[Innocent wayfarers, beware. This essay contains what are vulgarly known in the trade as “spoilers,” so if for some unfathomable reason you’ve yet to view Succession, Glass Onion, and The White Lotus, tread gingerly and try not to gasp.]
It may be the most famous and chewed-over exchange in American literature that never actually took place, at least not in real time. In 1936, when the country was still in the hold of the Great Depression and in no mood for mooniness, Esquire magazine published Ernest Hemingway’s cinematic story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a meditation on mortality and the beautiful consoling desolation of a cathedral mountain, all that. Amid the flashbacks and the regrets, the narrator couldn’t resist sneaking in a catty sideswipe: “He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, ‘Yes, they have more money’.”