and Stephen Adams
In the photograph, Ernest Hemingway is kicking a can high in the air on a wintery country road. It is a graceful, athletic move, and he is pleased with himself. The photograph was taken for Life magazine by John Bryson, on February 1, 1959, along the Big Wood River near Ernest’s home outside of Ketchum, Idaho. The image looks impetuous and somehow intimate, but it was staged, Bryson’s idea. Ernest was acting but claimed spontaneity and took all credit. That’s the trouble with Ernest. There are too many things you don’t want to know.
At the time, Ernest was between two disastrous rounds of electroshock therapy and two years before his suicide. By then, writing in America as a man meant dealing one way or another with Ernest’s literary manliness, with all its fallibility and sexual ironies. There were generations of us who not only read the work but were made to study it—to take it deeper than the words.
