This Will Make a Man of You

One Man?s Search for Hemingway and Manhood in a Changing World

Frank Miniter

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781510711921
• eBook ISBN: 9781510711938
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

One man's quest to becoming a man that Hemingway would be proud to call un compadre. Ben Franklin. Teddy Roosevelt. John Wayne. Babe Ruth. Ernest Hemingway. Looking to follow in the footsteps of these manly men, Frank Miniter decided to go to the places we all agree still make men. This quest led him across the world and finally to a secret fraternity of men who keep an ultimate rite of passage alive.Following the route of the iconic "Papa" Hemingway from Paris to Pamplona with he found that the answers to what happened to manliness, and therefore to what makes men, are in Hemingway's story. Part memoir, part how-to guide, This Will Make a Man of You narrates one man's journey to achieving manliness and uncovers a formula the ancients used to build men of character—a methodology that is still used in the places we all agree still make men. Even better, this formula can help all of us become all we want to be.Through his narrative, Miniter recounts his decision to run with the bulls and his harrowing participation in that intense event with a secretive fraternity of men and women. As he goes he provides readers with sage advice on how they can accomplish their own feats of manliness by using an ancient formula.
This is a must-read for every young man looking for a way to become man, for any middle-aged family man seeking adventure, and for all the other types of men in-between. This Will Make a Man Out of You should be read by every red-blooded male.

STEP 1

Chasing an Ideal

It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.

—Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

AT FORTY, I WAS IN a Paris café trying once again to answer Floyd Patterson’s question. His advice to seek and deeply question our heroes in order to improve ourselves had made me a journalist and author, but I didn’t know his simple advice to ask yourself “if you want to be one of those guys, and not sort of, but all the way” would become the key to answering a profound question modern society has been struggling with: What makes men?

This became clear as I used Floyd’s advice to understand Ernest Hemingway. I went from the Paris cafés Hemingway wrote in to the streets of Pamplona, Spain, where men test their machismo with fighting bulls. At each step, I found that the answers to what happened to manliness, and therefore to what makes men, were in his story. This made sense, as Hemingway’s iconic life, code, adventures, and fictional characters have been integral to every part of the last century’s rise, decline, and fall of manliness. Actually, Hemingway has been loaded with so much that is right and wrong with manliness that following his footsteps quickly became both an intense rite of passage and an archeological dig for manliness.

Though, to be candid, I was off balance from the start.

I assumed I’d be looking into Les Deux Magots, a corner café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris that Hemingway frequented, to see what drew him to such cafés, but I saw that all the fashionable people seated around the small round tables on a bright July afternoon were facing the street.

They were seated in tan chairs under the café’s green awning, because they wanted to see and be seen by the parade of Parisians on the walk and in the cars passing gently by on a summer afternoon. They were part of a living display begun generations before. The scene was coloring them with tender pastels and giving them timeless expressions and making their chatter as soft as jazz coming from an open window floors above. They looked like characters in the colorful Parisian prints sold to tourists along the Seine, though I supposed most of them wouldn’t like to hear any such thing.

I should have known this, as this wasn’t new. Hemingway said that in the 1920s many went to the popular cafés “to be seen publicly.”1 He went to them too, but he wrote in quiet, neighborhood cafés where the crowds wouldn’t find him during working hours. He separated the cafés into classes and treated them as their personalities dictated. To him, café life was central to why he said no other city was better arranged for a writer.

So yes, Hemingway’s ghost seemed to be there among the white-linen tables and waiters in black bow ties, even though the times had changed and changed again. As I let myself become a part of that decadent and popular living art in that fashionable Paris café, I wondered how a man, an American man no less, a man who loved African safaris and fishing for trout in small streams and for marlin in the currents of the great blue ocean and who adored the loud and face-smashing scene in and around boxing rings, could also be in love with Paris café life.

I shook my head and grinned. The notion that those things are out of sync was taught to me by a society out of step with the well-rounded man. I’d come here to dissolve such nonsense. So I looked at all the decorative people and thought how silly it is that we’ve let the sophisticate slay the man in full—or at least banish him from polite society.

The late Michael Thomas Kelly (1957–2003), a writer and editor for the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and more, actually blamed the king of cool, yeah Frank Sinatra himself, for today’s misunderstanding of the Hemingway ideal.2 Sinatra was perhaps America’s first true pop idol of the Entertainment Age. Kelly wrote that “what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool.” Before cool, there “was smart (as in the smart set).… The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca.” This old-school gentleman might have had the suave cynicism of Rhett Butler (Clarke Gable’s character in Gone with the Wind), but deep down he adhered to the old values, which was why Butler finally joined the war even as the South was crumbling. This old-school man would patriotically go to war and believe, despite the messiness and gross immorality of war, that somehow he was fighting for something good, and so he was good. This pre-Sinatra ideal was for “truth, justice, and the American way.” But Sinatra’s cool was apart and above those old values. “Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even.” Cool, as Kelly pointed out, is a cad. Cool isn’t pious and certainly isn’t virtuous. Cool is out for himself.

