While most people know that Ernest Hemingway loved bullfights and supported Castro and the Cuban Revolution, earlier I stumbled onto an interesting biographical detail that has heretofore been kept quiet.
Hemingway used to watch murders:
Fontova writes about influential Cuban agents in the United States and how the mainstream media continues to suck up to the Castro brothers in his new book, perhaps his most shockingly lurid anecdote is of writer Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Cuba at the time of the Cuban Revolution.
“Hemingway hailed Castro’s revolution as ‘very pure and beautiful,’” Fontova said. “He was also a guest of honor at many of Che Guevara’s firing squad massacres. Hemingway loved to watch Che’s firing squads murder hundreds of Cubans. Hemingway would watch the massacres from a picnic chair while sipping Daiquiris.”
Fontova’s source for this troubling detail of Hemingway’s life is a former employee of late Paris Review editor George Plimpton who says his traumatized boss once told him how Hemingway took him to one such fire squad social gathering.
It appears to be true, but it never appeared in any of Hemingway’s adoring biographies. I guess Hemingway thought the murder victims didn’t matter, or maybe that they “had it coming,” for he praised Castro and his regime.
This is not to detract from Hemingway’s writing, but I see no reason why his dark side has to be airbrushed out of existence. And watching Communists murder people in cold blood is dark, is it not? If, OTOH, it doesn’t represent his dark side — which it wouldn’t to people who believe Communist murderers and their supporters are to be admired — then why are they not praising Hemingway for it?
Speaking of interesting biographical details that are generally kept quiet, it turns out that another popular author, Oscar Wilde, was quite an admirer of the Confederacy. So much so that when he visited the United States, he made a point of paying an admiring visit to Jefferson Davis, the one American Wilde wanted to meet above all others:
While on his tour of the United States in 1882, there was one man Wilde wanted to meet above all others. No, not Walt Whitman (although the two did meet—and share a kiss—at Whitman’s New Jersey home that January). It was Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy. Wilde finally got his chance on June 27, 1882, when he blew through Beauvoir, Mississippi on his way to Montgomery, Alabama to deliver a lecture on “Decorative Art” at the local opera house. The seemingly mismatched pair actually found they had a lot in common. Wilde remarked on the similarities between the American South and his native Ireland: both had fought to attain self-rule and both had lost. He went on to declare that “The principles for which Jefferson Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.”
Supporting the Confederacy hardly fits fits the conventional Oscar Wilde narrative. Hemingway watching Communist firing squads is probably a better fit for the Hemingway narrative.
Alas! There’s no picture of Wilde and Davis.
But both truths will probably remain hidden away from the sight of ordinary students of either author.
It’s narrative uber alles.
As Victor Davis Hanson observed earlier,
Like Orwell’s dead souls, we live in an age of statist mythology, in which unpleasant facts are replaced by socially useful lies. So we print the legend that better serves our fantasies.
Hey, I’m as human as anyone, and I enjoy having my fantasies served as much as the next man. But I also like to know the truth — at least as closely as it can be ascertained.
Or is caring about the truth only for losers and weak-kneed wimps? Sometimes I wonder…
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16 responses to “Those who prefer narratives to the truth lead happier lives”
Hemingway shot himself in 1961, so this necrovoyeurism must have been very early in the Cuban revolution. By 1961 he was suffering from hemochromatosis, and the effects of a lifetime of alcoholism, getting hit in the head in multiple fights and electroshock therapy. He was too brain damaged to write a coherent sentence. OTTH Che was a murderous thug masquerading as a romantic figure, just the kind of goon an author who romanticized “manly” behavior might have latched onto with the charred remnants of his frontal lobes.
According to Plimpton, these executions occurred “right after the revolution” — which would have been early in 1959.
The 2009 date of the referenced story proves your title’s point. Never mind legends, how could politicians exist in a world full of philalethists?
The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons:
From Amazon:
“It’s the summer of 1942, and FBI agent Joe Lucas has come to Cuba at the behest of the Director to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway in the Caribbean. Lucas thinks of it as a demotion-a babysitting job for a famous writer who has decided to play spy, assembling a team of misfits including an American millionaire, a twelve-year-old Cuban orphan, a Spanish jai alai champion and more in a would-be espionage ring Hemingway dubs the “Crook Factory.”
