As to the alcohol and drug use of prominent people in the public eye? Nothing new, and I doubt that it will end. How are those in the public eye substantially better, or more perfect than the rest of us? Looking at the mirror as I write this.
And often, those who live large lives fail in large ways. Google "happy valley set" for an alternative view of 20th century life in East Africa.
It's interesting to me how this thread has been slowly percolating on the back burner for 15 years now... I guess I've done my part to keep it on life support, so mea culpa...
I think your comment about prominent people and public eye is very true. Anyone who dares to raise himself/herself above the general population in one form or another becomes "fair game" for those who choose to criticize or call them out. I know a couple of authors in the guns and hunting field fairly well, and they have commented to me about the unpleasant fact that anonymous critics are a constant bother to them. People seem to think that tearing down someone else, whether justified or not, raises themselves up. It's an incredibly juvenile attitude, but a very common human behavior.
As you say, when we look in the mirror we see someone as fallible, more or less, as these literary persons. We all have feet of clay. Some of the people who post on this board are bigger drunks than Hemingway or Capstick. Some are more seriously depressed. Most of the people who post on here are pretty confident about their own goodness, but some fail to look in the mirror before they hit "Enter". I know I've been guilty of this more than once.
I have been held Hemingway's writing in very high regard for most of my life. In my younger years I devoured everything he wrote that I could get my hands on, and read much of the secondary source material about his writing as well. I wrote papers on Hemingway for my English Lit classes (I double-minored, in History and English). I read several of his biographies, which saddened me at the time because I had built up a mental profile of the man based on his fiction that did not correlate at all with his actual life story. No matter. The man's work stands on its own, and I'm fine with that now. I re-read For Whom The Bell Tolls about a year ago and enjoyed it almost as much as the first reading more than 40 years ago.
I could say the same thing about my regard for Capstick's writing. I reread Death in the Long Grass again a year or two ago, and enjoyed it very much, just as I did more than 40 years ago.
