s “best-invented fictional character” (xix): Ernest Hemingway.

A major contributor to the construction of Hemingway’s new persona was his 1932 bullfighting

guide, Death in the Afternoon. According to Raeburn, Death “signaled a shift in his relationship

with his audience, and, more comprehensively than anything else he wrote, it formulated his

public persona” (38). While ostensibly a serious look at the centuries old Spanish sport,

Hemingway seems unable to resist inserting himself into the text with information, anecdotes,

advice, horrific accounts of war, and explanations of his approach to writing. Raeburn, in support

of his claim for Death’s importance, writes that the book sets out nine roles that became “the

foundation of [Hemingway’s] public persona” (39). These nine roles, according to Raeburn, are

sportsman, manly man, exposer of sham, arbiter of taste, world traveler, bon vivant, insider, stoic

and battle-scarred veteran, and heroic artist. Death in the Afternoon was not able to usher these

roles, or the man behind them, into the popular culture discourse on its own; however, these roles

formed the basis for the Hemingway persona being propagated by the man himself every month

through his contributions to the newly established Esquire Magazine.

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The articles (or “letters” as they were called) Hemingway wrote for Esquire beginning in

1933, were spaces for Hemingway to document his hunting and fishing exploits, make dining

recommendations, and offer advice on topics like writing and travel. As Raeburn argues, it was

in the pages of Esquire that the nine roles established in Death in the Afternoon found a wide

audience. Esquire’s popularity grew quickly, selling, according to the memoir of editor-in-chief

Arnold Gingrich, 550,000 copies a month by the end of 1936 (106). Having access to that level

of readership was unheard of for any other American author at the time (Raeburn 46). In many

ways, Hemingway and Esquire used each other to bolster their respective profiles and popularity.

When the magazine began publishing, it was seen as a major coup to have the work of an author

of Hemingway’s fame and quality appearing its pages. Gingrich’s aim with Esquire, which had a

newsstand price ten times that of the Saturday Evening Post (Raeburn 45), was to create an

authoritative periodical that would be the foremost publication on any topic it took on. It is for

this reason Gingrich looked for celebrity contributors such as Rudy Vallee (show business),

Bobby Jones (Golf), Gene Tunney (boxing), and Hemingway (anything he wanted to write

about). Gingrich, eager to bask in the glow of Hemingway’s literary prestige and celebrity, even

agreed to pay Hemingway twice the going rate for his contributions (Raeburn 45). Likewise,

Esquire provided Hemingway with space to cultivate a persona that would elevate his status

from critical favourite to bona fide celebrity, on par with movie stars and politicians by the end

of the decade (Raeburn 102).

It is impossible to discuss the formation of Hemingway’s persona during this period

without considering the idea of charisma. There are many similarities between the It Factor and

charisma, but the explanation offered by Max Weber, and augmented by Dyer, provides avenues

of consideration that are pertinent to Hemingway’s persona. The exceptional nature of

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charismatic individuals can draw others toward them to experience or gain something from that

interaction. While Weber’s study is concerned with the notion of political charisma, making the

argument for charisma as a driving force in the rise of dictators because of their ability to seem

exceptional, and thus elicit an enormous level of support from populations, Dyer connects

Weber’s tenets to the realm of celebrity. Charismatic appeal, according to Dyer, with some help

from Edward Shils, has everything to do with a figure’s ability to project a connection to some

overarching perfection. Shils writes, “The charismatic quality of an individual as perceived by

others … lies in what is thought to be his (her) connection with … some very central feature of

[human] existence …. The centrality, coupled with intensity, makes it extraordinary” (201). The

grandiose nature of Shils’ pronouncements aside, he touches on the reason that charismatic

leaders are effective: they appear to maintain a sense of understanding and control over the chaos

of life that is rooted in some deep connection with what it means to be human. Thus, being in the

presence of the charismatic figure, whether in a movie theatre or a political rally, brings with it a

sense of joy, satisfaction, and, according to Dyer, et al., comfort.

Dyer also writes that “charismatic appeal is effective especially when the social order is

uncertain, unstable and ambiguous and when the charismatic figure or group offers a value, order

or stability to counterpoise this” (31). Hence, the ability of charismatic political figures to gain

power in times of civil unrest via their ability to argue for simple to understand solutions,

solutions that they alone can achieve. Dyer explores the effect of charisma as a source of

stabilizing comfort through a study of movie stars. He argues that stars are especially effective if

their charisma can embody the anxieties of their times, and offer, if not solutions, then at least

respite from those anxieties for the duration of a film. In his book Heavenly Bodies, Dyer offers

Marylin Monroe as a case study, to argue that it was her ability to embody the sexual flux of the

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1950s that made her a star. Dyer writes, “In the fifties, there were specific ideas of what sexuality

meant and it was held to matter a very great deal; and because Marilyn Monroe acted out those

specific ideas, and because they were felt to matter so much, she was charismatic, a centre of

attraction who seemed to embody what was taken to be a central feature of human existence at

the time” (17).” Elsewhere Dyer points out that “Monroe’s combination of sexuality and

innocence is part of [the] flux” (31) that defined2 the anxieties around sexuality in the 1950s.

Monroe’s ability to embody, make light of, and make attractive, these new uncertainties made

her a figure that seemed to be supernaturally connected to something essential, and therefore able

to navigate the ambiguities of her time in a way that brought comfort to audiences while in her

presence, even if it was only a mediated presence, such as a film in which she appeared.

This sort of charismatic appeal was an integral part of Hemingway’s persona from very

early in his career. It is possible to read his austere and minimalist prose style as indicative of an

objective control when describing what are often narratives about the chaotic mechanisms of

war, for example. Yet, it was when Hemingway began publishing explicitly autobiographical or

topical works, such as his Esquire Letters, that his ability to offer ways of navigating the shifting

mores of the 1930s through his balancing of work and leisure, made him a popular charismatic

figure.

Esquire became the space in which Hemingway’s shift from being an “idol of

production” to an “idol of consumption,” as an expression of his brand, had its most public

manifestation. Hemingway’s appeal was based on his ability to construct a persona that operated

in the space between production and consumption. As Raeburn points out, Hemingway’s “public

reputation was the beneficiary of a shift to the gospel of leisure, but his appeal was greatly

magnified by his fulfillment of the requirements of the gospels of both work and leisure” (50). In

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the economic and political uncertainty of the 1930s, the growth of Hemingway’s persona as

propagated in the pages of Esquire was directly linked to the fact that he represented “a way of

life attractive to countrymen confused by the decline of an old ethic and the rise of a new one”

(Raeburn 50). This development of his celebrity image contributed a great deal to the sort of

charisma Dyer and Weber describe, as Hemingway provided the illusion of stability to male

readers of Esquire that found the social order becoming as Dyer describes it “uncertain, unstable

and ambiguous” (31). ‘Hemingway’ as an image – “a complex configuration of visual, verbal

and aural signs” (Dyer 34) – presents, in the pages of Esquire, the possibility that one could have

it all to the Depression era readers who lived in fear of having nothing. Hemingway provided a

way to gain the reward of hard, honest work, and the joy of leisure. The charisma Hemingway

was able to project through these Esquire letters increased his popularity and drew the attention

of other media, film in particular, not just to his work, but also to his persona.

According to Raeburn, the 1935 release of Green Hills of Africa, marks another transition

point for Hemingway. This safari memoir, Raeburn writes, “for all that it was a book about

hunting, was Hemingway’s reassertion of the importance of his role as heroic artist after so much

attention to non-literary matters in the Esquire letters” (79). This is evidenced in Hills by the

more experimental, and philosophical nature of the writing. Consider the 494-word sentence on

the nature of the Gulf Stream in Chapter 8, where Hemingway pontificates about the fleeting

nature of life in the face of the seemingly eternal movement of the water. The passage addresses

Hemingway’s existential dread through a far more experimental style than in his non-literary

writing of the 1930s. Even in his Esquire letters, it is possible to see a new concern for his role as

heroic artist. A letter published in the October 1935 issue called “Monologue to the Maestro”

operates like a Socratic dialogue, wherein Hemingway doles out advice to a (likely fictional)

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younger writer who has come to him for guidance. The letter allows Hemingway to explain what

he sees as important for writers to do, to notice, and to read if they want to achieve his level of

greatness.

Hemingway’s return to the role of heroic artist resulted in the novel To Have and Have

Not, released in 1937. Hemingway’s penchant for experimentation is on full display in that work,

but unfortunately, the end result is regarded by many as a mess of a novel that continues to rank

alongside Across the River and Into the Trees as Hemingway’s worst book (Curnutt xvii). The

novel also marks a major declaration of Hemingway’s more left-leaning politics, spurred on by

what he saw as an inadequate government response to the problems of the Great Depression and

the rise of fascism in Europe. Despite some powerful sections, the book is marred by

Hemingway’s loss of interest in the project after his attention was taken up by the civil war that

was flaring up in Spain (Berg 322-325). It was conversations with Jon Dos Passos, Archibald

McLeish and his new acquaintance and eventual third wife, Martha Gellhorn, that were

responsible for his burgeoning political awareness, and his desire to return to Spain.

When Hemingway arrived in Madrid, in March of 1937, it was as a correspondent for the

North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), which serviced more than sixty major

newspapers, giving Hemingway his largest audience by far. The assignment also recast

Hemingway in the popular role of heroic newspaper reporter, taking on the qualities of the

“dauntless, virile, cynical newsman who beneath his bluff and tough exterior had compassion for

the oppressed” (Raeburn 84). Hemingway himself played up this persona of a writer suffering

for the sake of truth, telling Newsweek in 1937 that he was going “to make money the hard way,

as a working newspaperman.” The reports Hemingway filed contributed to the construction of

the persona he had been building through other publications; offering reports on the war

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combined with personal reflection and instructive advice through the employment of his now

ubiquitous indefinite ‘you.’ Consider a NANA dispatch from 14 April 1937 titled “A New Kind

of War:”

At night, sometimes late, without lights, with the big trucks roaring past, you come on

back to sleep in a bed with sheets in a good hotel, paying a dollar a day for the best rooms

on the front. The smaller rooms in the back, on the side away from the shelling, were

considerably more expensive. After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel

you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you had

had, for less than a dollar. (263)

Hemingway makes use of the indefinite ‘you’ in the same way he employed it throughout his

Esquire letters3. Even though Hemingway always refers to himself, rather than ‘I’, he uses ‘you’

as a strategy for drawing his reader into his experience by allowing the readers to picture

themselves in the spaces he is describing. Additionally, as was his habit in Esquire, Hemingway

provides his reader with advice on staying comfortable in unfamiliar situations. While providing

descriptions of life in a war zone, Hemingway manages to share the things he has learned about

getting a good hotel room, as though the readers looking for information on the war might need

help in finding a place to stay should they decide to visit war torn Madrid in the near future.

It is important to note how Hemingway’s journalistic writing here reinforces the power of

his charisma. Hemingway’s personalized way of addressing his readers in his journalistic

correspondence during both the Spanish Civil War and later, during World War II, offer the

illusion that he had, if not control, at least a deep understanding of the chaos that surrounded him

and was, therefore, able to keep a cool distance from it. Hemingway constantly portrayed himself

in these dispatches as having the “grace under pressure” so vital to the characters in his books.

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Thus, Hemingway’s charismatic persona became a source of confidence to his readers in the way

described by Weber, as it offered a figure who appeared to have had the ability to move unfazed

through the frightening global upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Although a documentary project (The Spanish Earth [1937]) and Hemingway’s only

foray into playwriting (The Fifth Column [1938]) had grown out of his involvement with the

Spanish Civil War, the major artistic expression of his experience in this conflict came in the

form of the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, released in 1940. The book was a major literary

success, with enthusiastic reviews and substantial sales. Edmund Wilson, who although an early

champion had become Hemingway’s harshest critic in the 1930s, epitomizes the critical

consensus on For Whom the Bell Tolls. Writing in the New Republic, Wilson effuses, “the big

game hunter, the waterside superman, the Hotel Florida Stalinist, with their constrained and

fevered attitudes, have evaporated like the fantasies of alcohol. Hemingway the artist is with us

again; and it is like having an old friend back” (240). Wilson’s review, as well as a major profile

Time magazine ran alongside a review of To Have and Have Not published in 1937, reveal just

how popular and complex Hemingway’s celebrity persona had become by the end of the 1930s.

Even though Wilson is happy to see the return of Hemingway the author, he is forced to

acknowledge, even disparagingly, the other aspects of his persona. Hemingway’s reputation for

his literary work, in 1940, was just one part of his larger persona, and the rest of that persona was

as important to understanding the work as the work itself. In the same way that Dyer talks about

an audience’s understanding of the ‘truth’ of a character’s personality being based on what they

understand to “be the truth about the person … playing the part” (125), both of the reviews

mentioned above are inextricably linked to Hemingway’s public persona. Time can recommend a

bad book like To Have and Have Not because of Hemingway’s established reputation, as

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evidenced by their glowing personal profile. Wilson can recommend For Whom the Bell Tolls,

not just because it is a good book, but because it also marks the return of Hemingway as a great

author. Turner, as I mentioned earlier, writes that the hallmark of celebrity is when “media

interest in [a public figure’s] activities is transferred from reporting on their public role … to

investigating the details of their private lives” (8). In the case of these two reviews, the writers

cannot help but reference and consider Hemingway’s private life, which, over the course of the

1930s, became increasingly public, in their assessments of his achievements as an author.

Magazines like Time are important to consider with regard to Hemingway’s status in

what is called “middlebrow” culture. Joan Rubin in her book The Making of Middlebrow

Culture, writes that “in the three decades following the First World War, America created an

unprecedented range of activities aimed at making literature and other forms of ‘high’ culture

available to a wide reading public” (xi). Publications and organizations such as the Book-of-the-

Month-Club, Saturday Review, The Literary Guild, and the New York Review of Books provided

mass audiences with access to literature curated in such a way as to provide the participant and

reader with an air of sophistication associated with highbrow culture. Additionally, according to

Moran,

Time and Life were consciously ‘middlebrow’ in that they sought to emphasize both

seriousness and commercial appeal in their coverage of the arts and literature, and aimed

to be both informative and entertaining by providing a weekly digest of essential

knowledge, synthesizing a large amount of specialized information for broadly based,

though still predominantly white and middle-class, readership. (28)

Hemingway appeared frequently in both of these publications, often as the subject of long

profiles, and reviews, or sometimes both, as in the October 1937 issue mentioned earlier. Life, as

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well, was quick to form associations with Hemingway, and to cover his personal activities. His

face appeared on the cover numerous times, including the September 1952 issue that published

the entirety of The Old Man and the Sea. These magazines, as arbiters of middlebrow taste,

ushered Hemingway into that realm, making him an author that a middlebrow reader with

highbrow aspirations could be proud to be seen reading. In this way, the publications allowed

Hemingway to fulfill the ambition he expressed to Horace Liveright, his first publisher, in a 1925

letter wherein he claimed that he was the type of author who “will be praised by the highbrows

and … read by the lowbrows” (295). Despite Hemingway’s earlier misgivings about how much

he wanted the media to report about him (consider the correspondence with Perkins discussed

earlier), he eventually warmed up to the trappings of fame, even if it meant becoming part of the

bourgeois culture he had expressed contempt for as a young author in the 1920s.

Another major factor in Hemingway’s middlebrow popularity was the inclusion of For

Whom the Bell Tolls in the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC), a popular mail order book service

that boasted thousands of American subscribers at mid-century. This not only meant significant

sales – Scribner’s printed 135,000 copies, just for the BOMC, in addition to the initial run of

75,000 (Dearborn 415) – but it also put Hemingway’s novel in the homes of people attempting to

demonstrate their good taste via their reading habits. As Janice Radway writes in her book A

Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire,

BOMC drew its membership from a broad spectrum, not just upper-class readers or professionals

– doctors, lawyers, college professors – but also from less educated populations at the lower

level of the middle class, and were, therefore, looking to ascend in some way. Radway writes,

Positioned at the periphery of this new class by their only partial command of culture and

intellectual capital, they may have desired book club membership as a strategy for

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acquiring more of the knowledge they valued and as a way to display that knowledge

publicly. What they wanted, it seems, was a way to demonstrate their worthiness as

potential candidates for inclusion in the more visible group of managers and professionals

(296).

For BOMC subscribers, the authors and novels that came to their homes every month

represented the upper-class ideals they aspired to. Whether or not the subscribers read all of the

books that came in is, of course, unknowable; however, that these books would be in their

homes, displayed on bookshelves, allowed the subscribers to perform the cultural erudition seen

as necessary to joining middlebrow society. Therefore, the inclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls

marks another level of acceptance from bourgeois society, one that aligned him with the BOMC

goal of curating a collection of important authors worthy of reading by those with the very best

taste, or at least those who were pretending to have such taste.

Early on Hemingway was quite dismissive of literary clubs, calling them, in a letter to

Perkins from 15 September 1927, “litero-menstrual clubs” (288). By 1940, however, the amount

of money his inclusion in BOMC offered clearly outweighed any concerns about artistic

integrity. In an August 1940 letter to Charles Scribner Hemingway is eager to hear about his

BOMC deal so that he can “organize [his] scale of living” (508), even as he dismisses the

selection committee for their inability to recognize great literature (510). By 1949 Hemingway

had fully embraced the BOMC, and the money and prestige it provided, telling Charles Scribner

to “start chopping down the trees” (667) for Across the River and into the Trees (a book that was

not selected for BOMC). In the early 1940s it was only Perkins that gave any thought to whether

the relationship with BOMC might run counter to Hemingway’s artistic self-image. In a letter to

Fitzgerald, Perkins wrote that the BOMC inclusion was “the stamp of bourgeois approval.

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[Ernest] would hate to think of it that way, and yet it is a good thing, practically speaking” (266).

Rather than an affront to Hemingway’s sense of artistic purity – an act of selling out – inclusion

in the BOMC became, for Hemingway, another welcomed step in his ascension to the heights of

celebrity.

We can see a contemporary analogue to this phenomenon in Jonathan Franzen’s reaction

to the selection of his book The Corrections for Oprah’s Book Club in 2001. An article on the

fracas in the New York Times from 29 October 2001 claims that Franzen suggested: “that

appearing on her show was out of keeping with his place in ‘the high-art literary tradition’ and

might turn off some readers” (Kirkpatrick E1). Like Perkins’ fear that Hemingway would see the

BOMC as a sign of his own “selling out,” Franzen appears to have viewed Oprah’s Book Club as

a similar “selling out” to the power of television as a way of achieving commercial success.

There were also accusations of misogyny, as Franzen assumed being associated with Oprah

would turn off male readers (similar to Hemingway’s misogynistic labelling of books clubs

“litero-menstrual clubs”). Franzen walked back his most incendiary statements and made public

amends with Oprah in 2010 when his next novel, Freedom, was selected for the book club, and

he appeared on her show. Beyond all of that, this episode exposes the antipathy toward the

distinction between high and low art. Franzen’s fear that Oprah’s book club was not good for his

literary credibility is not unlike Perkins’ fear of Hemingway’s reaction to bourgeois approval.

Yet in both cases, the book clubs resulted in sales for each author, which means far more readers

for their works. The success of both For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Corrections reveal the

reliance “highbrow” art (the literary novel) has on “middlebrow” art (television and mail-order

book clubs) for its commercial viability. It is also important to note the underlying sexism at the

heart of these distinctions. Book clubs and reading in general have historically been considered

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feminine activities, not something in which “real” men would participate. In this dichotomy, the

fact that Hemingway and Franzen write novels at all lessens their manliness. Their inclusion in

book clubs for the purpose of promoting their authorship only exacerbates their feminization.

Clearly, their arguments about “high” and “middle” brow art only obfuscate their deeper

concerns about appearing un-“manly,” and thus further problematize these sorts of class

distinctions.

The popularity of Hemingway’s multifaceted persona, or brand, in the 1940s – he was a

literary author, macho man’s man, and intrepid reporter, simultaneously, without having one

adversely affect the other – meant that his “It Factor” drove public desire for greater intimacy

with him as “the ultimately unavailable icon” (Roach 44). This desire for more Hemingway was

manifest in the strong demand for the movie rights to his novels, which paid real dividends for

him when, just days after the publication of the novel4, Paramount purchased the rights to For

Whom the Bell Tolls for $110,000. The purchase price was, according to the New York Times,

“the highest price ever paid for a novel for film use” (25 October 1940).

The medial discourse around the film’s pre-production narrative reveals the production

team’s eagerness to promote the project’s association with Hemingway. For example, one

dominant pre-production rumour was that Paramount had brought Hemingway in for a

screentest, in the hope that he would play some part in the movie (Dearborn 414). Although he

declined to test for any role in the film, it is important to note what this sort of interest on the part

of the studio tells us about Hemingway’s celebrity in the early 1940s. While the studios courted

many prestige authors, including Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, and William Faulkner, none of

them were asked to appear onscreen; it was their public identity as authors that was of most

interest to the studios. That there was plausibility in the idea that Hemingway, a non-actor who

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frequently and publicly denounced Hollywood, was up for a part in a movie, tells us something

about the power of his fame at the time. He was, to studios, and audiences, “the unavailable

icon” Roach describes, and the public’s desire for greater intimacy with the “real” man was so

strong, that the studio thought it worthwhile to make him an actor. After all, in the public eye he

was leading man handsome; he was brave and physically strong; he was sexually successful with

a variety of women; he was a hard-living man’s man; and he wrote great fiction that seemed easy

to adapt to the screen. He possessed many more attractive attributes than did his literary

contemporaries, so it makes sense that the studios wanted to make as much use of him as

possible to sell their projects. As Turner writes, “Celebrities are developed to make money. Their

names and images are used to market lingerie, swimwear, fragrances, and sports shoes, as well as

the products of the entertainment industries: films, DVDs, magazines, newspapers, television

programmes – even the evening news” (36). Hemingway was a celebrity, and celebrities can sell

things. Turner continues: “Media entrepreneurs want celebrities involved with their projects

because they believe this will help them attract audiences” (36). It seems that Paramount felt a

connection with Hemingway would make for a successful film, and so the more obvious and

multiple those connections were, the more lucrative the project would be.

We can see how important Hemingway’s celebrity profile was as a means for selling the

film by studying the trailer for For Whom the Bell Tolls. In her book on the history and rhetoric

of movie trailers, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers, Lisa Kernan has

identified three rhetorical approaches that, despite significant stylistic shifts in presentation,

remain prominent in most approaches to trailer construction. According to Kernan, trailers use

the rhetoric of genre, story, and stardom as a means of persuading audiences to see a movie.

Janet Staiger, in her article on the history of film promotion, writes that these promotional

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techniques were established in the 1920s through the 1940s by secondary trailer companies such

as the National Screen Service (NSS), and the Advance Trailer Service Corporation (9), that

were engaged by the major studios to create and distribute trailers to theatres. While these

companies were an important part of creating a successful formula and for establishing trailers as

a vital means of film promotion, especially in the 1920s, their period of actual production was

quite short. Warner Bros. established an in-house trailer production department in the early

1930s, a trend adopted by most of the other studios by the 1940s. The NSS continues to this day

but is mostly concerned with the distribution rather than the production of trailers.

Of the three rhetorical approaches, it is the rhetoric of stardom that is most important in

considering the way Hemingway’s persona was employed to promote adaptations of his work.

Kernan, in her analysis of the rhetoric of stardom, borrows from Dyer in her description of the

appeal and experience of seeing stars in trailers. “As we watch a trailer,” Kernan writes, “the

images we see of the star are endowed with all our past associations of him or her,” meaning that

“the star is distanced from his or her character within this individual (still hypothetical) film, and

is understood in large part on the basis of our intertextual knowledge” (65). This intertextuality

allows a trailer to conflate the character with the actor playing that character, allowing the actor’s

appeal to sell the character in the film being promoted. This, Kernan asserts, emphasizes of “the

overarching star personae above either a star’s real-life identity or his or her character in this

particular film” (70).

While it is again important to acknowledge that Hemingway is not a movie star, his

association with any given adaption was often as much a drawing feature as the association of

any of the films’ stars. The trailer for For Whom the Bell Tolls proudly touts its association with

Hemingway, who is presented as a figure of both heroic adventure and literary prestige. The

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emphasis on literary prestige has a lot to do with the notion, evident in the trailers for many mid-

century Hollywood films5, that association with a novel was a key selling feature, especially for

films that had award ambitions. Awards, however, were not the only motivation. As Decherney

argues, filmmakers throughout Hollywood’s Golden Age often emphasized associations with

established cultural institutions such as museums and universities not just for the sake of

prestige, but also because it was seen as financially beneficial (4). Making movies seem classier

was believed to be good business, hence the high-class trappings associated with movie stars, the

establishment of prestigious awards, such as the Oscars, and, the proud touting of the association

of any film with its literary pedigree.

The film’s book provenance is a significant theme throughout the trailer for For Whom

the Bell Tolls released in 1943. Using a calligraphic style to connote a certain timelessness, the

trailer’s first five title cards read, “Paramount Proudly Announces the Screen Presentation of …

The Most Widely Read Book of our Time … Ernest Hemingway’s Celebrated Novel … ‘For

Whom the Bell Tolls’ Photographed in Technicolor … With The Stars Hemingway Himself

Selected!” The ambitions to literary respectability are obvious, as is the desire to be associated

with Hemingway, and his approval. An important aspect of Hemingway’s identity, as I have

discussed, had to do with his strong opinions and pugnacious run-ins with anyone (critic or

otherwise) whom he felt denigrated his work; hence, the emphasis on making sure audiences

believed that this film was not only a faithful adaptation of his work but also approved by him as

such.

It is also important to note that Hemingway is named in the title cards before the film’s

actual stars, indicating the level of fame he had attained by that time. The movie stars are

introduced as subordinate to his preferences, implying that everything in the film is meant to

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serve his vision. This is clear as well when the trailer introduces the supporting characters, after

saying that they represent “all the vivid characters of this unforgettable story.” Hemingway is

given priority in both of these cases, a clear act of deference to his elevated status. A final

assurance is offered to the viewer who might still wonder about a lack of fidelity to the source

text when the trailer closes with a card that promises the film will have “All the power and

passion of Hemingway’s masterpiece.”

We can see in the trailer a clear expression of the claims both MacDonald and Turner

make about the celebrity as a form of capital, “used to create advantage in the market”

(MacDonald 13). Just as the images and names of Cooper and Bergman are used to increase

interest in the film, the image of Hemingway, his “complex configuration” of signs, is a selling

feature of the film. It does not matter that Hemingway makes no physical appearance because the

celebrity “is not the person but rather a set of texts and meanings that signify the person”

(MacDonald 13). Though the audience does not see Hemingway, the repetition of his name

ensures an understanding of his involvement in the picture and creates the intertextual

expectations Kernan describes. The sheer dominance of his name indicates just how important he

was to audiences at the time; Hemingway in 1943 is not just another author, as he was in 1932,

but a major celebrity, one that is presented as just as important to selling a picture as the actual

movie stars that appear in the film.

To put the use of Hemingway’s name in context, we can contrast his treatment with that

of John Steinbeck in the trailer for The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Both films were based on

enormously successful books, a fact that both trailers emphasize; however, unlike For Whom the

Bell Tolls, which, as I have shown, is fixated on Hemingway, the trailer for The Grapes of Wrath

barely mentions Steinbeck, even though the book’s quality and popularity is the main strategy

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for selling the movie to audiences. Steinbeck’s name is shown onscreen numerous times on both

the cover of the book, and in headlines proclaiming the commercial success of the book, yet

despite the title of the book being spoken nearly twenty times throughout the two minute trailer,

Steinbeck’s name is only spoken once, and that is after both director John Ford and producer

Darryl F. Zanuck have been introduced. The emphasis on the work over the author represents the

more typical Hollywood relationship with writers, showing the exceptionality of Hemingway as

a celebrity figure in 1940s culture. This contrast reveals that despite The Grapes of Wrath and

For Whom the Bell Tolls being equivalent in terms of popularity and critical acclaim,

Hemingway’s persona was seen as far more of a draw to movie audiences than those of his

contemporaries.

The exploitation of Hemingway as prestigious author, as found in the promotional

strategy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, is also key to the pre-production publicity and marketing

campaigns of adaptations made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After suffering a number of

critical knocks in the wake of Across the River and into the Trees, released in 1950,

Hemingway’s triumphant literary return began when The Old Man and the Sea was released in a

single issue of Life Magazine on 1 September 1952, an issue that sold 5,300,000 copies in just

two days (Baker 504). When the novel was released in book form one week later, it stayed on the

bestseller list for twenty-six weeks (Dearborn 547). Unlike the abysmal notices that greeted

Across the River and into the Trees, the critics were nearly unanimous in their praise of The Old

Man and the Sea. Like For Whom the Bells Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea was again framed as

a comeback story in the medial discourse. Hemingway’s reputation as a great author was

solidified within two years as the Pulitzer and Nobel committees honored the book and

Hemingway, respectively, with their highly esteemed prizes. As well, the success of the book,

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according to Raeburn, “marked the beginning of a new public role, perhaps his most famous. The

battered but undefeated figure of Santiago merged with the image of his creator, producing a

sage who seemed to speak with the authority of all the ages” (143). This merger was manifest in

a number of medial discourses, including the advertising campaign for, and adaptation of The

Old Man and the Sea (1958).

Even as Hemingway’s work maintained a prominent place in the media discourse around

his persona, his personal life provided a story that even the most hyperbolic writer would have

avoided. Near the end of a safari in January of 1954, Ernest and Mary were aboard a private

plane that went down in Uganda. No one died, but the entire entourage had to wait out a tense

night spent avoiding curious elephants until they were able to hail a passing boat6. The boat

brought them to Butiaba, where they boarded another plane destined for Entebbe, but while it

was taking off, it too crashed, resulting in serious injuries. The news of the crashes went out over

the wires immediately and newspapers around the world prepared obituaries. When the full story

came out early on 25 January that Hemingway had survived not one, but two plane crashes, the

newspapers changed their reporting and enthusiastically ran the story of his survival, one that

perfectly reinforced Hemingway’s hyper-masculine persona as an unflappable adventurer.

For instance, in what was perhaps a willful exploitation of his public persona, or a

calculated promotion of his brand, it was reported in the New York Times on 26 January 1954

that Hemingway showed up to a press conference in Entebbe, Uganda carrying a bunch of

bananas under one arm, and a bottle of gin in the other hand. When asked about his condition he

is quoted as saying, “My luck she is running very good.” This story inspired Ogden Nash to

write a short poem called “A Bunch of Bananas,” which was later set to music and recorded by

Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer. The song, sung in a mock-Caribbean accent, begins “A

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bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin, /Keeps the hunger out and the happiness in, /I got a bunch

of bananas and a bottle of gin – /my luck she is running very good.” While the song was not a

major success, it does show the extent of Hemingway’s fame at the time. His macho persona,

and the stories of his seemingly superhuman exploits, had permeated the popular culture so

thoroughly that not only were his life and possible death front-page fodder for newspapers all

over the world but his exploits, like those of legendary folk heroes before him (from Johnny

Appleseed to Jesse James) were celebrated in song.

The Old Man and the Sea was the last work of fiction Hemingway published in his

lifetime; however, his popularity was maintained throughout the 1950s through multi-media

representations linked to both his persona and his work. He regularly appeared in the pages of

mainstream general interest magazines like Life, Time, and Newsweek; intellectual magazines

like The Atlantic, Saturday Review, and The New Yorker; and the society and gossip pages of

major newspapers. As well, throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Hemingway became a familiar

figure in men’s pulp magazines. As the 1950s progressed there was a marked increase in

interviews, profiles, portraits, republished short stories, and celebrations of Hemingway in low

budget and lowbrow magazines with titles like Man’s Magazine, Modern Man, Man’s

Illustrated: True Adventures for BOLD MEN, Escapade, Rogue, True: The Man’s Magazine,

Real: The Exciting Magazine, Bachelor, Sportman, GunSport, and one called, simply, MALE. As

David Earle, in his book-length study of Hemingway’s relationship with pulp publications,

writes, “again and again Hemingway was held up as an example of manliness, a role model and

tonic for the American male who was having trouble adjusting to a postwar suburbanization”

(18). This facet of Hemingway’s public persona, marketed primarily to young and working-class

men, was provided as a stabilizing force for males struggling in a world where it seemed (despite

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clear evidence to the contrary) that they no longer held dominance, in ways that were similar to

the Esquire letters in the 1930s.

At the same time, television stations were busy reworking his fiction into content for

anthology series like Schlitz Playhouse, Omnibus, Climax!, Lux Video Theatre, Kraft Theatre,

and Playhouse 90. There were also seven cinematic adaptations of his novels made between

1950 and 1960. At the same time, Hemingway’s writing was not forgotten. The early 1950s saw

the publication of a collection of academic essays edited by John K. M. McCaffery, and the first

book-length academic study of his work, simply titled Ernest Hemingway, by Philip Young.

Additionally, Hemingway’s brand drove companies as varied as Ballantine’s Ale, Parker Pens,

Pan-American Airlines, and the Ringling Bros. Circus to make him their spokesperson. The

sheer volume of this media exposure resulted in a level of ubiquity he had not experienced

before, even at the height of his 1930s fame.

Returning to the movie business, the power of Hemingway’s prestige, and the reach of

his influence, is clearly on display in the marketing campaign for The Sun also Rises, released in

1957. The trailer for the film opens with an image of Hemingway’s novel superimposed over

footage of the Seine flowing through the middle of Paris. The announcer proclaims, “20th

Century Fox brings to the screen Ernest Hemingway’s oldest love story that no one dared film

until now.” The copy not only connects the film to Hemingway but also insists upon its

connection to some ideal of Hemingway by emphasizing that it is adapting his “oldest love

story.” By 1957 Hemingway had been publishing for over thirty years with varying degrees of

critical success, and so this association with vintage Hemingway creates a connection to

Hemingway’s most enduring work. The trailer presents the book as a verifiable classic and

implies that the film will become a classic as well. The trailer also taps into Hemingway’s

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reputation as a world traveler as the announcer declares that, “The Sun also Rises has actually

been filmed amid the world-famous festival of Pamplona, the beaches of Biarritz, the streets of

Paris, and the bullrings of Mexico.” This approach works in three ways. It makes a claim that the

film is to cinematic realism what Hemingway was to literary realism, which was a defining

characteristic of his authorial style. The trailer also establishes Sun as an expensive film, and the

studio as willing to spare no expense in order to achieve perfection. Finally, the trailer connects

the film to the locations closely associated with Hemingway’s celebrity adventurer persona, thus

offering the viewer vicarious participation in the expatriate life, with all of its glorious nostalgia.

The announcer then introduces producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who speaks directly to the

audience from his Hollywood studio. Zanuck tells us that the previous week in Paris he and his

production crew “photographed the first scenes of Ernest Hemingway’s great novel, The Sun

also Rises.” Zanuck takes the opportunity to argue for the film’s fidelity to its source by claiming

to have “photographed the first scenes” of the novel, rather than the film. This word choice is

significant, as it makes the claim that the movie is the same as the novel, rather than an

adaptation of the novel. It is a clear attempt to associate the film with what McDonald calls the

“set of texts and meanings that signify the person” (13). Hemingway’s persona is a composite of

all the medial disseminations associated with him, including his books, and therefore, to sell this

as a Hemingway movie, the marketing department selects the features it sees as most

advantageous to selling the film as a Hemingway property. As Kernan points out about the role

of stars in trailers, “the images we see of the star are endowed with all our past associations of

him or her” (65). Hemingway is not a star, nor does he appear physically in trailer; yet, he was a

major celebrity figure, as popular in 1957 as movie stars and politicians (Laurence 5-6), and so

the invocation of his name would have called to mind the “intertextual knowledge” (65) for

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contemporaneous audiences Kernan describes as a functioning of the star’s role in trailer

construction.

A similar effort was made by David O. Selznick when he decided to make another

adaptation of A Farewell to Arms in 1957. Selznick, who had been attempting since the early

1930s to bring Hemingway’s work to the screen, exemplifies Decherney’s argument about the

commercial possibilities of prestige. “Hemingway himself is a star,” Selznick is quoted as saying

in a July 1957 article in Parade Magazine, “he has box office.” So, despite the mountain of

memos that reveal the extent of Selznick’s internal debate about how faithful he should be to

Hemingway’s novel7, the producer made significant efforts to gain the author’s blessing for this

new version. In addition to trying to arrange a pre-release screening for Hemingway in Cuba,

Selznick also promised Hemingway $50,000 if the picture turned a profit, despite not being

legally obligated to do so since Hemingway sold the rights to Paramount in 1931. According to

A.E. Hotchner’s memoir Papa Hemingway, Selznick’s offer met with little enthusiasm from

Hemingway. Hotchner writes that Hemingway “dictated a telegram in reply saying that if by

some miracle, Selznick’s movie … did earn $50,000, Selznick should have all $50,000 changed

into nickels at his local bank and shove them up his ass until they came out of his ears” (217-

218).

Despite Hemingway’s dismissive reply, this anecdote reveals Selznick’s desire for

Hemingway’s blessing, a desire felt by many of the producers8 in the 1950s working on

Hemingway adaptations. Even though the film would inevitably be different from Hemingway’s

novel, Selznick emphasized the film’s association with Hemingway as both a way to gain critical

respect and commercial success, in the ways that Decherney has argued for. Greg M. Colon

Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz, in their book about British literature on film, have also argued that

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many filmmakers see any literary connection, especially with authors of considerable note, as a

means of elevating cinema from a common entertainment to the level of art that is represented by

literature (71). We can see this emphasis on association play out in print advertisements for A

Farewell to Arms, where Hemingway’s name is consistently given higher placement, and a

larger font than the names of the stars of the film, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. As well, the

trailer makes three references to Hemingway, including calling his novel “the finest and most

unique love story of the twentieth century,” while presenting only fleeting references to and

images of the stars. Instead, most of the running time is spent showing sweeping vistas, powerful

explosions, massive crowds, and references to the film’s Hemingway connection, as well as to

Selzick’s past successes, Gone with the Wind in particular. The trailer’s emphasis on its literary

pedigree exemplifies Semenza and Hasenfratz reading of cinema’s relationship with literature, as

it stresses the importance of its literary provenance over the reputation of the film’s stars. As

well, the importance of Hemingway’s name reinforces the considerable power he had as a

celebrity figure in the late 1950s, and just how important the marketing department saw him as a

selling feature for the film.

