It seems as if Ernest Hemingway regarded homosexuals as effeminate sissies towards whom he had nothing but contempt. Not a major story but something worth knowing for use at some appropriate time. Billy R. Excerpts from a longer article with additional quotes on other subjects- Wellesnet.com
CLASH OF THE TITANS: When ORSON WELLES met ERNEST HEMINGWAY to narrate THE SPANISH EARTH (May, 1937) July 18, 2007 By Lawrence French ORSON WELLES: My relationship with Hemingway has always been very droll. The first time we met was when I had been called to read the narration for a film that he and Joris Ivens had made about the war in Spain; it was called The Spanish Earth. Arriving at the studio, I came upon Hemingway, who was in the process of drinking a bottle of whiskey; I had been handed a set of lines that were too long, dull, had nothing to do with his style, which is always so concise and so economical. There were lines as pompous and complicated as this: "Here are the faces of men who are close to death," and this was to be read at a moment when one saw faces on the screen that were so much more eloquent. I said to him, "Mr. Hemingway, it would be better if one saw the faces all alone, without commentary." This didn't please him at all and, since I had directed the Mercury Theatre, which was a sort of avant-garde theatre on Broadway, he thought I was some kind of faggot and said, "You effeminate boys of the theatre, what do you know about real war?" Well, taking the bull by the horns, I began to make effeminate gestures and I said to him, "Mister Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are!" That enraged him and he picked up a chair; I picked up another and, right there, in front of the images of the Spanish Civil War, as they marched across the screen, we had a terrible scuffle. It was something marvelous: two guys like us in front of these images representing people in the act of struggling and dying... We ended by toasting each other over a bottle of whiskey. We have spent our lives having long periods of friendship and others during which we barely spoke. I have never been able to avoid gently making fun of him, and this no one ever did; everyone treated him with the greatest respect. ---------------------------- Here is the transcript of Welles comments to Michael Parkinson in 1974 about Hemingway and bullfighting. As previously noted, there are many correlations between Welles comments here and his script for The Other Side of the Wind. Among them: Jake Hannaford's father, like Hemingway's, has commited suicide. And both Jake H. and Ernest H. will follow in their father's footsteps. Strangely, the great matador, Juan Belmonte, who Welles mentions in passing, and was admired greatly by both Welles and Hemingway, would also kill himself, a year after Hemingway's suicide. Welles also notes he stopped following the bullfights, just as his father stopped hunting, a telling comment, given that Welles later wrote he felt responsible for his father's death. Then there is the whole speculation about whether or not Hemingway's own homophobia might have been a smokescreen, if in fact, he did harbor any latent homosexual desires, as Jake Hannaford certainly does. ------------------------------------------- ORSON WELLES: He was a very close friend of mine. I knew him on and off for many years. We had a very strange relationship. I never belonged to his clan, because I made fun of him, and nobody ever made fun of Hemingway, but I did and he took it, but he didn’t like me to do it in front of the club. We met in the projection of a movie he made, which he wanted me to narrate. He had written the commentary, and we hadn’t seen each other, this was in a dark projection room. I was reading the text and I said, “Is it really necessary to say this, wouldn’t it be better just to see the picture?” and things like that. Then I heard this growl from the darkness, “Some damn faggot who runs an art theater trying to tell me how to write narration,” and so on. So I began to camp it up. I thought, “if that’s what I’m dealing with...” So I said, "Oh, Mr. Hemingway, you think because you're so big and strong and have hair on your chest that you can bully me.” So this great figure stood up and swung at me, so I swung at him. Now you have the picture of the Spanish civil war being projected on a screen and these two heavy figures swinging away at each other and missing most of the time. The lights came up and we looked at each other and burst into laughter and became great friends. Not a friendship that was renewed every year, but over many years at different times. I saw him again, the last year that he was entirely in control of himself, quite a lot. But we never discussed bullfighting, because except on the subject of (Antonio) Ordoñez we disagreed profoundly on too many points. He thought he invented it, you know. He really did think he invented it. Maybe he did. His book (The Sun Also Rises) is superb. He’s a great, great, great artist. My admiration for him… I was enormously fond of him as a man, because the thing you never get from his books, was his humor. There is hardly a word of humor in a Hemingway book, because he is so tense and solemn and dedicated to what is true and good and all of that. But when he relaxed, he was riotously funny. That was the level that I loved about him. I enjoyed being with him. I used to go out and keep him company when he went duck shooting in Venice in the autumns. I have many strange memories of him like that. I was enormously fond of him. But as an artist, I think that there are very few important writers, with the exception of Nabokov, who have not been influenced to some degree by him. I think it’s impossible to write the same as we did before he wrote -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
