Why Ernest Hemingway was the boxer of American letters

Indian Express

3 days ago

Ernest Hemingway was never one to mince words or hold back his opinions. Whether through the pages of his books or at the offices of Scribner's, the Nobel laureate turned every chapter of his life into a battlefield, often dragging fellow writers into the ring. Known for his clipped prose, cold drinks, and colder opinions, Hemingway approached literary life like a seasoned boxer: hands up, jaw out, waiting for someone to swing.
He punched back, too. Whether physically (as in the infamous Max Eastman incident) or in print (as with Fitzgerald, and Ford Madox Ford), Hemingway turned literary feuds into performance art.
Here are just a few of the more bruising bouts Hemingway engaged in:
Few feuds in American letters were as theatrically absurd as Ernest Hemingway's 1937 dust-up with author and critic Max Eastman. The confrontation, immortalised in the pages of The New York Times on August 14 of that year, reads like a lost scene from one of Hemingway's own parodies.
It began in the offices of Charles Scribner's Sons, where Eastman, seated with editor Max Perkins, found himself face-to-face with Hemingway. They were discussing Eastman's earlier essay titled Bull in the Afternoon, a parody of Hemingway's work, Death in the Afternoon. It was a jab at Hemingway's macho affectations, complete with the cutting line: 'Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you.'
Hemingway did not take kindly to the suggestion of toupee-like chest hair. He reportedly responded by baring his own, demanding Eastman do the same, and then, unsatisfied with the answer, slapped him in the face with a copy of his book, Death in the Afternoon, which incidentally was about Spanish bullfighters.
Eastman alleged he threw Hemingway over a desk and 'stood him on his head in a corner.' Hemingway denied it with typical swagger, offering $1,000 to charity, or to Eastman directly, for the chance to settle the matter in a locked room, bare-knuckle, with all legal rights waived.
'I just slapped him,' Hemingway told reporters. 'That knocked him down… He jumped at me like a woman—clawing, you know.' When pressed about Eastman's version of events, Hemingway scoffed: 'He didn't throw anybody anywhere.'
The skirmish has entered literary lore, and is interpreted as a microcosm of Hemingway's lifelong war on critics, his volatile pride, and his theatrical masculinity.
Ernest Hemingway was never known for generosity in his portrayals of friends and rivals. Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner all appear in his memoir A Moveable Feast. But perhaps the most lacerating sketch was reserved for Ford Madox Ford, the English novelist, critic, and editor who helped shape the literary modernism that Hemingway later came to define.
'He was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained moustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well-clothed, up-ended hogshead,' he wrote uncharitably of Ford in a chapter titled 'Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple'. Ford laboured breathing was likely the result of a World War I gas attack, but Hemingway took it as a symptom of affectation.
'I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room,' he wrote, adding with withering irony: 'Maybe it was the odor he gave off when he was tired.' This last line may have been a nod to Pound's private warning that Ford 'only lied when he was very tired,' a comment Hemingway weaponised.
Introduced by Ezra Pound, Hemingway briefly worked under Ford at The Transatlantic Review, a journal that had published early stories of his rejected by American magazines. But when Ford became ill, Hemingway took editorial control, and used it to ridicule Ford's friends, including Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, and TS Eliot. He wrote of Eliot: 'If I knew that by grinding Mr Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over [recently departed novelist Joseph] Conrad's grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear…I would leave for London immediately with a sausage grinder.'
Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald met in 1925 and quickly formed what appeared to be a strong literary friendship. Fitzgerald championed Hemingway early on, famously introducing his unpublished work to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's and calling him 'the greatest living writer of prose.' But the gratitude was short-lived.
In A Moveable Feast, he reduced Fitzgerald to a man defeated by his marriage and his nerves: 'Zelda said that the way for her to get her own way was to say that Scott could do anything she wanted him to… and that he would always give in.'
He mocked Fitzgerald's talent, saying: 'His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings… he did not know when it was brushed or marred.'
The final blows came long after Fitzgerald's death in 1940. In a letter written a decade later, Hemingway offered a withering epitaph: 'I never had any respect for him ever, except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent. If he would have had fewer pompous musings and a little sounder education it would have been better maybe.'
There was no love lost between Hemingway, and Fitzgerald's wife, he said: 'But anytime you got him all straightened out and taking his work seriously Zelda would get jealous and knock him out of it.'
Taking a swipe at Fitzgerald's alleged alcoholism, he wrote: 'Also alcohol that we use was the Giant Killer… was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.' Their friendship began with letters and literary admiration. It ended with ridicule, resentment, and regret.
In the 1950s, a literary rivalry flared between Hemingway and William Faulkner. After the release of The Old Man and the Sea, Faulkner quipped that Hemingway 'has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.'
Hemingway, never one to back down, fired back: 'Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?… I know the ten-dollar words. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.' A war of words—fitting for two masters of them.
For all his cruelty, Hemingway remains one of the titans of American literature. His style shaped the century, his stories endure, and his brawls (literary and literal), reveal a man who couldn't help but clash with the world.
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More