Eagerness to promote a film’s association with Hemingway came to its fullest realization

during the much-publicized pre-production of The Old Man and the Sea (1958). The film was

five years in production, and while some of the delays and cost overruns resulted from

scheduling conflicts and difficulties of location shooting, much of the blame can be fixed on the

film’s two high profile figures, Spencer Tracy, who played Santiago, and Hemingway, who had

managed to gain both script approval and the position of consulting producer, a level of control

he had not had before.

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For Warner Bros. (the studio financing the film), producer Leland Hayward

(Hemingway’s former literary agent), and Hemingway the idea of working so closely with the

author did not seem problematic. What better way to gain Hemingway’s blessing for the film

than to make him responsible for the final product? Early in the scripting phase, however, the

production team, which now included screenwriter Peter Viertel, director Fred Zinnemann, and

Spencer Tracy, were running into trouble. Despite his own confessions that he did not know

much about writing for the medium (Laurence 25), Hemingway had many thoughts about the

film’s style, recommending Vittorio De Sica as director, and hoping for a documentary-like

production style reminiscent of The Bicycle Thieves (1948). Warner Bros. was not willing to

grant that request but did bring on Zinnemann, who had achieved a suitably stripped-down

documentary aesthetic in films like High Noon and From Here to Eternity. Despite a promising

start, long production delays, as well as infighting, led to Zinnemann’s being replaced by John

Sturges, whom Tracy preferred, leaving Hemingway without his closest creative ally.

Even though Hemingway’s practical participation with the project caused far more

problems than the producers had anticipated, it seems that from a promotional perspective his

association with the film remained of vital importance. This is clear from the emphasis on the

visual similarities between Hemingway and Tracy in the film’s trailer, which features no footage

from the actual film, relying instead on paintings depicting scenes from the story. Included in

these paintings is a portrait of Santiago, with the words “Starring Spencer Tracy” superimposed

on the image (Figure 1.4). While all of the paintings in the trailer are somewhat impressionistic,

this image is particularly striking in its visual blending of Tracy and Hemingway. Nowhere in the

movie does Tracy look so much like popular images of Hemingway at the time, with his full

white beard, as he does in this trailer. As Laurence points out, “The last ten years of

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Hemingway’s life were not his most significantly creative. They were, however, his greatest

years as a celebrity, when he became his most photogenic” (5). It is clear from this image that the

publicity department, responsible for commissioning and approving the paintings, was aiming at

an association with those popular images by merging Tracy’s face with Hemingway’s and

achieving a conflation of the two personae.

Figure 1.4

The ad copy that runs throughout the trailer further emphasizes Hemingway’s literary

fame and prestige. The copy reads:

“From the finest work by one of the GREATEST WRITERS OF OUR TIMES! ... Ernest

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea…Which won for Mr. Hemingway the Pulitzer

Prize…and the Nobel Prize for its “Powerful style-forming mastery”…Translated into 41

languages to circle the world with its greatness!”

It is over a full minute before Tracy is mentioned, and even then, his image, as we have seen,

appears briefly, and is dominated by Hemingway’s. The trailer’s design exploits Hemingway’s

prestige, mentioning both of his major awards, and even includes quotes about his influence as

an author. It is the power of Hemingway’s literary celebrity, and the production’s faithfulness to

his great talent that are advanced as the best reasons to see this film, rather than the purely

cinematic qualities of the film itself.

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What each of these promotional campaigns reinforces is that Hemingway’s ‘It Factor’ for

the producers and marketing departments of these movies, was firmly rooted in his image as a

prestigious author. Hemingway’s name emphasizes his dominance over the film, and his

importance to its success. It is for this reason that the promotional strategies for these films

employ the “rhetoric of stardom” that Kernan describes with regard to Hemingway in addition

to, and sometimes rather than the film’s actual stars. Thus, in the promotional strategy, at least,

Hemingway is established as a non-acting star, in the sense that he has significant drawing power

for audiences, which is a key aspect of the persuasive power of the “rhetoric of stardom.”

Marshall, in examining the mechanics of celebrity, points to the disconnect between the

substance of the celebrity persona and the images of it propagated through the media. “There is

no substance to the sign of the celebrity,” Marshall writes, “without [the] embedded significance,

the celebrity sign is entirely image” (xi). Thus, just as Dyer wrote about movie stars, the ‘image’

of a celebrity is dependent on the many discourses that surround the person of the celebrity. A

name, an image, or even a performance, while imbued with some initial meaning, takes on

greater significance when blended with the multiple medial emanations attached to the site that is

the celebrity person. Marshall writes, “in its simultaneous embodiment of media construction,

audience construction, and the real, living and breathing human being, the celebrity sign

negotiates the competing and contradictory definitions of its own significance” (xi). Since every

celebrity persona, including Hemingway’s, is a construction built out of various medial

iterations, these trailers simultaneously provide insight into the way his persona was understood

at the time the films were produced, while creating new configurations of that persona for the

viewer of the trailer. These trailers were an important part of propagating Hemingway’s name

and persona to audiences who might never have read his novels, or even his non-literary writing.

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Laurence points out in his essay “Hollywood Publicity and Hemingway’s Popular Reputation”

that “movie publicity was a kind of vulgar literary criticism … it served to widen [Hemingway]’s

name recognition even with the public that might never have read a word he wrote” (24-25).

While Laurence is dismissive of popular entertainment and has been accused of elitism by later

theorists like Earle, he does make a point about the pervasiveness of the movies, and their ability

to popularize personae. Hence, these promotional strategies are important to understanding

cinema’s role in the development and overall construction of Hemingway’s celebrity persona.

The popularity and prismatic nature of Hemingway’s celebrity image is even more clear

when we consider how his celebrity was exploited in a series of marketing campaigns from the

mid-1940s to the early 1950s that drew on Hemingway’s reputation as a hard-boiled writer

whose work is full of brutal violence, action, conventionally masculine pursuits, and

womanizing. Much of Hemingway’s reputation as a hard-boiled writer can be attributed to the

popularity of his most violent novel, To Have and Have Not, and his being featured frequently in

the aforementioned men’s magazines. To a greater extent than the profiles in “respectable”

periodicals, these pulp magazine profiles were reliant on images far more than they were on

words. This meant that illustrations, with varying degrees of accuracy, and photographs of

Hemingway kept his physical image on newsstands around the world and provided him with a

level of recognition equal to that of movie stars. Most of the images had little to do with

Hemingway as a writer, presenting him aiming a rifle, reeling in a large fish, or posing next to

animal carcasses. These images participated in and perpetuated the mythical image of the heroic

Hemingway, which Earle describes as “the great adventurer, drinker, lover, and fighter” (70). We

can see this version of Hemingway’s persona manifest in the trailers for the films made in the

mid to late 1940s, a time when Hemingway was not writing much new literature. Into this

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literary gap, Hollywood poured a number of adaptations, none of which were particularly faithful

to their sources, as they were more fixated on the macho, rough and ready articulation of

Hemingway’s celebrity persona.

The trailer for To Have and Have Not (1944) is a perfect example of the marketing team

drawing from multiple aspects of Hemingway’s public persona, aspects that have very little to do

with the source material for the film they are promoting. For instance, the trailer begins with

footage of hands working furiously at a typewriter while the names of various regions (Spain,

Italy, Africa, and France) appear over a superimposed image of the globe. Each region named in

the trailer is associated with Hemingway; however, none of them appear in either the book or the

film that the trailer is promoting. The act of writing on a typewriter is again an aspect of

Hemingway’s persona as a famous correspondent rather than an idea associated with the film at

hand. What we see here is the visual yoking of Hemingway’s career as a writer and his

reputation as a traveler to the experience of watching a film based on one of his works. In an

attempt to associate the film with Hemingway’s reputation for the sort of dangerous wartime

exploits that had filled newspapers during the Spanish Civil War, and were then filling the pages

of Collier’s as Hemingway reported on events in Europe, the announcer declares: “Ernest

Hemingway, soldier of fortune, who can always be found where adventure beckons, now takes

you to the danger zone of the mid-Atlantic.” Terms like ‘soldier of fortune,’ ‘adventure,’ and

‘danger zone’ reinforce the risk-taking aspects of Hemingway’s identity. For audiences who may

be only vaguely aware of his writing, either literary or journalistic, the trailer, which announces

that the film is “Adventure and Romance as Only Ernest Hemingway can Write It!”, establishes

that Hemingway is an author of adventure stories of war and romance.

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We again find the power of Hemingway’s persona is a key aspect of the promotional

material for Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, released in 1946. For instance, in most promotional

material the film is not simply called The Killers, but “Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.” This is

true of the theatrical trailer, which, while not as focused on Hemingway as the trailer for To

Have and Have Not is, still manages to mention Hemingway’s name three times. This approach

makes sense when we realize that what the marketing department means when it refers to a story

as Hemingway’s has less to do with narrative proper than it does with keeping the adaptation

connected to the popular idea of Hemingway’s style, a style that by the mid-1940s was

associated with, brutal realism, hard-boiled characters, and a lifestyle of risk and adventure.

Thus, it appears that the film is employing a strategy similar to that used in For Whom the Bell

Tolls by attempting to draw in Hemingway fans through a promise of fidelity to his writing;

however, unlike the earlier film, The Killers (a “Raw, Rugged Ruthless Drama of a man who

gambled his luck, his love, his life for the treachery of a girl’s lips!”) is focused on the film’s

faithfulness to the pulpy, low-class image of Hemingway rather than to his literary prowess.

The emphasis on the connection between the film adaptations and Hemingway’s original

work began to have a reverse effect on the author as the adaptations increased in regularity. For

the much larger audience that existed for movies than for either novels or magazines, the name

Hemingway was becoming synonymous with films like To Have and Have Not and The Killers.

After all, for those who had not read Hemingway’s literature, it would be easy to assume that

those two films were based solely on their source material, stories by Hemingway. There would

be no guarantee that audiences knew that only the first ten minutes of each film bore any

resemblance to the original story. What Candace Ursula Grissom calls “the circle of his authorial

celebrity ouroboros” (233), took shape as the adaptation of Hemingway’s stories into specific

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genre films turned him, in the popular imagination at least, into a writer of hardboiled fiction

along the lines of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane. This led to later

producers replicating the successful formula established by the earlier films, which in turn

cemented a distorted authorial reputation. This shift was not lost on Hemingway. According to

Lloyd Arnold’s book High on the Wild with Hemingway, Hemingway even joked about turning

“The Killers” into a full-length novel (163), essentially novelizing a film that was an adaptation

of his own work, musing over becoming the writer that many assumed him to be in the first place

by recreating the work others had made and passed off as his. While he never actually followed

through with this plan, the anecdote reveals Hemingway’s recognition of the encroaching power

of his public persona over his literary reputation.

This ambivalence toward his own celebrity was a concern for Hemingway throughout his

life, and become a more prevalent concern in his work. Del Gizzo, in her essay on Under

Kilimanjaro9, Hemingway’s posthumously published, late in life safari memoir, points to a

number of examples in that text of Hemingway working to come to terms with his celebrity

image as he discusses the literary marketplace and autograph seekers. As del Gizzo writes,

“Under Kilimanjaro emerges as a study of the contradictions of commodity culture that are the

hallmark of Hemingway’s career, and offers a glimpse into how Hemingway came to feel

imprisoned by this dynamic” (10). Yet despite Hemingway’s concerns, the fixation on his

personal life, and the commodification of his celebrity continued to outpace interest in his work.

Hemingway’s death did not discourage the eagerness of the studios and their marketing

departments to promote a Hemingway connection, even for films that had very little narrative

similarities to the source material. Consider the second adaptation of The Killers, in 1964,

originally intended for television before being deemed too violent for that medium. It would be

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more accurate to classify The Killers as a blended remake of Siodmak’s movie from 1946 and

the 1954 Mickey Rooney vehicle Drive a Crooked Road, as it draws its plot points from both

films, retaining almost nothing from Hemingway’s short story. Yet the film’s promotional

material emphasizes the Hemingway connection by again referring to the film as “Ernest

Hemingway’s The Killers.” The trailer states that “only Hemingway could have conceived” the

film’s story, despite the fact that Hemingway “conceived” very little of what appears on the

screen. This approach tells us something significant about the shape of Hemingway’s persona at

the time of the film’s production. Released only three years after his death from suicide, The

Killers has a much closer connection to the Hemingway mythos than to his work. The emphasis

on the Hemingway connection, however, reveals his prominence as a celebrity author, a figure

Moran refers to as one “read about” far more than actually read (6).

The reliance on the Hemingway’s celebrity persona rather than the quality or details of

his writing by promotional departments is especially clear in the marketing of The Macomber

Affair in 1947. One of the taglines for the film, appearing on multiple posters, was “Gregory

Peck Makes that Hemingway Style Love to Joan Bennett” (Figure 1.5). The line is obviously

problematic in not only its aggressive overtones but also in the celebratory nature of its delivery.

As Hemingway’s name was often associated with violence, masculinity, aggression, and single-

minded accomplishment, it is hard to imagine the appeal of a “Hemingway kind of love.” As

well, the idea that Gregory Peck is “making” it “to Joan Bennett” feels even more unpleasant, as

it removes any suggestion of consent. It is possible that this particular marketing approach was

targeted to men who found romantic films unappealing, in the hopes that they would take their

wives to see the movie. It also traffics in contemporaneous tropes about masculine love-making

being connected to forcefulness – that women wanted to be taken by a strong man rather than

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wooed or even seduced. What is clearest, however, is that the “complex configuration” of

Hemingway’s public persona at this point had very little to do with his actual work.

Figure 1.5

After all, the “Hemingway kind” of lovemaking found in his writing is rarely presented

with the sort of macho posturing implied by this tagline. Rather, Hemingway’s treatment of sex,

which is, of course, the implication at play here, is often sensitive, surprisingly caring, female-

initiated, or frustratingly absent. Consider the tender encounter between Catherine Barkley and

Frederick Henry as he lies immobile in his hospital bed in A Farewell to Arms; the concern

Robert Jordan shows for Maria, after her brutal rape when she initiates a sexual encounter with

him in For Whom the Bell Tolls; the sustained attraction between Harry and Marie Morgan in To

Have and Have Not despite his disability and her non-typically attractive physical appearance;

and Jake Barnes’ frustrating inability to have sex with Brett Ashley, while she pursues multiple

sexual partners in The Sun also Rises. Of course, it is important to note that the sexual encounter

at the centre of The Macomber Affair’s source text (“The Short Happy Life of Francis

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Macomber”) is initiated by Mrs. Macomber and is met by Wilson’s glib indifference to such

matters. Clearly, the “Hemingway kind of love” found in his writing has very little to do with

whatever the marketing department had in mind when they crafted their campaign. As was the

case with The Killers, the eagerness of the filmmakers to be aligned with Hemingway results in

an association with ideas that were not originally his, in this case, aggressive sexuality.

This is not unlike the phenomenon of rumours printed in a tabloid becoming part of a

celebrity persona. Whether or not the rumours are true, they are attached to celebrities, and

therefore affect the “mass hallucination” of who they are. To again cite Braudy, the celebrity

image that is perceived is constantly filtered through the celebrity’s surround. Given

Hemingway’s popularity in mid-century men’s magazines, he became associated with the values

and ideas articulated in those publications (Earle 18). These magazines were often focused on

offering expert advice to men caught between the expectations and comforts of suburban life,

and a need for masculine adventure. As Earle writes, “men’s magazines forwarded the idea that

[the mid-twentieth century] was an era of middle-class martinis and lower-class adventure” (18).

Hence, the recurring theme of returning to masculine pursuits, such as hunting or fishing as a

way of offering “the American male escape from what was seen as the feminine sphere of the

suburban home and all their domestic responsibilities therein” (Earle 119). The antagonistic

relationship between the sexes implied a need to conquer women in order for men to return to

their rightful place, which reinforced a need for male sexual dominance, even within a marriage,

the most domestic of institutions. The purpose of these magazines was not so much to provide

strategies for men to find a way out of their marriages, as much as it was a chance for them to

live vicariously through the experiences of others.

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This is where Hemingway became a vital player. Hemingway’s role in these magazines is

as “the expert and insider who approaches the leisure activities of fishing, hunting, eating,

drinking, travelling, and women with the same skill, integrity, respect, and seriousness he

approaches a battlefield or a typewriter” (Earle 108). Oftentimes, Hemingway’s appearances in

the pulps were through a reprint of one of his short stories, or through “interviews” made up of

various quotes from his own writing, or articles that appeared in earlier publications. In this way,

the pulps benefited from his prestige and popularity, while shaping his persona, as they fulfilled

their role as a provider of valuable advice. The pervasiveness of these magazines, and the

frequency with which Hemingway appeared in them, meant that they became an important part

of his celebrity persona. It makes sense that films looking to appeal to the low-class aspects of

Hemingway’s persona borrowed from his reputation as a sexually aggressive womanizer, an

attribute frequently pushed in the pulps10.

The popular characterization of Hemingway as a writer of sexy stories is demonstrated in

low-priced paperback reprints of his literary work (Figures 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8). In stark contrast to

the middlebrow reputation offered by Hemingway’s inclusion in the BOMC discussed earlier,

publishers of these paperback editions try to make his literary novels more appealing to fans who

came to his work via the pulp magazines. The salacious images on the covers make the books

seem far sexier than they actually are. A version of Hemingway that he has little or no

connection to is imprinted onto the literary work he actually created, allowing it to colour the

perception of him in the popular discourse.

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Figure 1.6 Figure 1.7 Figure 1.8

The connection between Hemingway’s star persona and risqué sexuality was emphasized

again in the promotional campaign for The Snows of Kilimanjaro, released in 1952. While the

film’s trailer contains a lot of references to the many loves of the film’s protagonist Harry Street

(Gregory Peck), including footage of passionate kissing and suggestive flirtation, it was the print

campaign that stressed the film’s connection to the version of Hemingway found in the pulps.

The poster that ran in newspapers can be found in the 31 December 1952 issue of the New York

Times encouraging readers to see “Ernest Hemingway’s Greatest Love Story!” Once again, this

approach implies that the love story depicted in the film is based on Hemingway’s work, rather

than a narrative invented by the production team. This tactic is even more direct in a teaser

campaign run in newspapers under a tag line that billed Gregory Peck as “The Man Who Loved

HEMINGWAY’S WOMEN!” (Figure 1.9). Each day, the advertising campaign would introduce

one of “Hemingway’s women” from the film: Helen, “equally alluring at a wild party or hunting

wild game” (Susan Hayward), Cynthia, the model from Montparnasse (Ava Gardner), Liz, a

countess (Hildegarde Neff), and Connie, “the carnival girl” (Helene Stanley). While each of

these women are inspired by women in various Hemingway works (and his life), none of the

characters are direct creations of Hemingway himself. They are not his women, fictional or

otherwise. Yet the wording of the advertisement creates the impression that they are the sort of

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women that Hemingway writes about. By playing on Hemingway’s reputation as a ladies’ man,

a reputation central to his persona in the pulps, the ad implies that the actresses on the posters are

women that Hemingway would and could date, if he were so inclined. The suggestion is that he

is so desirable that he could, in his early fifties, easily attract, and possess (they are, after all

“HEMINGWAY’S WOMEN”) these much younger movie stars.

Figure 1.9

Hemingway’s treatment of women is one of the more problematic aspects of his legacy.

He had four wives, and while it is true that he cheated on at least three of them, his reputation as

a womanizer is mostly unfounded, especially if biographer Mary Dearborn is to be believed.11

The fine details of Hemingway’s sex life are not of interest to my study; however, it is important

to note just how much of his reputation as a womanizer is clearly attributable to extra-textual,

non-biographical mediations of his persona, of which these ad campaigns are a part.

Even amid the trend toward more genteel presentations of Hemingway in the promotional

strategies of the late 1950s, which I discussed earlier, the pulpier, violent version of Hemingway

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still made its way to the screen. This duality is important because demonstrates the prismatic

nature of Hemingway’s celebrity, as there were multiple avenues for accessing his persona in the

late 1950s. Consider the ad campaign for The Gun Runners in 1958 and the way it replicates the

approach of the publishers of the men’s magazines that were selling a lot of issues on the

strength of some tangential connection to Hemingway. Over the course of the film’s two-minute

trailer, for instance, the announcer claims that The Gun Runners “explodes with a Hemingway

kind of power,” and later says that the movie offers “That Hemingway kind of excitement.”

Additionally, the poster for the film (figure 1.10) proclaims the movie to be “Hemingway-Hot

Adventure,” a phrase ambiguous enough to mean almost anything but implies that “Hemingway-

Hot” is a particularly warm temperature for adventure while being at least mildly sexual in

nature. The poster is also filled with images related to Hemingway’s public persona as a world

traveler/adventurer, including a palm tree filled beach, explosions around an escaping boat, a

couple embracing, one man strangling another with a rifle, a man shooting a gun from what

appears to be a moving car, and an image of a shirtless Audie Murphy, looking far more fierce

than he ever does in the film as he swings a rifle like a baseball bat.

Figure 1.10

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While the film’s ads are clearly a call back to the promotional strategies of a decade or so

earlier, it is important to note that the producers also tried to associate their film with the prestige

of Hemingway’s name in their pre-production publicity. 7-Arts, a fledgling production company,

purchased the rights to To Have and Have Not in the mid-1950s. Lacking the resources required

to create and promote a major prestige picture, 7-Arts found ways to court controversy in order

to keep news about the project in the papers by repeatedly antagonizing Hemingway himself.

The first step was for producer Charles Greene to announce that the film would be called One

Trip Across, the title for the first iteration of the novel, published in Cosmopolitan in 1934. Press

agents from the studio then created a rumor about Hemingway planning to block the use of that

title, which lead Greene to announce that the movie would now be called Ernest Hemingway’s

Gun Runners. Milt Machlin, in his biography/memoir The Private Hell of Hemingway, reports

that Hemingway, after hearing of the title, tried to get an injunction to stop the film. As the

setting of the film was Key West and Cuba, Machlin claims Hemingway was worried that it

would look like “he had written a piece of propaganda for Castro” (209).

7-Arts was not, however, finished with their controversy campaign. Phillips reports that

Hemingway’s “chagrin turned to outrage … when starlet Gita Hall announced that she was

planning to change her name to Gita Hall Hemingway to indicate her lasting pride at being

linked to a movie made from one of this great writer’s books” (63). Machlin recounts

Hemingway’s anger over this ridiculous publicity stunt, which his lawyers were eventually able

to block. Whether or not these attempts at scoring publicity for the film helped, in the end, is

difficult to say; however, what is clear from these stories is the intense public interest in

Hemingway in the late 1950s. Greene realized that anything associated with Hemingway would

secure press coverage, especially if those stories were antagonistic enough to elicit a public

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response. In this way, we can read Greene’s actions as blatant attempts to sneak into the spotlight

that shone constantly on Hemingway in the late 1950s. In the same way that productions often

put out press releases when they have managed to book a major actor or director for a project, we

can see here that Greene sought to use Hemingway’s drawing power and its connection to his

film as a form of publicity. Greene’s attempt to change Gita Hall’s name can even be read as a

way of doubling down on the exploitation of Hemingway’s name and illustrates just whom the

producer was positioning as the film’s main draw. Conversely, Hemingway’s reported reactions

show his recognition of the power Hollywood productions had in shaping his public image. It is

unlikely that he would have fought back so strongly if he did not realize that audiences might

think of anything produced with his name on it as his work. Hence, Hemingway’s fear that if the

film were perceived as sympathetic to Castro, any anti-communist sentiments garnered by the

film would affect him personally12.

The deluge of cinematic Hemingway adaptations would slow to a trickle in the wake of

his death in 1961, with only two cinematic adaptations produced in the entire decade. In the

promotional material for Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), a pseudo-

biographical exploration of Hemingway’s persona via Nick Adams, a recurring character from a

cycle of short stories Hemingway primarily wrote in the 1920s, we see an attempt to present the

film as not only a story based on Hemingway stories, but also a story about Hemingway himself.

Producer Jerry Wald made it clear how important Hemingway was to the movie’s appeal and

construction, telling the Hollywood Reporter in December of 1960 that “Hemingway is as big a

name as any Hollywood star.” Wald’s belief in Hemingway’s drawing power is obvious not only

from the use of his name in the title but also in the tagline that appeared on most of first release

posters: “Nick Adams. Or Ernest Hemingway – One begins where the other leaves off.” Despite

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Pauline Kael’s dismissal of the film as a “moral offense” because “it’s a violation of his life as

well as of his work (223),” there appears to be no hesitation on the part of the producers and the

marketing department to blend aspects of Hemingway’s identity together at a time when

Hemingway’s life was of far more public interest than the literature he had written. Clearly, in

order to sell a movie based on stories that were nearly forty years old at the time of the film’s

release, it had to offer some access to the author himself. Hence, the promotional promise that

the film offers a blend of Hemingway and his work so that an audience member can sate their

desire to spend time near the “tantalizing apparition” while simultaneously experiencing the

pleasure of his work.

Although they were hardly the only media sources involved in the construction of

Hemingway’s persona, the contributions made by the Hollywood promotional departments are

important for what they tell us about the celebrity persona formed from the multiple discourses

around Hemingway. As Dyer points out, “promotion is probably the most straightforward of all

the texts which construct a star image, in that it is the most deliberate, direct, intentioned and

self-conscious” (60). The image of Hemingway found in promotional materials is often flattened

to one saleable attribute, an easy-to-consume aspect of his persona that will sell a particular

movie to a particular audience. The insistence and confidence with which announcers and

copywriters assert their specific version of a celebrity’s persona can leave a lasting impression.

The versions of Hemingway being loudly propagated in movie theatres and in newspapers during

the most pivotal years of his ascension as a celebrity contributed to Hemingway’s ability to

embody multiple personae which simultaneously endorse seemingly contradictory class and

cultural values. Somehow his middlebrow-ness did not exclude him from being someone of

significant literary value, as demonstrated by the many serious academic considerations of his

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work. Nor did his role as a prestigious author alienate fans for whom he was a paragon of macho

pursuits.

Dyer and Braudy describe an observer’s understanding of any specific celebrity, in

performance or otherwise, as an amalgam of the multiple medial representations of the figure

that the observer has experienced. In mid-century America, a time before any weighty

biographies, or a lot of academic examination, Hemingway existed as a construct of discourses in

popular media. The simplistic versions of Hemingway, usually emphasizing one or the other

idealized version of his public persona, visible in ads and magazine profiles, is both a reflection

of, and a contributor to, his reputation. These media discourses allow fans to enjoy the version of

Hemingway they like the best, whether that is the literary genius, and prestigious author

proclaimed in Life magazine, in the ads for A Farewell to Arms (1957) and The Sun also Rises, or

the rough and ready adventurer and ladies’ man of the pulps and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

This is why the Lillian Ross profile in the New Yorker in May of 1950 became so

controversial. The version of Hemingway she presented – a blowhard with man-child tendencies

who cavorts with movie stars while performing rambling speeches that end with repeated

catchphrases like “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” – was that he did not conform to either

idealized version of his celebrity persona. He was neither the erudite literary genius nor the

macho man’s man. Instead, Hemingway comes across as a bit eccentric and not all that pleasant

to be around. Ross has described the article as a sort of Rorschach test for Hemingway fans – the

reader can glean the version of Hemingway they like from it (Raeburn 136) – the controversy

around the article derives from its presentation of a complicated human being rather than the

simplified and saleable celebrity Hemingway that had been, and continues to be, in medial

discourses.

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The next chapter continues to consider the way Hemingway’s popularity resulted in, and

was the result of, Hollywood’s repeated drive to “put him in the movies.” I will shift from the

marketing campaigns to the film adaptations directly by reading the development of

Hemingway’s celebrity persona through textual, intertextual, and biographical aspects of his

celebrity persona. The way that these films become increasingly reliant on Hemingway’s

personal life rather than his work, explains a great deal about the nature of Hemingway’s persona

in mid-century America and beyond as Hemingway’s life continued to become more culturally

significant than his work.

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Notes

1 According to Leonard Leff, these publicity releases were often reprinted almost

verbatim in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times where headlines like “Author Lived Story

Showing on Screen Here” emphasized Hemingway’s biographical connection to the film (175).

2 Dyer also identifies Freudian ideas, the Kinsey report, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine

Mystique, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, relaxed censorship, and the rise of

television as contributors to the unsettling of 1950s culture.

3 From “Marlin off the Morro: A Cuban Letter” Esquire Autumn, 1933: “Getting up to

close the shutter you look across the harbor to the flag on the fortress and see it is straightened

out toward you. You look out the north window past the Morro and see that the smooth morning

sheen is rippling over and you know the trade wind is coming up early” (138).

4 The novel was released on 21 October 1940, the report of the deal was published on 25

October 1940.

5 See the fetishization of books in trailers for contemporaneous films: The Magnificent

Ambersons (1942), Jane Eyre (1943), How Green was My Valley (1941), Rebecca (1940), The

Grapes of Wrath (1940), and The Big Sleep (1946) to name just a few.

6 Dearborn writes that the boat they waved down was “the Murchison, a charter launch that

Marsh and the Hemingways discovered, to their delight, was the boat John Huston had used in

filming The African Queen” (562).

7 See chapter three for a more detailed account of the production history.

8 Consider the lengths Zanuck and company went to in gaining Hemingway’s approval of

their script (see chapter three), or the years of negotiations and delays, largely due to

Hemingway’s script approval for The Old Man and the Sea (see chapter three).

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9 Under Kilimanjaro is the expanded, academic version of his memoir published in 2005. It

was also released in a commercial version as True at First Light in 1999.

10 For example, an article in the tabloid On the QT titled “Hemingway – King of Vulgar

Words and Seduction,” proclaims that “Papa got the Nobel Prize for ‘creating a new style,’ but

he could have been saluted for his lovemaking scenes alone” and “his leading characters are

often hunting another kind of game, the kind that has long, slender legs, voluptuous breasts,

beautiful eyes and golden hair that tumbles over a pillow when the hairpins are pulled out” (Earle

128).

11 In an interview with the CBC (8 January 2018), Dearborn stated that she could find no

evidence that Hemingway slept with more than seven women in his life, hardly Lothario

territory.

12 It is important to consider Hemingway’s mental health in 1958 as a part of his concern.

He was frequently paranoid about FBI surveillance and was afraid that his past communist

activities would come back to haunt him (Reynolds 265-267).

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Chapter 2

Cinematic Constructions of the Hemingway Persona

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway offers the following explanation for his famously

succinct literary style: “if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may

omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling

of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an

ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (192). The so-called “Iceberg Theory”

or “Iceberg Principle” as a way of understanding his penchant for cutting narratives to their bare

essentials, has become as synonymous with Hemingway’s literary style as macho pursuits are

with his popular persona. While much has been written about the Iceberg Principle, what is most

important to my study is a consideration of the effect this reliance on subtext can have on a

cinematic adaptation. H.R. Stoneback, in his study of The Sun Also Rises, writes that

Hemingway’s style is “intended to make the reader feel more than is understood and to urge the

reader to participate actively in decoding the action” (211). Hemingway provides just enough

detail to give the reader an impression of the narrative events, characters, and themes without

being overly specific, thus showing the “one-eighth” of the iceberg and allowing his reader to fill

in the rest. By omitting the “things that he knows” Hemingway creates what Roland Barthes calls

writerly texts (4), establishing impressions of events or characters that the reader’s imagination

expands upon.

In terms of Hemingway’s mid-century medial interactions with Hollywood, the Iceberg

Principle that was so effective in his writing posed a problem for production teams seeking to

adapt his work, because the lack of details meant the formation of significant narrative,

character, and thematic gaps. The resultant films reveal that the methods the production teams

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employed to fill these gaps managed to simultaneously rely on and inform the configuration of

Hemingway’s public persona. The cinematic reconfigurations became a part what Braudy would

call Hemingway’s celebrity “surround,” the textual and extra-textual mediated iterations through

which an audience understands a famous person. As I will show, elements from Hemingway’s

“surround” were incorporated into adaptations of his works to add what Ann-Marie Fleming

calls “layers of authenticity” (320). In this chapter I will look at three specific strategies

employed by filmmakers attempting to fill gaps: first, the creation of new material based on

genre tropes around the original textual material Hemingway created; second, the incorporation

of intertextual material and meanings derived from his multiple works; and third, the insertion of

material and character traits drawn from Hemingway’s biography and public persona.

To begin let us consider Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946). Hemingway’s original

story tells us very little about whom the characters are (both the killers and Andreson, the killed),

and why the killing is necessary. The fact that the killers are “killing him for a friend” (218), tells

us they are hired for the job, which in turn indicates that other characters and machinations are

operating behind the scenes. Andreson has a complicated past, most likely involving organized

crime, and has wronged someone enough to warrant his death. We know this only because Mrs.

Bell, who works at the rooming house, tells us that Andreson was a professional boxer. As well,

George, the lunch-counter proprietor, assumes that Andreson must have “double-crossed

somebody,” since, as George states, “That’s what they kill them for” (222).

This notion of a buried past is important to the whole story, as Hemingway infuses the

short tale with signs of a sordid town history. The central lunch-counter, where most of the

story’s action takes place, had once been a saloon (217), for instance, connoting a pre-

prohibition, nefarious past. The lunch counter’s history is not dwelt on, but rather arrives and

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departs with no commentary, as though it is some bit of information that is bubbling up to the

surface, blurted out like a Freudian slip. The inability of the narrator to keep the disreputable

history of the building repressed connects thematically to Andreson’s inability to escape his past.

The killers are a bit of Andreson’s irrepressible history, rising to the surface to haunt him in the

present. In the short story, everything about Andreson’s past remains subtextual, allowing it to,

as Stoneback writes, “make the reader feel more than is understood” (211).

When crafting Hemingway’s slight story into a feature-length film, screenwriters

Anthony Veiller and John Huston (who was uncredited due to contractual obligations [Phillips

72-73]) delve below the surface of the narrative iceberg to show just “what could bring a man so

low that he would surrender himself to violent death” (Server 117). Instead of trying to expand

Hemingway’s narrative by setting the entire film within the diner, similar to the approach used in

Archie Mayo’s The Petrified Forest (1936), the production team recreated the entirety of the

short story and used it as the film’s opening sequence. The rest of the film is original material

meant to explain what past events led to Anderson’s death. The production team took full

advantage of this freedom to craft a quintessentially convoluted Film Noir crime drama,

complete with a flashback structure that relies on the testimony of no less than ten characters;

high contrast black and white cinematography; a central insurance investigator; a double-

crossing femme fatale; and a complicated plot that leaves the audience just as lost as the

characters. In the end, the majority of the film’s narrative is original to the screenwriters, and not

at all related to Hemingway’s story. The first ten minutes could be excised from the film without

affecting the rest of the story, since the only part of the sequence that contains important

narrative information for the rest of the film is the moment when Anderson is killed.

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In The Killers, the need for the screenwriters to generate new material comes from the

brevity of Hemingway’s short story, the source material for the film; however, there are

numerous other examples of adaptations in which new material is needed because production

teams decide to jettison large portions of the sources they are adapting. Consider Alfred

Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), a film that maintains little more than the names from John

Buchan’s novel; or how many of the late-1960s and 1970s James Bond movies, despite being

billed as adaptations, tend to retain only the title of one of Ian Fleming’s novels. In certain

instances, new material is generated by the production team simply to make a film more

interesting than a novel that may have the germ of an interesting plot, or some fascinating

characters, buried within a dull, overdone, or un-filmable story. In other cases, the content of a

novel may no longer be in step with the political, social, or commercial preferences of the time in

which it is being adapted, and so the production teams excise any elements that could be deemed

offensive or impossibly old-fashioned. In other cases, a mixture of these factors results in what

Linda Castanzo Cahir calls “radical” (16) adaptations. Whatever the reason, the decision to alter

or replace large amounts of a novel’s narrative leaves the production team with a great deal of

freedom to construct the story for the screen as they see fit. The results of such reconfigurations

can have significant effects on the public understanding of those stories, their characters, and the

authors of the source texts, especially in cases where the source texts are written by famous

authors with strong cultural brands, such as Ernest Hemingway.

We can see an example of this in the multiple adaptations of Hemingway’s To Have and

Have Not especially in the 1944 version, directed by Howard Hawks. The overt violence and

unconventional structure of the source novel meant that much of the narrative had to be replaced

to produce what the studio thought would be a commercially viable film. Each of the production

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teams had a lot of free reign, resulting in significant reconfigurations of the source work. Take

Howard Hawks’ version of the film as an example of this.

The production history behind To Have and Have Not is a complicated and storied bit of

Hollywood history, thoroughly documented by Bruce Kawin in his introduction to the published

screenplay. The novel’s portrayal of Cuba, writes Kawin, worried the United States

government’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, who were afraid of alienating

Cuba, then an ally in the war effort and an important supplier of sugar to the United States

(Kawin 31). Even though the novel was set during the Machado regime, it was feared that Batista

would see the film as an attack on his actions, and make international diplomacy and commerce

more difficult for the United States. It was the Inter-American Affairs office that suggested

moving the story to the French colony of Martinique, then under the control of Vichy, and thus,

outside of the American’s “sphere of concern” (Kawin 31). This change meant the antagonists

became Vichy agents trying to capture members of the Free French, and so Hawks turned to

novelist William Faulkner, who had recently been working on an unproduced script called The

De Gaulle Story, to rework Jules Furthman’s screenplay, based on his knowledge of Vichy (32).

Once the film was in production, the story continued to change to emphasize the on-set

chemistry between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. This resulted in Hawks’ decision to

remove a love-triangle subplot with Hellene (Delores Moran), the fleeing Free French agent

(Kawin 38).

What this production history makes clear is that once the most valuable aspect of

Hemingway’s brand, specifically his name, was attached to the project, the specific details of his

novel were treated by the production team was far less important. When the fiction’s setting

proved politically problematic, it was changed. When the nature of the central romance was

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deemed uncommercial, it too was changed to something more in line with Hollywood

conventions. When the real-life romance of the film’s stars gained attention in the press, the

film’s narrative was reshaped to emphasize that relationship. When Hemingway’s pessimism and

leftist leanings were deemed too depressing or out of step with the political climate, they were

replaced with more positive themes.

In the films produced from Hemingway’s texts during this period, it is the capital

associated with Hemingway’s name, and not the literary details of the source works, which is of

paramount importance in the process of adaptation. As I discuss in Chapter One, the power of

Hemingway’s celebrity had proven itself consistently profitable throughout the 1930s and early

1940s, justifying the large sums the producers were paying for the rights to Hemingway’s stories.

