Discover His Timeless Mantra

It was Ernest Hemingway's mantra: "Il faut d'abord durer." Above all, endure.

But on one particular day late in his life, as he drove toward the site of his eventual suicide, what he needed most to help him endure was a damn drink. It was October 6, 1958. He stopped at a bar in Sheridan, Wyoming, and took a seat.

The guy next to him looked up. Recognition dawned, then skepticism. "Well, look who thinks he's Hemingway," he said.

And at that moment, even the great man himself may have had his doubts. He was racked by angina, depression, and paranoia. Yet he gathered himself and convinced the barflies that he was, indeed, the original Hemingway, not the winner of some look-alike contest. Then he settled in to watch the World Series on TV -- the ultimate man of action now just another spectator.

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker puts him there on a day the Yankees beat the Milwaukee Braves 7-zip. Couldn't have been much of a game, so the guys had plenty of time to buy each other drinks. And talk.

It was one of the last good days of Ernest Hemingway's life.

Half a century later, I'm in Paris, on a personal quest to explore the importance of being Ernest. With my new-growth Hemingway beard, I feel like a hairball coughed up by one of his cats. I finish up my iron-man regimen of hanging around in cafés and drinking (coffee), and go into cooldown mode at a reincarnation of his favorite bookstore, Shakespeare & Company. Oddly, the fiction shelf goes straight from Heller to Hesse, with no Hemingway in between. When I ask the clerk about it, he spits back, "What are you, some kind of relative of his?"

Well, yeah, aren't we all?

For American men, Ernest Hemingway survives as an indelible example of what it means to be a man. This is a guy who left home at 18, was wounded by shrapnel while dragging around war casualties in Italy, and convalesced by romancing his beautiful nurse.

Soon he moved to Paris, writing the essential texts for manhood while befriending James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He took breaks to attend bullfights in Spain and chronicle revolution in Russia and Istanbul. All that, by age 26.

In Key West and Cuba, he trolled the Gulf Stream not only for marlin but also (drunkenly) for German U-boats. He blurred the line between writer and fighter during two wars in Europe and traveled to /// Africa to shoot big carnivores. Perhaps more frightening, he traveled down the aisle with four women, each of whom was convinced she could break him. To the two sons who came from those marriages, he fed grizzly-bear meat cooked medium rare, spread with marmalade, and served on sourdough pancakes.

It's a lost art, that kind of existence. The lockstep of life seems to overwhelm a lot of us now, to bury our masculine mojo under a to-do list that stands in for actual experience. Repeat after me: Attend school, marry wife, start family, buy house, marry job, buy bigger house, pay for college, die.

What's lost along the way is actual experience of the world, of people, of life and death. As a result, we miss the hard-won knowledge that is the by-product of intense living. We read Islands in the Stream or The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but who makes time to plunge in, or climb? And it's not merely a list of exotic locations and vivid activities I'm talking about, but rather an approach to the masculine life, fully lived.

Hemingway described himself as a man of action and lived his life to prove it. What adjectives adhere to the rest of us? Law-abiding? Dedicated? Resigned? And what bears witness to our passage? Potbellies? Credit reports? Lord help us all.