Admire My Manliness: On the World's First Influencer

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I.

What if I told you that much of what you know about Ernest Hemingway is a façade? One of the greatest pieces of marketing ever constructed? That you and thousands of M.F.A.s have been Don Drapered into believing the mythos of the authentic and unapologetically manly writer, striding through the twentieth century with a brash confidence and muscular prose that matched his zest for life?

And what if I told you that much of this was intentional on Hemingway’s part, a scheme hatched up with his publishers at Scribner’s, satisfying his deep desire to measure up to two of his boyhood heroes, Jack London and Rudyard Kipling? That much of Hemingway’s life was LARP, that it was marketing puff? That Hemingway was the first influencer.

Maybe you will throw up your hands and angrily denounce me. Or maybe you will see how fitting it is that Hemingway, the most discoursed writer of the past hundred years (and perhaps the most influential American writer ever) represents a pivotal shift between the past and our current era. I would submit to you, dear reader, that Hemingway symbolizes the beginning of the age we currently inhabit: the Age of the Influencer.

II.

Up until the early twentieth century, the main way to market a novel was to rely on the strength of the writing itself, via magazine serialization and/or early critical reviews. Over time, authors could develop a popularity with readers that could lead to literary stardom, but, on the whole, this was based on the quality of the writing produced over a period of years, not on the personality of the writers themselves.

Compare this to twenty-first century authors. Often, they lament the social media marketing they need to do for people to read their books. They are upset by the need to develop a cult of personality to form the parasocial bonds that will lead readers to buy their work. “I want to write,” I often see authors bemoaning, “not post photos and videos about my life.” Whether or not the social media strategy works all the time, it is undeniable that there are rewards for those who manage to turn themselves into a brand, whose management of the artificial world of publicity works in their favor. Ocean Vuong’s breakdown during his New York Times interview vaulted him, temporarily at least, to the highest point of modern literary fame. Rupi Kaur, who has sold over twelve million copies of her poetry collections, became famous through Instagram content and controversy. Patricia Lockwood, another best-selling poet, amassed a vast following on Twitter before inking deals with Penguin.

But the Faustian bargain of pursuing personal publicity over the writing itself contains a trade-off: your life becomes the text, and you become the main character. For writers of fiction this is dangerous territory, because the overwhelming temptation is to start mythologizing your own life while you are living it. Nobody represents this danger more clearly than Ernest Hemingway, one of the first men to make a literary career out of publicizing himself.

III.

Despite the popularization of portrait photography in the 1840s and the increased use of photography and photojournalism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it wasn’t until after WWI that publishing houses and magazines began to turn their cameras onto their writers in an attempt to boost their profiles and market their writing. The thirty-year gap between the careers of Kipling and London (born in 1865 and 1876, respectively) and Hemingway (born in 1899) illustrates this change.

Here’s a simple test: who can you hold a clearer picture of in your mind, the author or their most famous characters? Jack London is easily beat by Wolf Larsen and by his two famous canines: Buck from The Call of the Wild and the eponymous wolf of White Fang. Rudyard Kipling may elicit one or two images in your mind — the bespectacled and moustachioed colonialist — but the characters from The Jungle Book and Kim are likely more textured and memorable than anything you know about Kipling himself. The opposite is true for Hemingway. Partly this is because so much of his writing strayed into autofiction, with many main characters as Hemingway stand-ins. But mostly this is because the greatest character that Hemingway ever created was himself.

The facts of Hemingway’s life are known by many, at least in its broad contours. What I find more interesting is that a huge number of people also hold a set of Hemingway images in their minds: the barrel-chested, bearded old man holding a shotgun; the moustachioed Papa bleeding at his typewriter; the notebook scribbler loafing about in Paris cafes; the boozehound in cableknit sweaters; the sportsman and hunter who loved boats, cars, and guns; the house in Havana and hangouts with Castro; the thick stache and strong chin and pugilistic pose; the womanizer; the bull-fighter; the WWI soldier; the suicide. No other writer — in all of human history — has achieved this kind of iconographic stranglehold on the popular imagination. Hemingway managed to insert himself into the collective unconscious to a degree usually reserved for kings, revolutionaries, movie stars, and, now, influencers. As critic John W. Aldridge writes in his seminal text After the Lost Generation (published ten years before Hemingway shot himself):

“[Hemingway] had become a legendary figure, a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded against fierce German attacks.”

