Ernest Hemingway was a d*ck
My new hero is Pauline, one of Hemingway’s wives.
When Pauline discovers that Hemingway has a mansion and a mistress in Columbia—and has decided not to come home for over a year—she calls up her rich uncle and asks him for the money to build a pool in the backyard of the Key West home she shares with Hemingway.
The spot she chooses for the pool is the exact location of Hemingway’s prized possession—his boxing ring. She rips up the boxing ring and donates it around town.
When Hemingway finally returns and finds his precious boxing ring destroyed and a pool in its place, he is furious. The pool cost $20,000, and Pauline lets him believe that he paid for it.
He throws a penny at Pauline, symbolic of the fact that she “took him for his last cent.” Pauline then places that penny into a mold in the patio surrounding the pool and tells the story to her friends as they share cocktails and enjoy her revenge.
Pauline is my hero.
The tour guide from when I visited Hemingway’s Key West Home said that not a single literary author impacted American culture as much as Hemingway did.
I think about a short story I once read by Hemingway—one that contains a rape, but it isn’t portrayed as a man raping a woman. It’s portrayed as regular old sex.
I agree that Hemingway shaped American culture. He shaped a culture of cruel men—men used to getting their way, and who throw fits when they experience consequences for their behavior.
It’s unfortunate that horrible men like Hemingway had such an influence on American culture. But rather than erasing Hemingway, I think we should treat him as a cautionary tale, evidence of karma, and the means to remember how we got to where we are.
I also think we should completely replace his literary work with the works of Hemingway’s contemporaries:
Zora Neale Hurston
Gertrude Stein
Virginia Woolf
Katherine Anne Porter
And for the love of god, can we please remove Old Man and the Sea from high school reading lists? It’s boring AF.