{"id":85135,"date":"2015-04-24T14:32:19","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T18:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85135"},"modified":"2018-12-05T17:59:58","modified_gmt":"2018-12-05T22:59:58","slug":"distinctly-emasculated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/24\/distinctly-emasculated\/","title":{"rendered":"Distinctly Emasculated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and sexual anxiety.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hemingway in Paris, 1924.<\/p><\/div>\n

History tends to compare Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2014and why not? As contemporaries and rivals, the two make natural foils for each other. Hemingway, we\u2019re told, epitomizes a certain archetypal masculinity; he presented himself as a hunter, a boxer, a war veteran, and a ladies\u2019 man; accordingly, he wrote in a spare, economical style, mostly about war, solitude, and adventure. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, we know as a social striver, someone who prided himself on his budding elitism and his (incomplete) Princeton education, who was known to have his pocket square and his hair-part always just right. He wrote about socioeconomic status in prose that was, at least next to Hemingway\u2019s, often lyrical and adorned, and most would readily agree that he\u2019s the more effeminate of the two. But the sexual identities of these men, formed by their peculiar childhoods and the Lost Generation artists they surrounded themselves with, weren\u2019t as self-evident as many modern readers might think.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a classic story of the homosexual tensions bubbling just beneath the surface between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It takes place in the men\u2019s room at Michaud\u2019s, at the time an upscale brasserie in Paris. As Hemingway claims in A Moveable Feast<\/em>\u2014and claims <\/em>is just the word, because his own sexual insecurities tended to manifest in an unfair emasculation of Fitzgerald\u2014Fitzgerald told him: <\/p>\n

\u201cZelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally.\u00a0She said it was a matter of measurements.\u00a0 I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCome out to the office,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is the office?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLe water<\/em>,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re perfectly fine,\u201d I said.\u00a0\u201cYou are O.K.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing wrong with you.\u00a0You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened.\u00a0Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose statues may not be accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are pretty good.\u00a0 Most people would settle for them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Laying aside the inherent humor in using statues at the Louvre to measure one\u2019s manhood, Hemingway\u2019s claim that he took a look at Fitzgerald\u2019s member in le water<\/em>, the men\u2019s room, is treated with an odd informality given the intimacy of the act. It also seems to undermine the hyper-hetero, hypermasculine image Hemingway put forth on the page\u2014it\u2019s a quiet revelation. According to those who knew him, Hemingway\u2019s bull fighting and boxing, to say nothing of his string of submissive wives, didn\u2019t add up to the image of manliness he\u2019d attempted to create for himself.<\/p>\n

Kenneth S. Lynn\u2019s biography of Hemingway<\/a> quotes Lady Emerald Cunard, an American-born socialite who spent most of her life in London and who, when she first met Hemingway, told the literary critic Cyril Connolly, \u201cI was startled \u2026 Not a bit what I expected. You may think it bizarre of me but he struck me as androgynous \u2026 It is not the\u00a0mot juste<\/em>, perhaps. But that\u2019s how he struck me. Distinctly emasculated.\u201d Zelda Fitzgerald, who was, it must be said, sometimes prone to hyperbole, still told Scott one evening that Hemingway was little more than \u201ca pansy with hair on his chest,\u201d per Nancy Milford\u2019s biography of Zelda<\/a>. So strong was Hemingway\u2019s masculinity that he even claimed to lust after Gertrude Stein, who was generally precluded from male sexual fantasies. According to W. G. Rogers\u2019s When This You See<\/em>\u00a0Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person<\/em>, Hemingway said, \u201cShe used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and it was a good healthy feeling and made more sense than some of the talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ernest_Hemingway_with_Family,_1905\"<\/a>

Hemingway, far right, with his family, 1905.<\/p><\/div>\n

But the most fascinating example of Hemingway\u2019s fluid sexuality came in his second posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden<\/em>, which he had worked on since 1946 but did not see publication until 1986, nearly twenty-five years after he had killed himself. The novel deals with what Hemingway\u2019s biographer James Mellow calls \u201cthe ideas of sexual transference.\u201d It follows a newly married couple, David and Catherine Bourne, honeymooning on the French Riviera, where they meet a woman called Marita with whom they both fall in love. Catherine convinces her husband to dye his hair the same color as hers, so that, as Mellow writes, \u201cthey are twins, summer-tanned and androgynous.\u201d The novel shows a subtle interest in lesbianism and a more overt interest in androgyny and gender-role reversal. As James Tuttleton wrote in The New Criterion<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> \u201cthe sexually passive novelist and the sexual perversities in\u00a0The Garden of Eden<\/em>\u00a0appear to have destroyed the last vestiges of the myth of Hemingway as the Man\u2019s Man, the stoic soldier, the virile boxer, the macho big-game hunter and lover of women par excellence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ernest_Hemingway's_Baby_Picture_-_NARA_-_192665\"<\/a>