This was no accident. Chance did not make Hemingway an icon for masculinity, an avatar of his own idiosyncratic ideal. From the beginnings of his literary career, Hemingway and his editor Max Perkins (and the wider Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing house) realized that for the young writer to stand out — to be read and be interesting to the general public — he would need to become what we would now call a “brand.” Hence the stories planted with gossip columnists or left uncorrected in press releases: that Hemingway had been a member of the Italian special forces; that he made a living as a professional boxer; that he was himself a matador. And hence the hundreds of photos he posed for throughout his life, plus the regular column he published with Esquire where he told increasingly lurid stories of his travel and hunting expeditions, typed up and mailed from the green hills of Africa to thrill and entice the readers of the new magazine. Once Hollywood became interested in Hemingway, following the 1932 movie adaptation of A Farewell to Arms, the publicity machine went into full swing. It convinced the world that Hemingway’s stories were the product of a real soldier — a “man’s man” — who lived a life that was thought to have disappeared with the closing of the American frontier: heavy-drinking, womanizing, hungry for action and full of vitality — a man who knew what it was to be strong and courageous. A man from the previous generation. A man like Jack London.

IV.

Hemingway saw travel and adventure as a narcissistic conquest. He used his wives’ money (and then later, his own publishing riches) to fund high-end African safaris and deep-sea fishing trips on his customized boat. While soldiers — along with the French Resistance and Parisians — risked their lives to free Paris from Hitler’s rule, Hemingway led a convoy of armed jeeps to the Ritz Hotel where he “liberated” its bar. Any encounter with the outdoors or adventure was a chance to stride into a constructed gladiatorial arena, a controlled opportunity to prove his ideal of manhood.

London’s relationship with adventure and wilderness was very different, forged from systemic poverty and backbreaking labor. As a teenager he worked in factories and as an oyster pirate, rode the rails as a beggar across the train lines of North America. When he was just twenty-one years old, he lit out as a prospector during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, all to escape the starvation wages he had experienced for most of his life. He ferried hundred-pound packs over the Chilkoot Pass on his back, developing scurvy and other diseases which haunted him for years, and eked out a living in sub-zero temperatures — simply to survive. London didn’t have anything to prove when it came to his manhood.

Or consider both men’s documented love of boxing. Hemingway enjoyed the sport as a controlled exhibition: his own forays into fighting were when he sought to performatively one-up other men. Whereas Jack London, as noted in Earle Labor’s fantastic Jack London: An American Life, learned to fight in the waterfront saloons of Oakland. These were not ego-filled middle-class contests or demonstrations of athleticism: London fought to protect his earnings from criminals and drunkards, or else started fights when in the throes of his own drunkenness.

Hemingway applied the same self-focus to fishing, viewing it as a test of his strength against nature’s. Contrast this with the perspective of Rudyard Kipling, Hemingway’s other idol. Kipling devoted an entire chapter of his travelogue From Sea to Sea (1899) to near-spiritual descriptions of angling for salmon, reveling in the battle between fisherman and fish as an encounter with the divine. For Kipling, the eventual reeling in of his quarry was a providential gift, “a favor from on High,” and the struggle with the fish was a kind of dance with a fellow creature “who knows exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it.” Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), on the other hand, features a much more material battle. The hunt does not cause the self to recede and result in a greater communion with nature. Rather, it is viewed through an egotistical lens: What does the animal bring out of the fisherman? How much more does the fisherman have in himself? Lacking Kipling’s selfless spirituality, Hemingway describes a self-absorbed saga of mutual destruction — a fascinating metaphor for the trajectory of their respective lives: Kipling grew old in the English countryside with his wife of forty-four years before passing away of natural causes. Hemingway blew his brains out at age sixty-one after extended treatments for depression, leaving behind the last of his numerous wives to manage his estate and promote his legacy.

V.

