More like this

post more books about manhood/enduring adversities etc

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keep reading hemingway then I guess

So on an historic afternoon in June in Paris in 1929, Hemingway and Callaghan boxed a few rounds with Fitzgerald serving as timekeeper. The second round went on for a long time. Both men began to get tired, Hemingway got careless. Callaghan caught him a good punch and dropped Hemingway on his back. At the next instant Fitzgerald cried out, “Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes.”

“All right, Scott,” Ernest said. “If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

According to Callaghan’s estimate, Scott never recovered from that moment. One believes it. Four months later, a cruel and wildly inaccurate story about this episode appeared in the Herald Tribune book section. It was followed by a cable sent collect by Fitzgerald at Hemingway’s insistence. “HAVE SEEN STORY IN HERALD TRIBUNE. ERNEST AND I AWAIT YOUR CORRECTION. SCOTT FITZGERALD.”

Since Callaghan had already written such a letter to the paper, none of the three men could ever forgive each other.

As the vignettes, the memoirs, and the biographies of Hemingway proliferate, Callaghan’s summer in Paris may take on an importance beyond its literary merit, for it offers a fine clue to the logic of Hemingway’s mind, and tempts one to make the prediction that there will be no definitive biography of Hemingway until the nature of his personal torture is better comprehended. It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of the suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread which sits in the silences of his short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonizing demands of his courage. For the life of his talent must have depended on living in a psychic terrain where one must either be brave beyond one’s limit, or sicken closer into a bad illness, or, indeed, by the ultimate logic of the suicide, must advance the hour in which one would make another reconnaissance into one’s death.
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That may be why Hemingway turned in such fury on Fitzgerald. To be knocked down by a smaller man could only imprison him further into the dread he was forever trying to avoid. Each time his physical vanity suffered a defeat, he would be forced to embark on a new existential gamble with his life. So he would naturally think of Fitzgerald’s little error as an act of treachery, for the result of that extra minute in the second round could only be a new bout of anxiety which would drive his instinct into ever more dangerous situations. Most men find their profoundest passion in looking for a way to escape their private and secret torture. It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself. There are two kinds of brave men. Those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. It is the merit of Callaghan’s long anecdote that the second condition is suggested to be Hemingway’s own.
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This is the right answer. Even if given by a passive-aggressive beta.
Hemingway has a unique perspective. If you want more of it, no one does it as well.

Just read Hemingway. He's one of the ultimate men.

Jack London is an underrated

Thanks for posting this.

OP, check out more of his short stories. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a good collection. Hemingway's men are always interesting. They are old and frail and getting drunk in a cafe at night, or dying from gangrene and wrestling with death, or discovering courage on the hunt, or trying haphazardly to be better fathers than their own was to them.
The Sun Also Rises is also very good. It deals with impossible love, which may or may not be your speed (I can't relate to love stories), but in a unique way through the unsurpassable limitations of the characters. Fantastic scenery in France and Spain give a great backdrop.
If you want more Hemingway, there's only one man to read. Not to say he's the only worthwhile writer to deal with these themes, but his take on them, his calm, understated, assumed strength is unique.

True but I wouldn't say they're in the same vein.

One the great books ive read that is about masculinity and overcoming adversities is Seawolf.

I loved Call of the Wild and White Fang, so I'll have to check that out.