We can read those purchases as investments in Hemingway’s cultural capital, the same way that

McDonald describes the transactions that take place around actors, who are important to the

commercial apparatus of the movie business because “it is believed that the presence of stars

help to draw audiences to films” (5). Theoretically, the production team behind The Killers, for

instance, could have changed the character names, focused the opening sequence only on

Anderson’s death, and given the movie a different title, saving a lot of the money1 paid to

Hemingway for his story. That money, however, is important capital invested in the success of

the film since Hemingway was a major draw for audiences.

Only viewers familiar with the “The Killers” or To Have and Have Not would know for

certain that only the first ten minutes (or so) of each movie adaptation represents the entirety of

Hemingway’s contribution to what appears onscreen. The lack of distinction between what

filmed material comes from Hemingway’s fiction, and what was written specifically for the film,

arguably adds to Hemingway’s authorial reputation by creating the impression that the entire

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film is an adaptation of his work. For example, for many viewers of the film versions of The

Killers, it likely seemed as if Hemingway was the sort of author who writes convoluted crime

dramas, allowing that impression to become part of the complex configuration of Hemingway’s

public persona.

To account for how film adaptations of Hemingway’s fiction in this period both relied on,

and contributed to, the circulation of public knowledge of Hemingway and his multi-faceted

persona, his “surround,” I turn to the persistence of the biographical and intentional fallacies as

they operate in the reception of filmic as well as literary works. The tendency of readers to

attribute features of a literary work to an author’s biography was one of the targets of the New

Criticism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Literary critics like F. R. Leavis and

Wimsatt and Beardsley reacted against the substitution of biographical information about an

author for careful close reading of a literary text. Similarly, the New Critics argued against the

assumption that the meanings formed by a reader can always be referred back to the conscious

intentions of the author of that text. Particular interpretations of an author’s image are often made

through the interaction with a particular fictional work. This can be as simple as gaining

information about what an author looks like from the image on a dust jacket, to forming an

opinion of his or her talent, to making decisions about how to categorize that author according to

genre, style, era, politics, or something as amorphous as importance. Of course, numerous

theorists over the course of the twentieth century have discouraged this biographical approach to

literature, from T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to the aforementioned

Wimsatt and Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy,” through the Structuralists, Post-

Structuralists, and Deconstructionists. The idea that there is a single meaning to be found in an

author’s work has been dismissed repeatedly and replaced by a focus on the reader as the site of

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meaning creation. In his essay, “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault epitomizes the popular

understanding of an author when he writes, “we are used to thinking that the author is so

different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he

speaks meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely” (913). Foucault counters this

idea: “the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does

not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits,

excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation,

the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (913). So, for Foucault, the

author is a construct which merely limits what could be endless possibilities for interpretation by

the reader, because of the reader’s proclivity to assign meaning based on what is known about

the author. As Wolfgang Iser points out in his discussion of phenomenology, “one text is

potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full

potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way” (1005). According to

Iser, no text can have any singular, or even unified meaning, because readers create meanings

with each interaction. Therefore, according to these theorists, authors have no inherent priority in

terms of the meanings of their works.

Yet, outside the rarefied world of literary critical theory, it is very common, Moran points

out (61), for readers to look to details of an author’s biography to account for or supply a

meaning for that author’s work. Literary critics refer to this tendency as the biographical fallacy.

Consider the many questions Jeffrey Eugenides has been made to answer regarding just how

much of his novel Middlesex is autobiographical. An article in the Globe and Mail from 2007

explains that, “A surprising number of people seem to think Eugenides is Cal (Calliope

Stephanides, the novel’s protagonist, who is intersex): He’s still asked on occasion to remove his

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pants to prove that he’s not intersex” (Houpt). While Eugenides did fill the novel with a lot of

autobiographical information, which he says he used “to ground it in reality” (Neary), the

strength of the writing, especially the psychological realism of the central character, Cal, has

resulted in readers assuming they have gleaned some sort of “truth” about the author behind the

story, and therefore seek confirmation that their assumptions are right.

Within adaptation studies there is a long tradition of prioritizing the putative authorial

intention of a work on the assumption that for a film to be considered a successful adaptation, it

must capture something of the original work’s ‘essence.’ For instance, Andre Bazin writes about

the importance of capturing an author’s Form (20), and George Linden writes that “For a film to

be an adequate rendition of a novel, it must not only present the actions and events of the novel

but also capture the subjective tones and attitudes toward those events” (169). Despite efforts to

abandon notions of fidelity, ideas of betrayal and interpretation of a source still permeate the

discourse of more recent adaptation theorists (Leitch 65-66). Outside of the academic world, in

the popular realm of movie reviews, and the veritable wild west of internet forums, we can find a

recurrent fixation on ideas of faithfulness to what is claimed as authorial intention. Here we find

a persistent belief in what Glass calls “the author as a solitary creative genius” (6) which means

that any change to the source material is tantamount to betrayal on the part of the adaptors. So,

while the academic world has dispensed with authors and their putative intentions, it is important

to recognize that on a practical level, belief in access to authorial intention remains a significant

factor in the relationship between writers, their audiences, and those responsible for adapting

their material into a new medium.

In the case of Hawks’ adaptation, it is unlikely that the notion of Hemingway’s

intentionality was an important factor, especially considering the wholesale changes made to the

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narrative, characters, and thematic ideas throughout the movie. The major concern, as I have

discussed, appears to be more about how to make a commercially viable, and artistically

satisfying movie out of a novel that Hawks called a “god damned piece of junk” (Kawin 16). The

second adaptation of To Have and Have Not, produced in 1950 as The Breaking Point, reveals a

greater focus, on the part of the production team, on Hemingway’s intentions; however, it seems

the attention was on how to critique those intentions. We can see this with regard to the theme of

economic inequality that drives so much of Hemingway’s novel. While the criminal lengths an

otherwise honest person has to go to just to survive in an unjust system remains prominent in the

film, the production team pushes Hemingway’s critique of inequality even further by including

racial inequality, a topic taking greater prominence in the American conversation in the early

1950s. As critics like Toni Morrison and Charli Valdez have pointed out, Hemingway’s novel is

unapologetically racist, reducing many racial groups to stereotypes, or simply writing entire

ethnic groups off as criminals, all while using racial epithets like “chink” and “nigger” far more

often than necessary2. When Hemingway’s novel was adapted, both in 1944 and 1950, it was

obvious that the overtly racist elements had to be excised for the film to play to a popular

audience. Valdez argues that Hawks’ film retains the racism of the novel through its deliberate

pushing of people of color to corners of the frames, and removing the highly skilled black

characters from the film (129). By contrast, The Breaking Point, as we will see, has a more

progressive approach.

As the production of The Breaking Point took shape, the problem of racial inequality

became a central issue for director Michael Curtiz, screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, and star

John Garfield (Grissom 147). The production team’s new focus is manifest through the casting

of a black actor, Juano Hernandez, in the role of Harry’s first mate, Wesley. Wesley is a minor

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character in the novel, but the production team here has opted to have Wesley replace Harry’s

first mate from the novel and Hawks’ film, Eddie, an alcoholic old man that Harry keeps around

for sentimental reasons. Unlike Eddie, Wesley is a fully capable single father, an indispensable

member of Harry’s crew, and often, Harry’s moral compass.

As well, Wesley’s son, Joseph (played by Hernandez’s actual son, Juan Hernandez), has

a small role, but a powerful presence when he is on screen. The production team situates Joseph

as a physical reminder of the very real plight of people of color in 1950s American society,

which is most obvious in the film’s conclusion. As in the novel, the film’s climax comes as a

result of Harry agreeing to abet a group of dangerous men (gangsters now instead of political

revolutionaries) using his boat as a means of escape. When the gangsters arrive at the dock

Wesley tries to dissuade Harry from participating in the crime and is shot. After the boat has

gone out to sea, Wesley’s dead body is thrown, unceremoniously, into the ocean, along with one

of the gangster’s automatic weapons. The lost gun gives Harry an advantage in the ensuing fight

that leaves the gangsters dead, and Harry gravely wounded. Eventually, the coast guard tows

Harry and his boat back to the port where a large crowd has gathered. Between shots of Harry’s

wife and daughters tearfully awaiting news of his condition, Curtiz cuts to fleeting shots of

Joseph desperately searching for his father. The boy’s search goes unnoticed by the large crowd,

and the narrative focus shifts to Harry, aboard the boat with Lucy by his side, finally agreeing to

have his arm amputated to save his life. It is worth noting how much more concern the characters

show for Harry’s one arm than they do for Wesley’s whole body, which is never mentioned.

Harry is then carried off of the boat and loaded onto a waiting ambulance along with his family.

Interestingly, rather than fade out as the crowd disperses, Curtiz holds his camera on a

heartbreaking long take of Joseph, alone on the dock, left with no father and no answers.

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This final image is powerful, and it works to contextualize the positive ending for Harry

and his family within the greater, largely unnoticed, suffering happening around them. While the

white characters have arrived at a happy conclusion, Joseph is given no resolution. Instead, he

waits in silence, the whereabouts of his only family member, now lost in the vast expanse of the

ocean, unknown to him. Critics have had differing takes on the implication of this ending. For

instance, Gene Phillips, in his book Hemingway and Film, takes a very white-centric view of

Joseph’s significance, feeling that the lonely boy on the dock was nothing more than a clue as to

Harry’s ultimate fate (62). This reading, along with much of Phillips treatment of the film, sees

the black characters as little more than metaphors for the deep suffering of the white characters,

rather than figures that are suffering under their own trials. More recently, Michael Civille’s

article on the film re-examines the ending by taking into consideration the political and social

views of the production team and Garfield, as well as the political climate in 1950. Civille writes,

“this conclusion elevates the film from a white liberal attempt at acknowledging a social issue to

a visionary work that warns audiences of the difference between the pretense of ambitious

reforms and lingering American realities” (14). The ending manages to expand the social

problems the film is dealing with beyond the concerns of white America alone, to encompass the

injustice faced by visible minorities. While the inequity that Harry suffers is tragic, painful, and

worthy of note, Curtiz and his team, with this final sequence, insist on contextualizing Harry’s

travail within the experience of Joseph, and the people of colour he represents, who suffer

silently at the fringes of society.

The inclusion of Wesley and Joseph, and the act of giving the film’s final images to them,

also circles back to the film’s source material and the role Hemingway’s writing plays in the

adaptation process. The equalization, and at times prioritization, of the black characters, can be

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read as a critique of Hemingway’s work. As adaptation and translation theorist Lawrence Venuti

writes, “the move to a different … cultural medium with different conditions of production, can

invite a critical understanding of the prior materials as well as their originary or subsequent

contexts, the linguistic patterns, cultural traditions and social institutions in which they were

positioned” (38). The chronological gap between 1937 and 1950 results in significant cultural

differences which require changes to be made to the story to be acceptable in the later era. Curtiz

and his crew are engaging with Hemingway’s work, as they critique American society based on

the way they have extrapolated their understanding of the meaning of Hemingway’s original

critique, while simultaneously critiquing Hemingway for not expanding his consideration of

inequality wide enough to realize that the minorities at the edges of his narrative are suffering

due to the privilege that Harry, as hard as his life is, enjoys at the expense of those working for

him.

In terms of Hemingway’s image, the redressing of his themes in The Breaking Point

results in two plausible reconfigurations. It is possible that a viewer familiar with the original

narrative could understand the reinforcement and critique, and therefore come to a new

understanding of Hemingway and his politics as outdated, given his treatment of racial minorities

in his text. The second reconfiguration relates to viewers unfamiliar with the original novel who

may assume that The Breaking Point is a faithful adaptation. In this case, the film’s progressive

politics may be assigned to Hemingway, rather than understood as an adjustment of his politics

for another time. No matter which direction a viewer comes to understand either of these films,

the viewer’s perception of Hemingway will likely shift, since, as all of the celebrity theorists I

have been referencing assert, the popular perceptions of celebrities take on new attributes with

each medial iteration, even ones that they have very little to do with.

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The phenomenon of readers feeling they have gained some insight into the “truth” of an

author based on engagement with a “synthetic experience” can become even more resonant when

readers engage with multiple works by an author. This is especially true when authors are

promoted as writers of “personal” novels, or thinly veiled autobiographical works, as readers can

feel that they have special insight into the feelings the author has about the experiences they

write about. The assemblage of authorial traits, drawn from multiple texts, results in an

intertextual identity which allows the reader, and the medial discourse, to make assumptions

about who the writer is, and what s/he cares about, which in turn creates a framework for

understanding subsequent works. As Turner writes, “the literary celebrity is at least partly

produced by their own writing” (21). An author like Salman Rushdie, Turner states, “is going to

be read through a complex set of intertextual references, to which each successive book makes

its own particular contribution” (21). The image of the author, therefore, can be reconfigured

with each new work, allowing the public persona of the author to take on new shapes not only

for specific readers but within the cultural conversation as a whole. As Moran writes, “literary

celebrity can only be understood as the effect of a whole range of discourses, from publicity

material to literary texts, which authors themselves are not merely produced by but also help to

produce” (79).

The phenomenon of intertextual interpretation means that new work can force a

reconsideration of an author’s previous works. In the case of Hemingway, we can look to the

major critical reassessment of his earlier works following the release of The Garden of Eden in

the mid-1980s. As Lawrence Broer and Gloria Holland write in their introduction to Hemingway

and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, Eden, with its unexpected (for Hemingway’s

popular persona, at least) treatment of both sexuality and gender, not only reintroduced

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Hemingway as “a writer whose androgynous impulses … contradict the machismo Hemingway

of myth,” it also demanded “a reevaluation of Hemingway’s entire literary output” (xi-x). For

many decades, the critical work done on Hemingway focused on questions about “what makes a

man a man” first purposed by some of the earliest critics dealing with his work, such as Philip

Young. In the wake of Eden, Susan Beegel asserts, the “question was enlarged to include what

makes a man a woman? what makes a woman a woman? what makes a woman a man? what

makes men and women heterosexual? homosexual? bisexual? where are the boundaries of

gender? and what importance does gender have in our make-up?” (290). The Garden of Eden,

despite being released some twenty-five years after Hemingway’s death, drove critics to offer

new readings of well-studied works. These readings, based on a new intertextual understanding

of Hemingway, re-examined not only the female characters in his work but also examples of

queerness.

Outside of the world of academia, it is possible to identify instances where the meanings

that are assigned to authors through an intertextual understanding of their work affects the way

production teams approach an individual work in the process of adaptation. This can happen in

several ways, from subtle visual or spoken references, to metatextual inside jokes, to the

wholesale import of themes and narratives. A number of the adaptations of Hemingway’s works

provide examples of films shaped by an engagement with Hemingway’s intertext. This occurs

through the incorporation of themes, characters, and situations borrowed from other Hemingway

works that ostensibly have nothing to do with the work being adapted. Additionally, as I

discussed in Chapter One, the heavy emphasis on Hemingway’s association with every adapted

work contributed to the idea that the films were true to Hemingway’s writing, meaning that

Hemingway, and his work, became transmedial properties. His public persona was often shaped

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by both cinema and literature, and the promotional infrastructures engaged in their

representations.

To explore this, I will investigate the Hemingway code hero as it is employed in Under

My Skin (1950), and what its manifestation in that film reveals about the nature of Hemingway’s

celebrity image. Although it has been an obvious thread through much of Hemingway’s writing,

the term Hemingway code hero was first coined by Philip Young in his 1959 academic study.

Young writes, “the code hero … offers up and exemplifies certain principles of honor, courage,

and endurance which in a life of tension and pain make a man a man, as we say, and enable him

to conduct himself well in the losing battle that is life. He shows, in the author’s famous phrase

for it, ‘grace under pressure’” (11). It is the ability of a character to live up to some larger ideal

(or code) despite pain, and often certain death, that makes a figure in Hemingway’s fiction into a

code hero. Even though Young warns against such readings (10), the popular and academic

tendency to conflate Hemingway and his characters has led to a belief that Hemingway can be

read as a code hero, allowing the code to become an attribute of his popular reputation.

Much of the plot of Under my Skin has to do with Dan (John Garfield), a horse jockey,

and inveterate gambler, slowly paying back a gambling debt that has caught up with him in Paris.

To be free of his obligation to Bork (Luther Adler), the gangster to whom Dan owes his debt, he

must throw his upcoming race. If Dan refuses the deal, Bork will kill him. Dan is torn by a burst

of integrity, and loyalty to his son Joe (Orley Lindgren), who Dan feels would never forgive him

for throwing the race. Dan becomes aligned with the traditional idea of the code hero, when he

decides he will try to win, no matter the consequences. He makes bets on himself, planning to

give the money to Joe and Paule (Micheline Prelle), the film’s love interest, if he dies, so they

can use the money to go to America. In the end, Dan wins the race; however, a rider-less horse

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trips Dan’s horse, sending him flying headfirst onto the track. Dan survives long enough to tell

Paule and Joe his plan for them and the film ends with the pair going off together to live as

mother and son in America. This ending, with its opportunity for Dan to redeem himself via one

last selfless act despite the knowledge of certain death, perfectly reflects the popular

understanding of the Hemingway code hero.

The insertion of the code hero (which had no bearing on the source text, Hemingway’s

early short story “My Old Man”) is not the only element of Hemingway’s authorial persona

found in the film. Screenwriter Casey Robinson’s choice to expand the undercurrent of Butler

being a corrupt jockey signals not only a borrowing of subtext from the original story, but

reflects the fact that by 1950 the intertextual nature of Hemingway’s image was associated with a

cinematic style that revolved around shady characters, organized crime, and Noir aesthetics. This

reputation was due, in a large part, to not only Hemingway’s frequent appearances in men’s

magazines, but also to film adaptations like To Have and Have Not, and The Killers. Robinson’s

expansion of crime elements works to make a film that plays to what audiences expected from a

film that bore Hemingway’s name. Similarly, the addition of a love interest, in the form of Paule,

a Parisian woman with a deep seeded hatred for Dan, based on a misunderstanding from many

years before, represents Robinson’s need to broaden the story’s appeal by inserting a

complicated romantic entanglement. Specifically, the kind of romantic entanglement seen in The

Killers, and The Macomber Affair, which, despite having been mostly invented by the

screenwriters of those respective films, had become an integral part of Hemingway’s public

persona3. To satisfy the expectations of the audience, Robinson draws from aspects of

Hemingway’s image that, ironically, he had helped to create.

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As has been pointed out by several scholars, including Phillips and Laurence, Robinson is

an important figure to consider with regard to Hemingway’s onscreen representations. Much of

this is related to Robinson’s professed fealty4, as well as his broad knowledge and understanding

of Hemingway’s writing. This deep knowledge resulted in Robinson’s layering of themes and

attributes found in Hemingway’s writing into the adaptations he wrote, such as the

aforementioned connections to the Hemingway Code Hero in Under My Skin. His softening of

Robert Wilson (Gregory Peck) in The Macomber Affair (1947), however, provides an even

clearer example of Robinson’s interactions with the aspects of Hemingway’s persona that were

derived through an intertextual understanding of his work.

The shift by The Macomber Affair’s production team5 to a kinder Hemingway hero is

evidenced in the sanitized nature of the film’s central sexual affair. Unlike the original text, the

film’s affair is based on a romantic connection, rather than purely carnal attraction. The

production team even creates a scene in which Wilson professes his love for Margot, and

incorporates it into the replication of a scene from the text that was all about Wilson’s respect for

Francis. It is just after they have taken down the buffalo, when Wilson is so impressed by

Francis’ bravery that he takes the time to shake his hand, allowing enough time for the pair to be

“grinning at each other” (27). In the film, this moment is about Francis agreeing to divorce

Margot so that she and Wilson can start their life together. The two share a handshake, but rather

than an act of manly admiration, the handshake becomes a signifier of their agreement to transfer

Margot from one man to the other, with an “even break” for Francis.

This profession of love marks a significant change for Wilson, who in the story is cynical

and dismissive of women that go on safari, whom he thinks “did not feel they were getting their

money’s worth unless they had shared that cot with the white hunter” (21). This attitude of sex

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without love, mixed with Wilson’s admission that he sells access to his body along with his

hunting services, disqualifies Wilson from the role of typical Hollywood hero, not to mention

that these sorts of actions and ideas violated the standards of the Hays Office. Hence, the

production team turns to a familiar trope by making Wilson’s gruff nature nothing more than a

superficial covering over a sentimental man who is just waiting for the right woman to draw out

his romantic impulses. This is evident at the end of the film where the production team takes

Wilson’s dialogue, after Margot shoots Francis, verbatim, but shifts its implications. Rather than

coming across as a sarcastic cad who knows he has the upper hand on a woman he views as little

more than rich and spoiled, Wilson’s words become a way for him to suss out for himself “what

kind of a woman [she] is.” Since his report on Francis’ death claims that it was an accident,

Margot just has to agree with Wilson’s statement, and she will go free. Wilson is her savior, as

long as she plays along, and thus his questions serve as preparation for a lawyer’s grilling, rather

than the cynical teasing they were presented as in the short story.

This change in Wilson’s character is a key indicator of the film’s reconfiguration based

on an intertextual interpretation of Hemingway’s work, as it conforms to the popular

understandings of the Hemingway-hero-as-lover. To craft Wilson in this new configuration,

attributes are borrowed from other Hemingway characters, specifically Frederic Henry and

Robert Jordan who are both capable heroic figures and sensitive lovers in their respective novels.

This reconfiguration is important because of the way it circles back to Hemingway; the change in

Wilson is not entirely a fabrication, nor merely an acquiescence to genre conventions, because it

is crafted from an intertextual understanding of Hemingway. Trafficking in this assembled

version allows the production team to remain “faithful” to a popular idea of Hemingway, even as

they are “unfaithful” to the specific work at hand.

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We can again see the influence of Hemingway’s intertext in the narratives of two later

adaptations – The Gun Runners (1958) and Islands in the Stream (1977). The narrative of The

Gun Runners is less an adaptation of Hemingway’s original novel than it is a remake, or even an

amalgamation, of the two previous movie versions of To Have and Have Not, with a smattering

of references to the novel. For example, the Morgan character (renamed Sam, and played by

Audie Murphy) is married to Lucy, like the wife in Curtiz’s film, rather than Marie as she was

called in the novel and in Hawks’ film. The movie opens with the familiar sequence of Sam

being swindled by a rich patron, but this time the customer is arrested for writing a series of bad

cheques. Desperate for money Sam accepts a charter job from a gambler he meets named

Hanagan, the same name, albeit with a different spelling as a similar character, Hannagan, in The

Breaking Point. Just like his namesake from the other film, Hanagan brings along a young

woman, Eva (Gita Hall), providing a love-triangle subplot similar to the one found in Curtiz’s

film, but not in the novel. Therefore, we can see in the production team’s narrative choices, a

reliance on the “surround” constructed out of an intertextual idea of Hemingway established

through both his work and the adaptations of that work.

In the case of Islands in the Stream (1977), screenwriter Dean Petitclerc jettisoned much

of the novel’s narrative, choosing to keep the main characters and a few of the early situations

before borrowing heavily from To Have and Have Not, both Hemingway’s novel and the

Howard Hawks’ film. For instance, early in the film, we are introduced to a captain of a small

fishing boat, Ralph (Gilbert Roland), who is dressed remarkably similar to Humphrey Bogart as

Harry Morgan. Toward the end of the film, we find out that Ralph is using his boat to transport

refugees from the Caribbean islands to Florida, a plot point that is directly related to Hawks’

film. When Thomas Hudson (George C. Scott), and his two mates Eddie and Joseph6, find Ralph

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and his mate in a disabled boat, having been ransacked by the crew of a German sub, in the

middle of the ocean, they agree to take the refugees to Cuba. While transferring the refugees to a

smaller boat, the Cuban Coast Guard arrives, and Eddie pushes hard on the throttle, abandoning

the few remaining refugees off the coast of Cuba. The scene is reminiscent of the scene early in

the novel To Have and Have Not, wherein Morgan and Eddie flee similarly during the human

trafficking exchange with Mr. Sing. From then on, the film becomes a blended version of the

third section of Islands in the Stream and To Have and Have Not. Thomas and his crew are not

chasing Germans, as they do in the novel, but are rather being pursued by the Cuban Coast

Guard through the shallow rivers of the northern Cuba archipelago. Bullets fly as Thomas rigs a

makeshift bomb out of some extra gas cans, which ultimately stops the Cuban officers, but not

before they use a powerful machine gun to rip Thomas’ body apart.

In the tradition of the Hemingway code hero, Thomas Hudson’s heroics are not enough to

save his life, and so we watch a death scene that is a blending of two other Hemingway character

deaths. As Thomas can feel his life ebb away, he begins a paraphrase of Robert Jordan’s last

thoughts at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I’ve had a lot of luck to have had such a good

life,” Thomas says, “I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned. I was learning fast

there at the end7.” Additionally, Morgan’s realization at the end of To Have and Have Not, that a

man alone “ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” is reworked into the end of the film through

Thomas’ realization that the tragedy of his life has been that he has been unable to understand

himself as anything but an island in a stream, separated from all the other islands around him. He

has lived his life as “a man alone,” even though he was always surrounded by others that wanted

to be his companions, whether those were his friends, his children, or his wives.

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This deliberate blurring of characters and situations emphasizes the blending of

Hemingway’s literary reputation as presented in his fiction and the adaptations of that fiction.

His main characters are offered up as being so interchangeable that they can share dialogue and

attributes. In this way, Petitclerc and director Franklin J. Schaffner are establishing Thomas

Hudson as a composite Hemingway hero, one that owes fealty to Hemingway’s intertext. All of

this layering results in a central character that is in no way unique to this one film, but is instead

a character that can be viewed on a continuum of Hemingway heroes as presented on film that

include Bogart and John Garfield’s Harry Morgan, Gary Cooper’s Robert Jordan, Rock

Hudson’s Frederick Henry, and Gregory Peck’s Harry Street. Each of these actors and

performances adds to Hemingway’s surround via contributions to the popular understanding of

the Hemingway hero and so have contributed to the portrayal of Thomas Hudson in the film.

As we can see, the configuration of Hemingway’s persona becomes increasingly complex

with each reconfiguration as production teams attempt to fill in the narrative and character gaps,

formed by his minimalist and succinct style, with elements from his public persona. Each film

draws from Hemingway’s intertextual identity by reworking his story, and by inserting ideas and

themes from his other works, as well as attributes that have attached to his persona through the

work of other medial contributors. These aspects of his persona are so thoroughly entangled that

it becomes difficult to separate the elements. A deep study can pull the films apart and point out

the differences between material and ideas present in the source text, and elements that have

been added, and where those elements may have come from; however, to the average viewer

those elements simply coalesce into an idea of both the nature of Hemingway as a writer and as a

person.

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While the textual and intertextual aspects of a celebrity personae are important to their

overall images, it is often the case that performative interactions with any personae are viewed as

the least informative source for the “truth” about a public figure. This is why magazine profiles,

gossip columns, and social media exist, to offer candid, intimate, and immediate access to

celebrities. This is not to say that these “non-performative” interactions provide any greater level

of reality, as an Instagram post can be just as manufactured as a feature film; however, the

illusion of candid representations can give fans the feeling that they are gaining a deeper level of

understanding about a particular celebrity. Of course, it is only possible to gain a mediated, and

therefore constructed, version of whom that person is, as proven by the constant need to

reconfigure one’s persona as medial entities continue to proliferate. As Barry King writes,

celebrities are “individuals engaged in constantly re-negotiating the terms of their engagement

with public life” (52). The amorphous nature of celebrity does not, however, preclude it from

being understood by an observer as a source of truth about a person. For instance, there are

numerous examples of statements from old interviews or past tweets that often come back to

haunt celebrities. These statements are often taken to be true representations of how a public

person thinks or feels on a subject even if the statement has been taken out of context or is many

years old. While it is possible to untangle the complicated nature of one’s past from the public

figure at present, it is more often the case that controversial or salacious statements become

attributes of a celebrity’s identity. How the controversy affects the long-term fortunes of a career

is, of course, widely varied.

Nevertheless, the extratextual attributes remain affixed to the site of the celebrity, and the

resulting reconfiguration can affect the reputation of the celebrity whenever that persona is

encountered. Celebrity images are also significant factors in the way that what Roach would call

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their “synthetic experiences,” especially heavily constructed experiences like films, are shaped

by production teams. There are numerous examples of meta jokes wherein characters in films

make reference to the lives of the actors that are portraying them. Consider Cary Grant making

reference to Archie Leach (his own real name) and Ralph Bellamy (the actor playing his rival) in

His Girl Friday; Gloria Swanson and Erich Von Stroheim as fictional characters in Sunset

Boulevard, watching Queen Kelly, a film they made together in real life; or George Clooney and

Brad Pitt’s in-character conversation near the end of Ocean’s Thirteen which makes reference to

actual events in both actors’ lives. These instances are obvious references to the private lives of

actors playing a part, but references to the actual person behind any persona are evident in nearly

every type of celebrity performance. In the case of actors, as an example, since production teams

know that audiences will make certain associations, the characters played by any given celebrity

are immediately imbued with characteristics that revolve around the public aspects of the

figure’s private life.

In terms of narrative or character, there are important ways in which knowledge of

Hemingway’s real life resulted in interpretations and reconfigurations of both films and the

author’s persona through the way each is handled by the adaptation. For instance, the assumed

autobiographical connections between Hemingway and his characters were often emphasized

and even exaggerated by production teams; events based on known episodes in Hemingway’s

life were reworked to incorporate even more biographical elements; and even set design or

location choices were influenced by a desire to align the film with the Hemingway’s life

experience. Not only do many of the film adaptations provide instances of production teams

interpreting and inserting events from Hemingway’s life into their work, but they also draw from

his non-literary writing, activism, and public opinions to shape their films. This can result in

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more reconfigurations of Hemingway’s public persona, as those extratextual materials become

understood aspects of his textual expressions, thereby reshaping the public understanding of

what sort of writer he is based on interpretations of his writing he had very little to do with.

We can see an example of the incorporation of personal elements in The Breaking Point,

screenwriter Ranald MacDougall and producer Jerry Wald’s reworking of Hemingway’s To

Have and Have Not in the mode of mid-century social conscious films like Gentlemen’s

Agreement and The Lost Weekend. Wald was enthusiastic about the idea as these sorts of films

were gaining prominence at the time for dealing realistically with issues like racism, bigotry,

political corruption, and alcoholism. According to Civille these films, which were inspired by the

Neo-Realist films coming out of Italy at the time, were a way of looking inward at the mounting

issues that were coming to define American society. Civille writes, “progress in America was

possible, these films suggested, because an open recognition of the country’s troubles was the

first step to correcting them” (6). While the final film takes on a number of social issues,

including the aforementioned racism, the ostensible “problem” behind the film is the plight of

returning veterans,

As is often the case with Italian Neo-Realism, the Second World War casts a long, if not

always obvious shadow over the narrative of The Breaking Point. Harry Morgan, in this version,

is a veteran who has found no reward after returning to the country he fought to protect. He runs

a fishing charter business, using a boat he can no longer make payments on, his home life is

pleasant enough, but constantly teetering on the edge of financial collapse, and on top of

everything, he is abandoned in Mexico after his client, Hannagan (Ralph Dumke), skips town

without paying him. There are also clues throughout the film that Harry may be suffering from

undiagnosed PTSD. As Grissom writes, Harry’s “reactions to his circumstances, obsessive

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worrying usually followed by sudden and intensely violent reactions, show that his time in the

military has left him a physically tough but emotionally damaged man” (149). Additionally,

when Harry’s wife Lucy begs him not to take the job with the gangsters, and instead go work for

her father, a farmer, he responds by saying, “This is my business. It’s a job like any other job. I

did worse in the Philippines, and I got a medal for it,” indicating some lingering ambivalence

over his wartime actions.

This connection to the plight of returning veterans represents a connection to

Hemingway’s “surround”: as his concern for veterans was a well-documented aspect of his

public persona. We find the theme of war’s damaging effect on soldiers not only in many of his

works, including “Big Two-Hearted River,” The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms; but

also in much of his non-literary writing, including the scathing article he wrote for The New

Masses entitled “Who Murdered the Vets?” after finding the dead bodies of the abandoned

veterans working on the Matecumbe Keys during a hurricane in September of 1935. Reworking

Harry Morgan as a returning vet connects Harry to previous Hemingway protagonists like Nick

Adams and Jake Barnes, allowing Harry to be another in a line of Hemingway’s veteran heroes,

and a part of reshaping the public understanding of the Hemingway hero. This reconfiguration

creates a more complicated version of Morgan than was present in either the novel or the first

adaptation, thus expanding the understanding of a Hemingway hero. Given the constant medial

crossovers, and the popular drive to associate Hemingway with his protagonists, the more

complex Morgan is also likely to influence the understanding of Hemingway’s public persona.

We can see a full reversal of this approach in The Gun Runners (1958). Despite multiple

references to Hemingway, the source novel, and the previous adaptations, the film provides only

a surface level rendering of the story’s characters and themes. For example, the impetus for

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Sam’s downfall is still the loss of a fare, but he loses the money because his client is arrested for

passing bad cheques, meaning that he is as broke as Sam. Thus, the theme of exploitation of the

underclass as the result of societal inequity is replaced by a more simplistic notion of the

pervasive crime of the underclasses. Gone, as well, are The Breaking Point’s progressive racial

politics, and complex renderings of psychologically troubled characters. Sam is again a veteran,

but there is very little evidence that the events of the war haunt him in any significant way.

Rather, the theme of the film, as expressed by Harvey (the Eddie character, played by Everett

Sloane), is that a truly good man is incorruptible, no matter what outside influences may cause

him to do.

The simplification of the themes from the corrupting influence of inequality as the

ramifications of complex socio-economic factors, to the simple dichotomy of good vs. bad, has

everything to do with the Hemingway persona cultivated in pulpy men’s magazines of the era.

According to Earle, “It would be difficult to overemphasize the popularity of Hemingway in the

1950s, and this celebrity is at its most extreme and sensational in these magazines” (4). Unlike

the more complex representations of Hemingway’s persona found in his literary writing, critical

readings of his works, stronger film adaptations, and profiles in more prestigious magazines, the

men’s magazine of the era tended to flatten out Hemingway’s persona by emphasizing the most

sensational elements. As Earle writes, Hemingway “appears as a blood-and-guts soldier in the

adventure magazines and as an expert and lusty sportsman, drinker, and traveler in the bachelor

magazines” (4). It is the fanbase for this version of Hemingway that the producers of The Gun

Runners are after, and so are following the lead of the men’s magazines by layering on any

tangential connection they have to Hemingway’s persona while simultaneously simplifying the

nature of his themes and characters in order to appeal to lowbrow audiences.

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While the production team behind The Gun Runners was trafficking in the macho aspects

of Hemingway’s persona, the broad appeal and multifaceted nature of Hemingway’s celebrity,

resulted in a concurrent trend in the 1950s and early 1960s, wherein filmmakers relied on

biographical elements to fill in narrative gaps in their adaptations, as well as add prestige to their

films by emphasizing associations with Hemingway’s renown (more on this in Chapter Three).

This greater reliance on biographical materials points to Hemingway’s shifting identity from one

of Lowenthal’s “idols of production” to an “idol of consumption” as his persona grew more

popular. The observable change in Hemingway’s public persona conforms to Turner’s definition

of a celebrity as persons whose “private life will attract greater public interest than their

professional life” (3). As well, Su Holmes writes that the indicator of a particular person’s

celebrity is related to the desire for intimate knowledge versus interactions with the

manufactured manifestations. The current expressions of reality television and behind-the-scenes

documents about celebrities, Holmes writes, derive from “the desire to capture the self

unguarded, to probe into the interior, ‘private’ space that resides behind the masquerade of public

performance” (168). It is a desire to get to the story behind the story that drives celebrity

fascination; hence, the trend of making celebrities out of ‘ordinary’ people, a common aim of

reality television. After all, if there is no façade to begin with, then there is less to deconstruct to

get at the ‘real’ person.

As an example, we can consider the blending of Hemingway’s life into The Sun also

Rises (1957). Throughout the film, the production team8 has inserted dialogue that allows Jake

(Tyrone Power) to recount experiences and express opinions that are well-known parts of

Hemingway lore. For instance, Jake and Bill (Eddie Albert) have a conversation about Gertrude

Stein and her having labeled the returning veterans of the Great War as a “lost generation.” The

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scene works as a nod to the novel’s famous epigraph and to Hemingway’s relationship to Stein.

Bill refers to Stein, not by her name, but by referring to her art collection. Jake makes a subtle

reference to the souring of Hemingway and Stein’s relationship when he responds, “she was a

great talker, but I liked her pictures better.”

We can also consider the sequence wherein Jake recalls the days spent in the hospital,

recovering from his war injuries. In the novel, Jake’s description of his recovery in an Italian

hospital comes in the form of memories dropped into a stream-of-consciousness style where the

memories compete for prominence on the page. Over the course of two pages, Jake’s memories

slip in between much longer digressions within Jake’s mind. These short asides include remarks

about the furniture in his rented room, the quality of the bull-fighting papers he is reading, the

buildings and landmarks around the Italian hospital he stayed in, and the Catholic Church; each

of these digressions work as distracting reprieves from the difficult reality of his injury. The

broken-up nature of the passage represents Jake’s resistance to thinking about his sexual

inability. Hence, when the passage begins, the ratio of memory to digression is so lopsided

toward the digressions, that the memories feel more like afterthoughts. Yet, as the passage

continues, we can see the memories taking up more of the page until he is finally overcome and

begins to cry.

By contrast, the sequence in the film is a sustained flashback, wherein we see Brett (Ava

Gardner) first as a nurse in the operating room, before becoming Jake’s companion as he

gradually recovers. The pair discuss past loves, their reasons for being in the war, and their plans

for the future. None of this comes from the novel, through which we only know that Brett was a

V.A.D. nurse in England and that she lost “her own true love,” to dysentery (46). The film

constructs a cohesive narrative sequence by filling in the unknowns with narrative elements from

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Hemingway’s own life. Brett, in this sequence of the film, is a lot different from the woman we

have seen running through the cafes of Paris; instead, she is more like what the producers may

have imagined Agnes Von Kurowsky, the young nurse Hemingway had a relationship with while

convalescing in Italy, to have been like, based on Hemingway’s reconfiguration of her as

Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Since, as is so often the case, Jake is read as a stand in

for Hemingway, Brett is reconfigured to be like Hemingway’s real-life companion at the time

they are recreating.

