In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” (John O’Hara’s wildly extravagant assessment in praise of Across the River and into the Trees) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought. They agree that at least one, maybe two, of the novels (The Sun Also Rises and, possibly, A Farewell to Arms) might make it into the twenty-first century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center stage and deadly “reappraisals” began taking place.
It is not entirely coincidental, either, that soon after his death a particular kind of writing began to appear in this country, writing that stressed the irrational and fabulous, the antirealist against the realist tradition. In this context, it might be worthwhile to remind ourselves what Hemingway believed good writing should do. He felt fiction must be based on actual experience. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” he wrote in his introduction to Men at War. “His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.” And he also wrote: “find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it so clear that … it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
Given his stature and influence, maybe the sharp reaction after his death was inevitable. But gradually, especially within the last decade, critics have been better able to separate the celebrity big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman, the heavy-drinking bully and brawler from the disciplined craftsman and artist whose work seems to me, with each passing year, to become more durable.
“The great thing is to last and get your work done,” Hemingway said in Death in the Afternoon. And that, essentially, is what he did. Who was this man—by his own admission, “a son of a bitch”—whose novels and books of short stories changed forever the way fiction was written and, for a time, even the way people thought about themselves?
Peter Griffin’s wonderful and intimate book, Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (the title is from one of Hemingway’s early poems), supplies some of the answers. Mr. Griffin was a young Ph.D. student at Brown University when he wrote a short letter to Mary Hemingway telling her how important Hemingway’s work had been to him at a difficult time in his life. She invited him to visit and promised full cooperation in writing this book, the first of three biographical volumes. Working a territory where a regiment of literary scholars and specialists have gone before, Mr. Griffin has uncovered a significant amount of new and revealing information. (Five previously uncollected short stories are also included.) Several chapters deal with Hemingway’s early family life and relationships. His mother was an overbearing woman with pretensions to being a singer; his father was a prominent doctor who taught Hemingway to hunt and fish and gave him his first pair of boxing gloves.
But by far the larger and more important part of the book is devoted to Hemingway’s coming of age as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, then as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was seriously injured by an Austrian mortar shell and machine-gun bullets. There is a long section devoted to his convalescence in a military hospital in Milan. While there he fell in love with a nurse from Pennsylvania named Agnes Kurowsky, who became the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. (She jilted him for an Italian count.)
In 1919 he returned home to Oak Park, Illinois, wearing “a cock-feathered Bersaglieri hat, a knee-length officer’s cape lined with red satin, and a British tunic decorated with ribbons of the Valor Medal and the War Cross.” He had to use a cane to walk. He was a hero, and he signed up with a lecture agency to talk to civic groups about his experience in the war. When he was finally asked to leave home by his angry and bewildered parents (Hemingway didn’t want to work at a job, liked to sleep in late and spend his afternoons shooting pool), he went to the peninsula country in Upper Michigan and then to Toronto, where he accepted room and board and eighty dollars a month from a wealthy family to tutor and “make a man out of’ the family’s retarded son.
From Toronto he moved to Chicago, where he shared rooms and a bohemian life with a friend named Bill Horne. He worked at a magazine called Commonwealth Cooperative, for which he wrote, in his words, “Boys’ Personals, The Country Division, Miss Congress’s fiction, bank editorials, children’s stories, etc.” At this time, Hemingway began meeting literary people like Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg. He liked to read aloud and explain the poems of Keats and Shelley and once, in the company of Sandburg, who praised his “sensitive interpretation,” he read from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. He was crazy about dancing and won a dance contest with a woman friend named Kate Smith. (She later married John Dos Passos.) In October 1920, he met another woman, eight years older than he, who would become his first wife—the remarkable Elizabeth Hadley Richardson.
In the nine months of their courtship—she was living in St. Louis while Hemingway was living and working in Chicago—they each wrote over one thousand pages of letters. (Hadley’s correspondence was made available to Mr. Griffin by Jack Hemingway, the son of Ernest and Hadley, who has also provided a foreword to this volume.) The passages Mr. Griffin quotes are intelligent, witty, often moving, and show her offering a shrewd and perceptive response to the stories, sketches and poems that the twenty-one-year-old Hemingway was sending her every week.
In one of the letters, she contrasts her own writing with his. She knew, she said, that her writing was filled with abstractions, whereas his was not. But there was something more. “In all of Ernest’s sentences, the accents fell naturally on ‘the correct quantitative place.… I have to scratch lines under important words.’ ” She praised his intuitive sense: “It is a most lovely thing—intuition—inside dead sure of stuff. A very obvious example of it is … ideas just appearing in your mind that make you understand the way things are.” It was, she felt, the basis for his work. She encouraged their plan to go to Europe and felt it would be just the thing for his writing: “Why, you will write like a great wonderful breeze bringing strong whiffs from all sorts of interior places. You’ll give birth before I will, and for you Paris is the place to do it.”
