An Irishman's Diary

Congratulations to Chris Storm from Texas, who I see has won the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest at Sloppy Joe's, the writer's former haunt in Key West. Mr Storm (55) took the prestigious title at his fifth attempt, adopting Hemingway's big-game hunter persona with an outfit that included khaki trousers, boots, and a safari vest accessorised with five large-calibre bullets. In real life, he's an estate agent.

As usual, the competition at Key West was stiff. According to Reuters, the attendance included a man claiming to be called Richard Steel Hemingway, whose mother told him on her deathbed that he was a son of the writer. It is not clear from reports whether he was taking part in the look-alike contest, but given Hemingway's reputation for philandering, possession of his DNA could hardly be grounds for disqualification.

By contrast, the competitor who travelled from Kazakhstan, selling his car to raise the air fare, was unlikely to be related. Many participants return to the competition again and again, hoping, like this year's winner, that they may eventually grow into the part. But the 68-year-old Kazakh was already at a crucial disadvantage in trying to resemble a man who died at 61. Even if he can raise the fare again, his chances will hardly improve with the years.

In common with anyone who lives to be 60, Hemingway had many different appearances during his lifetime. Indeed, biographers trying to explain his famously macho image have seized on the fact that, when he was a child, his mother made him wear girl's clothes. Frustrated in her desire for twins, apparently, she dressed him like his older sister and called him "Ernestine" - thereby, amateur psychologists claim, condemning him to become a hard-drinking, gun-toting, bullfight-loving womaniser.

But the cross-dressing baby, the head-bandaged war hero, and most of the other Hemingways are airbrushed out of the picture at Sloppy Joe's. To win the look-alike contest, you have to resemble the iconic Hemingway of later years: the heavy-set man with a white beard who wrote The Old Man and the Sea and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This is not to be knocked, I suppose. Men are naturally competitive in everything they do. Yet compared with the plethora of awards available for being young and fit, the hugely popular activity of growing fat and middle-aged has no competitive outlet. On a thinner note, and in passing, it strikes me that there is a gap in the Irish literary tourism market for a Samuel Beckett look-alike competition. Admittedly, I have never seen anyone else who looks remotely like Beckett. Even so, it's a look you could probably cultivate by, for example, worrying a lot. And in this era of cosmetic surgery, moisturisers for men, and other outrages, it might encourage more people to embrace their wrinkles.

But back to the middle-aged Hemingway cult, whose downside is that it promotes readership of his worst books. I note that Mr Storm nominated The Old Man and the Sea as his favourite, which is de rigueur in Sloppy Joe's. It was also the token Hemingway on the Leaving Cert curriculum when I was at school, part of the Department of Education's campaign to put us off literature. Unfortunately, ever since the Nobel Prize committee started the rot, there has been a global conspiracy to pretend that The Old Man and the Sea is a classic.

Of course it's not a patch on The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms. Having said that, my all-time favourite Hemingway passage is the bit in his memoir where he defends the use of a cat as baby-sitter. Like a lot of things, the cat business happened in Paris in the 1920s, when the writer was poor and had just become father to a son, nicknamed "Bumby".

As he wrote: "There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big loving cat named F Puss. There were people who said it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie, the femme de ménage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F Puss was the baby-sitter."

Times have moved on and ideas about childcare have changed. You will search the manuals of Penelope Leach in vain for recommendations of the domestic pet, however well trained, as childminder. But in this, as in so many things, Hemingway was a man's man.

Never mind the warfare, the safaris, the deep-sea fishing, the hatred of adjectives. Nothing says macho quite like the idea of Hemingway abandoning the cradle for an afternoon at the racetrack, or whatever, and leaving the cat in charge.