The truth is that Hemingway was a shy, emotionally damaged product of the burgeoning pre-war American middle class. He barely experienced the First World War (he was briefly a volunteer in the Red Cross before getting injured), or any real adventure until after he achieved literary fame and financial success. The most notable thing about his upbringing is the inverted power dynamic between his parents and his feminization at the hands of his mother. In a pattern which would repeat itself through Hemingway’s own life, Hemingway’s mother was the main breadwinner of the family (from her private music lessons) and constantly belittled Hemingway’s father (a middling suburban doctor). In turn, he would lash out and bully his own children. Kenneth S. Lynn described Hemingway’s mother as “the dark queen of [his] world” in his 1987 psychological profile of the writer, especially due to her habit of dressing Hemingway as a girl and presenting him as his older sister’s “twin.” This unusual psychosexual environment led to major recurring themes throughout Hemingway’s life, which caused him no small amount of shame: his fascination with gender roles (and the taboo of breaking or inverting such roles with his sexual partners); his reliance on wealthier women to finance his pursuit of literary and masculine greatness; his depressive episodes and suicidal ideation; his cruelty toward those he saw as weaker; and his infamous infidelity. The more you get to know Hemingway, it becomes obvious that much of his public persona was a carefully maintained artifice to avoid the deep shame he felt about his many foibles.

Hemingway was born a generation too late. Despite not living up to them, his professed ideals and morals were distinctly Victorian (which, come to think of it, is itself very Victorian). His major influences were all masculine figures from that era: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, and, of course, London and Kipling. It’s no surprise that, when Hemingway was constructing the mythic version of himself, he took inspiration from both of them.

VI.

It’s difficult to bring Rudyard Kipling into an essay without getting lost in the weeds of his extraordinary talent and fascinating life. Few writers have had a comparable impact on modern English literature. Kipling represented a new kind of literary superstar that London and Hemingway would go on to emulate — the journalist, writing from the peripheries of an empire, that captures the essence of his era’s ideals to such a degree that the cultural gatekeepers at the empire’s center launch him into the limelight.

Kipling spent most of his formative years outside of Britain, foremost working as a journalist in India, but also traveling across the globe. London also spent his formative years on the fringes of the American empire, both geographically and economically, working and living outside of regular society. This mode of life seems to have been explicitly mimicked by Hemingway, leaving the United States at twenty for Canada then Europe, followed by a decade in Key West and two more in Cuba. What Kipling and London discovered, and Hemingway emulated, is the perspective gained from living on the edges of empires and great nations.

It served Hemingway to take on the mantle of Kipling and London, both to boost his image as the exotic American abroad, but also to continue to have new experiences to write about, to continue the self-mythologizing project. The difference, however, is that Kipling never sought adventure in order to expand his personal mythos, and most of London’s dramatic personal experiences happened before he found literary fame at twenty-seven. Kipling was exactly what he appeared to be: a provincial writer who achieved early success within the wealthiest and most powerful empire to ever exist, who wrote insatiably about everything that interested him, but did not court personal publicity (he famously refused honorary degrees, official positions, and public honors, including a knighthood). And London’s life takes the opposite trajectory to Hemingway’s — his most interesting life experiences all took place when he was a teenager and young man desperate to escape poverty, and his literary success led to him settling down to play cowboy on his toy ranch before his early death.

VII.

What is striking about Kipling’s writing is its originality. His work either feels like a pioneering of something new, or a perfecting of something existing. His fiction makes you realize how indebted many of your favorite writers are to him, from Graham Greene and Roald Dahl to Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell; even writers as disparate as Umberto Eco and Ruskin Bond. One of Hemingway’s most famous short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), directly apes Kipling’s own “The Hill of Illusion” (1888), where instead of discussing abortion, the couple are circuitously discussing their planned adulterous elopement. Shakespearean in his influence, Kipling introduced phrases into the common lexicon (e.g. “law of the jungle,” “just-so story,” “common touch,” “it will all come out in the wash,” “squiggly,” “cushy,” “the Great Game,” and referring to Germans as “Huns”); set the standard for depicting working-class men and women in their own voices and contexts; and exhausted the various ways one could tell and frame a short story.

