THE MENTION of Ernest Hemingway (pictured) in the December Instauration triggered a flood of memories, ranging from amusing to grotesque. He cultivated the rich and powerful assiduously, and our paths crossed often. I ran into him in East Africa, hunting with Winston Guest; bellied up to the bar at the Ritz with Leland Hayward; lunching at 21 with Marlene Dietrich; playing king to the whole world in Havana.
Pertinently enough, he embodied every strain of racism from pitiless clarity to utter confusion. And in him the spectrum was doubly pertinent because he was a national phenomenon, like Byron in his day and Jack Kennedy in his, acting out the fantasies of an entire nation, boozing and womanizing and generally living the American male dreams up to the hilt. His alcoholism, brutality and battiness were ignored and covered over by friends and enemies alike, where those traits in other famous figures were broadcast in detail. He had, again like Jack Kennedy, a strange power over his countrymen — a sort of blackmail in which he said, by implication, “If you dare to tell the truth about me, I’ll tell the truth about you, which is the same truth.” And, yet again like Jack Kennedy, he was the perfect chicken American male, the capon talking in terms of action but perfectly passive (or absent) when it came to going against established interests.
The only people he couldn’t bully were those in positions of power, and to them he was exceedingly deferential. ...
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