The phenomenon of using Hemingway’s fiction as a conduit for exploring his life came

to its culmination with Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, an episodic film based on the

Nick Adams stories, released in 1962, a year after Hemingway’s death from suicide. The film,

written by A.E. Hotchner, and produced by Jerry Wald, is ostensibly based on a handful of short

stories9 with obvious references to many other unpaid-for works, as well as Hemingway’s life. In

fact, the personal aspects of Hemingway’s image are so thoroughly intertwined into Adventures

that the film is really best described by its promotional tagline mentioned in Chapter One, “Nick

Adams. Or Ernest Hemingway – One begins where the other leaves off.”

This entanglement is best exemplified through a sequence involving Nick’s initial foray

into adulthood based on the short story “The Tree-Day Blow.” Hemingway’s story tracks a

conversation between Nick Adams and his friend Bill as they take shelter in Bill’s house during a

windstorm. The two friends start drinking Bill’s father’s liquor, and their conversation, while

circuitous, gets deeper as they get increasingly drunk. The non-linear route their conversation

follows, in both the story and the film, reflects a movement from the interests of childhood

(baseball, fantasy stories) to adolescence (teenage assessments of their fathers) to adulthood

(marriage and family). The movement back and forth represents the non-linearity of maturity, as

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these two teenage boys indulge in nostalgia for their youth, even as they long for the freedom of

adulthood.

The many clear insertions of elements from Hemingway’s life work to reconfigure Nick

(played by Richard Beymer) as being more connected to Hemingway than he is in the short

stories. For instance, while there are gestures and mentions of Nick’s writerly ambitions in the

short stories, they are never as clearly connected to Hemingway’s career path as they are in this

scene. At one point, Nick’s friend (now named George, and played by Michael Pollard) asks:

“When are you going to write a book, Nick?” To which Nick replies, “I’ll write a book. First, I’ll

get to New York and work on a paper. When I know enough, I’ll write a book.” This exchange

works to blend Nick and Hemingway, as it was Hemingway that honed his writing skills as a

newspaper reporter. Hence, Nick’s story becomes an expression of Hemingway’s biography.

Although it is possible to identify a number of similarities between the author’s life and the

stories about Nick, the conflation of their biographies is not an accurate representation, as the

stories are more than merely thinly veiled autobiographies. Jackson Benson, in his article “Ernest

Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life” explains that when Hemingway writes

he “projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which

has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts … That is to say, he writes out of

his life, not about his life” (350). Despite Hemingway’s efforts to push Nick beyond an

autobiographical figure, the film undoes that work by reconnecting the character and the author.

The production team’s decision to blend the two personalities led to the sort of murkiness

that is essential to building an understanding of a celebrity persona. Nick Adams, the film

character, is crafted out of what a viewer might have known about the character before the film,

mixed with knowledge of Hemingway’s writing and his persona, which are then combined with

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the character information presented within the film itself, as well as aspects of Richard Beymer’s

star image. The prominence of Hemingway as a figure in the film (his name is in the title, and a

painted image of his face is the first onscreen image) means that the understanding of Nick

embodies the cultural understanding of Hemingway, and vice versa.

Clearly, each of the production teams I have been discussing felt justified in bolstering

the characters with material from Hemingway’s life because even though the material is not a

part of the specific source text they are adapting, it belongs to the larger collective source that is

Hemingway’s “surround.” So far, I have been examining each of these aspects (his textual

output, the intertextual understanding of that output, and his private life) in isolation, to show

how interpretations of each aspect can be attached to a cinematic expression of his image;

however, the process involved in constructing, or understanding the construction of a celebrity

persona is never as demarcated as the reading I have been doing. Rather, a celebrity persona

comes into being through the “structured polysemy” that Dyer describes as the “multiplicity of

meanings and affects [celebrities] embody” (3). These meanings and affects are the result of

every aspect of their persona blending together around the actual person at the centre of the

celebrity persona. All of the information, whether professional or private, makes up the

celebrities “surround,” which both informs and is informed by any particular performance,

appearance, scandal, achievement, or activity that celebrities are involved in. When a celebrity

posts on Instagram, an actor plays a role, or an athlete wins a championship, the observer views

the public display through the veil of the celebrity’s surround.

In the case of Hemingway, the adaptations of his work that I have been considering in the

chapter simultaneously draw from and contribute to his surround. To close out this chapter I will

use a close reading of a particular sequence from The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) to consider

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how the amalgamation of attributes that form Hemingway’s surround function cinematically and

as a method for persona construction and reconfiguration. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, Snows

is a film that perfectly exemplifies a narrative constructed out of the many aspects of

Hemingway’s public persona. There are characters and plot situations taken from Hemingway’s

textual work, as the film adapts elements from the story to the screen; Hemingway’s

intertextuality shows up through the incorporation of nearly every one of his novels, and many of

his short stories; and his personal life is represented through the blending of biographical

elements into the narrative. This technique was not missed by Hemingway himself who

complained that he had “sold Fox a single story, not my complete works” (Phillips 109). The

film is based on a short story of the same name, first published in the August 1936 issue of

Esquire Magazine, concerning a middle-aged author, Harry Street (played by Gregory Peck in

the movie), who lays dying on the plains below Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, as gangrene slowly

works its way up his leg. The main narrative is frequently interrupted as Harry reminisces about

his life. These memories are presented as stream-of-consciousness ramblings that contain

glimpses of Harry’s memories of war and his youth in Paris, mixed with commentary,

grievances, and regrets.

Zanuck, a man who not only saw himself as a “Hemingway like figure,” but also had

remarked that if he could be anyone else, it would be Ernest Hemingway,10 brought on

screenwriter Casey Robinson, who decided to fill out the running time of the story by expanding

Harry’s stream-of-consciousness sections into four flashback sequences meant to tell Harry’s life

story as motivation for his regrets. The resulting film is simultaneously a Hemingway biopic, a

primer on his literature, and an adaptation of “Snows.” Director Henry King, when he first read

the script, said that he “couldn’t tell where Hemingway left off and Casey Robinson began”

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(Phillips 109). So complete is the entanglement of Hemingway’s life and work that Robinson’s

job was more one of curating than creating.

The best example of the production team assembling various aspects of Hemingway’s

persona into the narrative and character of Harry is found in a flashback sequence that purports

to tell the story of Harry’s early writing career in Paris. Harry arrives in Paris as a correspondent

for the Chicago Tribune, referencing Hemingway’s personal history, as he was both the Paris

correspondent for the Toronto Star, and was born and raised in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. In

the bars and cafes of Montparnasse Harry meets and begins a relationship with Cynthia (Ava

Gardner), whose worldliness and progressive attitudes toward sex mark her as a clear surrogate

for Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, thus referencing Hemingway’s intertext by drawing

another text into this adaptation. In one montage of images of Place Contrescarpe (the square

around the corner from Hemingway’s apartment on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine), Harry’s voice

over is drawn directly from the short story, before the scene then shifts to a small apartment

where Harry tells us he did his work and Cynthia took up housekeeping. The sequence, with its

obvious allusions to Ernest and Hadley’s early life in Paris, works as a seamless transition

between the short story and Hemingway’s biography, thus resulting in a blending of textual and

personal aspects of his persona. Harry publishes his first book, “The Lost Generation,” a

reference so comically direct that the sequence borders on parody, as it makes reference to The

Sun also Rises, and its famous epigraph, and so again connects to Hemingway’s intertext.

The amalgamation of Hemingway’s life and his work into the events of the film

continues throughout the rest of the flashback as Harry and Cynthia go on a tour of Hemingway-

related places and events, including an African safari that bears a striking resemblance to the

narrative events of both “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and Green Hills of Africa.

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The sequence also includes a secret pregnancy and Cynthia inducing a miscarriage by throwing

herself down a set of stairs after a fight with Harry, who does not want to slow down. The scenes

that follow, in which Harry learns the truth about the pregnancy and stays by Cynthia’s side

throughout her recovery, draw elements from Hadley’s first pregnancy, the ending of A Farewell

to Arms, and the short story, “Hills Like White Elephants.” When Cynthia is able to travel again

the film draws from Hemingway’s personal life by imbuing Harry with an insatiable wanderlust,

similar to the popular image of Hemingway, as embodied in his need to chase stories. As well,

more elements from Hemingway’s other works are inserted in the form of a bullfighting

sequence, and Cynthia’s return to her Brett Ashley roots, as she runs off with a Spanish dancer,

just as Brett does with a matador in The Sun also Rises.

Each of the four flashback sequences in the film follows the same trend as I have laid out

here, making numerous references to aspects of Hemingway’s persona. As well, there is a Jiminy

Cricket-like character named Uncle Bill (Leo G. Carroll) that shows up periodically to espouse

writing and life advice that is mostly lifted from Hemingway’s Esquire Letters and Death in the

Afternoon. Thus, Snows represents a perfect example of many of the ideas I have been

discussing. Each flashback blends multiple aspects of Hemingway’s identity into the narrative,

everything from his earliest short stories to the most prominent narratives about his life, to the

critical reception of his novels, become a part of the narrative. This closeness with which readers

and critics have viewed Hemingway and his protagonists, something emphasized by the

production team, means that Gregory Peck’s Harry Street becomes a surrogate Hemingway,

thereby reconfiguring the popular notion of Hemingway’s persona.

The film uses one story, which is semi-autobiographical, as an entry point for telling a

fictionalized biography of Hemingway by assembling the aspects of his identity so successfully

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that it results in a coherent, if inaccurate, portrait of the author. No part of Snows stays faithful to

any single text, but rather is always faithful to the ur-text that is the Hemingway celebrity image

as it was accepted and propagated in 1952. The film tells us a great deal about the overwhelming

popularity of the Hemingway persona at the time, in that no single thing that he wrote was as

important to the producers, or the audiences, as who he was perceived to be in the cultural

zeitgeist. This change also reinforces Holmes’ claim about the nature of celebrity; Hemingway’s

work, at this point, is still drawing attention, but the filmmakers are clearly invested in providing

audiences with a glimpse at the figure behind the work. The producers present the private life of

Hemingway onscreen in an attempt to provide what Roach calls “the illusion of proximity to the

tantalizing apparition” (44). It is that desire for connection to the person behind the work, rather

than the work itself that defines for Holmes, Dyer, Marshall, and Turner the mark of celebrity.

Ultimately, the reliance on Hemingway’s celebrity on display in Snows, as well as the

other films that draw from multiple aspects of his persona, are attempts to create a cinematic

object that bears the markers of authenticity that were so vital to Hemingway’s literary and

public reputation, especially in the early days of his career, as I explored in my first chapter. The

production teams attempted to achieve this alignment with Hemingway’s reputation by adding

what Fleming calls “layers of authenticity” (320) in the form of narrative material, biographical

elements, and known character attributes, culled from various medial sources. The resulting

films, rather than attempting to find a way to replicate the affective experience of reading

Hemingway’s work, instead offer a way to encounter the “tantalizing apparition” that is Ernest

Hemingway as an assembled celebrity persona, while furthering the fictionalized nature of that

persona.

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All of these medial interactions reinforce Roach’s theories about the power of the ‘It

Factor,’ as the interactions with Hemingway’s “public intimacy” both sates and “intensifies the

craving for greater intimacy with the ultimately unavailable icon” (44). In my next chapter, I will

further explore the draw of Hemingway’s It Factor,’ on the part of production teams adapting his

works to the screen, to both bask in the glow and gain financially from Hemingway’s charisma.

This drive to capture some element of Hemingway’s prestige reveals a great deal about the value

of Hemingway as an object of celebrity worship and the cultural ambitions of Hollywood.

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Notes

1 Producer Mark Hellinger paid Hemingway $36,750 for the film rights to “The Killers,”

the most ever paid for the film rights to a short story (Server 114).

2 Valdez and Morrison have pointed out the novel’s racist overtones and the way they

problematize not only the story, but also Hemingway’s legacy. Other theorists, most prominently

Carlos Baker, have countered the argument by pointing out the difference in prevailing attitudes

toward race and racial epithets at the time Hemingway was writing. There is evidence that Baker

may be right, at least partially, as most reviews of the book, while finding it overly violent and

structurally flawed, have little to say about the racist elements. Of course, we can also read the

lack attention paid to the egregious use of racial epithets in the novel as, if not an indicator of

prevalent racism, then, at the very least, it is a sign of racial obliviousness on the part of the

dominant critical community in the 1930s.

3 Consider, as evidence, how much emphasis is placed on romantic entanglements in the

promotional strategies for nearly all of the Hemingway adaptations, which I discussed at length

in Chapter One.

4 In an interview some decades later, Robinson said, “I try, when I’m writing a screenplay

from somebody’s original work to be as faithful to it as I can be” (Greenberg 13).

5 Including producer Benedict Bogeaus, director Zoltan Korda, and Gregory Peck, who

called himself “an uncredited coproducer on the picture” (Fishgall 113).

6 Although both of these characters appear in the novel, their portrayals in the film are

much closer to the Eddie of Hawks’ film (heavy drinker, unreliable first mate) and the Wesley

character from The Breaking Point (trustworthy, and often serving as a conscious).

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7 The quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls has Robert Jordan saying, “You do not want to

complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned,

though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end” (503).

8 Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, director Henry King, and screenwriter Peter Viertel

9 According to Phillips, 20th Century Fox paid $125,000 for 10 short stories (80).

10 This is according to film historian Scott McIsaac, who was interviewed for the

supplementary material on the DVD release of The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

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Chapter 3

Putting the Prestige in the Pictures

The end of Chapter One refers to the May 1950 New Yorker profile of Hemingway

entitled “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” The nearly 12,000-word article, written by

Lillian Ross, covers three days she spent with the Hemingways in Manhattan. The days are

mostly unremarkable, taken up by eating, drinking, shopping, visiting, museums, and business

lunches. Despite the banality of Hemingway’s activities, the article caused a stir and remains

important to an understanding of Hemingway’s persona for the way it portrays its subject as an

overbearing, rambling, sulking blowhard given to lengthy speeches filled Groucho-like non-

sequiturs, almost always ending with references to baseball.1 In one particularly memorable

speech, Hemingway explains where he sees himself in the pantheon of great authors. “I started

out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev,” Hemingway states, “Then I trained hard and I beat Mr.

de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last

one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep

getting better” (42).

The imagined literary boxing match blends two aspects of Hemingway’s celebrity

reputation: the macho figure, ever-ready to settle scores through violent acts, and the famous

writer with a place in the rarified, genteel world of prestigious literary authorship. His role as a

macho adventurer and prestigious author were both important aspects of his public persona and

co-existed in the popular understanding of his “structured polysemy” (Dyer 3) as it was manifest

throughout his life and after his death, despite their apparent incongruity. The prismatic nature of

Hemingway’s fame in mid-century American culture made it possible for fans and other content

creators (film producers, magazine editors, etc.) to focus on specific aspects of that fame

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exclusively to create and sell their products. As the 1950s progressed, the prestige aspect of

Hemingway’s persona began to dominate the discourse around his image as his age, longevity,

and his having received major literary awards facilitated a new understanding of him as an elder

statesman of letters. While Hemingway’s macho persona remained popular, it was his prestige as

an author that became the major draw for most of the Hollywood production teams working on

adaptations of his works. The reasons for this are three-fold; the first was a business calculation

on the part of production teams that Hemingway’s stories would not only translate into great

films, but also that an association with Hemingway’s prestige would result in pictures destined

for award recognition and the sort of cultural legitimacy Hemingway had achieved. Second, the

power of Hemingway’s charisma as a source of commercial confidence was attractive to

Hollywood producers whose entire business model was in flux as challenges to its primacy came

from myriad directions. Third, even as Hollywood was losing its monopolistic grip over film

production and distribution in America, cinema, as an artistic medium, was rapidly overtaking

literature as the dominant cultural touchstone for middle and high-brow artistic engagement. The

belief in Hemingway’s cultural and commercial value to the film industry resulted in Herculean

efforts, backed by enormous sums of money, to bring something of the author to the screen.

These attempts resulted in producers literally chasing Hemingway down to gain script approval,

as well as battles between attempts at script fidelity to his stories, and the demands of

commercial cinema, that occasionally bleed onto the screen. Eventually, the desire for

connection with what Roach calls the “tantalizing apparition” led film production teams to

emphasize various forms of association between Hemingway the person, and fictional

protagonists in films adapted from his works, by accenting visual resemblances through casting,

makeup, and costuming, as a way of putting him, and not just his work, on the screen.

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While the films discussed in the previous chapter relied on aspects of Hemingway’s

persona and biography to fill out narrative gaps and flesh out characters, the films in this chapter

take the dedication to the Hemingway mythos to another level, with efforts at appeasement and

fealty that were clearly detrimental to the final products. For this reason, this chapter will focus

primarily on the “symbolic identity” (deCordova), the “tantalizing apparition” (Roach), the

“image” (Dyer), or more simply the “celebrity persona” (Turner, Marshall, Douglas, McDonnell)

that Hemingway represented to Hollywood studios. I engage primarily with theorists like Roach,

Dyer (who draws from Weber and Lowenthal), Turner, and Marshall to consider how the

enunciation and understanding of Hemingway’s celebrity persona were shaped by his reputation

as an author of prestigious novels through inter-medial transactions with mid-century

Hollywood. It is these inter-medial transactions that further facilitated Hemingway’s shift from

acclaimed author to what he has become in popular culture today: a fictionalized celebrity more

famous for the exaggerated legends of his life and behaviour than for anything he wrote.

To begin, I return to Roach and the idea of celebrity ‘It Factor.’ Most important to this

chapter are the “character manifestations” that Roach breaks into three categories: “public

intimacy (the illusion of availability), synthetic experience (vicariousness), and the It-Effect

(personality-driven mass attraction)” (3). There are strong connections between the idea of

“public intimacy” and the “synthetic experience,” since it is the public’s interactions with the

“synthetic experiences” (plays, movies, novels, etc) that provide opportunities for them to

experience “the illusion of proximity to the tantalizing apparition” (44). Yet, as Roach describes,

these interactions rarely result in a satiating experience, as the power of the It factor “intensifies

the craving for greater intimacy with the ultimately unavailable icon” (44). What results is the

fan’s demand for greater information and access to the object of fascination. The work (the film

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or television show, for example) ceases to be enough, as it is too synthetic an experience to

provide what feels to the fan like access to what Dyer calls the “truth about the person” (125).

Roach goes on to describe the way disparate elements coalesce to create the idea of the icon in

the minds of the public. Roach’s use of the word ‘icon’ to describe celebrity is important, since

in its religious connotations, an icon, unlike an idol, is not a god in itself, but rather a

representative object (painting, mosaic, etc.) that directs the attention of the worshiper to the

divine (OED). This is not unlike a celebrity persona, which is not the person of the celebrity, but

an “image” (Dyer 34) that points a fan to that person, with the promise of a point of connection

to the untouchable figure. Roach goes on to say that the icon is “constructed both through the

publicity manipulated by celebrities themselves or their acolytes and through the imaginative

contribution of their fans” (44). These acolytes – fans, publicity departments, magazine editors,

film directors, etc. – are drawn in by aspects of the persona, aspects which are then reconfigured

repeatedly in the public articulation of the persona. As Roach writes, “It patches together a

specter more ragtag than any saintly relic: assorted features and body parts, bits of clothes and

accessories, briefly glimpsed gestures and expressions – all cohering only in the mass

hallucination that everyone either wants to touch or be touched by and no one can either find or

forget” (44).

It is possible to trace a desire “to touch or be touched by” the “tantalizing apparition” (44)

on the part of the production team behind The Sun Also Rises (1957) as they literally chased the

“apparition’s” blessing. Darryl Zanuck and Henry King, although pleased with the critical and

commercial success of their previous Hemingway adaptation, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, were

nevertheless bothered by the reported reaction Hemingway himself had to their film. Despite

admitting that he had not seen the movie in its entirety, Hemingway was quick to criticize it,

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referring to the movie as The Snows of Zanuck (Phillips 119). So, when Zanuck bought the rights

to The Sun also Rises from Howard Hawks in the mid-1950s, he was determined to make a film

that would please the author. Seeking approval, Zanuck sent the screenplay, written by Peter

Viertel, an acquaintance of Hemingway, to Ava Gardner, who was living near where

Hemingway was staying in Spain. According to King, Gardner “showed the screenplay to

Hemingway, saying, ‘For your own pride you have to read it and change things’” (Phillips 123).

Hemingway’s response was to tell Zanuck that he would sue if the script were filmed because he

felt it was not his story. Zanuck hired another writer to rework the script, but according to King,

the new version was no better. Finally, King claims he, Zanuck and Viertel locked themselves in

a London hotel room for four days where they worked at grinding out a better version of the

screenplay. Once the three men were satisfied, they drove to Liverpool where Hemingway was

docked overnight, had dinner with him in his stateroom, and “sat up half the night while he read

every word of the screenplay” (Phillips 124). King then states that once Hemingway agreed that

the new script was markedly better than the earlier version, he, Zanuck and Viertel “were

delighted, and drove back to London feeling that our mission had been accomplished” (Phillips

125).

The lengths the production team went to in their pursuit of Hemingway’s approval says a

great deal about his stature as a celebrity author at this time. In reality, Zanuck and company had

very little responsibility (even with the threat of what would have been deemed a spurious

lawsuit) to make a film that Hemingway would like. Rather, it appears that Zanuck and King, in

their desire to make a film that achieved the quality of the original novel and the prestige of its

author, felt that the blessing of what Barthes would call the ‘author-god’ would result in a better

movie, or perhaps, a more successful one. Barthes writes that “the author is a modern figure, a

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product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the

individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (875). The fixation on the “prestige

of the individual” means that if any one individual is at all exceptional, for instance, able to write

novels that large groups of people want to read, then it follows that s/he must be regarded as a

person of special interest by those deemed less exceptional. Therefore, Barthes writes, it is

“logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist

ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” (875). Hence,

the economic, academic, social, and political importance placed on the author as an idea, and on

specific authors as individuals. The very fact that authors can become celebrity figures, despite

the inherent detachment that exists between their works and them as people, bears Barthes’ point

out.

Authors, unlike actors, do not tend to be linked by readers to their fictional characters.

But this can occur in cases where authors bear enough It-ness to make them interesting to the

general public beyond the work that they produce. This is especially true when an author is

perceived to be a writer of personal novels, books that give readers the impression of special

access to the author’s “true” self. We can think of the personality cult that surrounds Harper Lee,

whose rare public appearances or interviews, and the fact that for most of her life she had only

one published novel, meant that many readers and fans felt they understood her as a person based

on the characters she created in To Kill a Mockingbird. As well, an alluring It-ness is created out

of the contradictions between the perception of her as a near recluse and an author of “personal”

work. Whether Scout is a version of Lee, or Atticus Finch is a version of her father, is debatable,

and likely unknowable. Yet it is a narrative that has long driven the mythology, and marketing

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strategy, of the original novel, the cinematic adaptation, various stage productions, numerous

memoirs and biographies, and the 2015 prequel/sequel/first draft, Go Set a Watchman.

In the case of Hemingway, the power of his It-factor led not only to a great deal of public

fascination with his life and exploits but also with his opinions and ideas. This deference to his

taste invariably led to concerted efforts to appease his often-volatile temperament. Consider

Maxwell Perkins’ decision to publish To Have and Have Not just as Hemingway submitted it,

despite considerable reservations about its quality (Berg 324); the casting of Bergman and

Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (see Chapter One); or the producers of The Old Man and the

Sea giving Hemingway a producer credit and script approval. Each of these cases, including

Zanuck and King’s trip to Liverpool, underscores the elevated status Hemingway held as he

shifted, to use McDonald’s terms, from a provider of labour to a form of capital in himself. To

exploit Hemingway’s celebrity capital, the production teams needed to appease the author so that

the narrative around the film included Hemingway’s blessing and endorsement of the movie.

The drawing power of Hemingway’s It factor, as well as the considerable influence he

wielded in the late 1950s, can be traced through a comparison of the 1932 and 1957 versions of

A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s lower profile in the early 1930s meant that despite the lip

service paid to the film’s fidelity to Hemingway’s prose in publicity material (see Chapter One),

the production team inserted only narrative and thematic elements from the novel that best

served the conventions of wartime romance genre they were shaping the film into. By contrast,

the 1957 version of the film, while sticking closer to the original narrative, clearly evidences a

struggle between producer David O. Selznick’s filmmaking instincts, and his desire to appease

Hemingway. As we will see, both films reveal important ideas about how production teams and

audiences interacted, understood, and reconfigured Hemingway’s celebrity persona.

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As mentioned in Chapter One, the first adaptation of A Farewell to Arms took the form of

a stage play. Laurence Stallings’ stage adaptation was a considerably condensed version of the

novel, which, for practical reasons, had cut out most of the war action, choosing instead to focus

on the central romantic relationship of the story. In the resulting film, it is clear that this

reconfiguration influenced the film’s production team2 who, despite having the ability and

resources to visually conjure anything Hemingway described in his novel, also foregrounded the

romantic elements of the story. Rather than attempting to replicate the existential and

meandering tone of the novel the production team took the general plot, a smattering of

situations, and the characters from the novel, cut out the less commercially viable aspects of the

story and replaced them with generic conventions of a Hollywood romantic melodrama.

An obvious way the film replaces the existential dread of the novel is by depicting

situations and character motivations around the narrative events that ground the central tragedy

as being the result of human interventions rather than the machinations of an indifferent

universe. The shape of the final film suggests that the sort of abstract malevolence3 on display in

the novel was far too vague and pessimistic, and so agency is given to Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou)

who believes that Frederick (Gary Cooper) would be better off without Catherine (Helen Hayes).

Rinaldi intercepts Frederick and Catherine’s letters to each other and has them returned before

they can be read. As well, Catherine’s fellow nurse, Ferguson (Mary Philips), who despite

knowing of Catherine’s pregnancy, refuses to tell Frederick anything about the baby or

Catherine’s whereabouts when he comes back looking for her. Frank Laurence, in his book on

Hemingway and film, writes that this change comes about because “in movies, and in popular

literature, the cause of tragedy is usually particularized in an individual, a villain, whom the

audience can easily recognize and understand” (58). While this assessment of the audience for

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popular entertainments is an overgeneralization and somewhat dismissive of viewer intelligence,

he is correct in his assessment of A Farewell to Arms, wherein the characters do tend to embody

more simplified notions of good and bad, or at least have clearer motivations for their actions,

than in Hemingway’s novel.

More so than the agency given to Rinaldi and Ferguson, the stark contrast between the

film’s approach to the story and the cold and indifferent universe that Hemingway created in his

novel is most evident in the changes made in the depiction of Catherine’s death. Whereas the

novel strips away any attempt to rationalize, contextualize, or even humanize the death –

Frederick describes his farewell to Catherine’s body as being “like saying good-bye to a statue”

(284) – the film elevates Catherine to the role of pseudo-martyr4. Director Frank Borzage

juxtaposes Catherine’s death sequence with news reports and celebrations of the armistice,

complete with numerous shots of bells ringing out, giving viewers the impression that perhaps

Catherine will come back to life, just like Italy, which had seemed so close to defeat5. Instead,

Catherine does die, and Fredrick, who has arrived at the hospital just in time, picks up her lifeless

body, bringing it to the open window as if to show her the celebrations, while he repeats the

word ‘peace’ as the film fades to black. The structure of this sequence implies that Catherine’s

death, and the many more like hers, are the reason Europe was able to find peace at the end of a

brutal war. The audience is given a narrative to provide a comforting meaning that Hemingway

categorically denies his reader.

The sorts of changes Borzage and his team made to A Farewell to Arms are typical of

traditional adaptations (Cahir 16), where making composites of characters, tightening narrative

material, and simplifying, or at least broadening, of themes is necessary to make a story work in

a commercial cinematic form. Hemingway’s novel was by no means sacrosanct in the eyes of the

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studio; it was a source that could be freely reshaped to meet the demands of a different medium.

The film bore enough resemblance to Hemingway’s work to honestly exploit the capital of his

name while incorporating elements that work better cinematically. Hemingway had not yet

become part of what Danae Clark calls the cinematic “privileged class” (5), and therefore it was

his labour that was more important than his capital. Hemingway’s position had changed

significantly by 1957 when Selznick made his version of A Farewell to Arms.

Selznick purchased the film rights to the novel from Warner Bros. in 1955 and sent a

personal telegram to Hemingway informing him of the purchase. That telegram was later

published in Life magazine as part of a profile on Selznick and the film. Selznick wrote, “Happy

to advise you have bought Farewell to Arms for my return to production and hope to do job that

will please you” (93). There is no response from Hemingway on record, but it is safe to assume

based on later correspondence6 that the author was not overly excited to see his novel adapted

again. The tone of the Life article, and the other correspondence related to the film, makes it clear

that Selznick viewed A Farewell to Arms as a perfect vehicle to return him to the artistic and

commercial prominence he had enjoyed after Gone with the Wind.

Famous for the mountains of memos he wrote while overseeing a production, Selznick

was no less prolific when working on Arms. The memos reveal Selznick to be conflicted, as he

was torn between a desire to remain faithful to the novel and his own commercial instincts. In a

lengthy memo to John Huston, whom Selznick had hired to direct, he writes, “The obligation of

adapters to the stage or the screen, respectively, is to do a play or a screenplay – not regard the

original as though it were Holy Writ” (427). Selznick would soon fire Huston for making

changes to Ben Hecht’s script, changes that brought the screenplay more into line with

Hemingway’s novel. Charles Vidor, whom Selznick saw as more malleable, was brought on to

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direct. In another letter, Selznick expressed a fear of doing damage to the original novel, writing,

“If we have done violence in any particular to Hemingway, it has been with great reluctance and

only after the most thorough discussions” (426). Despite his hesitancy, Selznick also expressed

his frustration with the process and Hemingway in particular, writing that he “doesn’t expect

Hemingway to like it;” however, Selznick did not seem to care that much since, “there is ample

evidence that if anybody changes a single word or scene or character, or even casts it any

differently than Hemingway’s visualized the characters, he is very upset7” (426). After this back

and forth, Selznick concludes his letter by saying that his only goal is to make a good film, no

matter what Hemingway thinks (426).

For all of Selznick’s tough talk, his desire for Hemingway’s approval and blessing over

his film is clear from a letter written (but not actually sent) near the end of production. “I hope

you will be seeing the film,” Selznick wrote before adding, “I hope most fervently that you will

like it” (442). In the letter, Selznick offers to send the film down to Cuba where Hemingway was

staying at the time and insists that he would not expect any publicity for doing so. These efforts,

in addition to the matter of the $50,000 in nickels discussed in the first chapter, show that

Selznick, like Zanuck and company, saw an association with Hemingway’s It-factor as both a

way to gain critical respect and commercial success. Hemingway was, in the mid-1950s,

receiving the sort of personal and professional acclaim as well as the commercial success that

had been afforded to Selznick in the wake of Gone with the Wind. Association with Hemingway,

either by creating a film that captured something of what made Hemingway’s novel so popular

and celebrated, or at least approval of Selznick’s film from the author, seems key to fulfilling his

ambitions for the project. It is important to note, as well, how differently Selznick treats

Hemingway than did the production team behind the 1932 version. The lengths to which

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Selznick seems willing to go to appease the volatile author, as well as the stock he puts in

Hemingway’s opinion, says a great deal about Hemingway’s elevated status as a prime cultural

property in the mid-1950s.

Selznick’s competing goals – Hemingway’s approval and commercial success – resulted

in a film that is an attempt to turn Hemingway’s Modernist existential novel into a broadly

appealing Hollywood prestige picture, complete with major stars playing Frederick Henry (Rock

Hudson) and Catherine Barkley (Jennifer Jones). Phillips explains that “Selznick … was bent on

making his version of A Farewell to Arms the epic picture of World War I, just as his production

of Gone with the Wind was the great cinematic epic of the Civil War” (26); Laurence points out

that Selznick spent “$5 million to shoot on European locations” using “twenty-eight freight cars

filled with props and equipment” which were “railroaded into the Italian Alps … Counting

villagers and troops from Italian army units, the movie had a cast of 11,000” (65-66); and

Grissom states, “Hemingway’s worst fear, that his novel would be turned into Gone with the

Wind set in Europe, became reality” (171). While Phillips, Laurence, and, to a lesser extent,

Grissom tend to view Selznick’s stylistic choices as problematic, what is most interesting to this

study is what his approach tells us about how much the public esteem for Hemingway changed

between the 1930s and the 1950s. In Selznick’s stylistic additions we see a reversal of the

approach used in the 1932 version, where elements of Hemingway’s story were inserted into a

film that mostly followed genre conventions. Here, Selznick has stayed much closer to the

source, and while he inserts stylistic flourishes to make the narrative more cinematic, the changes

seem to spring from both a desire to make a good movie, and to align the film with

Hemingway’s popular image as it was manifest in the mid-1950s, specifically as an author of

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spectacle and adventure, even as those perceptions are often incongruent with the tone and style

of the source text.

Selznick’s struggle to have it both ways is on display in the sequence of Catherine’s

death. Despite being far more faithful in his adaptation than were Borzage and his team, the

incongruencies between Selznick’s prestige picture sensibilities and Hemingway’s prose strategy

throughout the novel, which works to distance his readers from his characters in such a way that

reinforces the theme of dehumanization, reveal how much more influence Hemingway’s persona

had than what he actually wrote. Before looking at the movie itself, it is important to consider

Hemingway’s treatment of Catherine in both life and death in the novel. A major criticism of A

Farewell to Arms over the years has centered on how Catherine remains a male fantasy of an

idealized woman, rather than a fully fleshed out character.8 In contrast to this reading, some

feminist critics see Catherine as a paradigm for female survival in the face of war, a figure based

on intellect and social savvy rather than physical might.9 Despite the varied readings of Catherine

as a character, the prose style that dominates the end of the novel enables Frederick’s first-person

narration to act as an instrument of erasure. It is Frederick who provides the context for

Catherine’s struggle with childbirth, as well as her death, through the lens of overwhelming

Catholic morality. Throughout the sequence, Catherine is given very little to say, and what she

does say pertains almost exclusively to Frederick’s future without her. This has been read as an

example of Hemingway’s misogynistic bent; however, I contend that Catherine’s disappearance

is yet another strategy for exploring the dehumanizing effect of war. Hemingway denies his

reader catharsis by refusing to treat Catherine’s death with the sort of sentimentality that is often

typical of wartime romance narratives. Both Catherine’s death and Frederick’s reaction are stark

and brutal and given no significant meaning in the narrative. This approach makes Catherine’s

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death not all that different from many of the other deaths in the novel, particularly those in the

court martial sequence. The ending reinforces the existential fear that permeates the novel that

everything is ultimately meaningless, that the universe is cold and uninterested, and that life is

nothing more than a series of absurd events devoid of any significance.

By contrast, the ending of the film draws out Catherine’s death and emphasizes her final

words through the use of voice over and superimposed images as we watch Frederick walk away

from the hospital. Catherine’s ethereal presence, through which she is given the final words of

the movie, works to humanize her and give her the sort of dominance over the end of the

narrative that she is denied in the novel. Additionally, despite the use of the rain-as-death motif

throughout the film, there is a conspicuous lack of rain in this final scene as Frederick walks

toward a morning sun, again undermining the sense of finality that the rain signifies in the novel.

Although this ending is by no means upbeat, it offers audiences a sense of closure and catharsis

that Hemingway denies with his famously cold ending. This tonal shift reflects the changing

nature of what the Hemingway hero represented to popular audiences in the 1950s. This

reshaping came, as discussed in Chapter Two, as the result of numerous cinematic

reconfigurations in the film adaptations of the 1940s and 1950s.

Selznick has been unfairly criticized both by contemporaneous reviewers, and

Hemingway scholars for the liberties he took with Hemingway’s text. In a review by John

McCarten in the New Yorker, McCarten refers to Hemingway as the “master,” before

complaining about the way Selznick’s film does not stay as close to the novel as the 1932

version did (65-66), a surprising statement in light of what I have been discussing. Phillips writes

that “the lengthy scenes of spectacle … [tend] to weight the film down and cumulatively to

overshadow the personal tragedy of Catherine and Frederic” (30); Jill Jividen claims “the

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spectacular battle scenes in Selznick’s version risk overshadowing the intimacy of the love

story” (81); and Laurence, throughout his analysis of the film, returns countless times to the

problem of spectacle in the film’s style (63-81). Clearly, the spectacle versus starkness

dichotomy in Selznick’s adaptation remains problematic for critics, as though the bombastic

nature of the war scenes, the romanticism of the love story, and the overwhelming panorama of

the location shooting are inherently at odds with what is thought of as Hemingwayesque.

The stylistic incongruities make a lot of sense, however, when viewed in terms of

Selznick’s drive to exploit Hemingway’s It-factor. Selznick is not simply heaping on his own

preferences for spectacle (although that is part of it), but rather is drawing popular elements from

Hemingway’s “synthetic experience” and his “tantalizing apparition” into a single cinematic

narrative in order to make a film that feels true to the It-ness that made Hemingway so appealing

to audiences in the mid-1950s. Just like Zanuck’s choice to incorporate extra-textual narratives

and biographical information into his adaptations, examined in Chapter Two, Selznick is drawing

from the popular version of the Hemingway persona circa 1957 to augment the narrative.

Hemingway’s persona in the late 1950s, after all, was dominated by tales of his exploits in Spain,

at D-Day, and the exaggerated stories of his liberation of Paris; his life lived in exotic locales;

stories of his big game hunting that were frequent fodder for the pulp magazines; and his survival

of two plane crashes. On the other end of the spectrum, Hemingway was also considered the

great American author with the critical acclaim, awards, and commercial success to confirm his

elevated status. Hemingway, as portrayed in the media discourses of the day, was a walking

spectacle, and so it would have made little sense to avoid celebrating the spectacular nature of

his celebrity if one wanted to use his name to draw a large audience.

