NICK HORNBY HE WASN'T

Edward Docx defends Hemingway,

and laments that they don't make writers like him any more

IT is not always remembered that the liter- ary gestation of Ernest Hemingway was supervised, in the main, by lesbians. Born on 21 July 1899, one hundred years ago this week, his biographical renown is customari- ly built upon two principal pillars: that he was badly wounded (and later decorated) while working as an ambulance driver dur- ing the first world war; and that he saw action as one of the main chroniclers of the struggle between Fascists and Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

His first publishable fiction, however, was written between these times — in more-than-usually gay Paris, during the 1920s, where, as an impressionable and eager young writer, he liked to pay court to Gertrude Stein, the celebrated Sapphic hostess of the city's most stimulating salon. Stein herself describes him, aged 23, as `extraordinarily good-looking . . . with pas- sionately interested rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and looked.' And though they were later to fall out, it was she who first took him to a bullfight and it was she, more than anyone else, who was the mid- wife of his work.

But Stein was not at all alone. There were throngs of attendant aunts. In Paris at that time, when feminism knew what it was about, there were more than 80 femi- nist societies representing more than 60,000 members. And among this lively number of sexually emancipated and les- bian women were several who held crucial positions in the literary and publishing cir- cles through which Hemingway moved Hilda Doolittle, Alice B. Toklas, Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, to name but a few.

Marry this to the neglected information that Hemingway's real mother, Grace, who was strikingly similar to Stein in looks, age and artistic bent, was also suspected of having an affair with another woman and it will come as little Surprise that Heming- way's best collection of short stories from the period is called Men without Women (1927). In fiction and in fact, the rest of his life can be considered as a bruising series of bouts fought in an attempt to work out what that title might mean — where the male identity might find independent locus, where femininity ends and masculin- ity begins.

We may not see his like again. Certainly, he has no obvious inheritors today — no. single figure who combines the swagger of his subject matter with so spare and sinewy a style. Unlike their grandmothers, the recent gynocracy, it seems, have delivered a modern generation of literary eunuchs. Both consciously and unconsciously, Papa Hemingway is still the bloody and undis- puted champion of bare-knuckle fiction A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea — war, bullfighting, big-game hunting, explosives and deep-sea fishing.

Contemporary (so-called) male writers in this country (of whom Nick Hornby is the most widely touted) are a poor, emasculat- ed excuse for what was once a legitimate enterprise. The football fallacy provides a pathetic totem in which the only courage required is surviving an unexpectedly fever- ous rogan josh. Cowed, brittle and fearful of damnation, they do not dare do anything. Instead, limp little characters scrabble furtively for stature in lonely corners of mostly impotent narratives. And the serious authors are hardly more assertive: for all their undisputed elegance and talent, the likes of Louis de Bernieres, Alain de Botton and Vikram Seth come across like so many buffed-up and waxed-down members of a literary Boyzone.

Martin Amis, meanwhile, is mired in the memoir of his father that he is writing. Will Self refuses to re-emerge from the impene- trable thicket of his own vocabulary. Ian McEwan is more of an apologist for the fail- ings of masculinity than he pretends. Julian Barnes is merely sensitive. And there just aren't that many people around these days with the required stamina for Salmi' Rushdie.

With the noble (though ageing) excep- tion of Tom Wolfe, the Americans are suf- fering from the same castration. Richard Ford's last collection of short stories was entitled Women with Men — a telling rever- sal of Hemingway's previously cited title and Philip Roth (he who brought us Port- noy's Complaint) is increasingly obsessed with the male's naked incapacity and con- fusion: 'All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by noth- ing' (American Pastoral).

Worthwhile male writing has all but been stamped out, driven into parody, shooed into science fiction or thriller writing, genres which no one need take seriously — Michael Marshall Smith, Iain M. Banks, Grisham, Herbert, Sheldon, etc. Paradoxically, if you want to know how real men really behave, think, feel, you have to read women. By far the most substantial, unconcessionary, truth- ful, , male character studies of the past ten years are to be found in Pat Barker's Regen- eration trilogy. Or in Pulitzer Prize-winning Jane Smiley's writing. Or Bernice Rubens.

So why doesn't Hemingway (or Steinbeck, for that matter, or Joyce, or Hardy or Nabokov) have any obvious heirs? What is the late 20th century's problem? It was not, after all, ever thus. When English writing was at its most manly noon, Sidney, Shake- speare, Samuel Daniel and Donne devoted entire sonnet cycles to the very serious busi- ness of importuning women. Figurative or flagrant, subtle or frank, depending on their mood, these men wrote hundreds and hun- dreds of our best-loved lines — all of them in overt masculine verse and most of them centering on the fundamental premise that the male desire to talk, tease, cajole or brow- beat women into bed is worthy of poetry. But not an eyelid do we bat.

The answer may well be that our present and persistent disquiet with masculinity, both in literature and sociologically, is the legacy of the recent generation of less than rigorous feminists who, lacking the deftness and perception of their predecessors, have idly sought to imply that, where the femi- nine ends and the masculine begins, all is savagery and imperialism — men without women, to borrow Hemingway's title, are in some way atavistic or taboo.

This is the result of prizing invective over argument so that the intellectual value of a view is measured by the emotional temper- ature at which it is dispensed. But such slack suppositions are, of course, nonsense — Stein would have dismissed them out of hand — and those that are in any doubt should read some of Hemingway's work and find out for themselves.

As for the future, it would appear that we are in need of some more intelligent society lesbians.

The author is associate editor of the Express.