LIFE STORIES: WHEN PERSONAL HISTORY IS NOT ENOUGH

Life stories come in every form and flavor from hot to cold, bland to sassy, truthful to made up.

Tell the same stories long enough to the same people and they start to wonder:

“How many times have we heard this stuff?”

“Do they know they’ve told the same story over and over?”

If you’ve heard the same life stories over and over, be thankfully bored. At least you don’t have to interpret a BS artist on their personal history.

Who would stretch their life stories? Who wouldn’t?

Watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway documentary is revealing a sad truth about the celebrated fiction writer. He made stuff up.

Shocking? Not really. He wrote novels. Not fantasy novels, but he added some fantasy to his own life stories. He was an expert on everything.

I read a William Goldman book titled ‘The Marathon Man’ that became a movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. The Hoffman character was a graduate student who wanted to know everything. An academic.

He had a chance to know more than most.

Ernest Hemingway had a high school education and knew more about everything than anyone. Which was a problem.

If he was a hero, and who doesn’t like a hero, why not stick with what made him a hero instead of adding more to the pile?

I’ll take a chance with: “He’s a fiction writer working on new material out loud.”

Life Stories Give The Audience What They Need

Like news stories airing twenty four hours a day, a hungry audience needs to be fed. That’s the excuse for “Breaking News” and “The full story after the station break” and “When we return with the rest of the story.”

Can’t you feel the anticipation building? The tension? Hemingway did. I’m not calling him a candidate for a Fox News chair, but he had an audience to feed. He was a biggie before size was a measuring stick.

Not a rock star, or actor, or motivational speaker, or snake oil minister, Hemingway told his life stories to an equally demanding audience.

In his writing life he said he read his work in progress before starting each day. He ended each day when he knew what had to happen next.

A morning worker, his kids said he was inaccessible the first part of each day, and overly accessible the second part. Is this a noted condition?

Real life may be a work in progress, but Papa didn’t have a manuscript to update for each new audience he drew in public. So he added things of interest.

The Super Star Approach To Life

Kurt Cobain said he didn’t want to find himself singing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in Las Vegas when he was fifty.

He won’t be doing that.

Roger Daltrey of The Who sang, “I hope I die before I get old.”

He didn’t.

Mick Jagger famously said he didn’t want to sing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was thirty.

He does.

Media personalities have an audience they’ve attracted with their work. In 2021 we’ve seen the cycle of boom and bust too many times. From burn out, to flame out, to deciding to step away and live a normal life, celebrities show different paths.

Ernest Hemingway was there first. He sang his songs, wrote his stories, then stopped. Suddenly.

What he left behind is a thirst for more. More action, more shooting everything in sight, more fishing for the biggest catch. Along with an audience desperate for living vicariously, he left a void for charlatans without the body of a life’s work well done.

Hemingway went to Africa twice.

In the first, we see the infamous, strutting megalomaniacal Hemingway, approaching the peak of his creative powers, highly competitive and obsessed with “manliness.” In the second, we see “Papa” Hemingway, mellowed, less macho, unconcerned with “the kill,” and addled by fame and alcoholism. 

. . . for Hemingway, Africa “was like a crucible in which a new life could be minted.” In other words, the young Hemingway could embolden his macho image and the older could escape it. 

The idea that Ernest Hemingway was full of crap is an odd comfort. He seems like a ‘last word’ kind of guy. That’s my kind of people.

Do I get the last word on one of the greats of American literature?

Isn’t it pretty to think so.

Leave a comment, English major.