Writer Rosina Lippi (left) shares a light moment with Jack Hemingway (right) son of Ernest Hemingway

Web posted on: Monday, April 12, 1999 5:16:57 PM EDT

• A hard-living man
• Unpublished novel to be released

(CNN) -- Ernest Hemingway was celebrated Saturday, but politeness and sentimentality weren't the rule of the day.

"Patrician." "Mannered and coy." "Terrifyingly misogynist." "Appalling quality."

From Nadine Gordimer to Derek Walcott to E. Annie Proulx, writers gathered at the John F. Kennedy Library made it clear that admiring Hemingway's work doesn't mean admiring everything about the man.

Even Hemingway's son Patrick managed to tread on his dad's memory, telling the crowded banquet hall that the great writer suffered from hemorrhoids.

"Quite frankly, Ernie's a big guy; he can take it," the library's curator, Stephen Plotkin, said Sunday. "There is stuff to criticize and that's fine. It's not going to knock him down."

More than 400 people, including not a few white-bearded "Papa" look-alikes, attended a series of discussions with Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Derek Walcott and Kenzaburo Oe and celebrated writers Justin Kaplan, Frances Fitzgerald, Proulx and Robert Stone.

Hemingway killed himself in 1961. July 21 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

A hard-living man

He's remembered as a hard-living man whose lean, stylish prose for many readers defined a part of the 20th century and profoundly influenced other writers' work. "There were certain skills I learned from him that I will always be grateful for," said Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, whose latest book, "The House Gun," is set in her native South Africa in the period after apartheid. "From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters."

"He's a great writer, but he's also the first writer-celebrity," novelist James Carroll said. "His story as an expatriate and as an adventurer competes with his work."

Born July 21, 1899, Hemingway became the second most-translated author in English after Agatha Christie, with "The Sun Also Rises," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and the Sea," which led to a Nobel Prize in the early 1950s.

But even as they celebrated him, few pretended the late Nobel laureate was easy to get along with or that all his books were of Nobel quality.

Walcott, who likened Hemingway's influence to that of Shakespeare and Dante, says he still finds that Hemingway's later work suffered from "deserted joy" and that its tone became "patrician." Novelist Leslie Epstein said that Hemingway, when not at his best, could be "mannered and coy." P

roulx said the women in Hemingway's work tend to be "dummies," and novelist Francine Prose cited the "appalling quality of many of his female characters." She criticized his famous story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," in which a wife shoots her husband on safari in Africa, as "one of the nastiest stories ever written" and "terrifyingly misogynist."

Unpublished novel to be released

Gordimer was especially tough on him. She praised him as a major 20th-century writer, but found passages in the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" highly contrived. She also questioned why he didn't write about American blacks and thought he showed little interest in the people of Africa.

"Ernest Hemingway was in love with Africa and as with others in such a state of emotion ... he constructed for himself, according to his needs and desires, something that had little relation to the reality of the continent," said Gordimer, a native South African.

"I hope I won't offend anyone with heresy when I say that Hemingway never had both feet down on Africa," she added.

Hemingway events are scheduled throughout the year, including release of a previously unpublished novel, "True at First Light," based on a 1950s African safari.

Controversy surrounds the book, heavily edited by son Patrick, prompting some here to suggest that after this year it finally may be time to put Hemingway to rest.

"Too much will be speculated about him, too much spoken about him, too much written about him," Gordimer said. "When we go home, let us leave his life alone. It belongs to him. Let's read his books."

The Associated Press and Reuters Limited contributed to this report.