I have problems with that analysis, as Sinatra also spoke out against bigotry and lived his life opposed to racism at a time when that wasn’t fashionable. He was a man helping to bring a new ideal, not simply a man all about himself, all about cool. Still, Kelly had a point. Sinatra was a post-Hemingway man, a post-Bogart man, a new breed of man creating a new definition, and he did leave manliness in a mixed-up age in which James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause asks what makes a man but is given no answers.

This is why I was on a quest to find the old values Hemingway was trying to refashion, in order to see if they might be brought to the new age of equality Sinatra was a part of. The man of this age might be enlightened, but he needs a foundation to put those new values on.

I knew that, by today’s definition, the Hemingway man isn’t cool. But he is an adventurer and a gentleman. He follows a code. He is a man having a hell of a time, not living a guilty life. He has Mark Twain’s view of vices—and Sinatra’s, for that matter. He thinks drinking, smoking, chewing tobacco, and using profanity are fine at the proper times and in the right proportions. He believes that vices can refine a man even though he is certain that vices shouldn’t define a man. Still, to be closer to the modern ideal, he can’t be a bigot, a sexist, or anything else that blocks the truth with the ignorant blinders of prejudgment.

But then, when I looked around at the people posing like characters in a painting at Les Deux Magots, I saw cool all over them. This made me feel sorry for women who date cool men. A cad isn’t trustworthy. He is out for himself. He has no honor. He isn’t a complete man. He is a boy in man’s body.

This brings up an important misconception that must be put to rest right here. Some feminists attack “manliness” today for its past affronts on women and women’s rights. Many also consider “Hemingway” to be a loaded term—stuffed with sexism, egotism, even misogyny. Some of that is true and all of that will be addressed as we go, but it should be pointed out right from the start that when we define “manliness” by character traits, not by fleeting physical attributes or loaded ideology, we must concede we’re not only talking about men. I graduated from a military college with women as fellow cadets. I’ve run with the bulls in Pamplona alongside men and women. I’ve spelunked into caverns and climbed cliffs with men and women. Along the way, I’ve found that some of the most courageous and honorable people doing these things were women. I’ve also met and interviewed many fine police officers, US Marines, firefighters, and people in other occupations we consider to be manly and found that some of the best among them were also women. Obviously, what makes someone manly isn’t about chromosomes, but about character.

Character, after all, must be the necessary measure of manliness, as physical definitions of manliness are shallow. To see what I mean, imagine an NFL linebacker panicking at the sight of blood and so failing to help an injured person in need. Would he be considered manly? In contrast, if a barely 100-pound, stooped-back man with arthritis shaking his knees did help the injured person, we would say he was manly, right?

From another angle, ask yourself if Mr. Olympia, 6-foot, 2-inch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, is really manlier than slim, 5-foot, 7-inch Al Pacino in The Godfather.

Surely, physical traits can be signs of manliness. When we see a very out-of-shape person, we have reason to suspect they wouldn’t be much help in a crisis. But, as we can’t get in people’s heads to read their character, we really can’t know what their attributes and failings are. So again, we can only judge by their words and actions, not their physical appearance.

Despite this, a few still consider “manliness” to be akin to sexism, bravado, hubris. … To them I ask: Is a man who is so insecure that he has to prop up his own ego by putting down women really manly?

Obviously not.

Then is a woman who blindly attacks “manliness” as a threat really doing anyone any good? Surely such a person is guilty of a form of bigotry, even if it is fashionable in some circles. Though this is understandable given our history, isn’t it time we grew beyond that blind judgment?

With this view of the character of real manliness in mind, I looked about that Paris café and saw that an intellectual who disdains his own masculinity is a fop, whereas a so-called masculine man who mocks the finer things is sentencing himself to Neolithic life. Many sense the absurdity of this chasm between the man of culture and the man of action, but few have come to any true answers to bring the two halves back together. The best example we have today is the now more-than-half-century-old 007, a character with the depth of a cartoon hero for sure, and the ethics of a cad; nevertheless, he is a man who can wear a tux and a diving suit with the same masculine strength, and he does fight for something other than himself.

No, manliness is not a simple concept, even though it is often treated as such. As I searched for these answers, I wasn’t alone. I was with a group of men and women following the Hemingway trail from Paris to Pamplona all for our own reasons. We were going from the cafés, the art, the gardens of Paris to the brutality of running on Spanish streets with fighting bulls. The two places—Paris in summer and Pamplona during the San Fermín festival—appear so starkly different, it felt like we were transitioning from a Paul Cézanne post-impressionist landscape of plains of color building into green forests and softly lit yellow buildings to Francisco Goya’s “black paintings,” showing melting faces, devilish colors, and life frozen at the moment of rapture. Yet the Hemingway man, the iconic image he honed and presented in fiction, was at home in both Paris and Pamplona. By exhuming this Hemingway ideal, I hoped if not to resurrect a lost archetype, to at least understand what we’ve lost and maybe then to see how the two parts can be put back together again.

For bearings, before I left the US, I sought out the living authority on Hemingway, a college professor of literature and a poet who has lived in Paris and has been to Pamplona many times and, as this was being written, was the president of the Hemingway Society. I went to see Harry “Stoney” Stoneback at his home near New Paltz, New York.