Hemingway\u2019s baby picture.<\/p><\/div>\n

But Lynn\u2019s biography maintains that these gender-bending themes were nothing new for Hemingway. Transsexual fantasies and incest recur in many of his previous works, likely stemming from a turbulent relationship with his mother, Grace, whom Lynn dubs \u201cthe dark queen of Hemingway\u2019s world.\u201d Grace often dressed him and his older sister, Marcelline, as same-sex twins when they were children; in a scrapbook, a photo of a two-year-old Ernest is captioned \u201csummer girl.\u201d At the same time, his mother encouraged his masculinity, impelling him to be \u201ca little man.\u201d \u201cCaught between his mother\u2019s wish to conceal his masculinity and her eagerness to encourage it,\u201d Lynn writes, \u201cwas it any wonder that he was anxious and insecure?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hard though he tried to cultivate it, Hemingway\u2019s machismo was punctured as early as 1933, when the critic Max Eastman published a review called \u201cBull in the Afternoon,\u201d in which he wrote<\/a>, \u201cCome out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you.\u201d Hemingway claimed to have \u201cslapped Max Eastman\u2019s face with a book in the offices of Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons,\u201d and said that he would \u201cdonate $1,000 to any charity Mr. Eastman may name\u2014or even to Mr. Eastman himself\u2014for the pleasure of Mr. Eastman\u2019s company in a locked room with all legal rights waived,\u201d according to a 1937\u00a0New York Times <\/em>article<\/a>. Hemingway meant to indicate that he could beat up Eastman\u2014but one could just as easily read his request with a homoerotic subtext.<\/p>\n

\"F_Scott_Fitzgerald_1921\"<\/a>

Fitzgerald in 1921.<\/p><\/div>\n

Fitzgerald didn\u2019t use his writing to mask his sexual insecurities to the extent that Hemingway did, but he perceived his lack of control\u2014in his marriage with Zelda, his writing, and his \u201cemotional bankruptcy,\u201d which he wrote about extensively in The Crack-Up<\/em>\u2014as not just feminine but homosexual. It was an identity in which he saw emotional chaos.<\/p>\n

In an essay,\u00a0\u201cF. Scott Fitzgerald: Homosexuality and the Genesis of Tender Is the Night<\/em><\/a>,\u201d the scholar Angus P. Collins writes that Fitzgerald\u00a0\u201cwas so often the self-confessed \u2018woman\u2019 of his marriage,\u201d and that he \u201cappears to have suspected that he himself was the true homosexual in his choice of vocation.\u201d Collins goes on to show that Fitzgerald accepted the possibility of his own homosexuality but viewed it more as a basis for moral collapse (\u201cemotional bankruptcy\u201d) than as a sexual attraction to men:<\/p>\n

Homosexuality therefore defines the circle of his creative difficulties in that he is homosexual both in his moral and artistic commitment\u00a0and\u00a0in his proneness to moral collapse \u2026 Homosexuality can convey to him both his own much greater emasculation (the attenuations of art) and his own capacities for self-abandonment (the perils of self-indulgence).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fitzgerald was deeply suspicious of feminine beauty. In This Side of Paradise<\/em>, he characterizes it as malevolent: \u201cAmory knew that every time he had reached toward [beauty] longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil \u2026 Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.\u201d This anxiety manifests in nearly all of his novels. Consider the classic Fitzgerald story arc: a young man on the upward swing is prematurely drained of his youth and ambition by a woman, whose beauty seduces and eventually destroys him. From Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise <\/em>to Gloria Gilbert in The Beautiful and the Damned<\/em> to Daisy Fay in The Great Gatsby<\/em> to Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night<\/em>, Fitzgerald\u2019s principal female characters are wealthy, delicate, flirtatious, and beautiful, but they all eventually cause not just heartache but complete catastrophe for his male protagonists.<\/p>\n

As a middle-class boy growing up in a wealthy St. Paul suburb, Fitzgerald craved wealth and beauty, but as he realized them, they began to cause his downfall. He persisted in finding a way to live a life far out of his financial range: spoiling Zelda with jewelry and long stays at the Plaza and the Ritz; throwing wild, profligate parties at their house in Long Island; asking for large advances before he\u2019d even paid off his existing debts. Though at times he realized money and beauty\u2019s possibility for evil, he could never get over his Princeton-age infatuation with Keats\u2019s most enduring couplet: \u201cBeauty is truth, truth beauty,\u2014that is all \/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gerald and Sara Murphy, a married pair of dilettantes who had each inherited a large fortune, were close friends of the Fitzgeralds and nearly the whole of the top echelon of the Lost Generation expatriate group. For Fitzgerald, they embodied wealth and beauty. What added a wrinkle to it all was that Gerald was gay.<\/p>\n