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Selznick’s approach resembles Hemingway’s imaginary literary boxing match, in which

Hemingway is simultaneously engaged with two opposing aspects of his “structured polysemy”

by using the violent, masculine, and macho aspect of his persona to express how he sees himself

within the genteel, and prestigious world of literature. Selznick, and other Hollywood producers,

rush to align themselves with Hemingway’s prestige as an established author during a time when

he was also well-known for his macho pursuits, which were being exploited in popular men’s

magazines. The reverse is also true as the men’s magazines drew on Hemingway’s prestige to

lend legitimacy to what was often viewed as lower class publications. Thus, Hemingway’s It-

ness is reinforced by his being what Roach calls the “embodiment of contradictory qualities

simultaneously” (8), as he occupies the liminal space between the two poles of his persona. He

appeals to both sides and fascinates through his uncommon ability to embody seemingly

opposite distinctions like “a tightrope dancer on one foot” (Roach 8).

In Selznick’s actions we can read the power of Hemingway’s It Factor, as well as

Selznick’s “craving for greater intimacy with the ultimately unavailable icon” (Roach 44). The

correspondence and shape of the final film make clear that Selznick was less attracted to the

content of the novel at hand than he was to the assembled persona, the “specter more ragtag than

any saintly relic” (44). Selznick draws from the collection of attributes attached to Hemingway’s

specter, the metaphorical “features and body parts, bits of clothes and accessories, briefly

glimpsed gestures and expressions” (44), that create the “mass hallucination.” Selznick, like any

fan, “wants to touch or be touched by” the “tantalizing apparition” that “no one can either find or

forget” (44). It is Selznick’s faithfulness to Hemingway’s It Factor, if not his book, that can be

read as driving the spectacle that seems to so fully offend the film’s detractors.

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Selznick’s alignment with Hemingway’s authorial prestige as a strategy for elevating the

status of his film is not solely associated with Hemingway but connects to a long tradition of

cinematic interest in literature as a vehicle for attaining highbrow respectability. Although

writers like Robert C. Allen have called into question the notion that early cinema-going was an

exclusively low-class activity by arguing that “our picture of the nickelodeon is at best sketchy,

at worst misrepresentative” (164), there was, according to Semenza and Hasenfratz, in their book

on the history of British literature on film, a reputation that became associated with the movies

“because the theatres were often located in urban working-class neighborhoods, [and therefore]

had reputations as dingy and overcrowded dens of iniquity, pandering a debased product to an

impressionable and potentially dangerous mob” (72). There were numerous efforts made to class

up the movies, some political and others purely financial, that included the creation of the movie

palace, which presented films in opulent theatres modeled after European opera houses.

According to Semenza and Hasenfratz as early as the first decade of the twentieth century,

filmmakers were beginning to adapt literature to the screen out of a “desire on the part of the

early film companies to improve the cinema’s reputation” (72). On a practical level, it is easy to

see producers using the prestige of literature to create popular entertainments. Consider the

enormous early success of films made from literary sources such as Birth of a Nation (1915)

based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman; multiple versions of Ben Hur (1907, 1925, 1959)

based on Lew Wallace’s novel; multiple versions of The Wizard of Oz (1910, 1925, 1939) based

on L. Frank Baum’s stories; or Gone with the Wind (1939) based on Margaret Mitchell’s novel.

Each of these adaptations resulted in commercially successful and critically acclaimed prestige

pictures.

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These films exemplify Decherney’s theories about why Hollywood has often looked to

high-class institutions as a source of prestige and artistic credibility in its attempts to find greater

commercial success. As already mentioned, it is Decherney’s assertion that film did not become

art because of the artistic ambitions of filmmakers, but because it made good business sense. In

the same way, films did not become a medium for literary adaptations only because filmmakers

needed material to put on the screen, or out of a desire to make great art out of a story from

another medium, but also because an association with literature provided movies with a bit of the

prestige literature enjoyed, and that prestige became a method for broadening cinema’s appeal to

larger audiences with larger bank accounts, which meant more money for the studios’ bottom

lines.

Adaptation is also predicated on the hope that fans of a story in one medium will follow

that story into another medium. With regard to Hemingway, his considerable success as an

author gave producers confidence that his stories would make successful films. This inter-medial

relationship has a great deal to do with Hemingway as a charismatic figure as defined by Weber

and Dyer. The first chapter of this study discusses Hemingway’s charismatic appeal in terms of

his non-literary writing in the 1930s and 1940s in publications like Esquire, but the power of his

charisma was also important for production teams adapting his literary works. For instance, in

the production history of The Sun also Rises, discussed earlier, we can read in Zanuck’s actions

his having been drawn in by Hemingway’s charisma, resulting in Zanuck and his team going to

extraordinary lengths to gain approval from Hemingway himself. Consider Zanuck’s actions in

terms of Dyer and Weber, specifically their theories about charisma and stability. Given the

economic uncertainty of 1950s Hollywood, Hemingway’s perceived stability, via his role as an

established, prestigious, and (most importantly) commercially successful author, offered what

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must have seemed like a guarantee of success. As well, the source novel itself offered even more

assurances, as it was not only a success upon release, but had also endured as a vital work for

three decades. Compared to the more volatile realm of film production, especially as the studios

were struggling in the mid-1950s to reconfigure their business models in the wake of both the

Paramount Case and the increased competition from television, Hemingway and his novel,

replete with credibility and an established audience, offered a seemingly low-risk venture.

Adapting one of the most enduring novels of an author whose charismatic appeal was tied up in

his consistent popularity was a way to employ Hemingway’s celebrity to mitigate the risk of

producing an expensive movie. Hemingway was to Zanuck and his crew what so many

charismatic politicians have been to suffering populations: a figure with a seemingly simple

route to success and prosperity.

Hemingway’s charisma as risk mitigation is a prominent aspect of the production history

of The Old Man and the Sea (1958). For the first time, a production team did not just make lofty

claims about their faithfulness to Hemingway’s novel, but actually ceded significant control of

their film to Hemingway, making him a consulting producer with contractual script approval.

The title and position were provided as a way to capitalize on Hemingway’s celebrity. From a

popular perspective, this is Hemingway’s movie, given his much-publicized involvement in

making it. The promotional materials10 sell the idea that watching the movie, like reading the

novel it is based on, is a chance to experience Roach’s “proximity to the tantalizing apparition.”

The studio’s transfer of power to Hemingway did not, however, result in a successful project, but

a film that often struggles to break free of its literary roots. Meaning that the reliance the

production team put on Hemingway as a stabilizing figure based on his charismatic appeal, was,

like faith in so many charismatic political leaders, a poor decision.

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When thinking about Hemingway’s involvement with the movies, it is key to remember

that Hollywood filmmaking, at its core, is a commercial enterprise, designed to make money for

the stakeholders involved. This is not to say that filmmakers working within the Hollywood

system are not also interested in making good movies, but only that the burden of financial

success is a constant factor in production. The charismatic appeal of celebrity is inextricably

linked to the commercial aspects of the movie business, in that it is believed that the presence of

celebrities will result in the interest (and ultimately, the money) of audiences. As Graeme Turner

writes in his article “The Economy of Celebrity,” “Film producers use stars as a means of

attracting investment to their projects, marketers use celebrity endorsements as a means of

profiling and branding their products, [and] television programmes feature guest appearances

from celebrities to build their audiences” (193). For celebrities that are charismatic in the way

Dyer discusses, their popularity and past successes give producers, advertisers, brand strategists,

television network executives, and investors confidence that a celebrity’s involvement in a

project will result in financial success. So whether it’s Kim Kardashian endorsing lollipops on

Instagram, Brad Pitt, at the height of his A-List movie stardom appearing on an episode of

Friends, celebrated novelists like Fitzgerald or Faulkner writing screenplays, or Tom Cruise

taking a smaller part in an ensemble movie like Magnolia, the promise of future profits related to

the draw of the celebrity means additional upfront capital being put into lollipop production, the

purchase price of commercial spots during an episode, or a more opulent production style for a

feature film.

We can see the draw and influence of Hemingway’s charisma, and proven commercial

appeal in the realms of literature and journalism, as a way of mitigating risk in the production

history of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), as well. It was Hemingway’s ability to be, as he put it

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in 1925, “praised by the highbrows and … read by the lowbrows” (295) that drove his popularity

through the 1930s when he came to epitomize the ideal of the American author. The enormous

critical and commercial success of the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, along with the

fact that its plot and characters were much more adaptable to traditional cinematic storytelling,

led Paramount executives to position the film as a major prestige picture along the lines of Gone

with the Wind, which at the time of purchase was still a cinematic phenomenon, garnering

enormous box office returns and eight Academy Awards. The pedigree for Bells was similar to

Wind: an extremely popular novel dealing with a love story set against the background of war

and civil unrest, and so Paramount set out to make a similarly polished and splashy Technicolor

epic to match the ambitious Selznick’s picture. Originally Paramount tried to hire director Cecil

B. DeMille, whose track record on successful epic films was unparalleled, and dated back to the

silent era. When the project was passed on to Sam Wood, a proven and versatile journeyman

director who had helmed everything from Marx Brothers’ comedies like A Night at the Opera to

dramas like Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and even did some uncredited work on Gone with the Wind, it

was decided that Wood would try to make the film that DeMille might have made.

The bifurcated nature of Hemingway’s celebrity, as evidenced by his appeal to high and

low brow audiences, and through the polarized nature of the cinematic adaptations, which veered

between gritty noir and opulent prestige pictures, meant that despite the immense appeal of

Hemingway’s charisma, his persona was also seen as limiting, or even dangerous. This is true of

many celebrity personae, as the power of a celebrity’s charisma and influence does not

necessarily stop production teams and publicity departments from purposefully trying to

rearrange a celebrity’s “structured polysemy” by reconfiguring, downplaying, or ignoring aspects

of an image that are deemed controversial, or at least politically out of step. Dyer uses Jane

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Fonda’s performance in Barbarella as an example of how exploiting the capital of a politically

divisive actor poses challenges to producers and marketing departments, since the parameters of

the actor’s star image always include his or her controversial opinions. The same is true of

athletes. Consider the controversy around Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national

anthem. The desire, on the part of some fans and team owners, to retain the benefits of

Kaepernick’s athletic performance without the controversy of his political opinions led to certain

compromises, such as his agreeing to kneel, rather than sit during the national anthem. After an

intense national debate, with strong racist overtones coming from as high up as the president of

the United States, the team owners and league promoters were unable to structure the

configuration of Kaepernick’s image in such a way that his performance garnered more attention

than his politics. According to sportswriter Kevin Blackistone, Kaepernick was, despite an on-

field record that would, under typical circumstances, result in a contract, “blackballed” by the

NFL. This lack of employment did not, however, mean the end of his public life, as Nike sought

to capitalize on Kaepernick’s political controversy, and his bravery, by making him a

spokesperson for their products. Thereby fully embracing the very configuration of Kaepernick’s

persona that the NFL sought to suppress. We can also consider a figure like Paul Gauguin, whose

paintings, especially his Tahiti works, despite being lauded for more than a century, have been

accused of being exploitative and colonialist as attitudes have changed concerning the behaviour

of artists in general, and Gauguin in particular. As Farah Nayeri points out in a 2019 New York

Times article, this reconsideration of Gauguin poses problems not only for collectors and art

galleries but also for corporations like Paul Gauguin Cruises, that trace his journey through the

Polynesian islands. The stakeholders are forced to contend with Gauguin’s legacy, and find ways

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to restructure his polysemic persona in such a way that they can continue to benefit from their

investment without drawing criticism.

For Whom the Bell Tolls provides an example of Hemingway’s politics being

reconfigured by a production team. Despite being released only three years after the publication

of the novel, major geopolitical changes in the early 1940s, most notably the United States’ entry

into World War II, meant that the politics of the novel were out of step with the wartime climate

of the film’s release. This situation meant that Hemingway’s role as prestige author, with a

successful novel and the celebrity clout it takes to sell a film, conflicted with his left-leaning

politics, and his criticisms of government policies11. We can see in the film an emphasis on

Hemingway’s work, through a great deal of fidelity to the precursor text, and deference to his

artistic choices, offset by simplified and updated approaches to the novel’s complex politics to

align them with the popular ideology of World War II era American audiences. This selective

exploitation of Hemingway’s persona to minimizing controversy while maximizing his capital is

a practical example of the studio reconfiguring Hemingway’s “structured polysemy” that Dyer

describes.

In thinking about how this restructuring operates with regard to Hemingway, we must

consider the documentary film The Spanish Earth (1937), which is, in many ways, a cinematic

companion piece to the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Spanish Earth, directed by Joris

Ivens, was designed as a pro-loyalist propaganda piece, aimed at raising money and support for

the fight against fascism in Spain. The film, with narration written and delivered by Hemingway,

emphasizes the legitimacy of the republic as a democratically elected government against the

fascists who are referred to as ‘the enemy.’ These editorial choices work to dehumanize the other

side of the battle, subsequently elevating the cause of the loyalists as the only movement worth

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supporting. There is, however, one moment near the end of the film where we get a glimpse of

Hemingway’s burgeoning disillusionment toward the sort of ideological othering so prominent

through the rest of the film. While the camera lingers over a group of dead soldiers, whom we

are told belong to the Italian army, Hemingway intones, “these dead came from another country

… we took no statements from the dead, but all their letters that we read were very sad.”

Humanizing of the enemy is a hallmark of For Whom the Bell Tolls, with both its scathing

indictments of the actions of the loyalists and its third person omniscient narrator who often

crosses the battle lines to capture the motivations of the fascists. These techniques are related to

Hemingway’s theme of innate human interconnectedness as exemplified in the 1624 John Donne

poem from which he took his title. Donne writes, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am

involved in mankind.” Unlike The Spanish Earth, in which most of the narration sets the

ideological tone for the film, in For Whom the Bell Tolls the narrator leaves more space to

consider the human being wearing the enemy uniform. While Hemingway remained fiercely

anti-fascist, Bell’s narrator crosses ideological lines to emphasize the human tendency that exists

on both sides of any conflict to create an ‘other’ out of those conscripted to fight on behalf of

ideologically driven generals, commanders, and politicians, and then brutalize that other.

Hemingway repeatedly forces the reader to consider the life of the person caught up within the

movement, to recognize that even those on the other side of partisan divides are a part of the

larger thing that is humanity.

Despite emphasizing the damaging effects of ideological divisions, Hemingway does not

shy away from naming names, as it were, something that the film version tends to downplay.

There are conflicting accounts for why this occurred. For instance, Grissom asserts that shifting

the focus away from the communism of the protagonists of the novel is directly connected to

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Wood’s opposition to communism as demonstrated by his cooperation with HUAC (112).

Phillips writes that the studios were afraid to offend the fascists who were now in power in

Spain, and Spanish Americans who were in support of Franco (43). It is likely that there was a

confluence of reasons for downplaying the politics of the film, not least of which that the war the

film depicts was over and had been decided against the most sympathetic characters in the film.

The desire on the part of Paramount and Wood to downplay those politics is clear from a Time

magazine article about the film’s release. Producer Adolph Zuckor is quoted as saying “It’s a

great picture, without political significance. We are not for or against anybody” (60). Wood

argues that at its core the film is “a love story against a brutal background. It would have been

the same love story if they were on the other side” (60). Even Paramount president Barney

Balaban stated that “We don’t think [the film] will make any trouble” (60). The ability of the

director and executives to maintain what the article calls “an almost divine political detachment”

(60), speaks to the apolitical approach the production team took to the adaptation. It does not

seem like the filmmakers were politically or financially motivated to downplay communism, or

treat fascism lightly (as Grissom and Phillips suggest) but rather were, like most filmmakers

hoping to appeal to a large audience, reworking the themes to make their movie acceptable and

inoffensive to as large a group of filmgoers as possible, especially during such a politically

fraught time. Based on the reviews, the Oscar nominations, and the box office returns, the

production team succeeded on all fronts.

It is important to note that when a political conversation does occur in the film, its target

is a well-accepted and established contemporaneous enemy, the Nazis. Late in the film Robert

Jordan has an extended monologue in which he lays out his fears about the spread of fascism,

making claims that the Germans and the Italians are merely using Spain to prepare themselves to

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go after England, France, and American, to hit them before they’re ready. There is nothing

indirect about who the enemies to be feared are in this passage. Robert Jordan names the very

real enemies of the American people in 1943 to raise the stakes of the battle to a level that will

feel important and dire to the audience. Although these guerillas were fighting alongside the

Russians to maintain communism in Spain, the nature of their politics is not at the forefront, only

that they share a common enemy with the American audiences that would be the primary

consumers of the film. According to Grissom, this speech is “the result of Sam Wood’s ultra-

conservative politics combined with Hemingway’s more liberal view” (112); however, in the

absence of documented motivations, it seems that this speech is more the result of the production

team simply trying to add some much-needed definition to the broad political ideologies they

have created to appeal to a popular audience. After all, without any real physical or ideological

foe, it is very difficult to know why Robert Jordan is even there. If Robert has no real stakes in

the fight, it would make much more sense for him to just run off with Maria and leave the

Spanish to fight their war. The speech serves to align Robert’s motivations with those of the

audience by setting up the battle as one between democracy and fascism, rather than communism

and fascism, as the former was a more relatable dichotomy for audiences in the middle of World

War II.

The way the production team dealt with Hemingway’s politics reinforces the prismatic

nature of Hemingway’s image. Since as McDonald writes, “the image is not the person but rather

a set of texts and meanings that signify the person” (13), it is possible to separate a celebrity into

parts to emphasize certain aspects over others. This is exactly what we see in the film:

Hemingway’s narrative arrives on the screen mostly intact from the perspective of the plot;

however, the more controversial politics are removed or broadened to ensure alignment with

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more popular ideologies of the time. In the end, the most important thing for the producers was

to earn everything they could from their investment in Hemingway’s capital without being

dragged down by controversy. This tactic also results in a reconfiguration of Hemingway’s

persona. Rumours of Hemingway’s communist leanings followed him through much of his later

life, based on evidence from his writing and political activities, yet, those leanings are

downplayed in the film to him simply being sympathetic with underdog characters, no matter

their political leanings. Therefore, to the larger audience12 that encountered this narrative in the

film rather than the novel, Hemingway is not an author who harbours a ‘subversive’ ideology but

is a writer who maintains mostly mainstream political ideas. This reconfiguration of

Hemingway’s structured polysemy became so prominent that it served as J. Edgar Hoover’s final

words on Hemingway’s FBI file. The note, in Hoover’s own hand, reads, “Knowing Hemingway

as I did I doubt he had any communist leanings. He was a rough, tough guy & always for the

underdog” (113). It is interesting to note that Hoover’s confidence in Hemingway’s patriotism

and anti-communism was built on an understanding of an aspect of Hemingway’s public persona

that was constructed for him. After all, Hemingway had very publicly sided with the communists

during the Spanish Civil War, and, according to Nicholas Reynolds’ book, Writer, Sailor,

Soldier, Spy (2017), he even gathered information for the Soviets in the 1940s.

We can read in For Whom the Bell Tolls the role that film adaptations had in

reconfiguring Hemingway’s persona for popular audiences. The emphasis placed on the aspects

of his identity that would be more palatable to mass audiences meant that the narrative of the

film (which was, like so many other of his works, perceived as closely aligned to Hemingway

biographically) was read as pro-American, in the sense that it was anti-fascist rather than pro-

communist. This particular reconfiguration likely protected him from the wave of McCarthyism

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that plagued the United States in the next decade. In For Whom the Bell Tolls we see an

emphasis on Hemingway’s authorial role (the clear narrative fidelity to his literary works), his

role as a tastemaker (the use of his first choice in leading roles), and his sympathy for the cause

of the underdog (even with the ideology of that cause deliberately obscured), because they are

the appealing aspects of Hemingway’s persona in 1943. His politics, on the other hand, are

mostly excised in an attempt to make a film that can capitalize on what audiences like about

Hemingway, without calling to mind the ideas that might prove less popular. This can occur

because any presentation of a celebrity persona is a “structured polysemy.” Since these films

purport to provide access to Hemingway via adaptations of his “synthetic experiences,” the way

the filmmakers structure their films, including the themes or politics they incorporate or leave

out, provides a text that can shape the impression viewers have of Hemingway as the originator

of the narrative on the screen.

The tangible results of these inter-medial transactions are reconfigurations of

Hemingway’s celebrity persona via cinematic renderings which distanced his public profile from

its literary roots. The “synthetic experiences” (his novels) he created were replaced by other

“synthetic experiences” (the adaptations of his novels) which were created by others and

therefore allowed for less expressive control on his part. Hemingway became increasingly

popular through medial interactions that he had little or nothing to do with. The polysemic nature

of Hemingway’s fame, especially during the mid-twentieth century when so many versions of his

persona coexisted, meant that someone who might never have read his books could nevertheless

have an idea of who Hemingway was, and what sort of work he created, by having had

interactions with cinematic adaptations of his literary works. The disconnection from the

synthetic experiences Hemingway himself created resulted, over time, in the diminished

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importance of his work as a part of his celebrity surround as the various extra-textual personality

emanations, including cinematic adaptations of his works, became better known than the works

themselves.

The diminished interest in Hemingway’s actual work that coincided with the increased

fascination with his life and personality began to affect how his narratives, and especially the

protagonists of those narratives, were rendered on screen. Marshall, echoing Dyer’s claim about

the “truth” of movie stars, writes that “celebrities are the production locale for an elaborate

discourse on the individual and individuality that is organized around the will to … uncover the

‘real’ person behind the public persona” (4). It is this pursuit of who celebrities are, rather than

an interest in what they do or did to become famous, that drove the shift to Lowenthal’s “idols of

consumption;” it is why the celebrity gossip magazines McDonnell writes about are so

concerned with the personal lives of celebrities; and it is what drives filmmakers to shape

characters that adhere to a star’s persona to provide fans with greater proximity to the

“tantalizing apparition” through interactions with a “synthetic experience.” In Hemingway’s

case, this shift in interest results in films that, while still adaptations, are fixated on his celebrity

image, so much so that each film contains clear efforts to make the protagonists look and act like

public constructions of Hemingway. The three movies that bear this out are quite far apart

chronologically: The Old Man and the Sea, released in 1958 when Hemingway was still alive;

Islands in the Stream, from 1977; and Garden of Eden, released in 2008, yet, it is important to

read them together as they reveal a similar tendency to make visual connections between

Hemingway’s physical image and the protagonists of each film.

The first chapter covered visual similarities between Hemingway and Spencer Tracy

emphasized in the trailer for The Old Man and the Sea; however, the visual connections between

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the two figures are also a prominent part of the film itself. Originally, Tracy was only brought on

as narrator of the film, with the expectation that someone more authentically old, frail, and

Cuban would play Santiago. Tracy, Hayward, and Hemingway, who had formed a partnership to

make the film as an independent production, were soon pressured by Warner Bros. (who had

agreed to finance and distribute the film) to cast Tracy in the lead role (Phillips 139). This

decision bothered Hemingway, who, according to his wife, Mary, felt that “Tracy, with all his

talent, could not look like a thin old Cuban fisherman” (Phillips 143). It is important to note,

however, that Tracy does bear a striking resemblance to Hemingway. The two men were less

than a year apart in age, both were getting chubby in their mid-fifties, and their hair had turned

white. The visual connection between the two figures draws immediate attention back to

Hemingway as the author of the narrative by evoking his popular image via enmeshment of their

visual personae. We see the multiple aspects of Tracy’s persona: the schlubby, ambling, but

usually charming figure; an actor who had proven his chops in both dramatic and comedic roles;

and a two-time Oscar winner. These attributes, what is known of his personal life, his previous

roles, and his performance style in this particular film, are mixed with Hemingway’s public

persona via the visual reference to Tracy’s appearance, as well as Hemingway’s well-publicized

involvement in the film, both as the author of the source material and as a consulting producer. A

viewer’s understanding of Santiago, as a character, is not only drawn from onscreen information

but also relies, in ways that Dyer lays out, on the public aspects of Tracy and Hemingway’s

celebrity personalities. This, often subconscious, process of assembly not only provides the

viewer with ways to interpret Santiago as a character, but can also provide new reconfigurations

of Tracy’s star image because of his visual amalgamation with the character, and Hemingway’s

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celebrity profile, because of the assumptions frequently made about Hemingway and the

protagonists of his literary works.

The assumption that Hemingway’s protagonists can be read as versions of the author

himself, owes a lot to the blurred lines Hemingway created through his penchant for writing

novels based on his actual experiences, as well as his Esquire letters, his personality-driven

journalism, and his (somewhat) fictionalized memoirs. As I have discussed, there was, by the

1950s, a strong tendency among readers, critics, and the general public to view Hemingway the

person through the lens of his fiction, and vice versa. For example, Philip Young’s book-length

critical study analyzes his work biographically, placing a great deal of emphasis on his World

War I injuries. Beyond the academic world, we also find this inclination among popular

publications, for instance, in an editorial published in the 1 September 1952 issue of Life

magazine, the same issue in which The Old Man and the Sea made its debut. The editors attempt

a mock-academic analysis of Hemingway’s story, even after dismissing such an exercise as a

“highbrow practice,” writing, “For those who like a little symbolism, we have tried to deduce

some. Perhaps the old man is Hemingway himself, the great fish is this great story and the sharks

are the critics” (20). Although its simplicity and sarcastic tone reveal that the editors are offering

nothing more than a harmless joke, the passage gives us insight into the popular reputation of

Hemingway as an author. Hemingway is now Santiago, just as he had been Robert Jordan, Harry

Morgan, Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and Nick Adams before. This offers one possible

explanation for why the production team was so adamant to retain Tracy, despite Hemingway’s

reservations; not only was he a star attraction, but his image also invoked Hemingway, the film’s

other major attraction. Even though the firing of director Fred Zinnemann (with whom Tracy did

not get along) was upsetting to Hemingway, it was far more important to retain a connection to

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Hemingway’s image via visual emulation, than it was to please the actual person. After all, the

visual connection to Hemingway would be more important to selling the movie to a mass

audience, since it is, after all, the persona presented to the world, rather than the reality of a

celebrity’s personality, that attracts attention.

It is also possible to trace the production studio’s desire to emphasize Hemingway’s

presence in the film through Tracy’s double role as both Santiago and the narrator. The narration

Tracy recites is drawn almost entirely from the text of the novel in word-for-word chunks. Tracy

reads these passages in his voice, rather than with the slightly Spanish accent he affects to play

Santiago. This subtle difference implies a distinction between the two characters. Santiago is not

narrating the tale, as the use of the third person, complex vocabulary, literary devices, and

allusions make clear. This distinction sets up Tracy’s narrator role as another manifestation of

Hemingway, another melding of the two celebrity personae. Tracy is speaking Hemingway’s

words verbatim, he is taking on Hemingway’s authority on the topics of fishing and Cuban life,

and he is providing access to Santiago’s interior life (his memories and dreams) in the same way

Hemingway’s narrator does in the novel. Thus, Tracy is playing two separate characters in the

movie, Santiago and the narrator, both of whom are understood, in the popular culture, as

iterations of Hemingway.

The trans-medial interactions represented by Tracy’s performance as narrator are

significant, given the larger cultural shift taking place around the roles of literature and film in

the late-1950s. The inclusion of any sort of voice-over narration in films has long been a point of

contention amongst filmmakers, critics, and theorists, as it is often deemed un-cinematic.

Cinema, as a medium, has always lorded its ability to show rather than tell over the novel, which

relies on written language to tell stories. Robin U. Russin and William Missouri Downs write in

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their book Screenplay: Writing the Picture that “Too often a voice-over is a crutch, a simple

commentator who tells the story only because the writer doesn’t know how else to reveal her

exposition” (280). While there have been (as Russin and Downs acknowledge) many films13 that

put voice-over narration to excellent use, in The Old Man and the Sea, the narration tends to be

especially egregious, mostly because of Hemingway’s say over the script. While screenwriter

Viertel wanted to create flashbacks to portray Santiago’s relationship with his deceased wife, and

scenes involving Manolin and his parents, Hemingway refused their inclusion, stubbornly

insisting that those moments remain described by the narrator as they were in the novel

(Laurence 28). Hemingway fought to hold onto every aspect of the novel’s narration style,

something that put him at odds with producer Leland Hayward. According to Laurence,

Hayward fought Hemingway’s imposition of his style onto the film by trying “to cut at least the

repetitive parts” (29). He was unsuccessful, however, because “from Hemingway’s point of view

the repetition was important to the stream-of-consciousness style” (29). According to Phillips,

“the problem that arises from this liberal use of narration on the soundtrack is that at times it

leads to a certain redundancy, whereby the audience is simultaneously told and shown the same

thing” (147). The failure to “convert [Hemingway’s] words into visual images that should stand

on their own” (Phillips 147), results in a film that is almost oppressively literary.

The inability of the production team to bring Hemingway’s work to the screen in a way

that was successful either artistically or commercially operates as an interesting way to think

about the uncertainty of the larger cinematic evolution taking place at the time. In the late 1950s,

art films were pouring into the American market from countries like Italy, Japan, and Sweden;

Film Studies was emerging as an academic discipline; the French New Wave was just about to

completely upend cinematic form; and the reorganization of the Hollywood system known as

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New Hollywood was only a decade away. These seismic shifts meant that the movies were not

merely losing their old reputation as low-brow entertainment but were becoming a primary

cultural expression around the world. There at the centre of this shift in the prestige and

prominence of film as an art form is Hemingway, a figure of the literary old guard exerting his

considerable force of personality on the newer medium, one that would soon challenge the

position of literature as the primary driver of the cultural conversation. Yet, in The Old Man and

the Sea at least, Hemingway’s instincts, advice, and preferences, rather than invigorate the

movies in the way that he was able to do with literature some thirty years prior, resulted in

endless disruptions, cost overruns, and acquiescence, by the production team, to Hemingway’s

demands, leading to a film that feels overly literary and studio bound.14 The film feels all the

more outdated compared to the vibrant cinematic expressions that were arriving from Europe and

Asia at the time, like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957);

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958); Jacques

Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958); and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), to name just a few.

The shift from the cultural dominance of literature to that of cinema also involved a persistent

dependence of cinema, and the Hollywood business model, on the prestige of the literary world

for source material. Consider the role literature played in the American movie industry’s most

prominent display of its high cultural aspirations, the Academy Awards. It can hardly be a

coincidence that six out of ten Best Picture awards from 1956 to 1966, a decade in which

American cinema made the greatest strides in becoming the dominant cultural expression, went

to films based on novels. Of the four other winners, three were based on stage plays, another

artistic institution from which cinema attempted to borrow cultural cachet. Only one best picture

winner, The Apartment (1960), was based on an original screenplay.

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Returning to The Old Man and the Sea, the incongruency of Hemingway’s practical

involvement with the adaptation of his novel finds an appropriate visual expression through his

short cameo near the end of the film. While the critical consensus is that it is the overabundance

of Hemingway’s presence and creative control that drags the film down, that did not stop the

production team from literally putting him on screen, allowing the “tantalizing apparition” to

burst through the “synthetic experience.” Ernest and Mary both appear as tourists (perhaps the

ultimate expression of the ‘idol of consumption’), and there is an interesting visual contrast at

play, in that at the moment when “tantalizing apparition” is finally revealed, he appears different

from what one might expect. Hemingway wears a blue checked shirt and baseball cap; however,

despite having been rarely seen without his, by then, ubiquitous white beard, Hemingway has

only a mustache; the rest of his face is clean-shaven (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

His image on screen creates an incongruency similar to candid photos of celebrities

captured while running errands or on an early morning walk. The celebrity is recognizable but is

dressed down, perhaps with messy hair – not at all in the carefully fashioned mode often

presented in medial disseminations. Hemingway, when we finally see him onscreen, is not like

the images of him we encounter most often in the media, or in the film itself, by way of his

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resemblance to Tracy’s incarnation of Santiago. He is certainly nothing like the virile and

powerful figure propagated by men’s magazines at the time, nor like the “elder statesmen”

author who appears in the more prestigious periodicals. Rather, Hemingway is another American

tourist, eating on a patio. He is a bit overweight, and out-of-touch with the suffering of Santiago,

as he squints in the bright Cuban sunshine. The visual divergence between the mythological

image of Hemingway and the literal image of Ernest acts as a commentary on Hemingway’s

relationship with this film. Despite the power and influence of Hemingway as a dominant

cultural icon in the late-1950s, and his history as a revolutionary literary figure, his involvement

with The Old Man and the Sea makes the film feel old fashioned, and a little dull. It is, like Ernie

the tourist, not representative of any of the potent iterations of Hemingway.

Much like The Old Man and the Sea, the producers of Islands in the Stream (1977)

portray the protagonist, Thomas Hudson (played by George C. Scott) as a Hemingway

doppelganger. This instinct to align Scott with the “tantalizing apparition” is not unreasonable,

given that Thomas (in the novel) resembles Hemingway in several significant ways. For

example, Thomas was the same age Hemingway was at the time of his writing; he has three sons,

the eldest from his first marriage, the younger two from his second; he is an artist who spent his

apprentice years in Paris in the 1920s; he lives in Cuba for part of the novel, where he frequents

the same bars Hemingway frequented; and the final section of the novel plays out like a fantasy

of what Hemingway was hoping to have happened when he was hunting Nazi submarines with

his fishing boat in the early 1940s. Thomas comes across as a nearly parodic version of the

author, especially to those familiar with Hemingway’s biography. Hence, the production team’s

decision to cast Scott and to craft his image to look like the popular 1950s image of Hemingway.

Scott’s incarnation of Thomas Hudson sports the white beard that had become ubiquitously

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linked to Hemingway in the last decade of his life, and Scott spends most of the film dressed in

the sort of shlubby island wear that Hemingway was known to wear. There is even a short scene

near the middle of the film where director Franklin Schaffner makes a clear allusion to the Karsh

portrait. During a lengthy montage over which Scott can be heard reading a letter Thomas has

written to his sons, we see Thomas alone in his house one night. He turns on a desk lamp to

reveal that he is wearing a sweater that closely resembles the Dior turtleneck that Hemingway

wears in the famous portrait. Schaffner cuts to a medium close up as Thomas turns to look just

beyond the camera (figure 3.2), imitating the pose and forlorn distant look Hemingway affects in

his portrait (figure 3.3). The moment is short, but the homage to the famous image is

unmistakable.

Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3

These efforts at visual association are important as we look at Hemingway’s inter-medial

relationship with cinema in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Unlike those films

in which the most important aspect of Hemingway’s celebrity persona is his role as the author of

the source material, Islands marks a significant incorporation of Hemingway as an embodied

public persona is as, and at times more, important to character exposition than is his writing. As I

covered in chapter two, the amount of extratextual narrative information in Islands that has been

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lifted from his other works, the adaptation of those works, and biographical elements, make it

clear that a connection with the Hemingway mythos is far more important to the overall

construction of the film than the single literary source the film is purportedly based on. Although

the main character is named Thomas Hudson, because of the autobiographical nature of the

character in the novel, and the visual connections between author and character that the film

creates, I argue that we see here the clearest attempt to depict Hemingway as a character on

screen in an adaptation thus far. This development indicates just how much the public interest

had, by 1977, shifted from Hemingway’s writing to his life, the mythology around that life, and

what that mythology represents, over the decade and a half since his death.

The macho elements of Hemingway’s persona emphasized throughout Islands are

meaningful because they indicate an effort to reassert conservative values when Islands was

released by trafficking in Hemingway’s appeal as a model of masculinity. The late 1970s was a

time of social upheaval that saw American failure in the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the

challenging of traditional sexual and gender norms. The uncertainty of the era created a space in

which a figure with apparent stability could offer reassurance in ways that are resonant with

Dyer and Weber’s assessments of the charismatic figure. The film’s conjuring of the image of

Hemingway from the 1950s, the era in which he was at the height of his power and influence,

emphasizes his charismatic appeal as a figure that can bring order and stability to a time as

“uncertain, unstable and ambiguous” (31) such as the late 1970s. The irony, of course, is that the

1950s, while a period when Hemingway projected power and prestige through photographic

images, was a time of significant personal instability with regard to his mental health and

relationships. That did not stop the production team from making visual and narrative “call-

backs” to an imaginary simpler time, a common trend in 1970s America as demonstrated by

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shows like Happy Days and movies like Grease. It is the power of Hemingway’s charisma, what

Weber would call his “supernatural, superhuman or at least superficially exceptional qualities”

(48), that the film traffics in. Hemingway’s “exceptional” quality, in this case, is that he can

project stoicism in a time of such social unrest. It hardly seems incidental that the moment the

production team chose to make Scott look his most Hemingwayesque is while he bravely stares

down the prospect of being utterly alone after having spent the summer with his three sons. He is

performing the sort of “grace under pressure” so often invoked when discussing the qualities of

Hemingway heroes.

Like Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden (2008) comes across as autobiographical.

While there has been significant scholarly debate over how autobiographically we should

understand The Garden of Eden to be, my interest in the film has to do with how the production

team exaggerates the autobiographical nature of the narrative by adding additional connections to

Hemingway’s life, not present in the novel, while simultaneously making clear visual analogues

between Hemingway, and the film’s protagonist, David Bourne (Jack Huston). The connections

in the novel between David and Hemingway are frequent and obvious. For example, both are

novelists who share working habits, and the relationship turnover in the novel reflects the change

that took place in the late 1920s as Hemingway left Hadley for Pauline. The events are, it should

be noted, highly fictionalized. There are, however, certain episodes that, despite this, feel

strongly influenced by details of Hemingway’s life – for instance, Catherine’s willful destruction

of David’s work has echoes of Hadley’s accidental loss of Hemingway’s manuscripts in the early

1920s – and appear to give director John Irving and the production team license to portray David

in the film as a version of the real Hemingway in the same way the production team behind

Islands did with Thomas Hudson.

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These connections between the character of David and the real-life Hemingway were

reinforced in the Spring 1999 issue of The Hemingway Review, in which Valerie Hemingway,

Hemingway’s onetime secretary and eventual daughter-in-law, reflects on the novel and the

author’s place in it. In her essay titled, “Garden of Eden Revisited: Hemingway in Provence in

the Summer of ’59,” Valerie Hemingway makes several noteworthy associations between Ernest

and David, specifically concerning their writing habits.

Over the next year as I worked for him I was to learn just how close the character of

David Bourne was to his creator … it became apparent to me over the subsequent months

that David Bourne was Ernest Hemingway. Like David every morning Ernest got out of

bed, sharpened those pencils, took out his copybooks, and wrote and wrote. (107-108)

Here we can see that Hemingway has endowed David with his personal work habits just as he

did with Thomas Hudson. This shows Hemingway’s tendency to lend verisimilitude to his artist

characters. A tendency that led many to view Hemingway as a writer who merely documented

his lived experience. Valerie Hemingway goes even further later in the essay, calling David an

“incredible self-portrait,” and stating that “both writers act and talk in the same way” (109).

