Hemingway's Butterfly

Bromance (urban dictionary):

Describes the complicated love and affection shared by two straight males.

-noun

1. A non-sexual relationship between two men that are unusually close.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great source of inspiration for Ernest Hemingway. He was also the cause of much jealousy in Hemingway. Ernest didn't take too kindly to literary competition, and as much as he admired Fitzgerald, it was pretty evident in his memoirs that a part of him despised Fitzgerald having allowed his wife Zelda to have so much control over him. Personally, I think Zelda has been unfairly ostracized, and the accusations of her having been the main source of Fitzgerald's demise exaggerated. It reminds me of what Yoko Ono had to endure when she became involved with John Lennon. Sure, in many cases love can blind, but I always think it is all too easy for men to put too much accountability on a woman having been the source of their undoing and not nearly enough accountability towards themselves as the source of their undoing. One eventually reaches the point in one's life when one should be old and wise enough to be held accountable for one's own actions, yet many choose to continue to try to shift the blame onto anyone but themselves.

I digress.

Both men were volatile, both without the ability to have an anything less than tumultuous relationships with anyone, least of all themselves. When it was good between the two, it was amazing, as you could see by what Hemingway wrote of Fitzgerald in his memoir A Movable Feast:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

But when it was bad, it was unbearable, as Hemingway showed in his work The Green Hills of Africa, where he called Fitzgerald "an archetypal ruined American writer".

The relationship you have with yourself is the most important, after all, and if you can't even stand being in the same room with your own head, you're in for a very rocky existence.

Something both writers had in common was a heavy reliance on the drink, and in the end, such reliance lead to his death from his second heart attack right before the Christmas of 1940. The ever quotable Dorothy Parker was at his funeral, and was said to have murmured a line from underneath her tears: a quote from Jay Gatsby's funeral in The Great Gatsby:

"The poor son-of-a-bitch".

Hemingway's family history of suicide claimed him as well, and he blew his own head off with a double-barreled shot gun in his home right before the fourth of July 1961.

Although the tragedies and hardships of these two men are often romanticized, there is nothing romantic about alcoholism or depression. There is nothing romantic about being a prisoner of your own mind.

But maybe there was something romantic in the way Hemingway looked up to Fitzgerald.