Ernest Hemingway After Fitzgerald

Hemingway After Fitzgerald

Hemingway after Fitzgerald continued to be the man everyone expected him to be, superficially at least. He was famous, adventurous, had affairs with women, and continued to dominate the literary world. In the end, however, these very characteristics brought him into a state of depression that would ultimately defeat him. In the words of Kelly Dupuis, "[Hemingway's] final years were haunted by some of the same ghosts that haunted Fitzgerald: alcoholism, mental illness (in this case his own) and a creeping sense of diminished self-worth"1

Hemingway did not attend Fitzgerald's funeral after his death on December 21, 1940. It is not known when or how he had received word while in Cuba and Hemingway made no public statement regarding Fitzgerald's death.2 After The Last Tycoon was released to warm receptions that deemed Fitzgerald as capable of more "mature" work, Hemingway remained unmoved with the stories, saying "Scott died inside himself at around the age of thirty to thirty-five and his creative powers died somewhat later...the book has that deadness...as though it were a slab of bacon on which mold had grown" (Bruccoli, Dangerous 210).

At this point in his life Hemingway had moved to a house outside Havana, Cuba with his wife Martha. While his public image continued to expand (seemingly at the expense of his work), he continued working on several writing projects that would later become Islands In The Stream and The Garden Of Eden. In 1942 (in one of the most bizarre stories I could imagine) Hemingway began an undercover operation with some friends and professional operatives to hunt down German submarines in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Cuba. He used his own boat, Pilar, and attached radio equipment and extra fuel tanks, hoping that, in the offchance he found a German sub, he could "drop a bomb down the hatch". They called themselves the "Crook Factory." Nothing ever came of their sub hunts except a good time fishing and drinking together, in the process irritating Martha who thought Hemingway was avoiding the responsibilities as a great writer to report the real war then raging in Europe".3 From May of 1944 to March 1945 Hemingway served in London and France as Collier's correspondent. There he met his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who he married in 1946.

Throughout the 1950's Hemingway's reputation grew as a celebrity as his public image dominated the literary world with every new book he wrote.