Whether or not the production team was aware of Valerie Hemingway’s statements, it is clear

from the film that they saw David as a perfect opportunity to embody Hemingway, both visually

and biographically, on screen producing a more tangible rendering of the “tantalizing

apparition.”

Actor Jack Huston, with his dark features and medium build, resembles a young

Hemingway circa the mid-1920s. The mustache and tousled black hair accentuate the visual

connection to the point that Huston could be mistaken for a biopic version of the young

Hemingway. He certainly looks as much, if not more, like the young Hemingway than did Chris

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O’Donnell (In Love and War), Kevin J. O’Connor (The Moderns), or Corey Stall (Midnight in

Paris) in their portrayals. The production team then goes beyond these visual clues to provide

character details for David that are not in the novel. For instance, David’s small Paris apartment

(never mentioned in the novel) is in the building on Rue de Cardinal Lemoine in Paris that Ernest

and Hadley occupied during part of their time there.

More important is the film’s focus on, and augmentation of, depictions of David’s writing

process. As in the novel, we watch David rise early every morning and head directly to his work,

not allowing himself to be distracted by any other tasks; however, there are two important

additions that the filmmakers have added to these sequences that are drawn directly from

Hemingway’s life. The first has to do with the typewriter Catherine (Mena Suvari) gives David.

Nowhere in the novel does Catherine give David a typewriter; however, in 1921, on

Hemingway’s 22nd birthday, his first wife, Hadley, gave him a Corona 3 typewriter (Dearborn

104, Madsen 113). Since Catherine is constantly associated with Hadley in the novel, the

addition of this small episode allows her character to be read as even more biographical than

Hemingway originally wrote her. As well, the fact that the inclusion of the typewriter does little

narratively emphasizes that its presence is important primarily as a method of reinforcing the

David/Catherine and Ernest/Hadley connections.

The second addition is the filmmakers’ choice to always film David as writing while

standing up, whether at a typewriter or leaning over the pages of a cahier. This is another detail

not in the novel but is a well-known aspect of Hemingway’s writing process, having been

featured in numerous articles about him, the art of writing, and the benefits of standing desks.

Even at the Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s former home and now a museum outside Havana,

Hemingway’s preferred writing spot, standing in front of a short bookshelf, his typewriter

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propped up on a thick book to put it at the right level (figure 3.4), has been preserved as an

important part of his legacy. Although it is a small detail, the frequency with the image of David

standing and writing appears signals the production team’s intentional blurring of the lines

between Hemingway’s life and his characters by positioning The Garden of Eden and David in

particular as more autobiographical than Hemingway himself made them. As I mentioned earlier,

the frequency with which Hemingway’s fiction is connected to his life, in both academic and

popular realms, has resulted in the impression that Hemingway was essentially a documenter of

real events, rather than a creative novelist. This is a notion the filmmakers here seem only too

happy to indulge.

Figure 3.4

We have seen repeated attempts to emphasize the Hemingway-ness air of a film over the

content of the film’s story through the numerous adaptations of Hemingway’s work over the

course of the twentieth century; however, The Garden of Eden’s reliance on Hemingway’s

personal life to fill in narrative and character gaps is telling. Unlike the adaptations of the 1940s

and 1950s, or even Islands in the Stream, which all borrow from Hemingway’s other literary

sources in addition to his life, Garden of Eden eschews any literary element that is not

immediately present in the novel to flesh out its characters. The choice to use only Hemingway’s

life rather than his work, along with the paucity of cinematic adaptations over the past 60 years,

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reveals the general lack of interest and familiarity, in contemporary popular culture, with

Hemingway’s writing as opposed to his persona. The shape of the film makes clear that lifting

aspects from his other works does not signify to viewers as “Hemingway-esque” as easily as

does drawing elements from his popular persona.

In recent years, the outsized attraction of Hemingway’s celebrity has manifests in movies

and on television through Hemingway appearing far more often as a character, rather than as the

author of source material for an adaptation. This trend is a fulfillment of the trajectory that

Lowenthal identified: Hemingway is no longer a figure recognized primarily for his literary

output, his ‘production.’ It is Hemingway’s non-professional, or non-productive pursuits, such as

his connection with sports like bullfighting, boxing, big game hunting, and deep sea fishing; his

reputation as a womanizer, a heavy drinker or a connoisseur with expensive tastes; and the

legends of his travels and adventures that dominate the popular discourse around him. As I show

in my next chapter, Hemingway has become, in the twenty-first century media environment,

even more detached from the “synthetic experiences” he has crafted, as he has not only become

increasingly well-known for already being famous but has developed into a near-fictional

character used in films and other media to embody specific tropes of often toxic masculinity.

Like so many famous people, Hemingway has become a construct assembled out of an amalgam

of multiple extra-textual personality emanations that persist in popular culture.

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Notes

1 There are six distinct references to baseball, wherein Hemingway compares everything

from writing a novel, to literary critics and authors that write about war without having been

there, to Flaubert (“who always threw them perfectly straight, hard, high, and inside”[48]) and

finally to hunting.

2 Director Frank Borzage and the screenwriters, Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H.P. Garrett

3 Consider Frederick Henry’s musing on the nature of life: “The world breaks every one

and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills

the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially” (216).

4 Catherine’s death is only symbolically connected to the war effort because she is not

killed by anything directly connected to combat (she is not the victim of a bombing, for

example), but rather dies due to complications around childbirth; hence, she remains a pseudo-

martyr.

5 There was, in fact, an alternate ending that was shot in which that exact scenario happens.

Both were available for distribution, and so it was up to the theatre owners to decide which

version they preferred (Laurence 48).

6 In a letter to Wallace Meyer, dated 24 May 1957, Hemingway refers to “that bastard

Selznick sabotaging A Farewell to Arms” (875).

7 Selznick is not wrong in his assessment of Hemingway, as evidenced by Hemingway’s

reaction to the changes Selznick was making to A Farewell to Arms, which he expressed in a

letter to Wallace Meyer on 24 May 1957. “They have rewritten it all etc. My temper is a little

rough. Selznick he says has written a love story that is a love story not just followed slavishly

some screwy thing by me” (875).

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8 Jamie Barlowe-Kayes has pointed out in her essay “Re-Reading Women: The Example of

Catherine Barkley” that Catherine “demonstrates that Hemingway’s text, as a representation of

the traditions of gender relations, repeats that tradition’s inherent, unacknowledged

objectification of women. As a metaphor, Barkley also iterates Hemingway’s praise for

acquiescent, self-sacrificing, fully supportive women” (32).

9 Daniel S. Traber has argued, “Catherine should be read as a woman with agency,

someone attempting to find meaning and achieve a sense of psychological equilibrium against

the background of war” (29), Traber furthers his point by explaining how “the moments of

willful submissiveness and self-erasure … come only after Hemingway gives the reader clues

about Catherine’s strategy for surviving in a world where conventional ideas once accepted as

true have become shaky ground for creating a sense of self” (29).

10 See Chapter One for how this connection to Hemingway was heavily promoted.

11 Consider Hemingway’s criticism of FDR in the New Masses article or his frustration at

the United States not offering support for the Loyalists in Spain.

12 According to Variety (25 September 1946) the initial run of For Whom the Bell Tolls

earned $6,300,000. The average price of a movie ticket in the mid-1940s was $0.35 (National

Association of Theater owners [natoonline.org]), meaning that around 18,000,000 tickets were

sold. Even assuming that a large number of people saw the movie more than once, the number of

people that saw the movie as opposed, or in addition to, reading the book (which had sold

885,000 copies by the end of 1943 [Dearborn 416]) is significant.

13 See Sunset Boulevard, Annie Hall, The Killing, or any Terrence Malick film for example.

14 We can see the contemporaneous reactions through reviews from Variety: “it isn’t a

completely satisfying picture. There are long and arid stretches, when it seems as if producer and

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director were merely trying to fill time” and Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “For the

obvious fact is that the achievement of communicating in pictorial form the eloquence of Mr.

Hemingway’s minor epic of an old man’s lonely battle with a fish called for supreme

imagination and even luck on the part of the artists on the job. And those are favoring factors that

the artists here seem to have lacked.”

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Chapter 4

The Rise of the Fictocel

When Nick, a character on the Fox sitcom New Girl, has ambitions to write a novel, he is

quick to associate himself with the author that one of the other characters calls “the most famous

writer of all time.” As a solution for his not being able to write, Nick announces that he needs to

be “more like Hemingway,” before delivering a speech that becomes increasingly ludicrous. “I

need real life adventure,” Nick proclaims, “like Ernest Hemingway had at my age. Man, I gotta

run with the bulls. I gotta kill a man with my bare hands after making sweet love to him, and

then sleep in the warm belly of his horse. I gotta eat my way out of a sandwich house.” At this

point, one of his roommates asks, “how much do you know about Hemingway?” To which Nick

responds, “not a lot, but I’m gonna learn!” The scene ends as Nick grabs his computer and walks

away, making one last pronouncement, “I’m becoming Ernest Hemingway…ya idiots.”

While the scene, which aired in 2012, is clearly meant to be a throwaway moment of

comedy at the expense of Nick’s dilettante tendencies, it does provide insight into the shape of

Hemingway’s reputation in early twenty-first century popular culture. His legacy of macho

posturing, adventure seeking, and, to a lesser extent, his reputation as a writer, lives on, even in

this comedic distillation. In this chapter, I examine how the understanding of Hemingway’s

persona continues to be shaped in the half century since his death by visual media. Unlike the

previous chapters, which dealt with adaptations of Hemingway’s works, I focus my attention

here on films and television shows that are not based on anything he wrote, but rather feature

him as a character. The fictionalization of Hemingway is important to consider with regard to his

persona because the popularity of these iterations has resulted in a significant reconsideration of

his reputation. “In general,” del Gizzo writes, “the image of Hemingway circulating in

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mainstream culture today is a slightly domesticated version of the 1950s he-man. The hyper-

masculine, hairy-chested “Papa” has been repackaged to emphasize Hemingway as an

adventurer, literary craftsman, and discriminating connoisseur, qualities that resonate

comfortably and widely in American consumer culture” (“Cult and Afterlife” 122). So, while

Hemingway is a historical figure, with a well-documented public life and a body of work that

continues to be read and discussed, the Hemingway del Gizzo describes is based primarily on

fictionalizations, assemblages of artistic representations rather than his own work, or documents

of his existence. Lyons points out that, “while many of these images are overtly sardonic and

endearingly trite, … [they] … suggest not simply that the Hemingway myth endures, but that it

has also become a favorable archetype to re-create and reinterpret, specifically, that certain

readers and creators desire this image” (148). The frequent attempts in various media to “re-

create and reinterpret” the “archetype” means that Hemingway cannot be referred to merely as a

posthumous or historical celebrity, but rather a fictionalized celebrity, what I call a fictocel. I

have created this term as a way to consider figures who, although historical people, are now

mostly understood through artistic interventions made about them.

To trace both the fictocel, and Hemingway’s development into a fictocel, it is important

to acknowledge that, as is the case for most celebrities, Hemingway’s life, as we have seen,

rather than his work, is of primary public interest. This is why filmmakers now rarely obfuscate

Hemingway’s presence through characters or narratives that are not explicitly about him. This

fixation on Hemingway as a character can be tracked over the past thirty years through films

such as The Moderns (1988), Hemingway (1988), In Love and War (1996), Midnight in Paris

(2011), Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012), Papa Hemingway in Cuba (2015) and Genius (2016),

and television shows like Timeless (2017), The Frankie Drake Mysteries (2017), Great Minds

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with Dan Harmon (2016), and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (2018), all of which present

fictionalized versions of Hemingway and place him in numerous real or imagined situations.

Hemingway’s presence in visual media is that of someone noteworthy for being noteworthy,

famous for being famous. Observers of current popular culture are far more likely to encounter

Hemingway in the form of medial reconfigurations of him than through engagement with his

literary work. His public persona is shaped by representations he has no connection to, and that

have little to do with anything over which he had creative control. The result is that everyone

knows that Hemingway was a writer while being far less likely to have ever read any significant

portion of his writing than was the case in decades past.

Key to the shape of the fictionalized Hemingway is the obvious, yet important fact that in

the twenty-first century, Hemingway is firmly a posthumous figure. Some theorists have argued

that someone stops being a celebrity once they have died. For instance, Neal Gabler writes that

celebrity “requires a corporeal protagonist who can continue to provide a dynamic plot and who

has not just left behind a narrative to be amended and reworked by others like some ancient text”

(8). Others counter that the death of a celebrity does not lessen the fascination fans have with that

person, nor the activity of re-making the meaning of the celebrity’s persona. As Linda Levitt

writes about Marilyn Monroe’s posthumous fame, she has become “a simulacrum, as her

personality recedes behind representation” (64). This simulacrum effect plays out repeatedly

whenever a person becomes so famous that the actual celebrity, in most cases, is no longer in

control of the celebrity image, and the image becomes a sort of fictional character aligned with

the real person. Gabler even acknowledges this in his reading of celebrity lives as narratives

through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Not unlike the mythical

figures Campbell describes, a celebrity’s narrative is rarely the product of a single author but is

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pieced together by myriad storytellers and cultural factors. This returns us to Braudy’s notion of

the celebrity “surround.” In his work, Braudy is specifically discussing performers; however, the

idea of the surround is not limited to typical notions of performance, since in today’s celebrity

environment, built on the foundation of social media, every calculated public act can, and

probably should, be interpreted as performance. So, whether it is a star acting in a film, or a

YouTube personality posting a makeup tutorial, the performance is informed by, and becomes

part of, the surround of that celebrity.

Once celebrities are dead, they can no longer self-consciously perform, and so the

discursive content that persists about them becomes a part of their surround; however, the word

surround falls apart for the posthumous celebrity because there is no longer an embodied person

for the extra-textual material to surround. Instead, the surround becomes the celebrity, and the

celebrity takes a step toward becoming a mythological figure, not unlike the ones Gabler refers

to in his discussion of Campbell. Braudy, in his book The Frenzy of Renown, speaks of

Hemingway directly, writing that during his lifetime he “allowed himself to be fictionalized as

the Great American Writer” (28). As a posthumous figure Hemingway’s fictionalization

continues, but since he is no longer able to write, the nature of his fictionalization has changed.

With the absence of agency, the surround is no longer the thing through which culture views

Hemingway, it is now the totality of his persona.

This shift in Hemingway’s medial representations, from creative source material to

character of interest, reflects the transition, which I have frequently returned to, of Hemingway’s

transition from an ‘idol of production’ to an ‘idol of consumption’ (Lowenthal). Of course,

Lowenthal’s study is almost eighty years old, and while it is useful for thinking about

Hemingway, especially because Lowenthal’s readings of published biographies reflect the

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timeframe in which Hemingway became a public figure, recent theorists such as Thomas Austin,

Martin Baker, Alan Lovell, Su Holmes, Chris Rojek, and Mary Flanagan, working in the field of

celebrity studies, have built on Lowenthal, as well as on the work of Dyer and deCordova, to

apply theories developed in the twentieth century to the more fractured media environment of the

twenty-first century. Rojek, in his book-length study, Celebrity, provides a useful taxonomy of

fame by establishing three categories for the manifestation of celebrity in modern popular

culture. The first he calls “ascribed” celebrity, which “concerns lineage, [being] status [that]

typically follows from blood-line” (17). For example, consider the intense public interest in any

children born into the British royal family, paparazzi clamoring to get a snapshot of a celebrity’s

infant in a stroller, or the way Beyonce ‘broke the Internet’ in 2017 with an Instagram post

featuring the first photo of her newborn twins. These small children, even before they are aware

of themselves, or anything else, have become celebrities by virtue of their famous parents.

In contrast to ascribed celebrity, Rojek describes “achieved celebrity” as deriving “from

the perceived accomplishments of the individual in open competition” (18). This category refers

to musicians, actors, athletes, politicians, and people of industry who have achieved recognition

for their talents and accomplishments. This understanding of celebrity remains a prominent

paradigm because of how it conforms to the ideals of capitalism. Actors, musicians, or athletes

spend years honing their crafts and skills, years spent in obscurity and suffering before they can

be celebrated for their accomplishments. In this configuration celebrity is a byproduct of the

ambition to be great, rather than to be famous. Therefore, when fame does come, it is earned,

rather than bestowed.

Rojek’s third category, “attributed celebrity,” is somewhat more complicated. Rojek

writes, “achieved celebrity is not exclusively a matter of special talent or skill. In some cases, it

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is largely the result of the concentrated representation of an individual as noteworthy or

exceptional by cultural intermediaries. When this is so, it is attributed celebrity” (18). Rojek is

updating Boorstin here, who defined a celebrity as a “human pseudo-event” (57), a media-

created phenomenon that is not important in itself until it is made important through its coverage

by the media. Boorstin emphasizes his point by quoting from an advertisement for the Celebrity

Register which reads, “celebrities are ‘the ‘names’ who, once made by news, now make the news

by themselves’” (61). “Celebrity,” Boorstin continues, “is made by simple familiarity, induced

and re-enforced by public means. The celebrity therefore is the perfect embodiment of tautology:

the most familiar is the most familiar” (61). By separating celebrities into three categories, Rojek

counters Boorstin’s dismissive attitude toward all celebrity by acknowledging that some

celebrities are deserving of the recognition they have received, even if others are merely the

product of media created “pseudo-events.”

To understand attributed celebrity, we can take as an example a “human pseudo-event”

like William Hung, the 2004 American Idol contestant who, despite having little musical talent,

gained a following after his appearance, which lead to a record contract outside the show’s

infrastructure. Hung’s recording career did not last; however, the machinations of the cultural

industry, spurred on by the burgeoning influence of the Internet, turned him into what Rojek

calls a “celetoid,” which he defines as “a media-generated, compressed, concentrated form of

attributed celebrity” (18). We can also see personalities like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, or

contestants on Big Brother as attributed celebrities because they are not meant to be understood

as anything other than themselves while onscreen. Reality contests are particularly interesting

with this in mind, since, unlike reality TV made about already famous people, which purport to

offer a glimpse of their lives, shows like Big Brother or Survivor are meant to showcase

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‘ordinary’ people. As Su Holmes writes, reality TV shows offer “self-conscious negotiation of

the real, focusing as they do on exploring the difference between ‘reality’ and its production, as

well as the ‘real’ and the performed self” (17). It is the “reality” of who a person is, even though

that reality is highly mediated through the machinations of television production, that draws fans.

The reality celebrity, in the case of a show like Survivor, may face challenges to overcome as a

part of the show, but what makes the personalities interesting is not that they succeed or fail, but

what the challenges and the interpersonal interactions on the show reveal about the persona on

display. Attributed celebrities give the impression of being more immediate than movie stars, for

instance, because they have no established façade to hide behind, like a character, that could

obfuscate direct contact with what Roach calls the “tantalizing apparition.” Attributed celebrities,

it is believed, are always playing themselves, and therefore provide what Dyer would call the

“truth” of their personae without obstruction.

Even though Hemingway began as an “achieved” celebrity, over the course of his

lifetime and beyond, his achievements, particularly his literary output, are no longer the most

significant aspect of his public persona. Rather, especially from the perspective of popular

culture as expressed through visual media, Hemingway is far more important for his macho

posturing and the legends that surround him. While most of the medial representations I consider

in this chapter at least acknowledge that Hemingway was a writer, what he has written is far less

significant to these representations and depictions than what being a writer afforded him in terms

of his lifestyle. This trend toward emphasizing Hemingway as a macho figure, rather than an

author, is not isolated to the realm of cinema and television, as it can also be seen in literary

treatments of him. Beyond the considerable number of novels and plays that feature Hemingway

as a character, it is worth noting that despite the unpublished literary works sitting in his archive,

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since 1986 – when The Garden of Eden was released – all the major publications of previously

unreleased material, except for a handful of short stories, have been memoirs. Examples include

The Dangerous Summer (1985) True at First Light (1999), Under Kilimanjaro (2005), and the

restored edition of A Moveable Feast (2009) which are expanded book versions of journalistic

work published in magazine or revisions of earlier memoirs. Furthermore, even high-profile re-

issues of his literary work1, released under the banner of “The Hemingway Library Editions” are

filled with photos of him, as well as reproductions of early drafts to give a behind-the-scenes

glimpse of his writing process. On the academic side, while there remains a great deal of

scholarship on Hemingway’s literary work, a project like the Cambridge University Press’

seventeen volume set of his letters, although significant and valuable to scholars studying his

work, is primarily focused on the person behind the work, rather than the work itself.

Outside of literature or film, there was a great deal of fascination with Hemingway’s

persona in the early part of 2019 when his former Toronto apartment went up for sale. Even

though Hemingway only lived there for sixth months in the early 1920s, his persona was a major

factor in the sales strategy. Countless articles were written by a variety of media outlets that

pushed the significance of the space because of its connection to Hemingway. A CBC News

story from 9 April 2019 writes that, “Listing agent Andrew Harrild of Condos.ca said the

Hemingway unit offers buyers a chance to own 102 square metres (1,100 square feet) of literary

history. ‘You get a nice feeling when you walk into the place,’ he said. ‘An eerie sense of

history.’” Here we can see the narrative of Hemingway’s celebrity in almost religious terms,

wherein the space he occupied, takes on mystical implications. This connection to the past is a

selling feature of many of the locations connected to his life, such as his birth home in Oak Park,

Illinois, his Key West home, and the Finca Vigia, his home in Cuba. A pamphlet sold at the

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Finca Vigia gift shop, for instance, promises that “when you visit the interior of the mansion, you

can feel the presence of Hemingway in the air” (7). In each case, Hemingway’s former homes

are examples of the “saintly relics” Roach describes as offering a connection to the “tantalizing

apparition.” As well, the fascination with these lived in spaces reflects Hemingway’s place as an

artist in what Walter Benjamin calls the “age of mechanical reproduction.” Hemingway’s art,

has, for the most part, come in the form of the novel, a mass produced, and therefore replicated

object. Unlike a painter or a sculptor, Hemingway’s art does not retain what Benjamin calls his

“aura,” since it is unlikely that he had any part in the actual production of the books, other than

writing the content in a different form. So, as the promotional materials for his lived-in spaces

emphasize, any opportunity to be in the places he occupied, becomes a chance to experience the

vestiges of Hemingway’s “aura” in a way that no copy of his work, unless it were a signed first

edition, perhaps, can provide.

As I have discussed in my previous chapters, Hollywood continually pushed

Hemingway’s persona to the forefront of the public discourse by exploiting the capital associated

with his life through multiple adaptations of his work. While the films and TV shows I examine

in this chapter are not the only medial representations2 of Hemingway, they are a key part of his

continued reconfiguration. Whether by design or as the result of negligent research, these

examples reveal a trend wherein production teams create characterizations of Hemingway as a

person that are regarded as at least plausibly accurate by employing popular attributes. These

representations have increased Hemingway’s fame with an exaggerated persona to the point

where actual, biographical information about who he was, how he behaved, and especially, the

nature of his writing seems inaccurate by comparison.

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The fictionalization of historical figures is nothing new, one can look to Shakespeare’s

treatment of Richard III or Tolstoy’s characterization of Napoleon in War and Peace.

Shakespeare himself has been fictionalized in various medial iterations like Shakespeare in Love

(1999) and All is True (2018). The 2004 novel The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

fictionalizes historical figures like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford within an alternate history

narrative in which Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 presidential election. The novel was turned

into an HBO miniseries in 2020, which emphasizes the connections between Lindbergh and U.S.

President Donald Trump, further fictionalizing Lindbergh to a larger audience. We can also

consider a figure like Orson Welles, who spent most of his life cultivating a public persona that

has been fictionalized repeatedly in films like Ed Wood (1994), RKO 281 (1999), Cradle Will

Rock (1999), and Me and Orson Welles (2008). In a 2019 lecture on the disorientation that can

result from using historical figures in fiction, entitled Most of What Follows is True, Canadian

author Michael Crummey relates the feeling of disorientation he had after learning that the true

fate of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was far less heroic than “the sepia-toned image of

those two men running free into gunfire” (4). It is important to recognize the power of what

theorist Ron McFarland, speaking specifically about Hemingway, calls “appropriations,” since

fictionalized versions of historical figures can gain sufficient ubiquity to both influence the

discourse around, and the feelings toward, that person3. Yet despite the widespread use of

fictionalized historical figures in various media, a distinct term and definition for the

phenomenon of the fictionalized versions of persons becoming the dominant version of a

historical figure in the popular discourse has not emerged. The phenomenon is closely related to

celebrity for how the fictionalizations reflect the trajectory outlined by the celebrity theorists I

have been dealing with. It is very often the life, rather than the accomplishments of the

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fictionalized person that take the forefront in the medial representation, and it is therefore that

life, and the character attributes, that reshape the general reputation of the person. It is similar to

how the medial discourse around a celebrity’s personal life shapes the overall impression of the

person at the centre of the celebrity persona.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Hemingway’s presence on screen as a character, and not just

a source for adaptation material, has contributed to the development of his celebrity persona that

incorporates many fictional elements. Since Hemingway once lived, however, he can never be

just fictional, and so it is apt to refer to him, and figures like Richard III, as fictionalized

celebrities. The fictionalized celebrity, or fictocel, as I call it, is the result of content creators

appropriating, remediating, and fictionalizing an historical figure to the point where the

predominant popular understanding of the individual is as a fictional character. While it is not

entirely necessary that the celebrity being fictionalized is deceased, having agency to shape or

influence the construction of one’s public persona makes it more difficult for others to

fictionalized it since the person of the celebrity can always choose to respond, and therefore

influence the public discourse.

It is important as well that the fictocel achieves a level of fame greater than its originating

figure so that its fictitious elements overshadow the reality and drive the conversation and

reputation of the historical figure. This configuration of fictocel fame makes it akin to what

Rojek calls a “celeactor,” which is described as “a fictional character who is either momentarily

ubiquitous or becomes an institutionalized feature of popular culture” (23). In describing this

phenomenon, Rojek cites Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character, but we could easily include

many fictional characters like James Bond, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson, none of whom

ever actually existed, yet each of which is quoted or referenced as much as anyone who did.

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Rojek also points out that celeactors are particularly potent when “they cater to the public

appetite for a character type that sums up the times” (23). For instance, James Bond’s ability to

capture something of the new openness toward sexuality, while mixing in Cold War anxieties,

made him an important touchstone for audiences in the 1960s; Archie Bunker’s bigoted buffoon

worked to satirize the stubborn mores being shuffled out by a more progressive generation in the

1970s; and Homer Simpson’s apathy and incompetence made him a perfect send up of anxieties

around the new shapes of families in the 1990s. While the fictocel is distinct from the celeactor

because of its basis in a historical figure, like any celebrity figure4 a fictocel benefits from its

ability to be a “character type that sums up the times” (23). The fictocel Hemingway, for

instance, is often employed to represent nostalgic impulses toward a bygone era of masculinity

and American exceptionalism that is either celebrated or problematized, depending on the

inclinations of the production teams.

Hemingway’s prominence as a fictionalized character over the past thirty years makes

him an ideal subject of study in tracing the parameters of the fictocel. To begin this investigation,

let us consider three films in which Hemingway is not the main character, but a figure who

appears periodically to provide comic relief or to assist in expressing some thematic idea

concerning the main character. The films (The Moderns, Midnight in Paris, and Genius) are

significantly different in terms of genre, tone, and approach to Hemingway, and yet manage to

both capture something that seems resonant of Hemingway’s persona, while simultaneously

crafting new aspects that are absorbed into the fictocel. The Moderns is a 1988 historical

drama/fantasia, directed by Alan Rudolph, about a struggling painter living in Paris in the 1920s.

The painter, named Nick Hart and played by Keith Carradine, has a casual friendship with

Hemingway, played by Kevin J. O’Connor, who makes appearances in locations often associated

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with the Hemingway persona: a café, Gertrude Stein’s salon, a brothel, and a boxing match Hart

is fighting. In every appearance, Hemingway wears the same grey three-piece suit, a replica of an

outfit he was photographed wearing in the late 1920s, as though it were his uniform.

We first see Hemingway during the opening credits, as the wandering camera comes to

stop on him, seated at the bar, hunched over a notebook. Another man, obviously a fan, offers to

buy him a drink. Hemingway is annoyed at first, but he cannot refuse the man’s offer and so puts

his work away. There are temporal jumps in the conversation, and we hear the admirer remark on

Hemingway’s war wounds: “This business of 227 pieces of shrapnel,” “270,” Hemingway

interjects, correcting the man with false information. Later in the sequence, female admirers

twice interrupt Hemingway, the first, a younger woman he tolerates because she “has [her] hand

on [his] flyrod.” The second woman is much older and speaks in French. When she leaves

Hemingway states that “if she comes back here, I’m going to hit her.” Finally, after Hart has had

a confrontation with a woman we later discover is his estranged wife, Hemingway looks on and

enquires about the situation.

In this short sequence, Rudolph quickly constructs Hemingway’s character and cultivates

audience recognition by using the popular aspects of his identity. For example, Hemingway was

known to write in Paris cafés; he had a reputation as a heavy drinker; he was wounded during the

First World War, and he was known to exaggerate the severity of that wound5; he had episodes

of irascibility, especially when he had been drinking; he was attractive to, and enjoyed the

attention of, women, while simultaneously being dismissive of them; and he was a keen observer

who crafted stories out of the real-life events that took place around him. Whether or not all of

these attributes are true is irrelevant to the characterization since they are true to the complex

configuration as established through the surround of his public persona, and are therefore a

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recognizable shorthand for the production team to establish the character as Hemingway in the

mind of the viewer.

It is also important to recognize that certain aspects of Hemingway’s persona are absent

from the performance, for instance, his gregariousness, and boisterous confidence. Unlike later

portrayals of the author, or Stacey Keach’s performance in Hemingway from the same year,

O’Connor’s Hemingway lacks a larger-than-life presence, brimming with the bravado so often

remarked upon during his lifetime6. The Moderns’ Hemingway is a dour writer, lacking in

confidence, even while burning with ambition. Yet, despite this seriousness, Hemingway also

acts as a comic foil, bringing some levity to a mostly humorless film. Most of the jokes revolve

around Hemingway’s inability to be Hemingway. For instance, one night Hart sees Hemingway

at the brothel across the alley from his apartment and overhears him yelling at two sex workers

for laughing at him. When Hemingway notices Hart watching him, he becomes somewhat

contrite and justifies his actions by paraphrasing a line from chapter four of The Sun also Rises,

saying, “It’s easy to be hard-boiled in the daytime, Hart, but at night…” he trails off while

shaking his head. This moment of self-quotation represents one instance of a running gag

throughout the film in which we see Hemingway constantly working out what will become plots,

titles and well-known aphorisms.

At other moments in the film, Hemingway spouts lines that sound like they could be

Hemingway quotes: “A fight is just a fight, and when it’s fought, it’s something else;” “Drink

and permanent attachments have ruined almost all of our friends;” “Art is never the full story;”

“The dead are the most brave;” “There are only two things that can really kill a man, suicide and

gonorrhea;” and “Marriage is absolutely bitched7.” The Hemingwayesque tenor of these lines

means that they could easily be mistaken for quotations since they sound like something he

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might say based on his popular image. The fact that these are not actual quotes is of little

consequence to the typical viewer, however, and so Rudolph can create lines of dialogue

connected to aspects of Hemingway’s public persona (death, bravery, fighting, drinking, suicide,

romantic relationships) and create a character that is recognizably Hemingway as a young, not

fully formed, author.

Another joke near the end of the film, in which Hemingway tries to craft a metaphor to

describe Paris, has a similar effect. While waiting in the train station, Hemingway looks to the

ceiling and says “Paris est bon repas, a traveling picnic, Paris is a portable banquet.” Another

character remarks, “you should work on that.” The obvious joke is that Hemingway is already

crafting the title for his memoir on his years spent in Paris, a memoir that he would not start

writing for another twenty-five years. All these half quotes, misquotes, and knowing references

reinforce the idea of Hemingway as a developing artist, or as Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, the

film is “a fanciful and irreverent look at the man before his public profile froze into myth.”

Rudolph’s Hemingway is not yet the celebrity persona that he would become, because he is still

working out the persona that will one day be famous.

Unlike the later versions of Hemingway that we encounter, writing is still a large part of

his persona in this film’s characterization but writing hardly makes him an interesting character.

Throughout the film he is dour and far too serious about his writing; it is only when he becomes

involved in macho pursuits, the boxing sequence, for instance, that he becomes an interesting

character to watch. Thus, we can see a similar dynamic playing out as with the adaptations, in

which insertions of the non-literary aspects of Hemingway’s persona are employed as ways of

making his writing more interesting to popular audiences. The same is true of the Hemingway

miniseries which, despite taking almost five hours to tell the story of Hemingway’s life, spends

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very little time on his work. After his initial apprenticeship in Paris, where the filmmakers

include some visual references to his stories and provide ample scenes of him writing, and being

taught to write by Stein and Pound, Hemingway’s work is almost forgotten. For instance, there is

no mention of A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, or To Have

and Have Not. For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and into the Trees are only used to

contextualize his success and failure, while The Old Man and the Sea gets only a fleeting

mention.

In terms of the development of the fictocel Hemingway, it is important that these two

films were released within a month of one another8 because their similarities cannot be read in

terms of one being influenced by the other. Rather, both films are independent expressions of the

way Hemingway’s persona was understood in the late 1980s. The posthumous novel Garden of

Eden, with its narrative focused on complex gender roles and sexuality, had been released just a

few years before and was, as I mentioned, responsible for a major reconsideration of Hemingway

and his work. The macho façade that had been so prominent was certainly fractured by the clear

obsession in the book with what we would now refer to as transgender subjects. The films take

on Hemingway’s broken macho façade differently. The Moderns tends to revel in the idea that

Hemingway was insecure and not as virile as he has been portrayed. By contrast, Hemingway,

despite some minor episodes in which the author becomes uncharacteristically sentimental,

ultimately reaffirms Hemingway as a macho figure. Even the scene of his suicide is framed in

the context of his taking matters into his own hands, as it is strongly implied that since none of

the doctors can cure him of his mental illness, he must cure himself by having the bravery to end

his life. What stands out in both approaches to the changing image of Hemingway is just how

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much more important the life and the character were to the filmmakers than the work

Hemingway produced.

This approach, and the character development that results, turns the Hemingway

character into something like a puppet, an inanimate object brought to life via the manipulations

of a ventriloquist. O’Connor, for instance, looks like Hemingway, with the aforementioned

uniform and the trademark mustache, but the words he speaks are not Hemingway’s; rather, they

are words written to sound like something Hemingway would say. In the same way that skilled

ventriloquists can produce a sufficient suspension of disbelief for their audiences to accept that

their dummies are not only sentient, but, depending on the shtick being performed, in control of

both the conversation and the ventriloquist, Hemingway in The Moderns is not an accurate

rendition of Hemingway, but is convincing enough to suspend disbelief in the same way a puppet

can be believable. The believability on display has the effect of reconfiguring the Hemingway

persona for viewers, a reconfiguration that becomes part of the public understanding of

Hemingway’s mythos. This ventriloquism act has become an increasingly important aspect of

the fictocel, as each film reworks Hemingway’s image.

As I mentioned earlier, Boorstin, in his book The Image, uses Hemingway as an example

of how the Hollywood star system has adversely affected the literary world when he dismisses

him as a kind of Douglas Fairbanks” (162). Although Boorstin’s overall analysis is egregiously

contemptuous of visual media in a way that seems almost curmudgeonly today, he does make a

point about the shape of Hemingway’s public persona at mid-century. In the twenty-first century,

that image of Hemingway as a Douglas Fairbanks type has gained traction, as his toughness and

charm have become the central motif of his image, while his writing has faded into the

background. This shift is particularly pronounced in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011).

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Where Rudolph’s rendition of Hemingway as a slightly subdued, often drunk, and less than

confident young author, Allen’s Hemingway (portrayed by Corey Stoll) is brash, boisterous, and

overly confident. Allen’s Hemingway is similar to the version of Hemingway in Rudolf’s film in

terms of being constructed out of aspects that make up the Hemingway persona; however,

Allen’s reconfiguration is even less reliant on the writer persona. There are no instances of

Hemingway working out recognizable phrases, ideas, or titles; nor is he ever seen reworking

actual events into fiction. Rather, Stoll’s performance is marked by charismatic confidence. He

effortlessly tosses out fully formed bon mots which, while not actual Hemingway quotes, seem

as though they could be, and subsequently have been, via the murky world of Internet memes,

attributed to him in the years since the film’s release.

While Midnight in Paris represents the best-known of Allen’s fantastical trips back to the

early twentieth century, it is not the first time he has used 1920s Paris, and Ernest Hemingway,

as narrative fodder. A late-1960s stand-up routine titled “The Lost Generation” involved Allen

recalling a whimsical series of memories of the time he spent with Hemingway, as well as

Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso, with each vignette ending with

Hemingway punching the speaker in the mouth. In 1971, Allen expanded the routine into a short

story titled “A Twenties Memory,” adding to the cast of characters, and broadening the

situations. In both the stand-up routine and the short story, Allen indulges in Hemingway’s

macho mythology as he crafts a character that while jovial, keeps the narrator on edge with his

volatility. Allen’s Hemingway character is especially sensitive when it comes to criticism of his

work, an attribute drawn from popular understandings of Hemingway’s persona. He was

famously thin-skinned, often writing angry letters to critics he saw as unfair, and in the case of

Max Eastman, having an actual physical altercation9. So, when Allen writes that he and Gertrude

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Stein felt that Hemingway’s novel “was a good novel but not a great one,” leading Hemingway,

who at first “laughed over it” to punch “me in the mouth,” it is Allen narrowing in on, and

exaggerating, Hemingway’s reputation for macho volatility. Allen performed a similar

amalgamation in caricaturing Humphrey Bogart in the 1969 stage play (and 1971 film adaptation

staring, but not directed by, Allen) Play it Again, Sam. Bogart, like Hemingway is constructed

out of numerous medial iterations drawn mostly from characters Bogart played. Meaning that the

Bogart character is really a mash up of Rick Blaine, Sam Spade, Fred Dobbs, Philip Marlowe,

and even Henry Morgan, rather than an approximation of Bogart as an historical figure. The

character is important to consider as it establishes the paradigm Allen employs when

fictionalizing celebrities.

In Midnight in Paris, Allen establishes Hemingway as a character via reinforcements of

Hemingway’s macho posturing10 and generalizations both of character and of time period.