London was aware he was working in Kipling’s shadow. His debut novel The Son of the Wolf earned him the nickname “the American Kipling,” and he was continuously compared to the man who was only ten years his senior. (London later admitted that he taught himself to write by copying out Kipling’s stories in longhand at his local library.) But London worked hard and lived harder to earn the adventure tales he wrote. He alchemized Kipling’s instinct toward fable and the supernatural into something more naturalistic. London’s gift for taking the reader inside the mind of dogs and wolves in The Call of the Wild and White Fang is an impressive development from the Aesopian human-avatars of The Jungle Book. In fact, the first four chapters of White Fang (which work as a standalone short story and are a masterclass in ratcheting tension) detail the death of a British lord who had journeyed from England only to perish in the Klondike. This serves as a handy metaphor for London taking over Kipling’s mantle as the transcriber of wild adventure, and the eclipse of the British Empire by its errant American progeny.

Where does this leave Hemingway? There’s no denying he was a talented writer. No American novelist has matched his influence on literary style since Mark Twain; many of his novels and short stories are amongst readers’ favorites. But his immense fame and influence are a double-edged sword. They have created a parade of his mimics who not only attempt to ape his style but his narrow self-focus. In part, this accounts for the modern obsession with autofiction as well as the homogenous style of MFA writing and its obsession with “iceberg theory.” Yet many of these authors misunderstand his genius: He was far more internally conflicted than his hyper-masculine projection, and his characters are embroiled in emotion beneath the macho exterior. Additionally, his writing is more inward-looking and recursive than his claims to “direct observation” imply. One does not read a Hemingway story without experiencing Hemingway’s turmoiled mind.

But the true Faustian bargain of pursuing personal fame over recognition for his literary talent was that it led to a diminishment of Hemingway’s output, or at least a waste of his skills. Even as early as 1939, Edmund Wilson lamented in The Atlantic that after the publication of Death in the Afternoon, the world saw Hemingway passing into a diminished phase of his fiction career:

“...where he is occupied with building his public personality. …[T]he opportunity soon presents itself to exploit this personality for profit: he is soon turning out regular articles for well-paying and trashy magazines.”

Aside from The Old Man and the Sea, an older Hemingway produced nothing near the quality of his earlier work of In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927), and A Farewell to Arms (1929). As John Raeburn, a pre-eminent Hemingway critic, notes in Fame Became of Him, “there seems to have been an inverse relationship between the growth of Hemingway’s celebrity and the quality and even quantity of his fiction.” Leonard Leff, in Hemingway and His Conspirators, similarly concludes that Hemingway understood he could no longer supply his vast audience with work that was “quick, honest, and controlled,” or which was anywhere close to as powerful or as enduring as his earlier work. Instead he could supply the audience only with “himself, Ernest Hemingway the Professional Writer, Ernest Hemingway the husk.”

Because of the method by which he first sought and attained fame, Hemingway believed the only way to continue to sell his work was to play-act himself to the public.

VIII.

To be fair, Hemingway did pick up a few tricks from London when it came to using an inflated personal mythos to sell books. As London’s short life drew closer to its end (he died at age forty), he became more and more guilty of courting public perception and indulging in grandiose stories of his past feats. By the time he wrote The Cruise of the Snark (1911), an account of his voyage across the South Pacific, the line between living an adventure and writing it for an audience had essentially collapsed. He announced the journey publicly before it began, sold dispatches to magazines during the voyage, and was acutely aware throughout the trip that he was “generating material” for public consumption.

You can see here the familiar beats of what Hemingway would go on to do for most of his career — think of his desperately machismo pronouncements that he was using his private ship to patrol for Nazi U-Boats off the coast of Cuba (he never found any). But London’s first three decades of life were truly filled with hard living and thrilling adventure, of challenging feats of survival and endurance, of great risks and rewards. If any man deserved to build a brand on muscular adventurism, it was London. The fact that Hemingway is more widely known as the masculine American writer par exemplar feels like stolen valor, especially when you see how confected it was from the very beginning of his career and only amplified as he aged into a parody of himself.

As critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his landmark 1942 treatment of American literature, On Native Grounds, “the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived.” This is the marked difference between London and Hemingway. Hemingway turned himself into a fictional character that sold stories, while London lived a life which was more dramatic than any of his fiction.

IX.

A final Hemingway anecdote for you to consider:

When the twenty-two-year-old Hemingway first arrives in Paris, unpublished but desiring to break into the burgeoning literary scene of “the Lost Generation,” he decides to get Ezra Pound’s attention. Pound is a literary and poetic heavyweight by this time, connected with Poetry, the New Age, and the Little Review journals; the editing work he goes onto perform for Hemingway will transform the young man’s flowery style into the direct imagery he is now known for. (Pound was the founder of the “Imagism” style of writing in which absolutely no word could be used that “does not contribute to the presentation,” so he relentlessly cut out most of Hemingway’s descriptive modifiers and adjectives.) Pound will also connect Hemingway with publishers, getting Hemingway’s first short story collection In Our Time published in 1925 with Boni and Liveright, Pound’s poetry publishers. This collection is what gets F. Scott Fitzgerald’s attention, who then lobbies Max Perkins of Scribner’s to buy Hemingway’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, for publication in 1926. And, as we know, it’s the connection with Scribner’s that makes the gears of publicity turn so Hemingway can commence his transformation from man to myth.

But what’s most interesting to me is how Hemingway first got Pound’s attention. Hemingway was a nobody, a young foreign correspondent writing for a Canadian newspaper, and Pound’s influence markedly altered the trajectory of his career. Hemingway knew he needed to stand out in some way, to link himself to the great writers of the past and catch Pound’s attention. He did this by sending a poem to Pound that aped Kipling’s own famous poem “Mandalay.” Then he went a step further by signing the letter as from “Rudyard Kipling, Hotel Loewen National, Triberg, Baden, Germany,” with a false Kipling signature that Hemingway had apparently practiced for years beforehand. This brazen communication piqued Pound’s interest and led to the start of their friendship.

Even before Scribner’s got involved, Hemingway was imitating and impersonating Kipling to get attention. He then spent the better part of four decades propagating his fantasy of a Kipling/London hybrid, a manly writer capturing the realities of the world, via the commercial machinery set up by Scribner’s, Esquire, and Hollywood. As a young man, he was aware that he didn’t yet possess Kipling’s talent nor London’s masculine character, but he intuited that in a post-colonial, post-Empire, post-certainty world, the truth no longer mattered. Instead he foresaw and helped bring about the influencer age we live in today: where appearances matter more than realities, where artifice is rewarded more highly than the art itself, and where the surest way to sell your writing is to turn yourself into a caricature of what the public wants to see.

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Stands for live action role-playing. From Wikipedia: “A form of role-playing game where the participants physically portray their selected characters.”

To take two examples: Victor Hugo became famous at age twenty for his precocious poetry; Charles Dickens became famous as a result of The Pickwick Papers serial’s popularity.

A New York newspaper claimed Hemingway “had been more battered than any soldier facing the Central Powers.”

“Biography”by John Raeburn in Ernest Hemingway in Context (2013) edited by Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne Del Gizzo. See also Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004) by Loren Glass.

For further reading on the publicity machine surrounding and driven by Hemingway, see Fame Became of Him (1984) by John Raeburn, and Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (2005) by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

As Stephenie Hollyman explains, he had the yacht company modify the boat for deep-sea marlin and tuna fishing. This included lowering its profile, adding a heavy roller bar, adding a higher steering platform, live bait wells, and painting it black to look like a Prohibition-era rum-runner.

Hemingway repeatedly explored transgender and androgynous behaviors and relationships in his own sexual partnerships with women and alluded to the same in his fiction. See both Lynn’s biography and Richard Fantina’s fascinating 2005 book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism.

Hemingway internalized Kipling’s “muscular Christianity” and Carlyle’s “gospel of work,” plus the values of emotional restraint and chivalric duty, all while viewing women through the Madonna/whore paradigm.

Published in 1932 and Hemingway’s first official foray into publishing non-fiction about his life.

Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980 by Loren Glass (2004).