No one took keener note of the Hemingway example than Norman Mailer, who would often apply literal muscle to his own prose. Here’s what he had to say:
Let any of you decide for yourselves how silly would be A Farewell to Arms or better, Death in the Afternoon, if it had been written by a man who was five-four, had acne, wore glasses, spoke in a shrill voice, and was a physical coward. That, of course, is an impossible hypothesis—such a man would never have been able to feel the emotions of the man who wrote that early prose. . . . Without a sense of the big man who wrote the prose, all the later work would be only skeletons of abstraction, the flash gone.
Or listen to The New York Times:
Ernest Hemingway became and remains an American icon and one embodiment of America’s promise: the young boy from Oak Park who set out to become the best writer of his time, and did just that. His ambition, intensity, creative drive, sense of duty, belief in hard work, and faith in the strenuous life carried him to the pinnacle of his profession and provided him with worldwide recognition and considerable wealth before destroying him when he could no longer meet the demands of his public life. It is an old story, older than written words, a story the ancient Greeks would have recognized. Hemingway told us that pursuit was happiness, and that any story followed far enough would end badly. He lived constantly on the edge of the American experience and constantly in the public eye. He wrote books that influenced two or more generations, and was awarded not only with prizes, including the Pulitzer and the Nobel, but with fame such as few writers have known or have had to endure. At the end of the next century, the basic human struggle with universal demons that Hemingway put down with such clarity will still be read, and men may still take heart, knowing that they are not the first nor the last to face their fate.
The simple fact is that Hemingway made it look easy. That’s what grabs us: the masculine adventures, the plainness of his style, the boozy exploits, and, of course, the beard. If the truth about Papa was more complicated than that—and the psychobabble never quits—it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is his great writer’s knack for bringing the action to the reader and with it, the participation in an actual human experience. Here’s how he lets us know what it feels to be Jake Barnes, a guy who loves a girl but cannot show it, who night after night must leave her in the company of losers while he heads home alone:
I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement. Some one waved at me from a table. I did not see who it was and went on. I wanted to get home. The Boulevard Montparnasse was deserted. Lavigne’s was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside the Closerie des Lilas. . . . My flat was just across the street, a little way down the Boulevard St. Michel.
Barnes is the guy who knows all the parties he hasn’t been invited to.
Bush vs. Gore
The American urge to be on the move, forever demanding an audience for our achievements, made Ernest Hemingway an American natural.
Our faith in the value of action began with the frontier. For better or worse, run a cowboy against a dude for president and the cowboy wins. The guy with the sun in his face invariably beats the indoor candidate.
That has never been truer than in the politics of our new American century.
In the 2000 election, Al Gore held powerful advantages. The economy was the strongest in history. The stock market was booming and everybody seemed to be in it. Inflation was so low no one talked about it. Gore, the vice president, enjoyed the best possible credentials to be elected to extend the boom of the previous eight years. While Bill Clinton had embarrassed the presidency and suffered impeachment for his attempted cover-up of an affair with a young White House intern, Gore himself was viewed as a solid, faithful, and loving family man.
So why didn’t he eat Bush’s lunch? One reason is that Governor George W. Bush, son of the former president, trumped Gore’s considerable edge with something Gore couldn’t match.
Bush was the cowboy in the race, the guy who wore boots and loved nothing better than kicking back at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Gore, despite his roots in Tennessee, came across as the city slicker. Bush had an easy stride and impressed us with who he was. Gore came across to voters as a know-it-all, a guy who had done all his homework but was hesitant to act. Bush was the man on horseback, Gore the guy riding up on the buckboard.
The murkiness of the 2000 election’s outcome, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush’s favor on the Florida recount, cannot obscure the fact that Gore blew a race he should have aced.
Actually, George W. Bush did not become the nation’s true leader until the Friday after September 11, 2001. It was the sight of him standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center that won him his full legitimacy. Here was an American leader come to lead his people in a cause as righteous as it was necessary.
Hemingway called it “grace under pressure,” and there are few things we Americans love more as a nation than watching our president display it.
We tend to entrust the job of commander in chief to someone who’s proved his stuff along the way. The battlefield is but one possible arena. We simply like leaders who’ve undergone genuine rites of passage, whether in log cabins or on PT boats.
George Washington
We saw how George Washington refused to convert his role as Revolutionary commander in chief into a lifetime dictatorship. America would be spared a Napoleon. But there’s little doubt that it was his triumphs as a soldier that made him the obvious popular choice for first president.
Hadn’t he led us as we defeated the most powerful military force on the face of the earth? Thanks to his strategy, sacrifice, and raw guts, this Virginia planter and veteran of the French and Indian War was the British army’s worst nightmare.