Consider Hemingway’s introduction: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) is trying to introduce

Gil (Owen Wilson) when there is a quick cut to Hemingway, positioned behind a table at the

Polidor, glass and bottle before him; he introduces himself by stating only his last name. This

short exchange is indicative of Stoll’s performance, which exudes a level of confidence that

emphasizes the common perception of Hemingway as unflappable and self-assured of his talent.

Stoll’s performance, and the nature of his frequent monologues throughout the film, are

vital to Hemingway’s characterization. Allen has written these speeches as a parody of

Hemingway’s literary style, complete with declarative statements, simple syntax, and run-on

sentences for emphasis. This is especially true later in the film when the character Hemingway

describes a battle scene:

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The assignment was to take the hill, there were four of us, five if you count Vicente, but

he had lost his hand when a grenade went off and couldn’t fight as he did when I first met

him and he was young and brave. And the hill was soggy from days of rain and it sloped

down toward a road and there were many German soldiers on the road and the idea was

to aim for the first group and if our aim was true we could delay them.

Hemingway did not actually speak in such a manner, but that is not really important because by

blending the literary aspects of Hemingway’s identity into the character, and delivering the lines

with such consistently deadpan delivery, Stoll’s performance simultaneously replicates the

experience of reading Hemingway’s prose, while being so artificial that it becomes a joke, even

for a viewer who might not know that much about Hemingway’s prose style. The end result

creates a recognizable rendition of Hemingway while adding new aspects to the fictocel.

The written dialogue here is another example of how the ventriloquized Hemingway is

important to the construction of the fictocel. Here Allen draws more from reality than did Rudolf

in The Moderns, by mimicking Hemingway’s writing style, but the effect on display is still

mostly parody in the same way that a ventriloquist’s dummy is a parody of a human being. It is

the gap between realistic representations of human behavior and the heightened representations

coming from a puppet that makes a ventriloquist act fun for an audience. The same is true here.

A realistic portrayal of Hemingway in the 1920s, speaking only words he is known to have

spoken, may have worked within the film, but it is unlikely that it would have found the sort of

resonance with audiences that Stoll’s heightened, comedic parody does. Just as Picasso said that

“art is a lie that makes us realize truth” (264) Allen’s ventriloquized version of Hemingway is

recognizable to general audiences because of its exaggeration. The lies make us feel as though

we are seeing the “truth” of the figure behind the persona. As well, Stoll’s depiction offers

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insight into the nature of Hemingway’s reputation in the twenty-first century, while

simultaneously reconfiguring it for an audience that may not be familiar with him or his work.

Throughout the film, Allen continues to layer in various aspects of Hemingway’s public

persona. For instance, when Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) tells Gil that Hemingway has taken

Adriana (Marion Cotillard) to Mt. Kilimanjaro for a hunting trip, the film’s Hemingway is linked

to Hemingway’s association with safari culture. The reference is anachronistic11, but the details

are not as important as the tangential connections. By referring to lion hunting, hyenas, and

Africa, Allen connects his character to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of

Francis Macomber,” and Green Hills of Africa, which works to make his Hemingway more

recognizably Hemingway-esque.

This deliberate generalization of dates, activities, and attributes associated with the

Hemingway character works in Allen’s favour, since a typical audience would likely not be as

familiar with the details of Hemingway’s life or work as they might be with a few general

attributes and topics like war, seriousness, bullfighting, or Africa. It is these attributes that Allen

employs to create a recognizable Hemingway character. If we consider Allen’s rendition of

Hemingway through the themes of the film, his ambiguity becomes a clever way of expanding

the film’s central concern. Allen is not attempting to create an accurate rendering of Hemingway,

or Paris in the ‘20s for that matter, but a fantastical version built on nostalgia for an amorphous

past that would be ruined by too many precise details. Gil is in what Paul (“the pedantic fellow”

played by Michael Sheen) describes earlier in the film as a “Golden Age” version of Paris

assembled from his romantic fantasies, and he interacts with a romantic fantasy version of

Hemingway drawn from Gil’s knowledge of the Hemingway mythos.

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The popularity of Midnight in Paris, and Stoll’s performance in particular, cannot be

underestimated in terms of its effect on the reconfiguration of Hemingway’s reputation in the

twenty-first century, as the film’s version of Hemingway, has become one of the more prominent

aspects of the fictocel Hemingway. As I have pointed out, Midnight in Paris’ Hemingway is a

caricature constructed from various aspects of Hemingway’s persona, designed to satirize the

overly serious “great author” role and to deflate any celebration of the toxic masculinity

associated with him. In an interview, Allen plainly stated that he did not attempt to create an

accurate version of Hemingway (or any of the other historical figures in the film) but was simply

replicating their general cultural manifestations. According to Allen, “characters like

Hemingway, Picasso, Salvador Dali. They are so vivid and have such pronounced styles, I didn't

have to do any research at all. I could write it off the top of my head” (Kilday). This act of

writing “off the top of [his] head” results in characters that are recognizable, without being

entirely accurate. Meaning that Hemingway is a fictionalized representation of a historical figure.

While this is true of all medial representations of historical figures, Hemingway in Midnight in

Paris represents another step toward overt fictionalization because of the blatant disregard for

accuracy.

The entire point of Stoll’s performance is to create a satirical version of Hemingway, not

a perfect representation of him. In an interview with The Wrap, discussing his preparation for the

part, Stoll said that he listened to tapes of Hemingway speaking, but found that his voice was

“just not your image of Hemingway at all,” that it was “actually kind of high and reedy, with a

little bit of a lisp.” This incongruency between what Stoll felt was the “image” of Hemingway

and the reality led him to create a caricature rather than try to embody the real person. In the

same interview, he goes on to say that he is “playing the iconic writer, the idea that is instilled in

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all of our minds of Hemingway, not the real person” (Pond). This approach to the performance is

key to understanding the fictocel Hemingway. As Stoll states, the goal was to present the icon

rather than the thing the icon represents. The Allen/Stoll Hemingway is a portrayal of the idea of

Hemingway rather than an attempt to depict the actual person.

The fictocel Hemingway, like many celeactors, or celebrity personae, cannot be contained

by any one film. Many actors have portrayed a celeactor like James Bond in multiple films made

by a variety of writers and directors, and yet he is recognizable as the same celeactor. Each

iteration does not cancel out the previous ones but adds to the understanding of the celeactor as a

developing entity. This lack of unified development is a key aspect of the idea of the celeactor

and the fictocel, especially for Hemingway. As medial versions of Hemingway continue to

appear, each reconfigures the character in ways that broaden the picture of who he is, for better

or worse, with greater or less accuracy. Since, unlike James Bond, Hemingway is not a

copyrighted character, there are more opportunities to take on and reconfigure his character into

broader and more diverse iterations. So, while a movie like Midnight in Paris is one of the more

prominent articulations, it remains just one iteration among a plethora of medial disseminations

that are a part of the assembled fictocel Hemingway.

We can view the development of the fictocel Hemingway, and the influence of Midnight

in Paris, by considering the difference between how the film The Moderns portrays Hemingway

and the way he appears in the 2015 film Genius, directed by Michael Grandage and based on the

1978 biography of Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg. The narrative deals primarily with Perkins’

(Colin Firth) relationship with author Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law); however, the film makes use of

both Fitzgerald (Guy Pearce) and Hemingway (Dominic West) – Perkins’ other two ‘geniuses’ –

as possible futures for Wolfe, depending on how he handles his newfound fame. There are, in

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this dichotomy, clear connections to the conflict between Hemingway and Fitzgerald presented

in Midnight in Paris: Hemingway is all confidence, while Fitzgerald struggles; Hemingway is

free to pursue his life of action, while Fitzgerald is hampered by his commitment to Zelda.

Alcohol makes Hemingway more charming and brilliant, while it destroys Fitzgerald’s ability to

write. Though each of these attributes is based in biographic reality, the simplistic way with

which they are handled and presented as absolute is strongly reminiscent of the

Hemingway/Fitzgerald relationship found in Midnight in Paris.

In Genius, the Hemingway character spends less than two minutes on screen, yet the

filmmakers have managed to fit in nearly every cliché of his celebrity persona as it is understood

in the twenty-first century. In Hemingway’s one scene, Perkins visits him in Key West, and the

two are just getting off a fishing boat, having caught an enormous marlin. Hemingway is about to

leave to cover the Spanish Civil War as he excitedly tells Perkins that he needs to feel the

“struggle for life,” adding, “what else is there?” The two men then discuss Wolfe, whom

Hemingway dismisses as self-important, and too ready to believe his own hype, calling the book,

Of Time and the River, that we have just watched Perkins struggle with for two years, “crap.”

Hemingway is quick to dismiss Wolfe’s long-term potential, comparing him to Fitzgerald, whom

he calls “the most elegant writer I ever knew,” before adding that now “the poor son-of-a-bitch

can’t string five words together to save his own life.” Finally, Hemingway warns Perkins that

Wolfe will leave him for a better offer, saying that Wolfe’s written dedication to Perkins at the

beginning of his latest book “read like something on a tombstone.” Impressively, screenwriter

John Logan has Hemingway touch on action, life, war, writing, celebrity, loyalty, and death in

such a brief conversation. Add in the fact that they are fishing, and the production team has

managed to mark nearly every item on the proverbial Hemingway checklist.

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The construction of these characters mirrors the way fans patch together a celebrity

persona out of the “ragtag specter” Roach describes. We get snippets of familiar quotations,

references to works or well-known hobbies, and impersonations built around an amalgamation of

Hemingway’s literary style, physical appearance, and archived recordings of his voice. What is

fascinating about West’s performance in contrast to O’Connor’s, for instance, is the distinct echo

of Stoll’s performance of Hemingway in Midnight in Paris. The popularity and charismatic draw

of that particular iteration has become an integral and easily recognizable aspect of the fictocel

Hemingway.

As mentioned previously, for a fictocel to gain significant public interest, it is important

that it, like any celebrity figure, captures something of the political, social, and artistic zeitgeist;

that it becomes a “character type that sums up the times” (Rojek 23). The fictocel Hemingway

accomplishes this through its embodiment of an often toxic form of masculinity and a nostalgia

for a bygone era dominated by that form of masculinity. Even though both nostalgia and toxic

masculinity are under significant scrutiny in the general discourse, they both remain extremely

popular with large segments of the population.12 Donna Peberdy, in her book Masculinity and

Film Performance, draws on Judith Butler’s framing of gender as a construct to argue for

cinematic masculinity as a performative act meant to reinforce these social constructs. In making

her argument, Peberdy uses the work of David Buchbinder, who writes in his book Performance

Anxieties: Re-Producing Masculinity, that masculine “representation works to enable men to

‘recognize’ themselves and each other within the relevant culture and social class, and hence to

approve male behavior in terms of ideological correctness” (29). Peberdy argues that the

reinforcement of traditional masculinity has a limiting effect on cinematic representations.

Whether the character under consideration is a hero, a villain, a father, or a man in the midst of a

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mid-life crisis, Peberdy argues that each performance “involves a set of restricting prescriptions

and proscriptions that limit the range of acceptable performances associated with the role” (30).

All these prescriptions and proscriptions create expectations of what counts as ‘true’ masculinity.

Whether a role is celebratory or critical does not matter, according to Peberdy, since in both

cases the expectations prohibit any engagement beyond the extensive set of social constructs.

The Hemingway of Midnight in Paris walks Roach’s tightrope by simultaneously highlighting

the ridiculousness, and power of, these expectations in his hyper-confident pronunciations of the

tropes of masculinity. This complex performance allows the fictocel Hemingway to operate as a

parody of macho masculinity, while still attracting admiration for the nostalgic version of

masculinity he represents.

So much of what makes Allen/Stoll’s Hemingway interesting to watch has to do with the

confidence with which he makes his pronouncements, even though most of them are

embarrassingly outdated. This outdatedness, which seems to be an intentional skewering of

outmoded notions of masculinity, has nevertheless found considerable purchase within the

fictocel Hemingway’s cultural cachet for reasons that have to do with the popular perception that

masculinity (especially white, heterosexual masculinity) is under attack. Nicola Rehling, in her

book Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity and Contemporary Popular Cinema,

argues that cinematic masculinity in popular films has, since the early 1990s, revolved around

the figure of the “angry white male.” This figure, in both critical and sympathetic realizations,

has become an important part of the popular discourse for how it has galvanized and polarized

certain segments of society. Rehling writes that the figure of the “angry white male” as a cultural

trope rose in “the wake of the heated debates that raged in the U.S. in the ‘90s over

multiculturalism, illegal and legal immigration, sexual harassment, feminist-inspired legislation,

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gays in the military, gay marriages, and numerous other issues that pointed to the increasingly

hybridized nature of contemporary U.S. life” (25). These changes resulted in a perceived de-

prioritization of males in the cultural and societal hierarchy, which Rehling states was

“manipulated by the right to produce a rhetoric of white male victimization” (25). This notion of

victimization, Rehling writes, when mixed with right-wing politics and neo-liberal discourses,

was redirected from anger at globalism, economic austerity measures, and corporate greed as the

reasons behind the loss of jobs and wages and refocused on multiculturalism and affirmative

action. Divisions developed over race and gender rather than economics and class. Rehling sums

up the shift by writing that “white men, who had once been the oppressors, or at best inhabited

the ordinary, universal position, transmuted into a self-proclaimed, marginalized, extra-ordinary

group” (26).

This feeling of marginalization has resulted in the formation of the Men’s Rights

Movement and the troubling phenomenon of incels, which amplify their sense of victimization to

the point of violence. Cinematically, Rehling writes, the feeling of male disaffection often results

in the emergence of male hero characters who must battle enemies coded as manifestations of all

the “oppressors” of white male primacy. Affirmative action, equal rights, and immigration are

presented as making the world more difficult for white heterosexual males, and thus breed

nostalgia for a time of perceived male dominance. In films, this tends to take the shape of white

males being proven correct or being tragically sacrificed on the altar of equality so that less

qualified, or “undeserving” others can prosper. Rehling cites films such as Falling Down (1993),

Disclosure (1994), and Crash (2004), as examples of wronged white male films. Of course,

Hemingway’s public persona has long been attached to the “angry white male” trope not only

through the surround constructed by him in his writing and public exploits (hunting, war, etc.),

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and others, such as the mid-century men’s magazines, but also through acolytes such as Norman

Mailer. As Glass writes, the “tough-guy persona that Mailer established in the 1960s can be seen

as a willed resurrection of Hemingway” (183). This association means that the parts of

Hemingway’s mythology foregrounded by Mailer, and incorporated into his own persona, can

shape the understanding Hemingway in the popular discourse. For instance, Mailer’s public

opposition to second-wave feminism in the late 1960s has been read as an outgrowth of his

dedication to Hemingway’s male heroes (Glass 188). Therefore, the opinions of Mailer, as

acolyte, are grafted onto Hemingway, even though Hemingway had nothing to say about late

1960s feminism, since he was dead by the early 1960s.

As I have stated, nostalgia, a major theme of Midnight in Paris, is a vital part of the

fictocel Hemingway’s masculine appeal. The double-edged nature of nostalgia in the film and the

response to it is worth noting. As Lyons writes, “Midnight in Paris certainly exists as a statement

on the problematic notions surrounding the hasty Romanticisation of famous figures, but it is

nonetheless a gesture towards creating nostalgia, as is evident not only in the script but most

prolifically in the cinematography that throughout is glowing and romantic in itself” (151). Allen

may present the idea that engaging in nostalgia is a futile activity, but audiences have responded

positively to the ability to vicariously spend time in the past. The same is true of the Hemingway

character, who despite being a blowhard, and clearly irresponsible, becomes an ideal of

masculinity, especially when placed in contrast to Gil, as the “Woody Allen” surrogate. Del

Gizzo, writing about Stoll’s Hemingway in particular, states that the author is so often “the

source of nostalgia and laughter is because [he] is no longer a truly viable identity” (127); rather,

he is a fictocel, and as such can embody any ideals and tropes a content creator endows him with.

For instance, throughout the film Hemingway tells Gil to be more “manly,” as though to appear

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any other way is indisputably wrong. Much like the relationship between Bogart and Allen’s

character, Allan, in Play it Again, Sam, Gil is as nebbish, indecisive, and overly romantic as

Hemingway is brash, confident, and practical. Hemingway represents the typical masculine man

of the past, while Gil represents what is thought of as a feminized, and therefore weak, male of

the present.

The film is not a simple dichotomy, as Gil does not have to become Hemingway to find a

resolution to his problems in the film, and Hemingway’s hyper-masculinity is often portrayed as

buffoonery and somewhat toxic; however, that hyper-masculinity, when detached from the film,

has retained a surprising cultural potency. Consider Frankie Drake Mysteries, a Canadian

Broadcasting Corporation series about a detective solving crimes in 1920s Toronto, wherein

Hemingway (played by Steve Lund) appears periodically as an intrepid newspaper reporter,

looking to private detective Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith) for interesting stories. Despite

some jokes about Hemingway sticking to the facts because he is “no good at fiction,” and the

fact that he is working as a reporter, the series pays little attention to his role as a writer, nor his

literary ambitions. Rather, in the series, Hemingway’s work is merely an excuse for him to be

near action, not to be a better writer.

We can see this same sort of characterization in an NBC series called Timeless about a

group of time-traveling crimefighters. In an episode titled “The Lost Generation,” the heroes

travel to 1920s Paris to keep Charles Lindbergh from becoming a Nazi sympathizer. Improbably,

given the chronology, their ally on their mission is none other than Ernest Hemingway (Brandon

Barash). We see the same sort of factual blurring at play that was used in Midnight in Paris, for

instance, Hemingway is still working as a reporter for the Toronto Star, even though Lindbergh

landed in May of 1927, three years after Hemingway had quit the paper. There is also a lot of

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talk of war exploits, prostitution, and he is best friends with Josephine Baker. There are many

points to nitpick, but the generalizations, most of which would not matter at all to the average

viewer, are important to establishing the character as Hemingway. That his thirst for adventure

and intrigue is so much more important than his writing, which gets only a fleeting mention,

simultaneously tells us something about how the fictocel Hemingway is understood, while

adding, for general audiences, new aspects to the fictionalized version of the historical figure.

In both Frankie Drake and Timeless Hemingway’s macho posturing, despite drawing the

occasional eyeroll from the other characters, goes mostly unchecked. In contrast, there are

examples of production teams very deliberately subverting, and problematizing Hemingway’s

macho persona. In an episode from a comedic series of shorts produced for the History Channel

called Great Minds with Dan Harmon, Hemingway (played by Scott Adsit) is brought back to

life by the title character. The rendition of Hemingway is built around his need for action, his

love for hunting, and his unwavering self-confidence, epitomized in deep, gravelly voiced,

staccato pronunciations and Hemingway-esque quotes, which work to make Dan Harmon look

ridiculously neurotic by contrast. Harmon ultimately gets the final word when he suggests that

perhaps being a man is not about proving manliness through violent acts, a statement that sends

Hemingway into a violent rage that is only stopped by his turning into dust at the end of his

period of reincarnation.

This trend comes to a much fuller realization in yet another TV series about time-

travelling crimefighters called DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, wherein the team of superheroes

finds themselves in Paris in 1927. In this particular episode, titled “Tender is the Nate,”

Hemingway’s (Andrew Lees) perceived heroic spirit and lust for adventure is seen by one

character as proof that he should help with their mission of catching a Minotaur that lives in the

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catacombs under Paris. Aside from the minotaur, the main conflict in the episode has to do with

Hank (Tom Wilson), who is some sort of government bureaucrat tasked with cutting the budget

of the Legends of Tomorrow’s department, which also happens to be run by his son, Nate (Nick

Zano). A generational rivalry plays out as a competition between Hank’s bullish approach and

Nate’s more careful attempts to assess the situation. Hemingway’s role in all of this is to egg on

Hank’s brash instincts, and so every macho stereotype attached to the Hemingway persona is

trotted out and employed as comic fodder.

The show itself promotes progressive politics by placing several female and LGBTQ

characters in leading roles and by emphasizing empiricism and rationality over violent physical

assault as a means of remedying conflicts. While it is by no means perfect, it is a refreshing

approach, especially in the superhero genre which tends to accentuate fascistic notions of might

equals right. The fictocel Hemingway that both shapes and is shaped by this portrayal, is clearly

meant to be read as an ineffectual relic of a bygone time, when rushing to action resulted in far

more destruction than resolution. We can read the critiques of Hemingway as problematizing the

macho super-hero movies wherein saving the world always means destroying at least one major

metropolitan area. Hank’s hero-worship of Hemingway places him on the wrong side of this

divide.

Throughout the conflict with the minotaur, there are some obvious indicators that

Hemingway is outmatched by team leader Sara Lance (Caity Lotz). Her insistence on needing a

plan, which Hemingway dismisses, is proven correct when Hemingway is unable to kill the

minotaur with his gun. Hank’s attempt to imitate Hemingway’s courage nearly gets him killed,

and even Sara’s physical confrontation, while more successful than the two men, leaves her

battered and calling for a retreat. Hence, Hemingway’s method of diving straight into action

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proves to be ineffectual. As the episode progresses, the team learns from the mythology books in

their library that the Minotaur is susceptible to lute music, which lulls him to sleep. In the final

confrontation, when all hope seems lost after Nate’s lute is broken, and Hemingway has been

knocked unconscious, it is Hank who saves the day by picking up a guitar and serenading the

Minotaur with the song “Sweet Baby James” by 1970s folk rock singer, James Taylor.

Empiricism, rationality, and gentle folk melodies win the day, Hank is converted to Nate’s way

of thinking, and Hemingway, along with the ideals he is imbued with by the producers of the

show, slinks away, bruised and beaten. Clearly, Legends is problematizing the nostalgia that is so

intrinsic to the fictocel Hemingway by making his methods and posturing ineffective and

comedic. It is a reversal of the trend that Rheling describes as animating “angry white male”

movies. The macho and overly violent ideals are replaced by new methods; but rather than a

mistake that must be corrected by reinforcing those old ideals, it is a new set of values that win

the day.

Beyond short appearances, and comedic caricatures, the continued influence and

reshaping of the fictocel Hemingway is on display in several feature length cinematic

biographies that purport to present an accurate rendition of their subject. In the four biopics I

analyze here (Bernhard Sinkel’s miniseries Hemingway, Richard Attenborough’s In Love and

War, Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway & Gellhorn, and Bob Yari’s Papa Hemingway in Cuba) it is

possible to identify an interesting trajectory regarding the medial rendering of the Hemingway

persona. One that sees an increasing effort put into imitation as the popularity of the fictocel

grows over time. The result is a greater focus on imitating what Stoll calls “the idea that is

instilled in all of our minds of Hemingway.”

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George Custen, in his book-length study of the development and impact of biopics in

Hollywood’s golden age, provides a useful way to consider how cinema shapes popular

impressions of historical figures. This process, according to Custen, is related to the nature of

star image construction.

Movie biographies presented a double level of the articulation of fame. At the first level,

one was absorbed by the narrative constructed about selected episodes in the life of the

subject. At the second level, one encountered the famous figure in other filmic contexts as

well as through repeated exposure to publicity materials. Combined, these two levels of

image created the facets of what Richard Dyer perceptively refers to as the polysemic star

image. Here, the moviegoer is drawn to resonant aspects of the impersonator as well as

the life impersonated. In this light, perhaps one admires Queen Elizabeth I for her

statecraft but also because she is Bette Davis. (Custen 34)

The appeal of the performer playing the subject of a biopic is important to the overall success of

the film since the audience must connect to the central figure. As Dennis Bingham writes in his

book on biopics, “The biopic narrates, exhibits, and celebrates the life of a subject in order to

demonstrate, investigate, or question his or her importance in the world; to illuminate the fine

points of a personality; and for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be

this person, or to be a certain type of person” (10). Bingham continues, “The appeal of the biopic

lies in seeing an actual person who did something interesting in life, known mostly in public,

transformed into a character” (10). Therefore, the ability of filmmakers to turn a historical person

into an interesting character is key, even if that character becomes something quite different from

the person it purports to represent.

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Often the gap between character and subject in biopics appears as the result of the erasure

of aspects of a subject’s life or personality that are considered distasteful or objectionable at the

time the film is released. Custen cites Cary Grant’s portrayal of Cole Porter in Night and Day

(1946), as an example of the erasure of queerness to craft a character and a film that would

appeal to a mass audience (17). To draw from a more recent example, we can consider the film

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), which has been accused of downplaying Freddy Mercury’s

sexuality for the sake of wide appeal. Aja Romano, writing for Vox, points out that the film

“retreads queerphobic stereotypes instead of giving us a fascinating, complex look at a real gay

man.” As Romano points out, the film spends far more time on Mercury’s wife, Mary Austin,

who is presented as “personifying virginal beauty and traditional wholesomeness — everything

Mercury could have, the film implies, if only he weren’t tragically queer.” Although Austin was

a significant part of Mercury’s life, one cannot help but read her prominence as a concession to

non-queer viewers, who, it is assumed, require more typical romantic expressions. This is

emphasized, Romano writes, by downplaying Mercury’s seven year, monogamous, relationship

with Jim Hutton, which is “reduced onscreen to a single kiss and a brief hand squeeze.” In the

end, as both Bingham and Custen point out, turning the subject into a figure that producers think

will appeal to the biggest audience is paramount, even if that means ignoring the reality of who

the subject was, and sometimes, what they accomplished.

It is this matter of accomplishment that brings Custen to a consideration of biopic

subjects via an allusion to Lowenthal’s idols of production and consumption. Much like the

magazine biographies that Lowenthal studied, Custen finds that as the twentieth century

progressed, the studios became far more interested in figures who lived interesting lives rather

than ones who accomplished great things. This makes sense if we consider that the entire

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enterprise of commercial filmmaking is aimed at crafting appealing characters at the centre of

entertaining films. People who accomplish great things do not necessarily lead cinematically

interesting lives, and so in the hope of creating interesting movies, filmmakers go after

interesting lives, no matter the accomplishments. It is for this reason that Ellen Cheshire writes

that we have seen a “re-awakening of the bio-pic that, by the mid-1990s and into the twenty-first

century, has increasingly become a staple of both Hollywood and commercial world cinema,”

since “this period closely mirrors that of a wider societal fascination with the private lives of

stars” (3).

Hemingway represents an interesting junction here, because, although he is ostensibly an

idol of production, his productions are not as interesting to a general audience as is the life he

lived. Unlike biopics of other notable authors, such as Capote (2005) or The Man who Invented

Christmas (2017), where what drives the plot is the creation of In Cold Blood and A Christmas

Carol, respectively, it is Hemingway’s exploits and adventures, rather than his work, that

become the focus of the biopics. Although the biopics about Truman Capote and Charles

Dickens present biographical materials, most of the life events are presented as ways of

providing insight into the specific work. By contrast, Hemingway & Gellhorn, while it touches

on the writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls and the production of The Spanish Earth, restricts

them to minor episodes within a larger film about the relationship between the two title

characters. In Love and War gestures toward Hemingway’s future as a writer, but the narrative is

set before he becomes an author. Papa Hemingway is largely about Hemingway’s inability to be

productive, and how his life is affected by his failure to write. Even the five-hour miniseries,

Hemingway (1988), which is ostensibly an examination of his life and work, quickly leaves the

importance of his work behind to focus on his life and macho pursuits.

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To consider the development of the fictocel Hemingway in biopic renditions, it is best to

return to Hemingway, which was billed as a major television event when it was released in 1988.

Hemingway is played by Stacey Keach, who made a name for himself playing Mickey Spillane’s

Mike Hammer character in a variety of television projects. The film is based on Carlos Baker’s

1969 biography, as well as the volume of letters Baker edited. The Baker biography, which has

faced accusations of inaccuracy, most notably by Martha Gellhorn, has also been criticized for its

indulgence in, and reinforcing of, the macho myth around Hemingway. Dearborn, whose 2018

biography of Hemingway was advertised as the first one written by a female author13, stated in an

interview with the CBC that her intention in writing another Hemingway biography was to

portray her subject with no “investment in the macho legend that I saw over and over again in the

male biographers” who “seemed to slip into the same uncritical enthusiasm about Hemingway

that he was surrounded with in his lifetime” (CBC 8 January 2018). The miniseries tends to revel

in moments in which Hemingway’s macho heroics are displayed with very little critical

contemplation. We can see this enthusiasm in every exaggerated war scene, during fishing trips,

and most problematically when he punches out a poor Black fisherman on the dock at Key West.

This scene, which is based on an account Baker describes in his book (274-275), sees

Hemingway offer an open challenge, promising $100 to anyone who can go three rounds with

him. Willard (the fisherman played by Raymond Forchion) accepts the challenge, and

Hemingway quickly dispenses with him in front of a crowd. If the scene is designed to make him

look like a hero, it fails in that regard, because Hemingway comes across as a rich jerk, willing to

humiliate those less fortunate than him for his own amusement. If it is included to make him look

bad, it also fails because it is far too ambiguous about Hemingway’s motivations. Does he just

want to show off, does he take pleasure in humiliating other men by emasculating them through

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his display of strength? How does the character’s being Black affect how we are supposed to

read Hemingway here? Is Hemingway’s action motivated by a belief in his racial superiority?

The filmmakers attempt to offer a corrective in the following scene in which Willard appears at

the bar and Hemingway gives him the $100 anyway and offers a bit more so that he can buy his

wife a dress. Hemingway’s actions, it seems, are meant to make him look like a good guy who

was just having a bit of fun; however, his adding of insult to literal injury comes across as

patronizing. Not only is Hemingway physically stronger than Willard, but he is also rich, and so

can play the role of saviour for Willard’s family. This is further emphasized by Willard’s

supplicating appreciation of Hemingway’s generosity, with echoes of popular representations of

slave/master relationships.

The mercurial nature of Hemingway’s personality in this sequence – going from physical

assault to financial generosity – is indicative of Keach’s performance throughout the film. In the

portrayals of his relationships with his four wives, especially, Hemingway swings from overly

saccharine professions of love and affection to brutal instances of emotional and physical abuse.

In an interview included in the DVD supplemental material, Keach explains that for him “as an

actor it was wonderful to explore and run the gamut of emotions. [Hemingway] was a

complicated, idiosyncratic man. There’s not a color of the human spectrum he doesn’t reflect. He

was a gentleman, a boor and a braggart, along with being sensible and humble.” It seems that it

is an attempt to keep Hemingway from being a one-dimensional caricature that drives these

mood swings; however, it is difficult to understand his motivation other than seeing him as a

tough jerk who wants things his way, and so will not suffer fools, or his wives, unless it is

advantageous for him.

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Throughout the film, Keach’s channeling of his famous role as Mike Hammer results in

his crafting Hemingway as the sort of hard-boiled macho man of pulp novels, who despite

mellowing at certain points, never really changes, even as he suffers from mental illness. This

consistency of character portrayal has a lot to do with the fact that Keach, who was in his mid-

forties at the time of shooting, plays Hemingway at nearly every phase of his life from age

eighteen to sixty-one. The only time another actor plays Hemingway is during flashbacks to his

childhood when a young Hemingway appears dressed like Huckleberry Finn, complete with

overalls and a straw hat. This consistency in portrayal forces the viewer to consider Hemingway

through Keach’s star image, as it was established through the popular television roles that

defined him as a public figure. Keach’s polysemic star image, as described by both Dyer and

Custen, is an important interpretive method for understanding Hemingway as a character in the

movie. It is for this reason that we do not see the inclination toward imitation that becomes a

major part of the fictocel Hemingway in the twenty-first century. Rather than trying to create a

realistic imitation of Hemingway, Keach, and the production team, shape of the character around

Keach’s star image. In the same way Custen describes people admiring “Queen Elizabeth I for

her statecraft … [and] … because she is Bette Davis” (34), a viewer can find the mediated figure

of Hemingway appealing because he embodies the qualities one might find attractive in Stacey

Keach.

We can see a similar approach to character portrayal in Richard Attenborough’s 1996

biopic In Love and War. The film is crafted as an epic historical romance and is Attenborough’s

attempt to do for Hemingway what he had done in earlier biopics for Mahatma Gandhi and

Charles Chaplin. Rather than a full life treatment, Attenborough’s film focuses on the time

Hemingway spent in Italy during World War I, and the love affair he had there. The two main

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characters, Agnes Von Kurowsky (on whose diary the film was based) and Hemingway are

played by Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell, respectively. Bullock was one of the 1990’s

biggest movie stars, and was coming off major successes like Speed, The Net, and While You

Were Sleeping when she took the role that must have seemed like sure-fire Oscar bait. Similarly,

O’Donnell had made a name for himself through a series of roles in extraordinarily successful

films like Scent of a Woman, Mad Love, and Batman Forever.

The pedigrees of the film’s two stars are important to consider because of how their

personae shape the renditions they create of the two historical figures at the center of the

narrative. Bullock and O’Donnell give the sorts of performances audiences expect from them as

movie stars. As Dyer points out, “a star will have a particular performance style that through its

familiarity will inform the performance s/he gives in any particular film” (142). Dyer goes on to

say that “the specific repertoire of gestures, intonations, etc. that a star establishes over a number

of films creates the meaning of her/his image just as much as the ‘inert’ element of appearance,

the particular sound of her/his voice or dress style” (142). This approach to film acting is

common in commercial productions and is often a draw for audiences who want to spend time in

the presence of a star they have enjoyed watching in other films. It can also, as Custen points out,

be a way of turning a historical figure into an engaging character.

In Love and War contains no clear attempts by either Bullock or O’Donnell to imitate the

known characteristics of the people they are portraying. Rather, the real-life figures fold into the

stars’ personae. Bullock’s portrayal of Von Kurowsky is filtered through the star image she had

established through the feature film roles she had over the preceding few years. Likewise,

O’Donnell’s Hemingway could just as easily be Batman’s sidekick, Robin, whom O’Donnell

portrayed in Batman Forever as young, impetuous, and in constant need of action. This is not a

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criticism of either actor, but rather a way of pointing out their lack of dependence on imitative

approaches for rendering historical figures. The production team was far more comfortable with

Hemingway being a young man in the mold of O’Donnell’s star persona rather than having

O’Donnell attempt a Hemingway impersonation. In this way, the actors fulfill what Custen

identifies as important to the portrayal of a biopic’s main subject by giving a performance that

presents “resonant aspects of the impersonator as well as the life impersonated” (34). The

difference between this approach and some of the performances we will see later goes beyond

stylistic choices, as it reveals a great deal about the increased prominence of the Hemingway

persona in the twenty-first century.

Despite a lack of imitation, there are notable narrative incursions from Hemingway’s

mythology. The first instance of this comes after a young soldier, Jimmy, who has been

physically disfigured, uses broken shards of glass to slit his wrist. Both Von Kurowsky and

Hemingway are distraught over the loss of their friend, and as a final gesture, she is trying to

complete the last letter Jimmy was writing to his parents. The content of the letter is banal, full of

vague well-wishes and dishonest assurances of his condition. Von Kurowsky feels the drive to

send the letter as is but wishes that it could convey something deeper, considering that it is the

last letter the family will receive from their son. Hemingway, however, does not hesitate to

rewrite the message in full. He instructs her to start the letter over again and begins to dictate a

message that manages to succinctly capture Jimmy’s internal struggles and fears as he

contemplates suicide.

The scene presents Hemingway in the role of great writer, as this dictated letter,

improvised on the spot, separates him from the others. Hemingway is exceptional because no one

else, not even Jimmy, who is actually facing death, can express complicated feelings as well as

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he can. The film makes the point that only a writer like Hemingway could put those complex

emotions, the sort of emotions that would drive a young person to suicide, into such elegant

words.

Also of note is the way the production team inserts other aspects of Hemingway’s

persona to connect their Hemingway to the larger mythos. Specifically, Hemingway’s mention of

a fear of the dark in the letter alludes to the real Hemingway’s fear, which he developed after the

war (Dearborn 75); a fear that he frequently ascribed to his wounded veteran characters14.

Attenborough gives the audience a glimpse into Hemingway’s psyche as he projects his fears and

anxieties onto Jimmy through this fabricated letter. That projection can be understood as a

transference rather than something Hemingway just creates in the moment because of what is

known about Hemingway as a person and his literary tendencies. While the scene works whether

or not a viewer has that knowledge, the depth of Ernie’s character becomes greater for those who

recognize how the filmmakers are constructing the character out of aspects of Hemingway’s

public persona.

Attenborough’s film again draws from Hemingway’s literary work by making clear

allusions to the novel most closely associated with the events of the film, A Farewell to Arms.

For instance, despite Von Kurowsky’s insistence that she and Hemingway never consummated

their relationship (Dearborn 66), the film includes a sequence in which the two spend a night

together in a brothel before being separated, a clear allusion to Frederick and Catherine’s night

together in the novel. The blending of the fictional and the biographical makes Hemingway’s

fiction the basis for his biography, rather than the other way around. We are not viewing the

story of Hemingway’s life as it happened, but rather are looking through a lens affected by the

way he fictionalized what happened, which is then grafted back on to him as biography. The real

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Hemingway and his real relationship with Von Kurowsky mixes with the fictionalized

Hemingway (Frederick Henry), and the fictionalized version of the relationship (A Farewell to

Arms). The actual events as they took place in 1918 are mixed with a fictionalized version of the

events as they were written in 1929. These events assemble into a narrative that is posited as

factual, even though it too draws from the Hemingway mythos, rather than strict biography,

while simultaneously creating new aspects of that same mythos.

This reworking via the blending of fact and fiction is furthered by the filmmakers through

an invented ending used both to provide closure and to further the connections between the

Hemingway character and the larger persona. As the film ends, Von Kurowsky, who has broken

off their engagement, journeys to a cabin to see Hemingway, who is spending the summer there,

trying to write. After an apology, which the stubborn Hemingway refuses to accept, she offers a

proclamation of love, one that he flatly ignores. The scene implies that it was this affair that

came to shape Hemingway as a person. His ability to coldly refuse Von Kurowsky, and to move

on so thoroughly is presented as a precursor to Hemingway’s tendency to betray or abandon

friends and mentors like Stein, Pound, and Fitzgerald, and explains his frequent marriages and

divorces.

This notion is reinforced through a voice-over from Von Kurowsky that ends the film.

She says about the breakup, “some say he lived with the pain of it all his life,” a sentiment that

has been proposed by biographers like Jeffrey Meyers, who wrote that this relationship made

Von Kurowsky “the most influential woman in Hemingway’s life, apart from his mother” (41).