If this book has an accurate description of Hemingway he was already getting weird and out of control. The ECT must have been a response to years of strange behavior. So, what was his mental state in 1959?
The Right is having a field day because of the Mathew Shepard revelations. Lots of cluk cluking all around. OK, he may have been tortured and murdered by a drug crazed bisexual. Got it. It wasn’t homophobia. Is his death any less tragic? Does that mean there aren’t gays murdered and attacked because of homophobia? Did my gay friends Win Mowder and Gary Matson deserve to die?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Gary_Matson_and_Winfield_Mowder
As to Hemingway and Wilde, do their personal failings lessen their artistic achievements?
Mussorgsky composed some of the most beautiful music of the 19th century. He died a hopeless, crazed alcoholic at 42. Is the truth of his music destroyed because he was a drunken lout?
There’s a long list of celebrity icons and artists, past and present, whose personal lives don’t match the excellence of their work.
M.Simon recently pointed out that the Left’s deadly sin is envy. I would add that the right is just a guilty. And with good reason because there are so few talented and gifted artists among their ranks.
Frank, there is a difference in self-punishment -IMO- often manifested in addiction, and culpability with respect to the rights of others.
During WW2, Japan’s unit 731 did vivisection and freezing/thawing experiments on human beings; later, both the data and the expertise was used in their fishing industry. Did their personal failings lessen their scientific achievements?
Third News, are you comparing Ernest Hemingway with Jap sadists? Pretty soon we’ll have him as the 20th century Marquis de Sade.
Frank
Big difference between self destructive behavior and someone getting his rocks off on murder. I’m positing that by the time it happened Hemingway was too brain damaged to have enough moral sense to understand how evil Che was.
Dead is dead and murder is murder. Creating a class of hate crimes that are worse than regular, run of the mill, everyday, same old, good old fashioned murder creates a protected caste. Like the idea that killing a police officer is somehow worse than other killing.
No Frank. I’m comparing your faux naïf thinking to those who accepted letting the Japanese slide
If figure ignoring Hemingway’s disgusting habits is because it’s not polite to talk about Hemingway’s disgusting habits but it’s even worse to talk about Che’s disgustingly murderous habits.
Otherwise, I figure that certain people would glorify that too, “Look! He revels in death! He’s so manly!“
MMM, in theory murder is murder, particular motive be damned. Blind justice should suffice. I’ve made the same argument in opposing hate crimes laws because they single out a protected class, as you state. That doesn’t mean you can’t be outraged by gay bashing or a black man dragged behind a pickup in Texas or white people becoming everyday targets of reverse discrimination.
This latest expose of Hemingway hit a nerve with me. Here is a long dead novelist whose work is dated and being forgotten. The recent attacks on him are not focused on any lack of writing ability, but rather centered around his Bohemian lifestyle and his leftist politics. The theme of all this is that not only was he a Communist, but queer to boot.
What a disgusting human being. How could he live with himself? He should have taken a gun and ended it all…
Quotes from Ernest Hemingway during his sane years before he pickled his brain in alcohol:
The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
http://antiwar.com/quotes.php
No date for when Ernie said that. I assume it was ca. 1920s as a reaction to the Great War. It was really stylish to be antiwar then, after all it was a war of German Capital against English Capital fought by the Workers. Leftists have always picked between which wars were good and which weren’t. 1939: war against Germany baaaad! 1941: war against Germany gooood! What they never consider is the national interest of their home country.
I can get plenty outraged by particularly egregious murders without insisting on special laws post facto to protect official victim classes.
Thought experiment, which is worse:
Some rampant homophobes beat a man half to death and tie him to a fence to die slowly because they hate them some gays
or
Loansharks beat a man half to death and tie him to a fence to die slowly because he didn’t pay the vig
????
Is it the hate or the nature of the murder?
MMM:
About the quote: from “Notes on the Next War,” published in Esquire Magazine, 1935.
FrankK
About the quote: from “Notes on the Next War,” published in Esquire Magazine, 1935.
Would Hemingway said several years later that “there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying” to defend the Loyalist government against Franco?
I doubt it.