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Perhaps it is better to read the book as fiction; Hemingway recommends just that in an introduction where he says, ironically, that it "may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Take his account of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The indictment-by-anecdote is irresistibly funny, but was the author of The Great Gatsby such a petulent clown, fatuous snob, and pathetic simpleton about sex?
On Hemingway's saying, Zelda Fitzgerald almost destroyed Scott through her insane envy of his talent by convincing him that he was sexually inadequate. Hemingway claims that he realized she was insane long before Fitzgerald was forced to accept the fact. As evidence, he cites the time that Zelda asked him: "Don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?" Perhaps the lost generation was not really lost after all, merely mislaid.
Tragic Grace
The gay and artless sketches (with a lifetime of craft behind each deceptively negligent line) have a heartbreaking quality when the reader recalls that these glittering trivia were cut and polished by a man soon to take his own life. So the reader searches for a clue to the tragic flaw in a nature that seemed all confidence and gallantry, and finds it in a pride so vast that it demanded others live according to Hemingway's own stern and complicated code (even when they could not know the rules), a pride so touchy that it could make the humdrum business of ordering a cup of coffee a mortal combat.
Hemingway had to win, even when others were unaware that anything was at stake. In lesser men, this is now called one-upmanship, and it made taxing for Hemingway the ordinary business of living. He aspired to the natural grace and integrity of the truly simple man, but often seems to have achieved something closer to the contrived spontaneity of the method actor. The exactions of pride were made tolerable by an equally vast joviality--a humor that could be gentle or sardonic, and served as mask, armor and weapon of his severe stoicism.
He knew this well enough himself. In one anecdote, he brilliantly re-creates a scene at the Dme caf, where the doomed painter Pascin is drinking with two model-tarts or tart-models. "He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the '90s than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dme. They say the seeds of what we do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."
Is this a man writing the obituary of another man or his own?