That final American victory over General Cornwallis at Yorktown could never have been achieved were it not for Washington’s incredible feats earlier, especially those legendary victories at Trenton and Princeton. “Lord Cornwallis once observed after Yorktown that the military fame of George Washington would rest not on the Chesapeake but on the Delaware. It was that marvelous bitter, nerve-racking campaign that revealed the fortitude and constancy of the American leader.” That’s Winston Churchill writing, and it takes one great leader to know another.
In the beginning, Washington made a classic mistake: he attempted to take the stronger, better-trained, better-disciplined British forces head on. The Battle of Long Island was a disaster. Had he not quickly and shrewdly evacuated the Continental army to Manhattan, that early battle fought in what is today’s Brooklyn might easily have been the war’s last.
The retreat bought time for the Continental army. But as Churchill was to note in equally dire circumstances two centuries later, wars are not won by evacuations. Falling back through New Jersey, where he found little citizen support, Washington ended up in Pennsylvania desperately needing a victory.
The young country was demanding action. And Washington was ready to give it to them. On Christmas evening 1776, a group of twenty armed Colonials emerged from the woods and attacked a Hessian outpost in Trenton. An hour later, the main force of Americans began crossing the icy, sleet-pelted Delaware River in force, transporting eighteen cannon one at a time on their single flatboat. The officer in charge of logistics was the brilliant Colonel Henry Knox, who had managed to haul the cannon down from the captured Fort Ticonderoga. He was a huge man, standing 6 foot three inches and weighing 280 pounds.
“Shift that fat ass, Harry,” Washington teased him as they made the crossing meant to change everything, “but slowly or you’ll swamp the damned boat.”
With Knox’s potent firepower aboard, the attacking forces surrounded and defeated the Hessians. Nine hundred and eighteen were taken prisoner, twenty-one killed. Only one American was killed and only two
were wounded.
Washington would follow this victory with another morale builder at Princeton. Angered by the first, humiliating defeat at Trenton, the new Hessian commander warned his troops to take no prisoners. They were to kill any rebel they got their hands on, whether he surrendered or not, or else suffer a reward of fifty lashes for every surviving Continental soldier.
News of the Trenton defeat also brought Cornwallis to the scene. With Washington still at Trenton, the British general saw a rare opportunity to trap the American commander with his back to the Delaware River. But after spotting the enemy campfires below him, the tired British general unwisely chose to spend the night on the high ground and attack in the morning.
“We’ve got the old fox safe now,” he announced. “We’ll go over and bag him in the morning. The damned rebels are cornered at last.”
Famous last words. Leaving his campfires aglow to confuse the enemy, the American commander in chief led his forces around Cornwallis to attack Princeton, which the British had left unprotected. This second victory humiliated Cornwallis, along with his regular British troops and the Hessians.
Washington was executing a strategy as brilliant as it was necessary. Through daring raids and calculated retreat, he was keeping his army together long enough to outlast the British and win the backing of the French for the climactic battle at Yorktown. He was proving himself not only a skilled fighter but also a shrewd politician.
As the obvious choice for president of the new republic, George Washington also turned out to be the right one.
Andrew Jackson
The Battle of New Orleans clinched it for Andrew Jackson. The climax of that military encounter was a British frontal assault on the American lines. Concentrated cannon and rifle fire from the city’s defenders cost the attackers almost two thousand dead and injured. The Americans lost only six with 10 wounded. In the election of 1828, voters wagered that Jackson’s military exploits were a harbinger of strong executive leadership. The fact of his historic, activist presidency proved it a good bet.
William Henry Harrison
The electorate’s gamble of 1840 was less successful. Anxious to win the White House after twelve years of Democratic rule, the Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison. The candidate’s sole credential was his putative military achievement at a place called Tippecanoe Creek in 1811. Surprised by Indians, General Harrison’s army forces had suffered significant casualties before driving off their attackers.
Yet it was this excursion—its outcome far from glorious—that gave Harrison victory over Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. For his running mate the Whigs chose former Senator John Tyler of Virginia. (Hence the memorable slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”) But, apart from that one questionable military exploit in the remote Northwest, Harrison’s chief campaign asset was the silence he managed to maintain.
In fact, the Whigs didn’t even bother to write a platform. As instructed by the party chiefs, their candidate kept mum on such issues as slavery, the tariff, and the U.S. Bank. His military background and that alliterative catch-phrase were all he had going for him. They turned out to be enough: Harrison and Tyler won by a landslide.
Sadly for Harrison and the country that chose him, on a cold, wet Inaugural Day he developed pneumonia and was dead within the month. His anemic triumph at Tippecanoe had presaged his presidency; neither amounted to much.
