From a NY Times article, referencing Ernest Hemingway's intermittent way of getting back to good writing in his bloated later years:
Yet Hemingway was not a healthy man during the latter phases in his life. He was drunk much of the time; he often began drinking at breakfast and his brother counted 17 Scotch-and-sodas in a day. His wives complained that he was sporadic about bathing. He was obsessed with his weight and recorded it on the wall of his house.
He could be lively and funny, the organizer of exciting adventures. But he could also be depressed, combative and demoralized. His ego overflowed. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who endured a psychological crisis at about the same time, observed that Hemingway “is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”
Even as a young man Hemingway exaggerated his (already prodigious) exploits in order to establish his manliness. When he was older his prima donna proclivities could make him, as one visiting photographer put it, “crazy,” “drunk” and “berserk.”
He was a prisoner of his own celebrity. He’d become famous at 25 and by middle age he was often just playing at being Ernest Hemingway. The poet David Whyte has written that work “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself … losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.” Hemingway seems to have lost track of his own authentic voice in the midst of the public persona he’d created.
His misogyny was also like a cancer that ate out his insides. He was an extremely sensitive man, who suffered much from the merest slights, but was also an extremely dominating, cruel and self-indulgent one, who judged his wives harshly, slapped them when angry and forced them to bear all the known forms of disloyalty.
By this time, much of his writing rang false. Reviewer after reviewer said he had destroyed his own talent. His former mentor Gertrude Stein said he was a coward.
I went to a presentation today by someone that appeared to be a narcissist. He was old, and his mannerisms both betrayed pomposity and a deep insecurity and concern for whether he was being perceived as some great scholar or intellect. He combined an odd amount of name dropping with an awkward obsequiousness to the people who invited him to speak, calling one of them by the wrong name at one point in a case of trying to hard to endear himself and fumbling in the effort. But narcissists don't irritate me anymore. And I don't want to say I feel sorry for them, because I feel like that's it's own form of both (my) pride and (their) offense. But sociopaths and narcissists are an interesting comparison because both live empty lives, but the sociopath tends to embrace his with a nihilistic glee while the narcissist is afraid of his, like to look the shadow in the eye would cause him to lose all hope for a happy life. Just ramblings.
Yet Hemingway was not a healthy man during the latter phases in his life. He was drunk much of the time; he often began drinking at breakfast and his brother counted 17 Scotch-and-sodas in a day. His wives complained that he was sporadic about bathing. He was obsessed with his weight and recorded it on the wall of his house.
He could be lively and funny, the organizer of exciting adventures. But he could also be depressed, combative and demoralized. His ego overflowed. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who endured a psychological crisis at about the same time, observed that Hemingway “is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”
Even as a young man Hemingway exaggerated his (already prodigious) exploits in order to establish his manliness. When he was older his prima donna proclivities could make him, as one visiting photographer put it, “crazy,” “drunk” and “berserk.”
He was a prisoner of his own celebrity. He’d become famous at 25 and by middle age he was often just playing at being Ernest Hemingway. The poet David Whyte has written that work “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself … losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.” Hemingway seems to have lost track of his own authentic voice in the midst of the public persona he’d created.
His misogyny was also like a cancer that ate out his insides. He was an extremely sensitive man, who suffered much from the merest slights, but was also an extremely dominating, cruel and self-indulgent one, who judged his wives harshly, slapped them when angry and forced them to bear all the known forms of disloyalty.
By this time, much of his writing rang false. Reviewer after reviewer said he had destroyed his own talent. His former mentor Gertrude Stein said he was a coward.
I went to a presentation today by someone that appeared to be a narcissist. He was old, and his mannerisms both betrayed pomposity and a deep insecurity and concern for whether he was being perceived as some great scholar or intellect. He combined an odd amount of name dropping with an awkward obsequiousness to the people who invited him to speak, calling one of them by the wrong name at one point in a case of trying to hard to endear himself and fumbling in the effort. But narcissists don't irritate me anymore. And I don't want to say I feel sorry for them, because I feel like that's it's own form of both (my) pride and (their) offense. But sociopaths and narcissists are an interesting comparison because both live empty lives, but the sociopath tends to embrace his with a nihilistic glee while the narcissist is afraid of his, like to look the shadow in the eye would cause him to lose all hope for a happy life. Just ramblings.
