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But Hendrickson believes it was also a mask covering up “a tortured sexual ambiguity.” That “Kansas City-boy brutality,” as Gertrude Stein called it, was an authentic part of him. He understood there was something about himself so sensitive, a tuning-fork tremulousness, that it was almost as though it shamed him, and he put on the he-man act.” But now scholars, ironically including great female scholars, have burrowed down into him and found this sly and deceptive sensitivity toward women. Hendrickson notes that after Hemingway’s death, “it was very fashionable to put him down for his misogyny. “Much of Hemingway’s work, particularly the stories he wrote during his marriage to Hadley,” she said, “brilliantly chart the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.” Especially now that women are rising and men are declining, as The Atlantic has noted in two cover stories, women can feel secure enough to “relax and enjoy him,” as Diliberto puts it. They all wanted to be Hemingway, to live his outdoorsy, action-packed life.īut Diliberto says women are wrong to think Hemingway has nothing to offer them. “He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat,” Hendrickson writes.ĭiliberto recalled that when her Hadley bio was first published in 1992, she was surprised to find her book readings filled with men “who looked like stage-three Hemingways with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies. Paul Hendrickson has written a captivating book called “Hemingway’s Boat,” about Ernest’s 27-year love affair with Pilar, his mahogany cabin cruiser that outlasted three of his wives “and all his ruin.” Papa played Fats Waller records on a scratchy phonograph on the boat, where he “dominated” marlins, propositioned women, hunted German subs, saved guests from shark attacks and drank daiquiris, trying not to fall off the flying bridge. And the bittersweet biography of Hadley by my friend Gioia Diliberto, which inspired McLain, has just been reissued under the title “Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.”

“The Paris Wife,” a novel about Hadley Hemingway by Paula McLain, was a best seller. He was the funniest character in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” A staging of “The Sun Also Rises” is playing off-Broadway. There’s a new volume of his lusty letters. Writing in “A Moveable Feast” about dumping his older first wife, Hadley, for his older second wife, Pauline, he whinged that “the oldest trick” is “that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”īut Hemingway is enjoying a renaissance this year, the 50th anniversary of his suicide by shotgun, so it is time to give that most self-consciously masculine American writer another look. And even when he was cheating on a wife with her friend, he painted himself as a victim of predatory and trusting women. Scott Fitzgerald noted, Hemingway needed a new wife for every big book.

If you perused Hemingway in college in the first flush of feminism, he seemed like a relic. What could be more gorgeous than “The Great Gatsby”?