Ulysses S. Grant
In 1868, the Civil War concluded, Americans again chose a warrior and man of action as its leader. Ulysses S. Grant had given the North what it desperately needed—victories. A beaten Confederate general had offered to negotiate a surrender only to be told: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Grant’s foe promptly turned over his sword in addition to his fourteen thousand men.
When critics bedeviled Grant, President Lincoln came to his general’s defense. “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” Late in 1863, he was called to the capital, where Lincoln made him his commander in chief. Always his defender, Lincoln was said to have rebuked those who complained of Grant’s heavy alcohol consumption. Find out what he drinks and give it to the other generals, the president told them.
Grant’s many victories in the field made his presidency all but inevitable. As the man who’d accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, he was the hands-down Republican choice three years later. Tragically for his reputation, the eighteenth president really had neither a talent for governance nor the interest to serve as the country’s chief executive.
Scandals dogged him, and as his poor appointments came back to haunt him, he found himself surrounded by the sleazier elements of the political world. To Grant’s discredit, he would enter the history books as one of our very worst presidents.
Theodore Roosevelt
Generals Jackson, Harrison, and Grant were all just warm-up acts for the greatest man of action ever to be an American president. Teddy Roosevelt was a Dakota cowboy, a New York City police commissioner, a Rough Rider charging up San Juan Hill, and a big-game hunter.
He was also something never seen before in the White House—he was fun.
Both a showman and a show-off, he gave the American audience a one-man display of masculine adventurism such as they’d never seen before. Nor would they ever see its like again.
Mark Twain was characteristically clear-eyed about this combination of extreme energy and outlandish egoism. “Mr. Roosevelt,” he wrote, “is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience.”
Roosevelt was utterly conscious of his own effect, however, and knew he was packaging himself for the consumption—and delight—of the American public. He felt strongly that the voters wanted from the man in the White House precisely what Lincoln had demanded of his generals—action.
“It is not the critic who counts,” he said at the Sorbonne during a 1910 tour, “not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.”
But, like so many other Americans, Roosevelt had needed to reinvent himself before he would take center stage. Asthma and poor eyesight had been just two of the handicaps he’d struggled to overcome. Yet he never had motivation any greater than the punches he continually absorbed as a young man in the boxing ring. What was to be done, he wondered, about the way his opponents handled him with such “easy contempt?”
The solution he came up with was to join what he termed “the fellowship of the doers.” That meant he would need to exercise twice as hard as he had before. No problem. He had the will and he had the energy, and he was giving notice that he, Theodore Roosevelt, was a man to be dealt with.
When the curtain rose on the career of Teddy Roosevelt, he stepped into the spotlight in the role of cowboy. It was as a rancher in the Dakotas—the rough-and-ready outdoorsman—that he first presented himself. The former sickly boy was now a buckaroo.
One favorite episode he liked to repeat was the story of his capture of three fugitives who had stolen a boat from the Roosevelt ranch. When he caught up with the trio, he pulled his gun and ordered them to put their hands up. “Finnegan hesitated for a second, his eyes fairly wolfish,” Roosevelt wrote later, chronicling the episode for Century magazine. “Then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering the center of his chest so as to avoid overshooting, and repeating the command, he saw that he had no show, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and held his hands up beside his head.”
Next came the “Rough Riders.” With America at war
with Spain in 1898, Roosevelt assembled a motley crew of pals to ride with him into history. They included cowboys from his Dakota days, a quartet of policemen who had served under him in New York City, a legendary Harvard quarterback, and, completing the ensemble, a renowned champion tennis player. To guard against the faint danger their efforts might escape attention, he signed with Scribner’s to produce a war memoir to appear first in magazine form, later as “a permanent historical work.” In his effort to grab the public imagination he was leaving nothing undone.
He wanted to be famous in 1898—and even more famous later.
The zenith of Teddy Roosevelt’s adventures was the famous charge up Cuba’s San Juan Hill. The chief Rough Rider had arrived in Cuba ready for action. When his orders came, he performed his self-styled war dance: “Shout hurrah for Erin Go Bragh! And all the Yankee nation!” His toast to victory in the upcoming battle was brimming with bravado. “To the officers—may they get killed, wounded or promoted.”
Yet for all his shameless self-promotion, Teddy truly was a man of guts and action. And he figured America was ready for him.
Following his rousing exploits in Cuba, Roosevelt accepted the backing of New York State’s Republican boss to run for governor. But he proved so independent that party leaders soon decided to get rid of this fellow they called “that damned cowboy.”
Much like the backroom crowd that put Jefferson Smith in the U.S. Senate, the Republicans of New York miscalculated. Their solution was to gain for him the Republican nomination for vice president.
The ticket of President William McKinley and the hero of San Juan Hill was elected in 1900. Six months into the new term—September 6, 1901—McKinley fell to an assassin’s bullet. Eight days later Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 170