His redbrick nineteenth-century home has brick walls around it and a lovely garden between old trees. The home is hidden in the forested edge of a small Hudson Valley town. Actually, his brick home could be frightening to a child in the wrong light, and the light I first saw it in was all wrong. Stoney was in the gazebo rosebushes had grown over. The late afternoon was dark. A summer thunderstorm had dimmed the sun, and lightening flashed to the west.

Stoney stood and walked with a badly stooped back as he led me inside the old brick home and closed a heavy oak door to the storm.

Once inside, he settled into a wheelchair and asked me to go into the dining room. He rolled his chair into his kitchen, and I soon heard glasses clinking and him rustling in a drawer for a corkscrew.

I took my time, as the home is a museum to an interesting man. There were books in French and English piled on tables and stacked along walls. Half-written poems were scribbled in the margins of open books and on yellow legal pads strewn on dark-wood end tables and chairs. Paintings purchased during sabbaticals to Paris, New Orleans, and China cluttered the walls. As I looked at them, I thought that a well-traveled man used to decorate his home with things that represent real things and places within his life. I thought that such a man wouldn’t even comprehend a modern American suburbanite’s habit of hanging pictures and displaying knickknacks because they match the color of the flat wall paint. An authentic man only hangs paintings and shelves books if they are pieces of an authentic life. Such an old-school man wouldn’t have much to say to an urban sophisticate who displays Oriental or African art because it’s hip; if the pieces aren’t representative of who a person is, they shouldn’t be on display, as without real meaning such things are only a façade hiding an inauthentic life, a fable there to impress visitors. So I was impressed that Stoney was all over the room and that he fit right into the scene, as it was an extension of him.

I sat down in the dining room at the end of a long cherry-varnished table that would seat ten if it wasn’t so cluttered with books and scraps of paper slathered with half-written poems. The room felt like an ancient library half fallen in but came to life when Stoney rolled in, using his right hand to propel his wheelchair. He had a bottle of French red wine and two wineglasses in his left hand.

Stoney has a scraggly white beard and a crooked back broken from being pushed off an embankment by thieves in Cuba. This gives him a crumpled slouch when he walks. Photos on the walls, however, show he spent most of his life walking with shoulders wide enough and eyes high enough to stand even with Liam Neeson. One large photo is of Stoney and his now-departed wife. She has cake smeared on her face and is laughing in celebration of a birthday spent on a ship on the Hudson River. He told me this is his favorite picture, and he managed to keep tears out of his eyes as he said this, but not his voice.

I looked from the poster-sized photo to Stoney and saw that though he’s now stooped into a wheelchair, his presence, charm, and intellect haven’t diminished with his posture. His eyes are vivacious and his wit quick. He is still very much alive.

Stoney answered my polite questions simply but soon directed the conversation to what he knew I really wanted to know. He began by explaining he was a man of the times, of the 1960s and 1970s, when he began lecturing, but that through investigation he found the truth about Hemingway and himself and this truth shaped his life.

He told me in his professorial tone that he first discovered Ernest Hemingway when every boy should. When he was fifteen, he ran away from a Kentucky boarding school and hitchhiked east. Somewhere in West Virginia, he found himself at a truck stop drinking coffee and deciding where to go next when a waitress shushed the diner. She had a copy of Life magazine and wanted to read something to everyone. She began, “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff …” She kept reading The Old Man and the Sea, and all the truck drivers sat listening, leaning back against the diner’s chairs and over the counter. She read the entire story. When she finished over an hour later, the truck drivers banged their rough hands together and cheered.

Stoney looked around at the working-class men and women in the truck stop and conceded he had a lot to learn. There would be time enough for adventure along the way. He had to study. He hitched rides back to Kentucky and to school. Days later, in early September 1951, in a class on literature, his teacher said with this sniffing tone, “Everyone is now reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but we’re not going to read about the glorification of men who want to bring back a misogynous and patriarchal society. We’re going to read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.”

Stoney said he found this existential book on feminism important, but at the time he didn’t realize what was happening to the view of manliness Hemingway articulated. He didn’t then see what society was diminishing. Quite a long time later, he would push back against this feminist misunderstanding of Hemingway, but he had a lot to experience first.

Years later, he was in Paris as a young professor. While there, he says, “After work I could walk down the Boulevard Raspail to meet a friend at the DÔme and never once think of Hemingway. We would eat at Lipp’s, go up on the hill afterwards, do the clubs, or go to a bal-musette where neighborhood locals still danced to an ancient accordion player, and never once think of Hemingway. … By the sheer force of cultural complicity, at least, I shared in the ill-informed condescension toward Hemingway that had become so fashionable in the 1960s.”

At the time, he met the novelist James Jones in Paris, author of The Merry Month of May, and Jones looked him over and accused, “What are you, kid? ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: A Shining Example of a Man
• 1: Chasing An Ideal
• 2: The Terror and the Confusion
• 3: The Guides
• 4: The Gauntlets
• 5: The Codes
• 6: The Reckoning
• 7: The Way
• Appendix: Codes of Honor
• About the Author