Hence, we are to understand that this is the point from which grew everything good and bad

about Hemingway as a person, and an artist. This idea is driven home through the film’s final set

of images. The voice-over continues, “The hurt boy became the angry man, a brilliant, tough

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adventurer who was the most famous writer of his generation.” Attenborough chooses to freeze

the frame as we hear this voice-over, leaving us to look at O’Donnell’s face while he stares out

the window with a forlorn gaze. The image then goes out of focus as a black and white photo of

Hemingway at age eighteen is superimposed over O’Donnell’s face. This image shifts to an

image of Hemingway at around 40 years old, mustachioed and squinting. Finally, the image

morphs again into the famous Karsh portrait, which lingers a few seconds longer than the rest of

the images as the screen fades to black. This use of superimposition is vital in melding

O’Donnell’s star persona with Hemingway’s character in the film, and his larger persona outside

the film. In this final moment the film invokes the historical Hemingway and the mythos that

surrounds him. The prominence of O’Donnell’s star image, along with the subtlety with which

aspects of Hemingway’s persona are employed, results in a reconfiguration in which Hemingway

becomes O’Donnell much more than O’Donnell becomes Hemingway. O’Donnell’s performance

achieves what Custen and Bingham describe as the pleasure of the biopic performance. The

recognition of the subject, and the ability of a viewer to see the subject as a character, is mixed

with and bolstered by the recognition of the actor playing that subject. O’Donnell and the

production team have crafted their Hemingway character from a well-blended mix of subtle

character references, historical attributes, and O’Donnell’s star image, to present the character on

screen without relying on impersonation.

The more subtle approach to character employed in In Love and War has not been

replicated by later Hemingway film biographers, nor do we find characters constructed with such

psychological depth in the post-Midnight in Paris era. Often, as is clear from Clive Owen’s

performance in Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012), it is quite the opposite. Instead of relying on his

star image as O’Donnell did, Owen and the production team (which included director Philip

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Kaufman and screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner) drew extensively from

Hemingway’s public persona, layering on physical attributes, vocal approximations, quotations

(both real and apocryphal), and fully made up characteristics sometimes based on Hemingway’s

mythology, but more often constructed from assumptions about period-specific expressions of

masculinity.

Perhaps we can attribute at least some of this penchant for imitation rather than

characterization to the influence of Philip Seymore Hoffman’s monumental performance as

Truman Capote in the previously mention Bennet Miller film, Capote. In a tribute to Hoffman

after his death in 2014, Adam Smith wrote in Empire magazine that “Hoffman’s transformation

into Truman Capote remains one of the great achievements of any recent film career” (26). For

actors attempting to portray historical figures, Hoffman’s performance became the aspirational

standard. We can see such attempts at transformation, with varying degrees of success, in post-

Capote performances by Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln,

Michele Williams as Marilyn Monroe, Brian Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, Eddie Redmayne as

Stephen Hawking, and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. Except for Lincoln, each of these

figures were prominent twentieth century media personalities with hours of footage documenting

their recognizable characteristics and mannerisms. Hemingway, on the other hand, despite being

photographed often, was rarely filmed, and so we are left with very little footage of the way

Hemingway spoke, moved, and behaved, especially in his younger years. What footage that does

exist of Hemingway is not nearly as prominent as that of Monroe, Capote, or Thatcher, and so it

would have been simple for Owen’s performance to operate similarly to O’Donnell’s. Instead,

Owen pushes the boundaries of credulity with his hyper-masculine, over-the-top performance.

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He creates a visual imitation assembled from Hemingway’s mythology, expectations of

masculinity, and the prevailing shape of the fictocel Hemingway.

The costuming and makeup department tasked with turning Owen into Hemingway drew

inspiration from images of the author during the late 1930s, a decade he spent cultivating the

look and lifestyle of a sportsman to help sell the adventurer lifestyle he had been propagating in

Esquire magazine. During this era, Hemingway was often photographed with windswept hair,

wire-rimmed glasses, and a few days’ stubble, in addition to a dark mustache, and dressed in

shabby island clothes. Owen’s Hemingway is not the insecure and lovelorn teenager, the

bohemian writer in 1920s Paris, nor the shambling middle-aged man, frustrated and unsure of his

talents. Rather, the film presents the self-assured “greatest writer in the world,” confident in his

genius, and ready to fistfight anyone who might disagree with him. Owen’s Hemingway stalks

around his Key West home making overly serious proclamations, taking over every room he

enters, and chomping on a cigar. More than one reviewer was quick to point out how much more

Owen, with his penchant for one-liners and his overly expressive eyebrows, resembles Groucho

Marx than Hemingway. The lengths the production team went to to make sure that Owen looked

the part is a complete reversal from the approach taken by the producers of In Love and War.

Owen is a movie star in his own right and could easily have absorbed Hemingway into his

persona but chooses instead to perform an imitation in which he layers attributes associated with

Hemingway onto himself to disappear into the other persona. Nicole Kidman, who plays Martha

Gellhorn, makes no similar attempt, other than to affect an American accent. Kidman portrays

Gellhorn through her star image in a way that conforms to Custen’s description of biopic

performances.

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Owen’s attempt to replicate Hemingway’s voice is another sign of his imitative approach

to embodying the character. Rather than performing the dialogue with an unaffected American

version of his own voice, Owen makes the choice do a vocal imitation. In an interview at the 92nd

Street Y, Owen says that he arrived at the Hemingway voice after working with a vocal coach

and archival recordings of Hemingway speaking; however, he does not mention which

recordings he listened to. Based on the performance, in which Owen approximates a midwestern

drawl and deliberate tone, it seems likely that a major influence was Hemingway’s narration of

The Spanish Earth. Since, in that film, Hemingway is very clearly reciting pre-written narration,

Owen’s adoption of the pacing and determined tone of Hemingway’s speech patterns in The

Spanish Earth, results in line readings that feel more like recitations than spontaneous speech. It

is fascinating that the production team made this choice, especially because the stylized nature of

the performance is incongruent with the naturalistic performances of the other actors in the film,

especially Kidman.

This approach reveals the power and prominence of the one-dimensionality that is a

common attribute of the fictocel Hemingway. Owen’s performance is less an attempt to portray

Hemingway as a fully formed character than it is an attempt to evoke the self-assured, macho

image of Hemingway common in popular culture. This is even more obvious when we consider

that the screenwriters could have drawn inspiration for Hemingway’s dialogue from documented

records of the way he spoke, such as the easily available and well-known Ross profile. There are

no instances in the film of Hemingway’s rambling speeches, baseball references, or “Indian” talk

that are such a prevalent part of his portrayal in the piece. Of course, Ross’ profile was, and

continues to be, a point of contention for Hemingway observers as it presents an unappealing

version of the author. In a preface to the publication of the article in book form shortly after

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Hemingway’s death, Ross wrote about her critics, saying, “they didn’t like Hemingway to be

Hemingway. The wanted him to be somebody else – probably themselves. So they came to the

conclusion that either Hemingway had not been portrayed as he was or, if he was that way, I

shouldn’t have written about him at all” (17-18). This is similar to the way Stoll describes his

reaction to hearing Hemingway’s voice, and his decision to craft his performance out of the idea

of Hemingway, rather than the actual person. That decision has made Stoll’s Hemingway very

attractive to audiences, especially admirers of Hemingway, despite its inaccuracies. Hence, the

production team behind Hemingway & Gellhorn chose to craft Owen’s Hemingway in the mold

of the one-dimensional mythological figure, rather than presenting a more complex rendition.

Owen’s stylistic rather than naturalistic characterization is most obvious when we

consider the frequent one-liners Hemingway tosses off throughout the film. While most of

Hemingway’s lines are delivered with the staccato style already discussed, throughout the film

Hemingway often pauses for emphasis before delivering some bon mot, meant to sound as

though it were conceived spontaneously. Some of these one-liners are paraphrases of quotes

from books he had yet to write, and are meant to give Hemingway a philosophic air, such as

when, after watching newsreel footage of Franco’s victory in Spain, Hemingway says, “man can

be destroyed, but not defeated,” a paraphrase of the famous line “A man can be destroyed, but

not defeated” (103), from The Old Man and the Sea. Later in the film, Hemingway draws from a

posthumous release when he quotes Marita from The Garden of Eden, who claims, “Happiness

in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” (97).

While those quotations can be verifiably attributed to Hemingway, the screenwriters also

include several apocryphal quotes. For instance, at various points throughout the film

Hemingway states, “There’s nothing to writing, all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed;”

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“The best writers are all liars;” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls is selling like ice cream in Hell.”

None of these quotes can be verified as actually having been uttered by Hemingway, and appear

nowhere in his writing, even in the known letters. Yet, a quick Google search for the phrases

turns up numerous quotation websites that attribute them to Hemingway, alongside endless

memes that superimpose the words over public domain images of the author. Through endless

unchecked repetition (often propagated by countless social media reposts), these phrases have

become a part of the Hemingway mythos and therefore contribute to the shape of his surround.

The screenwriters have inserted these quotes into what is billed as a factual biopic, thereby

reinforcing aspects of his persona that, despite being inaccurate, are becoming increasingly

identifiable and important to his public persona.

Hemingway & Gellhorn and Owen’s performance are largely defined by a not always

successful attempt to graft Hemingway’s persona onto Owen by having him say things

Hemingway said, or at least things that he was purported to have said, or at the very least, things

that sound like something Hemingway could have said. These quotes are then passed through a

vocal performance that seeks to imitate a popular idea of what Hemingway sounded like,

wrapped in costume and makeup choices designed to make Owen look like Hemingway, and

bolstered by attributes that seem to reinforce ideas of masculinity, despite not being actual

attributes of Hemingway15. Thus, we can see the production team attempting to creating

something Hemingwayesque by inserting as many aspects of his persona as the film could fit,

just as Allen and the mid-century producers did. While the aim of blending these attributes with

Owen’s performance may have been to create an accurate version of Hemingway, what the

production team really accomplishes is a bolstering and expansion of the fictocel.

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In terms of the ventriloquism analogy, in Hemingway & Gellhorn we see an increase in

the parodic nature of the visual and performative representation of Hemingway even as the

dialogue comes more in line with actual quotes. As I have already pointed out, not everything

offered up by the film as a Hemingway quote is verifiable. The dialogue here goes beyond the

attempts in The Moderns, In Love and War, and Midnight in Paris, to present dialogue in the

Hemingway form. Yet the performance manages to seem even more like a ventriloquist act

because of the way its visual presentation feels like more of a parody than the earlier iterations.

The performance of masculinity in the film is important to consider in terms of Rehling’s

wounded masculinity. In a scene meant to mark the beginning of the end of their relationship,

Hemingway, who has become increasingly incensed about the amount of time Gellhorn has been

away on assignments, announces that he is taking a job as war correspondent for Collier’s

magazine, meaning that he has taken her job, since Collier’s would not pay for two war

correspondents. While this sequence is based on historical events, including Hemingway’s

resentment of Gellhorn’s career16, the film emphasizes Hemingway’s wounded masculinity by

couching his announcement in a fight in which she belittles his pursuit of German U-boats off

the coast of Cuba as childish and pointless. The filmmakers even insert a moment of spousal

abuse by having Hemingway slap Gellhorn across the face before telling her she could never

understand just how much she needed for him to hit her17. In reality, Hemingway’s going to work

for Collier’s was not the devastating act that would seal the end of their marriage. In fact,

Gellhorn, according to Dearborn, was surprisingly helpful in arranging Hemingway’s trip to

Europe (444). That narrative, however, does not fit as well when portraying Hemingway as a

wounded male attempting to regain some of the ground taken from him by a woman, even if that

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woman is his wife. This emphasis has everything to do with the brash masculinity so associated

with the fictocel Hemingway, and the “golden age” of manliness it has come to represent.

We can trace a similar trend toward ventriloquizing in Papa Hemingway in Cuba,

released in 2015, which deals with the final few years that Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) spent in

Cuba. While the title of the film promotes the centrality of Hemingway, the narrative is primarily

focused on the young writer character named Ed Meyers (Giovanni Ribisi). Meyers is a

fictionalization of the aforementioned Denne Petitclerc, a journalist and writer whose only other

public connection to Hemingway is as the adaptor of Islands in the Stream. Despite frequent

announcements in promotional material, and a title card in the film’s opening credits claiming

that the movie is “A True Story”, the narrative seems embellished, with unsubstantiated subplots

about Hemingway’s gun running activities, and Meyer’s clandestine meetings with FBI agents

and mafia dons ratcheting up the tension. For this reason, the production team works hard to

ground the fantastical nature of the narrative by incorporating many aspects of Hemingway’s

identity into the film as a way of beefing up its claim to authenticity.

Much like the screenplay of Hemingway & Gellhorn, Petitclerc’s screenplay is rife with

quotations and anecdotes meant to make the Hemingway character sound and act more like the

Hemingway persona. For instance, early in the film Hemingway is giving Meyers writing advice

when he commands him to pick a number. Meyers picks six, and Hemingway sets out to write a

full story in six words on a napkin. The story he writes is the famous Baby Shoes story18, the

attribution of which to Hemingway, and the circumstances of its composition, is unverified,

despite being a well-known and often cited aspect of Hemingway’s mythology. Petitclerc also

inserts several actual Hemingway quotes, such as “the faces of the dead are all the same19,” “one

true sentence20,” and “How do you like it now, gentlemen?21” While the quotes are mostly

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accurate, and easily confirmed, Petitclerc disassociates them from their context, making them

seem like spontaneous quips, rather than painstakingly designed statements or, as in the case of

“gentlemen,” an often repeated catchphrase. As they did in Owen’s performances, these aspects

of Hemingway’s persona layer onto the performance as a way of lending veracity to the

character. It is a step beyond the characterizations in Midnight in Paris or The Moderns where

paraphrases, imagined early versions of later famous quotations, and statements that sound

Hemingwayesque were staples of the dialogue. This extra step reveals a stronger desire to create

a character that is not simply a parody, or vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway, but is a fully

fleshed out rendition of the real person. The approach does not work as well as Attenborough’s

technique to build a believable character first by blending O’Donnell’s star persona with subtle

references to Hemingway’s life and reported personality. Ultimately, the use of these quotes

reinforces the feeling that Sparks is constantly relying on imitation, which never allows the

performance to leave the realm of parodic ventriloquism.

Another way the production team attempts to overcome the problematic nature of the

narrative through the much-publicized use of the actual locations where the events took place22.

Unlike Hemingway & Gellhorn, which was shot entirely in and around San Francisco (The

Location Guide), and employed sets meant to approximate the spaces Hemingway occupied,

Papa Hemingway was shot in locations around Havana, including the Hotel Ambos Mundos,

The Floridita Bar, and the Finca Vigia. While both the Floridita (Figure 4.1) and Ambos Mundos

(Figure 4.2) are still operating business establishments, they both dedicate considerable space to

commemorations of Hemingway, and his connection with them. As well, the Finca Vagia is

preserved exactly as Ernest and Mary left it in the late 1950s and is now maintained as a museum

by the Cuban government. These spaces, all major tourist draws in Cuba, are a significant part of

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Hemingway’s surround, and so the considerable lengths the production team went to, to shoot in

these spaces is a clear attempt to create veracity through the use of superficial elements of

Hemingway’s public persona.

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2

Throughout the film Sparks not only looks, sounds, and acts like Hemingway (or at least

the popular perception of Hemingway) but he does all of that looking, sounding, and acting, in

the spaces where Hemingway did similar things. Sparks sits on Hemingway’s couch, he drinks

daiquiris at Hemingway’s favourite bar, he listens to records on Hemingway’s stereo, he swims

in Hemingway’s pool, he eats at Hemingway’s table, and he struggles to write at Hemingway’s

typewriter. Director Yari, discussing the effect the location shooting had on the performances,

said, “I remember Adrian standing in exactly the spot in the bedroom that Hemingway used to

stand while he was writing, … He came to me later and said: ‘That is when I stopped acting and

starting channeling Hemingway’” (Garcia). The ability to access a touch of the “aura” that

pervades the locations is, according to the production narrative, as important a part of

constructing Hemingway as a character in the film as costuming, dialogue, well-known

anecdotes, and historical references, as they meld into one another over the course of the film’s

running time. Shooting in Hemingway’s house and haunts tends to operate throughout the film as

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a way of employing realism to mitigate against potential accusations of inaccuracy that may

derive from the often-outrageous narrative.

Papa Hemingway in Cuba also has a complicated relationship with the shape of the

fictocel Hemingway as it both relies on, and offers a correction to, the version of Hemingway the

fictocel has come to represent. A major theme of the film is the deconstruction of Hemingway’s

macho persona. He is shown as gregarious and confident throughout the film, with moments of

touching sensitivity and real genius; however, alongside these generous instances, there are

frequent takedowns of his boastfulness, and scenes meant to suggest his mental instability.

Hemingway has severe writer’s block, and more than once Mary Hemingway (Joely Richardson)

takes pleasure in pointing out how repetitive he has become with his anecdotes. In fact, the main

narrative of the film revolves around Ed’s disillusionment with the real Hemingway after having

idolized him for so long. In many ways, the film is a direct challenge to the dominant narrative,

even as the film’s portrayal of Hemingway reinforces aspects of the fictocel version and

contributes new attributes to Hemingway as a cultural figure.

Returning to New Girl, we can see how the exaggerated claims based on archaic ideas of

masculinity mixed with a level of insecurity on the part of Nick, reflects the development and

prominence of the fictocel Hemingway. The contemporary shape of Hemingway’s reputation,

based on real and imagined physical traits, portrayals of him by various actors to varying degrees

of success, his economic and direct writing style, notions of 1950s masculinity, and the

popularity of Midnight in Paris, has resulted in a complex and prismatic persona. Culturally

speaking, Hemingway is understood to be a writer, but that aspect of his persona is never as

important as his role as adventurer, and icon of an era of masculinity that no longer exists, if it

ever did. It is very telling that in New Girl, Nick, an aspiring writer, expresses no desire to write

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like Hemingway, but rather to live like him, as though “running with the bulls,” “killing a man

with his bare hands,” or “eating his way out of a sandwich house” would somehow endow the

hilariously unqualified Nick with Hemingway’s talent without him having to do any of the real

work necessary to become a great writer.

We can see a similar prioritization of the life over the work in every biographical

representation of Hemingway. Whether chasing stories as an intrepid reporter, pontificating on

what it means to be a “real” man, or hunting a minotaur, it is consistently the life of adventure

that is most important to understanding the Hemingway character. Writing, when it is mentioned,

is just an excuse to get closer to the adventure that will slake his seemingly unquenchable thirst

for action. These choices are not difficult to understand, after all, the adventuring, drinking,

pontificating Hemingway is far more interesting on screen than when he stands at his typewriter,

either obnoxiously hammering out pages, while inventing axioms about how great he is at

writing (see Hemingway & Gellhorn) or struggling late in life, to get even a single word onto the

page (see Papa Hemingway in Cuba). It only makes sense that production teams, in their desire

to make an interesting character, draw more frequently from the impression that Hemingway was

a gregarious figure, quick with a drink and some biting witticism, ever ready to set out on his

next globetrotting adventure, or fistfight (see Midnight in Paris).

The prioritization of Hemingway’s life over the work in the development of the fictocel

has, importantly, resulted in a substantial shift in Hemingway’s celebrity persona. As Rojek

points out, “Celebrity construction and presentation involve an imaginary public face. In the case

of celeactors, there is no veridical self, and the public face is entirely a fictional one” (25). While

the historical Hemingway had a veridical self, he existed in the world and he participated in

activities that contributed to the construction of his celebrity persona, the fictocel Hemingway,

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being a mostly fictionalized character, does not, in the same way, have a veridical self. Yet, due

to the nature of Hemingway’s development as a celebrity figure, it is now the fictocel that

dominates discourses about him in popular culture. It is a fictionalized version of Hemingway

that is most often responded to, celebrated, or critiqued in the realm of popular culture. This goes

back to what Dyer writes about the nature of the star image. “The ‘truth’ about a character’s

personality and the feelings which it evokes,” Dyer writes, “may be determined by what the

reader takes to be the truth about the person … playing the part” (125). In a strange reversal of

the actor/character dichotomy, the fictocel Hemingway is now “playing the part” of Hemingway,

the historical figure, in the popular imaginary. It is not the full picture of who Hemingway was,

what he represented, or the work he created, but in the current media environment, the fictocel

has become the source of the ‘truth’ of his personality and governs the “feelings which [that

personality] evokes.” The fictocel Hemingway is not the real Hemingway, in the same way that a

reality show, with its contrived situations, and heavy editing, does not present a real, ‘ordinary’

person, but a constructed persona built out of countless hours of footage of that person. Yet, it is

frequently the most readily available and easily digestible version of a persona that dominates the

public impression and opinion about that persona.

This is why cultural commentators feel free to trot out Hemingway whenever they require

a male chauvinist punching bag to prove a point. It is why the name Hemingway has become

shorthand for those nostalgic for an (often imagined) time when America produced powerful

writers and manly men. The dominance of the fictocel is also the reason journalists rarely fact

check before including apocryphal quotes and anecdotes in their articles. The fictocel is, for the

general populace, the historical person. It is the fictocel that is now revered, reviled, reacted to,

and represented all over modern culture, spreading beyond film and TV to include internet

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productions, theatre, meme culture, graphic and prose novels, Twitter accounts23, lifestyle

brands, mattress stores, bars and eateries, high-end hotels, and even physical spaces like his

former homes in Oak Park, Key West, and Havana. In the twenty-first century media landscape,

there is no longer just an author named Ernest Hemingway who wrote a handful of once-

influential novels. That person is merely one iteration of the prismatic entity that has gone far

beyond even his own considerable ambitions.

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Notes

1 A Farewell to Arms (2012), The Sun also Rises (2014), Green Hills of Africa (2015), The

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (2017), For Whom the Bell Tolls (2019), and The Old Man

and the Sea (2020).

2 There have been several literary, stage, and television projects that have either created

fictionalized versions of Hemingway, or proport to be mostly accurate biographical treatments of

his life. Ron McFarland’s book length study, Appropriating Hemingway: Using Him as a

Fictional Character, focusses primarily on the literary creations, but does dedicate a chapter to

examining some of the visual media treatments.

3 Consider how much of the popular notion of King Richard III is based on Shakespeare’s

depiction of him as having a hunchback, a characterization that was disproven after the 2012

discovery of his bones under a parking lot in Leicester, England (NYT 4 Feb 2013).

4 Consider Dyer’s extensive argument in Stars for the charismatic power of Marylin

Monroe being associated with her ability to “‘be’ the very tensions that ran through the

ideological life of 50s America” (31).

5 The admirer was correct when he states 227 pieces of shrapnel, Hemingway’s correction

of 270 is an exaggeration.

6 Archibald MacLeish described Hemingway in the mid-twenties as “a charming, sweet-

natured person … He was also blessed with a tremendous physical presence.” Hemingway was

the only person MacLeish had known “other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt who could exhaust

the oxygen in a room just by walking into it” (Donaldson 144-145).

7 This is a paraphrase of a quote from Bill in “Three Day’s Blow” where he says that

“Once a man is married he’s absolutely bitched” (90).

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8 According to IMDB.com, The Moderns was released in theatres on 15 April 1988 and

Hemingway was first broadcast on 16 May 1988.

9 Eastman’s 1933 review of Death in the Afternoon for the New Republic, referred to

Hemingway’s “continual sense of obligation to show evidence of red-blooded masculinity.” He

goes on to say that Hemingway has “formed a literary style of wearing false hair on the chest”

(Eastman 131). Perkins, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, reported that Hemingway opened his

shirt to show his hairy chest before exposing Eastman’s mostly bare chest. The fight escalated

after Hemingway shoved a copy of Eastman’s book, containing the offending review in

Eastman’s face. The two grappled shortly before Hemingway, smiling, relented and the two

made up (Baker 317).

10 The often-GIFed image of Stoll, bottle in hand, challenging anyone nearby to a fight,

serves as a perfect example.

11 Hemingway did not go on his first safari until 1933, and that was with his second wife,

Pauline, not a random Paris woman he happened to be infatuated with at the time.

12 Consider the popularity of remakes and nostalgic TV shows like Stranger Things, or the

tenor and content of Donald Trump’s election campaign.

13 This is not entirely accurate, as a much slighter “Critical Biography” by Verna Kale was

released in 2016.

14 See Nick Adams in “Now I Lay Me” and “A Place You’ll Never Be,” the old man and

the older waiter in “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” and Jake Barnes in The Sun also Rises.

15 Smoking cigars, for instance. In a Forbes article about Hemingway & Gellhorn from 21

July 2012, Patrick Hemingway stated that his father never smoked cigars (Kendall).

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16 There is evidence that Hemingway resented Gellhorn’s prioritizing of her career over

their marriage, or rather, her care for him. An often-cited example is a cable Hemingway sent

wherein he demanded to know if Gellhorn was “A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN

MY BED?” (Dearborn 445).

17 This is another example of a production team blending Hemingway’s writing into the

character. This is paraphrase of a line that Richard Gordon says to his wife after slapping her in

Chapter 21 of To Have and Have Not (188).

18 The entirety of the story reads as follows: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

19 A quote from the narration Hemingway wrote and recited in The Spanish Earth.

20 A Moveable Feast (12).

21 Somewhat of a catchphrase, he is quoted as asking this rhetorical question several times

in the infamous 1950 New Yorker article written by Lillian Ross.

22 A lot of the film’s early publicity centered around the fact that it was the first American

film production shot in Cuba since the revolution (Hollywood Reporter).

23 At present there are six Ernest Hemingway Twitter accounts. None of which are

connected the Hemingway estate, or to each other. The purposes of the accounts range from

parody, to political comment, to a location for propagating real and apocryphal quotes. The

handles are as follows: @hemingsteen, @ehemingway, @_hemingway_, @dailyhemingway,

@phlegmingway, @nothemingway.

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Conclusion

Near the end of the 1961 Michelangelo Antonioni film La Notte, Giovanni (Marcello

Mastroianni) has a short conversation with a man he meets at a party.

“One day last year in year in Venice, I invited that American author to dinner –

what’s his name? The one who hunts elephants.”

“Hemingway?”

“That’s the one. Now there’s a man for you! A real artist! I told him, ‘my dear

Hemingway, I like you. I’ll come visit you on your farm in Cuba one day.’ You know

how he replied? ‘If you do, I’ll shoot you.’ There’s a man who really knows his business.

He earns all the money he wants. Millions of dollars.”

Almost forty years later, in a teen romantic comedy called 10 Things I Hate About You, a student

named Kat (Julia Stiles) gets annoyed when one of her classmates proclaims her love for The Sun

also Rises, calling its author “so romantic.” “Romantic? Hemingway?!” Kat responds in disgusts,

“He was an abusive alcoholic misogynist who squandered half his life hanging around Picasso

trying to nail his leftovers.”

At the risk of nit-picking, it is important to note that neither of these depictions of

Hemingway are accurate: he did not hunt elephants, there are no documented cases of him

threatening to shoot someone, especially someone who paid for his dinner, and throughout his

life he rarely had all the money he could have wanted1. On the opinion espoused in the second

film, it’s true that Hemingway was no saint, but to characterize the entirety of his personality as

“abusive alcoholic misogynist” is unfair. The handful of years he spent in Paris were hardly half

his life, and the idea that he was trying to “nail” Picasso’s “leftovers” (a reference to women that

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is more than slightly misogynistic itself) is based on unsubstantiated rumours about one woman

in particular.

I begin with these two moments not as an attempt to either bring Hemingway down to

earth, nor to defend him, but rather to explore the exaggerated role his celebrity persona has

taken on, even in cursory references to his personality. While the artifacts of what made

Hemingway an ‘achieved’ celebrity, specifically his novels and short stories, are still easily

accessible and continue to sell well, their prominence within his popular image is far less than

his reputation as a macho adventurer, and have been so for the better part of the last sixty years.

Consider, for example, that in both films the characters’ interest in Hemingway quickly shifts

from his being an author, or a discussion of his work, to him specifically. This change, which

occurs repeatedly in multiple medial representations, is intrinsically linked to Hemingway’s

medial representations both during his life and especially after his death. Whether his literary

work, his journalism and memoir writing, his appearances in gossip columns and magazine

profiles, his association with men’s magazines, the products he endorsed, the adaptations of his

work, or the appropriation of his image into film, theatre, and television projects; each of these

interactions push the personal aspects of the complex configuration of his persona to the

forefront. As I have endeavored to argue throughout this project, it is cinema and, more recently,

television, that were not only major elements of his public persona construction, but have, in the

twenty-first century, become the most important site for the reconfiguration of Hemingway as a

figure of popular culture.

To trace the role of cinema in Hemingway’s rise to prominence, I have examined the

development of his public persona through the lens of celebrity. This theoretical framework is

particularly useful when considering Hemingway not only because Hemingway was, and

237

continues to be, a celebrity figure, but also because the theories around celebrity provide a useful

taxonomy and trajectory for understanding the transformation of the Hemingway persona into a

near mythological, and certainly fictionalized figure in popular culture. For most of

Hemingway’s public life, the structured polysemy both he and the many other media

stakeholders constructed around him foregrounded the personal aspects of his life over his

professional accomplishments. Despite Hemingway’s beginning as what Leo Lowenthal would

call an “idol of production,” or what Rojek would call a “achieved” celebrity, he quickly became

an “idol of consumption,” or an “attributed celebrity.” The popularity of Hemingway’s

“synthetic experiences:” his novels, primarily, drove a desire for what Roach calls “public

intimacy” with the “tantalizing apparition” that is the celebrity. Media entities like magazine

profiles and gossip columns, along with Hemingway’s writing about himself through his

journalism, memoirs, and especially the Esquire letters, fed the desire for intimacy, or at least

intimate knowledge, that, according to celebrity theorists like Graeme Turner, P. David Marshal,

Leo Braudy, Su Holmes, and others, remains a marker of celebrity. Despite the fact that celebrity

is always a cultural construct built out of various medial disseminations from performances,

gossip columns, interviews, and rumours, fans and observers feel an ability to glean some

conception of the “truth” about the person at the centre of a celebrity image. As celebrity culture

has pervaded into more realms, the appeal of any public figure, whether an actor, athlete,

politician, or YouTube personality, is based on presenting believably candid expressions of who

they are in “real life.” For Hemingway, however, the development of his persona has continued

in the sixty years since his death as he has been used repeatedly as a character by content creators

who reconfigure his persona to such a degree that he has become a fictionalized celebrity, or

fictocel. This process has made him an amorphous figure, prismatic enough to have ascribed to it

238

multiple, and sometime contradictory attributes, as we see with the two examples with which I

began my conclusion.

To investigate mechanisms that transformed Hemingway from a respected literary figure

into what is essentially a fictional character, I began, in my first chapter, by exploring the way

Hemingway’s persona was propagated and reconfigured from 1930 to 1960 via the promotional

strategies employed to market the adaptations of his works. As any public persona is a prismatic

entity, with varying points of access that lead to varying understandings of its identity, a

celebrity image is the confluence of every attribute ascribed to the celebrity. The Hollywood

studios, and their marketing departments, designed advertising campaigns and publicity that

exploited whichever aspect of Hemingway’s image that was most advantageous their respective

marketing approaches. Since Hemingway was a figure of middlebrow appeal, there were many

avenues for promotion. Whether Hemingway was presented as a genteel author of prestige, or a

hard-boiled writer of stories filled with raw and rugged adventure, the marketing departments

constantly found ways to exploit his considerable drawing power. Each of these marketing

approaches not only worked to sell the film, but also added new aspects to Hemingway’s persona

in the popular discourse.

The ad campaigns, which tended to flatten Hemingway into one saleable, easy-to-

consume aspect of his persona, resulted in three prominent versions of Hemingway: the hard-

boiled writer of noir crime stories and a figure of adventure as epitomized in films like The

Killers, To Have and Have Not and The Gun Runners; the womanizer, a version brimming with

toxic masculinity, which is particularly strong in the promotional material for The Macomber

Affair and The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and the prestige author, whose critical and commercial

success meant that films like The Sun also Rises, A Farewell to Arms (1957), and The Old Man

239

and the Sea touted their connections to his literary genius in the hopes of gaining a level of

prestige. It is interesting to note how prevalent these aspects of Hemingway’s persona remain

within the contemporary manifestations of his structured polysemy.

In my second chapter, I continued to examine how Hemingway’s public persona was

reshaped by Hollywood by looking at the way both he and his writing were reconfigured through

adaptations of his works. The films I discussed in this chapter were based on either short stories,

or small sections of longer works. The brevity of the original works meant that the production

teams needed to find ways to fill the gaps in character or narrative content. There were two

primary approaches to these films, and each had a significant impact on the reconfiguration of

Hemingway’s public persona. The first was to fill out the narrative with original material, usually

drawn from popular genre conventions. We can see this approach in The Killers, Under my Skin,

The Macomber Affair, and the To Have and Have Not adaptations, each of which contain

narrative elements unrelated to Hemingway’s work. The result is that the image of Hemingway

as a writer became, in the minds of popular audiences, something closer to what the films

present. In the second approach, the filmmakers turned to Hemingway’s other writing and

personal life. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Sun also Rises, and Hemingway’s Adventures of a

Young Man are assemblages of textual and intertextual readings of his work, blended with

known personal and private attributes. While the films are not faithful to any one specific text,

they are faithful to the ur-text that is Hemingway’s persona. If, as is the popular (and sometimes

academic) assumption, all of Hemingway’s writing is little more than thinly-veiled

autobiography, than it is possible that viewers may read these cinematic adaptations as

biographical, as well.

240

The desire to connect to the “tantalizing apparition” Roach describes became significant

in the approaches employed by the production teams I discuss in my third chapter. Rather than

treating Hemingway as just another author, or jettisoning most of his narrative while cashing in

on his celebrity capital, the filmmakers behind A Farewell to Arms (1957), For Whom the Bell

Tolls, The Sun also Rises, and The Old Man and the Sea attempted to get as much Hemingway

into their films as possible. These films traffic in the prestige Hemingway enjoyed at the times of

their respective production, hoping that some of what made Hemingway so critically and

commercially successful would translate into critical and commercial success for them. In the

production histories of these films, we can see a considerable effort on the part of the creative

teams to appease Hemingway and thereby receive his authorial blessing over their projects.

Within the films, there exists frequent attempts at narrative fidelity, and significant deference to

Hemingway’s preferences. Much of the fealty on the part of the production teams relates to Dyer

and Weber’s notions of charisma. Hemingway was a symbol of critical and commercial stability,

something the Hollywood studios of the 1950s, especially, sorely lacked in the wake of major

disruptions to their business models. In a time when Hollywood was “uncertain, unstable and

ambiguous” (Dyer 31), Hemingway’s continued success offered a calming reassurance.

The importance of presenting biographical elements of Hemingway on the screen can be

read in the 1977 adaptation of Island in the Stream. The film reconstructs Hemingway and his

novel, both visually and narratively, out of the macho expressions of his persona. Additionally,

the film emphasizes the biographical aspects of Hemingway’s identity through visual imitation

via the film’s star George C. Scott, who is made up to look like the author. This visual imitation

points to another trend within this film, and the only other cinematic adaption of a Hemingway

work in the half century since his death, 2008’s Garden of Eden, specifically, the use of

241

adaptation as an excuse for telling a story that is really about Hemingway. This operates in both

films because the production teams push the biographical nature further by inserting narrative

elements from other stories, and biographical features that were not a part of the original texts.

Add to this the greater reliance on making the protagonists look like Hemingway, and it is clear

that even within the adaptations, which are ostensibly related to Hemingway’s work, the fixation

on biographical elements reveals the interest in his life.

This movement toward Hemingway’s life is the focus of my fourth chapter, where I trace

how cinematic and television treatments of Hemingway as a character both reveal, and further

facilitate his ever-changing public persona. This ongoing change occurs because in the most

popular on-screen versions of Hemingway he has become a mostly fictional character. While this

is true of all cinematic representations of historical figures, the Hemingway characters in many

movies and TV shows represent another step toward overt, and often celebratory fictionalization.

The result of these representations is that Hemingway’s persona in the popular discourse has

changed from an historical figure to a fictionalized celebrity: a fictocel. Although access to the

historical figure and his works is still prevalent, it is the fictocel Hemingway that is most

recognizable in the twenty-first century, a fictionalized version associated with macho pursuits

like hunting, fishing, war, drinking, fist fighting, womanizing, and a life of leisure. The fact that

so many of the attributes that have come to be associated with Hemingway are frequently

problematized in his literary work is now lost in a culture where his writing is far less important

than his image.

Hemingway, as a public figure, an ‘attributed’ celebrity, a public persona, or a fictocel,

has become so amorphous that he can represent multitudinous, and often contradictory ideals. He

is the prime example of the great American novelist, or he is another dead white male writer that

242

gets far too much affirmation; he is the epitome of masculine strength and stability, or he is a

tragic example of misdiagnosed mental illness; he is the paradigm of heterosexual masculinity,

or he is a surprisingly progressive thinker (given the era in which he wrote) about the fluidity of

gender; he was a brutal writer who had little respect for women both in his fiction and in his life,

or his often sensitive writing about emotional and sexual relationships reveal attitudes about sex

and gender that are too complex for the simple categorization favoured by popular discourses; he

was an asshole who disposed of people when they no longer had anything to offer him, or he was

a psychologically damaged person whose mental illness made relationships difficult; he was a

boisterous drunk whose desire for attention caused him to dominate social situations, or he

engaged in performative displays to mask the deep insecurity he felt.

Each of these interpretations is available in the endless medial discourses that surround

Hemingway, yet, as is often the case, the loudest voice is the one most often heard. As Dyer

points out, while an audience can select certain meanings or feelings from the complex

configuration of an image, the configuration that is the easiest to comprehend tends to be the

most popular; in Hemingway’s case, that configuration is a fictionalized “attributed” celebrity.

Hence, despite the many avenues available to contemporary observers, it is the fictocel version,

the result of over eighty years of medial dissemination, that dominates the discourse. This

condition is both a testament to Hemingway’s celebrity power, and to the power of celebrity.

243

Note

1 While Hemingway was wealthy in his later years, the level of wealth conjured by

“millions of dollars” is an exaggeration. According to a New York Times article dated 22

February 1964, the total value of Hemingway’s estate at the time of his death was $1.4 million.

244

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