The further away in time we get from Hemingway the more interesting a figure he becomes. The years may not have been kind to his work, but the man himself, or at least the mythic figure he manufactured out of the raw material of that self, holds a fascination that increases in direct proportion to the shrinking into the past of the world that produced him.
That was a world dominated by war and the rumours of war. Reeling as we are from the recent and present horrors of the Balkan conflicts, we forget that the majority of people living now have no direct experience of war on a worldwide scale, either as soldiers or civilians, participants or helpless onlookers. The first half of the century, however, the half that was Hemingway's, was a period of almost continuous conflict, whether in the trenches of Flanders, in the arroyos of Spain, in the blue waters of the inaptly named Pacific, or the various slaughterhouses of Fortress Europe. It was a time peculiarly suited to the talents of a storyteller obsessed with violence and the extremes of bravery and endurance, a writer determined to confute Yeats's dictum that the artist must choose between perfection of the life or of the work, a man who from his teenage years onwards never ceased to consort with "that old whore, Death."
Who reads Hemingway now? Despite the high quality of his short stories, and the many extraordinarily fine passages of action-writing in the novels, his reputation seems to have sunk into a chamber deeper even than that which normally awaits that of a writer in the two or three decades immediately after his death. Reading the recently published last volume of Michael Reynolds's exhaustive and superb biography, an extract from which appears elsewhere in this supplement, one is struck by the scale of the older Hemingway's popular and critical success while he was alive, and especially in the years following the publication in 1940 of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his novel of the Spanish Civil War, the "big book" on which he staked his hopes for immortality. Now in his 40s, and having lived more than most men might hope to do in two or three full lifetimes, he was one of the most famous human beings in the world, up there with Roosevelt and Churchill (and, some detractors would have said, with Hitler and Stalin, too). It is hard to think of any artist living now who could command such attention and attract such adulation and envy.
He was a man's writer in a man's world. Power was still firmly in the hands of men who saw themselves in the role of the fast-living, hard-drinking, three-packs-a-day Hemingway hero. They sought to bring the black-and-white issues of the battlefield and the big-game hunt into boardroom and workshop. Their ideal women were formed in the image either of Catherine, the beautiful, tender and doomed nurse beloved by Frederic Henry, hero of A Farewell to Arms, or those tough boy-girls who stalk the pages of the early novels, or, indeed, any one of Hemingway's numerous wives, especially Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and a worthy Hemingway rival in toughness and daring, or Mary Welsh, the huntin', shootin' and fishin' Miss Mary, who saw him through the last, terrible decades to his suicide in 1961. Now that machismo has become a risible condition to aspire to, and men have realised that to continue to hold the high ground in the battle of the sexes they must curb their tongues and learn a new, "caring" language, the Hemingwayesque concept of man's life as an agon, a valorous struggle against insurmountable odds, is simply embarrassing.
Yet the example of Hemingway does continue to present the possibility that one may live well outwardly despite an inward hurt - indeed, that all of life is a struggle with death, and that only the coward will refuse to join that mortal fight. To the American writers who came after him, from Norman Mailer through to Raymond Carver (ironically, one of his truest heirs is a woman, Annie Proulx), he left the uneasy suspicion that the work may not, after all, be all that matters, and that the writer who does not live life to the full will produce only empty books. In this, the figure he most resembles, though it would have horrified him to hear it said, is Oscar Wilde, whose most arresting work of art was not any of the plays he wrote, but the life he so lavishly lived. One may, of course, simply decline the challenge Hemingway offers. Gore Vidal, himself no mean adept of the life fully lived, never misses an opportunity to laugh at Hemingway, whom he usually refers to as "that old woman." And poor Scott Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway disloyally caricatured in the posthumous A Moveable Feast, had the measure of him all along; after receiving his signed copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, he wrote to the author that it was "better than anybody else writing could do", but in his private notebook set down a more considered view: "It is so to speak Ernest's Tale of Two Cities though the comparison isn't apt. I mean it is a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of Rebecca."
The two most significant events of Hemingway's life were his father's suicide, and his experiences in the first World War. The former he regarded as a betrayal, an act of cowardice on the part of a brave man who had been driven to seek a desperate escape in part at least by his wife, Grace, whom the son always referred to as an "all-American bitch" (a review of a book on Hemingway and his mother in the New York Review of Books a few years ago was headed, by a sub-editor of genius, "Pressure under Grace", an inversion of Hemingway's famous definition of bravery). In the war, in which he served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, the 18-year-old Hemingway was caught in an explosion and wounded badly - though not as badly as he liked to claim in fanciful moods later on. The real damage may have been psychological rather than physical; it was probably the first, clear, unmistakable appearance of the "old whore," who was never to leave his side.
After For Whom the Bell Tolls, he feared that he was written out. He worked doggedly for years on novels set in Africa and the Caribbean - The Old Man and the Sea, perhaps the most overrated comeback ever, began life as a section of what was to be posthumously published as Islands in the Stream - but in his heart he knew they would never be finished. A Moveable Feast, his account of his early years as a writer in Paris, contains some of the most tender, lyrical writing he ever did, even though it was intended primarily as a means of avenging himself on those whom he considered to have slighted him, such as Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. The best thing he wrote in this last phase of his life is the novel that was first published only a few years ago, in heavily edited form, called The Garden of Eden; here, for the first time, Hemingway confronted the deep ambiguities of his sexuality, and turned his fears and forbidden longings into art.
Will he be "rediscovered" in this centenary year? It is hard to believe that the worldly-wise and disenchanted young of our time would be taken in by his hairy-chested posturings and blustering sentimentality, the most immediately striking characteristics of his work. This is a pity. Few writers of this or any other century have written so accurately, so movingly, and with such vividness about the natural world, about the realities of warfare, and about the difficulty of being true to oneself and others in a time of uncertainty and bad faith.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times