User:NrmMGA5108/sandbox: Difference between revisions

echoes the ‘’Playboy’’ stance on working hard to enjoy the products of capital- ism with a female companion.

Relying so heavily on Hemingway allowed Spectorsky to “advertise the magazine’s commitment to masculinity” (Gilbert 209). His “reputation as a literary tough guy” had been well established in the 1930s (Osgerby 45). ‘’Esquire’’ proudly featured Hemingway for his “rough-hewn machismo,” even offering him one thousand shares of stock in 1937 (Osgerby 47). Due to Hefner’s relationship with ‘’Esquire’’ and Spectorsky’s desire to remasculinize readers, Hemingway became the obvious “godfather” for the journal during the early Cold War. Rather than publish what Spectorsky deemed literature of “morass incense and butterflies and Spanish moss, of ‘’précieuse’’ style and hyperfine imagery,” ‘’Playboy’’ published what it considered to be elite, although accessible, fiction for its masculine audience (2, Sept. 1956). It did not want any writers too busy “exploring stylistic jungles”; instead, it wanted Hemingway, “perhaps because he has trekked many a real jungle in his life” (4, Sept. 1956). Spectorsky claimed that he wanted to veer away from stories likely published by ‘’The New Yorker’’, stories that reflected what he called a “womanized,” “neurotic,” and “castrating world”(Gilbert 208). He promoted Hemingway’s attributes because he knew that ‘’Playboy’’ “was surely” to “get literally hundreds of ‘fine’ stories a month which are intricate embroidery on the motto: The Sensitive Misfit is a More Interesting Man and a worthier Topic than the The Man Who Fulfils His Masculine Destiny” (Gilbert 208). Instead of wasting time reviewing stories about sensitive misfits or mutilated heroes, Spectorsky wanted Hemingway heroes.

And yet, ironically, Hemingway’s heroes are often castrated in one way or another. While many of Hemingway’s characters are “real” men on the battlefield or on the hunting grounds, they could also be classified as androgynous in terms of their sexuality. In ‘’Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism’’, Richard Fantina reappraises the foundations of the old Hemingway myth of machismo and argues that his fiction’s “greatest legacy” may be the “embodiment of diverse models of masculinity”(3). Well before Hemingway scholars revised perceptions of him as the ultimate American macho man in the 1990s, ‘’Playboy’’ editors subtly address misgivings about Heming- way’s sexuality. In the same “Playbill” that praises him in comparison to other contemporary writers as a “standing out like a rugged oak in a field of delicate pansies,” editors call Hemingway “sexually insecure”(2). Why would ‘’Playboy’’ editors admit this in the same announcement that begins over a