I happened to see the above viral TikTok on the same evening that I got around to watching the recent Ken Burns' film Hemingway on PBS and was reminded that, on first reading The Sun Also Rises, my leading question was: The money that these people spend on liquor, hotels, and tickets to the bull fight while pursuing their pleasures across Europe—where does it come from? Jake Barnes has a job, but it doesn't appear to require attendance, and no one else puts up with workaday indignities either. On the evidence, one might develop the hypothesis that it's possible to be disillusioned while running down a trust fund.
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
"What brought it on?"
"Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England."
Yes, I can imagine. The film points out that, though Hemingway loved to recall his early days as a starving artist in Paris with first wife Hadley, the truth is they lived comfortably on her inheritance. Hadley was supplanted by wife #2, Pauline Pfeiffer, who was even more loaded with family wealth: seem to have been star-struck dilettantes too, happy to bankroll, for example, a months-long African safari. The book that came out of that experience was Green Hills of Africa, one of the leading exhibits in the Hemingway Masculinity Cult featuring him as the talkative expert on topics A to Z, including fishing, hunting, boxing, bull fighting, drinking, all matters military, and of course how-to-make-love-to-a-woman. Don't recall him mentioning that the safari, including the entourage functioning as the audience for his camp-fire wisdom, was paid for by his wife's family.
Somewhere, the literary critic Malcolm Cowley takes up the question of why so many literary geniuses seem to have been, in their private lives, insufferable narcissists. The conclusion of the discussion is a kind of linguistic shrug of the shoulders and the observation that (I'm going from memory) "no complete son-of-a-bitch ever wrote a good story." Many of Hemingway's best stories criticize, implicitly but to harrowing effect, a character who resembles the version of himself that he rather oddly enjoyed presenting to the world—this one, for instance, which Burns also highlights.
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