Russell Banks, Ernest Hemingway and Masculinity in America

Sat, 02/25/2012 - 04:39 — Anonymous The New York Review of Books explores
Russell Banks' novels and touches on Ernest Hemingway's legacy in
American letters. When it comes to the anxiety of influence, American women
writers seem to have an easy relation to their gentler and more urbane
literary ancestresses; but men writing in America have to contend with the
shade of Hemingway, and the longstanding tradition of manliness he tried to
represent. They may reject that tradition but they can't ignore it, though
Henry James may have been trying to by making himself into an Englishman.
Most of the ongoing mining of Ernest Hemingway's character, sexuality, and
personal history arises from our sense that he embodied the paradoxes and
conflicts in masculinity as Americans have constructed it. Was he a bully or
a baby, brave or cowardly, gay or straight, tough or weak? That "shade of
Hemingway" has colored American travel writing as much as any other genre,
of course. The article is available online but only subscribers can read the
piece in its entirety. World Hum