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Ernest Hemingway’s Idaho playground

In Ketchum, Idaho, heart of the skiing mecca of Sun Valley, my wife and I found ourselves on Picabo Street — the avenue leading to the Warm Springs ski lodge, that is, not the 1998 Olympic gold medalist in the women’s supergiant slalom. We walked past a “private residence club” denominated The Hemingways, which called to mind the author’s complaint that Sun Valley boosters were using him for public relations purposes. “I love Idaho,” Hemingway wrote Peter Viertel in 1948, but “when they are having pictures painted of you and hung in real estate promotion offices it is past time to blow.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The paradox of political power

Since the founding of the Republic, the average American, if asked to express in a single word what his country stood for, would likely have answered “Freedom!” (or “Fweedom!” as the childe Kamala spake all those many years ago). The so-called American Dream, a concept dating from the 1930s, has always been materialist in nature. H.L. Mencken predicted that the socialists would ultimately fail in their attempt to transform the United States into a Soviet paradise on the North American continent for the simple reason that every American hopes to become a millionaire before he dies. Almost a century later, money is being progressively eclipsed in the pantheon of national values by power.

Cosmo Landesman

The sex lives of writers

A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as a great lover. I said a great writer because, well... that’s what you’re meant to say, isn’t it? My friend chose great lover. Why? “There are lots of great writers,” he explained, “but men who are great in bed are rare. And besides, great writers aren’t sexy anymore.” I used to think that when male writers — and I mean novelists, critics, journalists — complain about how literature has lost its cultural significance and that no one cares about the printed word anymore, what they really mean is: no one wants to shag me. And I suspect that they’re right. The era of the Great Literary Sex God is over.

Life