\u201cMurphy had a repressed homosexual side, which he called his \u2018defects\u2019 in a 1931 letter to Archibald MacLeish, saying that his post-adolescent life \u2018has been a process of concealment of the personal realities,\u2019\u201d writes<\/a> the art historian John Richardson. Fitzgerald seemed to know Gerald was gay; he \u201cmischievously introduced Gerald to a suitable young Chilean, Eduardo Velasquez, whose hopes that psychoanalysis might cure him of homosexuality had seemingly been dashed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Image

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1937, June 4. Photo: Carl van Vechten<\/p><\/div>\n

Even with knowledge of Gerald\u2019s sexuality, Fitzgerald used the Murphys as a basis for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night<\/em>, where Dick is a charismatic, heterosexual, Oxford-educated doctor who attracts female attention nearly everywhere he goes. Even so, Dick undergoes the classic Fitzgerald arc: a promising, charismatic young man, he\u2019s sucked dry of his youth and strength by a wealthy woman, Nicole, whose beauty and fortune hide mental illness and emotional abuse. Dick is feminized by Nicole\u2019s beauty and mental illness, leading to his total bankruptcy. By the end of the novel, he can\u2019t conjure the strength needed to perform a waterskiing trick.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest criticisms of Tender Is the Night<\/em>\u2014and the principal criticism leveled by Hemingway\u2014was that Dick Diver was a washy combination of Murphy and Fitzgerald: an inconsistent character. Fitzgerald wrote the bulk of Tender is the Night<\/em> in an emotional hell, living at the La Paix estate outside Baltimore, drinking incredible amounts, and struggling with his self-perceived \u201ccrack-up,\u201d all while Zelda was hospitalized for mental illness. Gerald\u2019s homosexuality is depicted as neither good nor bad, but Fitzgerald seemed to believe it implied an emotional weakness\u2014he wondered about his own femininity, his inability to please his wife, and his lack of control, equating all of it with what he termed \u201chomosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The fluidity and confusion behind Fitzgerald and Hemingway\u2019s sexual identities may have compelled them to expatriate to Europe in the first place. \u201cIt\u2019s the freedom from moral scrutiny,\u201d said<\/a> Kirk Curnutt, a scholar of Hemingway and the author of The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/em>. \u201cThe Puritanism of America was pretty stringent in the 1920s\u2014there were consequences for certain behaviors. Once you lived abroad, as long as you had some money, you didn\u2019t have to work, and you could indulge whatever desires were repressed at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both men had strong perceptions of what it meant to be gay, and set ideas of how to interact with their gay friends\u2014most notably Gerald Murphy, Gertrude Stein, and Cole Porter. Fitzgerald saw homosexuality as a weakness\u2014less a sexual predilection than something one undergoes in times of emotional distress. Hemingway used fiction to broadcast his virility after a sexually confusing childhood. Both were more sexually fluid than their contemporary reputations suggest.<\/p>\n

In The Crack-Up<\/em>, Fitzgerald remarked that \u201cthe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.\u201d Certainly both Hemingway and Fitzgerald managed the former\u2014but whether they retained the ability to properly function is another question entirely.<\/p>\n

Cody C. Delistraty is a writer and historian based in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and sexual anxiety. History tends to compare Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2014and why not? As contemporaries and rivals, the two make natural foils for each other. Hemingway, we\u2019re told, epitomizes a certain archetypal masculinity; he presented himself as a hunter, a boxer, a war veteran, and a ladies\u2019 man; accordingly, he wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":822,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[5371,571,660,10829,3292,17901,17903,12612,270,179,1070,4770,17902,15710,11854,3290],"class_list":["post-85135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-moveable-feast","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-gerald-murphy","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-homosexuality","tag-lady-emerald-cunard","tag-masculinity","tag-paris","tag-sex","tag-sexuality","tag-tender-is-the-night","tag-the-garden-of-eden","tag-the-lost-generation","tag-this-side-of-paradise","tag-zelda-fitzgerald"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Sexual Anxiety of the Lost Generation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the public imagination, Hemingway and Fitzgerald have settled into conventions of masculinity\u2014but their approaches to sexuality were complicated.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/24\/distinctly-emasculated\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Distinctly Emasculated by Cody Delistraty\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 24, 2015 \u2013 Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and sexual anxiety. 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History tends to compare Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2014and why not? 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