When James Joyce met Ernest Hemingway there was, of course, some drinking involved.

Hemingway’s New York Times obituary has this account:

The author of “Ulysses” was a thin, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight. When they were making the rounds of the cafes and Mr. Joyce became embroiled with a brawler, as he frequently did, he would slip behind his hefty companion and cry, ‘Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.’”

So the story goes, but there are a few problems with it

First, Hemingway is the only source. It’s not backed up by anyone else, least of all Joyce’s tireless biographer Richard Ellmann. The New York Times obituary writer, who was obviously a Hemingway fan, gave us the emasculating description of Joyce, the flattering description of Hemingway, the brawny alliteration and even that little detail that Joyce “slipped behind” his companion. Hemingway’s Joyce “says” where the Times man has him “cry.”

Whether it’s true or not, the two writers have crafted the perfect Hemingway story.

Hemingway told the story to Time magazine during an interview for a lengthy piece about him in 1954, when he was in full legacy-building mode. He would do an interview with the Paris Review the same year that, while fascinating, has a tendency to wheel off into self-parody.

Putting aside the question of whether Hemingway’s memory was reliable 30 years later (there are seven different versions of Joyce’s meeting with Proust, for example), you have to wonder if this is a little bit of personal myth-making.

Hemingway never wrote a book as good as Ulysses and he knew it. Around the time he gave that interview, he was probably realizing it was never going to happen.

In 1954, his last good book was 14 years behind him, save for the spasm of inspiration that produced The Old Man and the Sea three years earlier, and Hemingway was seven years away from shooting himself. He repeatedly promised his editor a big new book but Maxwell Perkins knew For Whom the Bell Tolls was the last major literary work he’d receive from his most successful writer. Hemingway’s promises sounded more and more like the delusions of an aging prizefighter demanding one last fight to prove himself.

Hemingway, for all this bravado, was a frayed wire of insecurity, sparking wildly for most of his life. He was a man who feared his craft was effeminate and reacted violently against that fear. To be in the shadow of Joyce — that womanly man he met in his 20s — must have been embarrassing.

Like Norman Mailer and Jack London, boxing was Hemingway’s antidote. Maybe they were trying to balance the scales. Writing may be a sissy thing to do, but nobody can say that about boxing.

Hemingway was a tremendous writer and his novels and stories are polished enough that they don’t immediately betray the insecurity that was driving him. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is perhaps Hemingway’s greatest artistic triumph and the clearest example of his thoughts on how a man should live his life. Margot Macomber is Hemingway’s all time, all American bitch; Robert Wilson is his manly man, the writer’s aspirational view of himself; poor Francis Macomber is the driver of the story, the coward who gains his courage by killing a lion, only to be martyred by his wife seconds later. There’s a wishful nobility to it. The story is almost a fairy tale.

Hemingway’s letters provide a more unvarnished view of what pushed him into such a manly self-parody. His screed against homosexuals in a letter to his friend is revealing. His writerly insecurity was rivalled only by his fears about sexuality. Hemingway claims that a writer can get famous overnight by being a “fairy” and doing “stuff to get on that a male is barred from.” (Notice that, to Hemingway, homosexuals are not even men). He compares gay writers to the masons and writes that “the Royal Road to quick Literary success is through the entrance to the colon.”

The letter is filled with classic, cringe-inducing Hemingway stuff. He painstakingly describes his poker wins, gives a few thoughts on bull-fighting and says “aint” a lot. He refers to three queens in a poker game as a “trio of vaginas.”

Hemingway’s manly pursuits weren’t just acts of macho bravado, he also needed material for his books. He told the Paris Review he could beat writer’s block by urging himself to write “one true sentence.” Hugh Kenner, the literary critic, believed that’s what ended up killing him:

His subject had become Ernest Hemingway and he had to keep developing the character… Hemingway died of the American belief in sincerity: of believing there was such a thing as One True Sentence.

Unequivocal fidelity to the truth is an American tradition going back to George Washington. It must make fiction writing difficult, though. The Hemingway character wasn’t real and, for a man obsessed with what’s true, it literally killed him to live a lie.

Joyce had no such concerns. “For sincerity — Joyce is telling us — can damn,” Kenner wrote.

Though sickly and ailing most of his life, Joyce was obsessive about his art. He wrote Ulysses while the First World War raged around him and Finnegans Wake was published in the first year of the Second World War. Joyce wanted nothing to do with the fighting. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus responds to some soldiers who are threatening to “biff” him by saying, “Personally, I detest action.” Joyce once told his brother, “Cruelty is weakness.”

Unlike Hemingway, he was certainly not insecure, least of all about something as silly as manliness. He related to Leopold Bloom, his “new womanly man.” Joyce thought artistic creation was an inherently feminine act, mimicking the gestation period of a fetus.

James Joyce.

He believed that an artist, to be any good, had to be in touch with his feminine side and Joyce embraced this, even amusing his friends by closely watching the habits of women. He was certain that putting books upside-down in a bookcase was a female trait and, whenever he spotted one in a friend’s house, he demanded to know who had put it away. It was a minor triumph for him if it turned out to be a woman.

Joyce’s body of work looms over Hemingway’s because he explored his womanly side (compare Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom to any female character in Hemingway’s books) and because he wasn’t obsessed with trying to prove how manly he was. In that sense, it was also a time management issue. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes:

Hemingway never wrote the comprehensive novel. He may have been too busy having the experiences of the century to devote himself, over a sufficiently long period of time, to the one great work that would stand, like “Ulysses”, as one of the century’s monuments. Joyce lived through revolutionary times and, in order to create that monument, stayed away from those revolutions, left them out, and instead, accomplished a revolution in literary form.

With Joyce — the better artist, the happier person, the devoted husband — forging the way for a new kind of man who is comfortable in his own skin, it’s baffling that some men long for that manly charade of Hemingway’s.

It’s not hard to find someone bemoaning the lack of manly men these days. They invariably invoke Hemingway, because he was a little more stable than his disciple Mailer. He didn’t die a squalid, miserable death like Jack London, who suffered from dysentery, uremia, and late-stage alcoholism.

Those kind of writers still exist, but we’re wise to them now. The boxing thing also endures.

A Gawker writer had some fun when he noticed Esquire writer Chris Jones had written in his Twitter profile: “Standing offer for shithearts: 10 rounds, 8-ounce gloves, no headgear.”

And the work still suffers when writers are battling with themselves about their own manliness. In his Zanesville Zoo piece, Jones writes, “Dolores Kopchak was calm because even little old ladies can find courage at opportune times.”

Even little old ladies? John Steinbeck knew all about the courage of old ladies.

We find here the fundamental problem, though. Somehow, some misguided men got the idea that courage, toughness and a love of adventure are all male qualities. But maybe the weakest men are the ones who pretend to be manly because they’re worried they don’t measure up.

Genghis Khan, when he was conquering the world, put an emphasis on bravery and heroism in his ranks. But that didn’t mean he was looking for a bunch of Hemingway-types. A bataar, or hero, “might be male or female, young or old, and frequently, only a child.”

Little old ladies did alright under Genghis Khan and, in fact, some of them ended up ruling parts of his empire. One descendent of Genghis Khan was a woman, Khutulun, who was feared in battle and would only marry a man who could beat her in a wrestling match. She went lonely for years.

The Mongols understood something Hemingway didn’t. Real courage can’t be a contrivance.