Ernest Hemingway in Cerebus

Cerebus #251–265 (2000-2001)
Other literary luminaries, or their doppelgangers, have appeared in Dave Sim's 300-issue run of Cerebus, including Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

The title character -- a humanoid aardvark who starts as a barbarian and becomes a prime minister, a pope, and finally, an outcast -- is the vehicle for Sim's exploration of philosophy, religion and gender politics.

In this story, "Form & Void", Cerebus treks home with his love, Jaka, and they encounter his idol, author "Ham Ernestway". This Hemingway avatar depicts the author at the end of his life, nearly subverbal as he fights a losing battle with depression. His icy wife Mary, always at his side, works to protect his legacy.

This spare story arc near the end of Cerebus' 300-issue run is part comic book, part obsessive notebook of Sim's Hemingway-related citations and tangents published at the back of each issue. The research Sim conducted for this arc is staggering, and he goes to great lengths to prove that Mary Hemingway kept a handwritten journal from her 1953 safari in Africa that’s since been lost or destroyed in favor of her typed and edited manuscript.

Sim's references rely heavily on Hemingway’s posthumously published The Garden of Eden and its depiction of gender ambiguity. On one page in Cerebus, an older Hemingway begins to disrobe, revealing women's lingerie.

The text quotes Hemingway: "Mary is a sort of prince of devils... She always wanted to be a boy and thinks as a boy without ever losing any femininity... She loves me to be her girl, which I love to be – not being absolutely stupid, and also loving to be her girl since I have other jobs in the daytime."

Sim goes farther than most scholars and biographers in claiming that Hemingway was bisexual.

"If all of the Garden of Eden manuscript pages were ever published, I'm sure Hemingway would become a de facto bi-sexuality poster boy," Sim says.

Below, a longer Q&A with Sim about Hemingway and Cerebus.

A: I took Norman Mailer's word for it that Hemingway was the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Literary World and decided that I would "do" him as the "capo di tutti capi" ["boss of all bosses"] literary presence in Cerebus -- all without having read of word of his fiction. If he's good enough for Mailer, he's good enough for me.

A: I'm a huge fan of the very early Hemingway, but ultimately decided that most of his work was "The Emperor's New Clothes". Not much "there" there. The lower-case in our time I would rate the highest [in our time was Hemingway's short story 1924 collection printed in Paris. His 1925 expanded edition, printed in New York, was upper-cased as In Our Time -- ed.]. Some parts of Men Without Women. I'd rate Fitzgerald and Mailer higher than I do Hemingway.

A: The adventurer! All the frontiers would be explored in the course of Hemingway's lifetime and he was one of the last to travel to exotic locations and write about them and his choices were very astute: he made Kilimanjaro, bullfighting, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and the Spanish Civil War, among others, his own.

It must've been both a great joy and a great burden to be Hemingway, probably both simultaneously, and in a way that mixed very badly with atheism and alcohol. His "black ass" was largely self-inflicted, I think.

A: They haven't. We all go through periods of "black ass" in our lives and it's up to us to pull ourselves out of it. Hemingway didn't, which was a failure on his part. Period.

A: The fact that she left the keys to the gun chest in plain sight suggests to me that she knew what she was doing and she knew what the result would be. So, it seems to me definitely premeditated. That having been said, it was Hemingway who unlocked the gun chest, loaded the weapon and pulled the trigger(s).

A: Two things: first, Mary Hemingway's Africa diary where it was clear that he was fantasizing that she was a young boy -- his "kitten brother"... Second, The Garden of Eden book which he wildly "over-wrote" to the tune of hundreds of pages trying to explain his sexuality in such a way as not to sound gay. He couldn't do it and gave up trying. If all of The Garden of Eden manuscript pages were ever published, I'm sure Hemingway would become a de facto bi-sexuality poster boy.

He wanted to be all man and all woman and he wanted his wives to be all man and all woman. Mary documented that in her journal, he snooped and read it and had to add his own entry after doing so, knowing that Mary's journal would be read, in order to "clarify" things for posterity. I think he thought that everyone was like that: all man and all woman and that he was the only one who was honest about it.