Andy Rooney Meets Ernest Hemingway: A Cautionary Tale
by Sam Bluefarb (November 2014)
On Andy Rooney’s death, I went back to a letter I wrote to him, prompted by his honest admission that he was a Democrat and, presumably, a liberal. In the process of researching his background—small town origins (Albany, New York), prep school, Colgate University, etc.—I hit upon a rather revealing You Tube* which fleshed out a view of Ernest Hemingway within a myopic vision. Not that Hem’s reputation was all that universally acclaimed—witness the largely dim view of him by feminists because of his “Doll’s House” heroines. But from the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), until the posthumously published The Garden of Eden (1986) and beyond, conventional wisdom was that Hemingway was a writer whose (literary) reputation was solid, pacé such bloopers as Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and To Have and to Have Not (1937).
Your comment last Sunday indicated that you are still a loyal Democrat. That wouldn’t be so egregious if you were talking about Bill Clinton, or going back to Harry Truman—if not for him, after VE Day, both of us would have been shipped to the Pacific Theater for the “grand” invasion of the Japanese homeland. [Rooney and I were both World War II veterans and served in the European Theater.]
The problem is that people like you and your friends at CBS live in a bubble, not close to the unwashed who still “cling to their guns and religion.”
When Nixon won the 1968 Presidential election, the late Pauline Kael, an otherwise excellent film critic, found herself side-blinded by his win. As she put it at the time, “No one I knew voted for him.” Precisely. No-one she knew. Simply because: she moved in those chummy circles that would rather be caught in Delicto Sexualis than found “guilty” of voting for an evil Republican. As Ernest Hemingway, put it in his short play, “Today is Friday,” A young Roman soldier at the crucifixion has a case of the shakes due to the agony on the cross, whereupon a tougher, older soldier, turns to the younger, and tells him, “You been out here too long.” Andy, “You been out in bubble-land [W. 57thStreet] too long.”
As I previously indicated, both Rooney and I served in World War II, but I came out of the war with my leftist—later, liberal—views crumbling, while Andy, it seems, came out of it with his intact—the No-Growth Syndrome.
In that video, Andy Rooney’s off-the-cuff comments on Hemingway shone a bright light on Rooney’s stunted views of Hemingway.
Rooney’s problem, perhaps his tragedy, was that he could have been a great newsman. But he found shelter within the liberal bubble of CBS News. (See Bernard Goldberg’s Bias (2002), based on Goldberg’s experience as a reporter for CBS. It’s an eye-opener, and bears out why men like Rooney became what they became, at CBS.)
Yes, Hemingway was a swaggering, bullying oaf, a functional alcoholic, smitten by depression for most of his relatively short life—all part of a very flawed man—but Rooney’s flaw was that he was unable to separate the dross from the gold. For at heart, it was envy of a man who was not just an intrepid newsman, but a writer who transcended the topical world of the news room, to distinguish himself as a supreme artist. And that was what folksy curmudgeon Andy Rooney could not see.
[*] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okQtr6ERIrU
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Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.
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