At the end of April 1921, Hemingway told her he was beginning his first novel, a book with “real people, talking and saying what they think.” The young man who was the hero of the novel would be called Nick Adams. Hadley wrote back: “Thank the lord some young one is gonna write something young and beautiful; someone with the clean, muscular freshness of young things right in him at the moment of writing. You go ahead. I’m wild over the idea.” His style, she observed, “eliminated everything except what is necessary and strengthening. [It] is the outcome of a deep feeling and not just intellection.… You’ve got a good ear for rhythm and tone and lines. Do you realize how many important threads you’re weaving your life with these days? Honey, you’re doing some of the best things you’ve ever done in your I life … I’m completely under its power.… Simple—but as fine as the finest chain mail.” But she warned him too: “it takes a lot … to hold yourself down to truthfulness in an art. And up to the day of your death you’ll probably find yourself slipping with technical ease into poor psychology. But no one has a better chance to be honest than you because you’ve the will to be.” “Honestly,” she wrote, “you’re doing marvels of stirring, potent stuff.… Don’t let’s ever die … let’s go on together.”
Mr. Griffin’s biography closes just as the newly married couple, armed with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, are about to sail for France. It brings to life the young Hemingway with all his charm, vitality, good looks, passionate dedication to writing, like nothing else I’ve ever read about the man.
Quite a different Ernest Hem
ingway emerges from the pages of Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography. Mr. Meyers, a scholar and professional biographer, has written books on T. E. Lawrence, George Orwell, Katherine Mansfield, Siegfried Sassoon, Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few. He seems to have read everything ever written on Hemingway and interviewed many of Hemingway’s family members (with the notable exception of Mary Hemingway, who, quite tellingly, I think, refused to cooperate) as well as friends, cronies, and hangers-on.
Adulation is not a requirement for biographers, but Mr. Meyers’s book fairly bristles with disapproval of its subject. What is especially disconcerting is his strong belief that, “Like his heroes Twain and Kipling, [Hemingway] never fully matured as an artist.” This is more than a little dispiriting to read, but it’s one of the premises of the book and it is sounded repeatedly as one reads dazedly on. Mr. Meyers talks briefly, and disapprovingly, about Death in the Afternoon (though he calls it “the classic study of bullfighting in English”), Green Hills of Africa, Winner Take Nothing, Men without Women, To Have and Have Not, Across the River and into the Trees, Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast (which he nonetheless maintains was Hemingway’s “greatest work of nonfiction”) and The Old Man and the Sea.
By and large the rest of the work, according to Mr. Meyers, is ruined by “an excessive display of vanity and self-pity … an inability to create a reflective character, a tendency to try to act out his fantasies.” What’s left? The Sun Also Rises, a dozen short stories (among them, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”) and maybe A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. He seems to find it lamentable that Hemingway was not killed in one of the African crashes. Had he died, Mr. Meyers says, “over a cataract or among wild elephants, his reputation would have been even greater than it is today. He would have gone out in a literal blaze of glory … before he began to decline and waste away.”
While the biographer doesn’t, thank Heaven, mention fishing rods and penis envy in the same breath, his interpretation of Hemingway and the man’s work is strictly Freudian. There is plenty of talk of “wounds”—not only the physical injuries Hemingway suffered, beginning with the shrapnel and machine-gun bullets in Italy in 1918, but the “wound” he sustained when jilted by Agnes Kurowsky. Another “wound” occurred when a suitcase of Hemingway’s early work was stolen from Hadley’s compartment while she was on a train from Paris to Switzerland; according to Mr. Meyers: “The loss was irrevocably connected in Hemingway’s mind with sexual infidelity, and he equated the lost manuscripts with lost love.”
It was an unfortunate and dismaying accident, but to the biographer it’s clear that as a result Hadley was about to become the former Mrs. Hemingway. Yet not without guilt on Hemingway’s part and guilt’s sometimes exceedingly strange manifestations. Mr. Meyers writes: “Hemingway had three accidents, probably connected to his guilt, during the first year of marriage to Pauline [Pfeiffer].” And then this amazing statement: “Hemingway—like many ordinary men—had been engaged in an Oedipal struggle against his father for the possession of his mother. If the bullfight symbolizes sexual intercourse, as it clearly does in The Sun Also Rises (“the sword went in, and for just an instant he and the bull were one”), then the matador’s triumphant domination of the bull at the moment of orgasmic death represents a virile defense against the threat of homosexuality.”
Moving from Freud and the unconscious to the mundane (and flat-footed), consider some of these sentences: “Hemingway made a successful assault on the literary beachhead soon after reaching Paris.” “Hemingway had a short fuse and a bad temper, liked to be considered a tough guy rather than a writer.” “He was selfish and always put his books before his wives.” “The two sides of Ernest’s character came from his two parents.” “Hemingway had four sisters (and, later, four wives).” “The world of war was attractive to him because it removed women, the greatest source of anxiety.” There are hundreds more like these, of similar perspicacity. The book is very tough going indeed.
After his move to Key West in 1931 and the publication of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway adopted the macho stance so often associated with the man and his work. He killed lions, water buffaloes, elephants, kudu, deer, bears, elk, ducks, pheasants, marlin, tuna, sailfish, trout. You name it, he caught it or shot it—everything that flew, finned, scooted, crawled or lumbered. He began to bluster and posture, encouraging people to call him “Papa,” got into fistfights, became merciless to friends and enemies alike. Fitzgerald remarked perceptively that Hemingway “is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.” Damon Runyon said, “Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.”
Reading the depressing account of Hemingway’s middle and late years, from 1940 on—the years of decline, as Mr. Meyers calls them—the reader is left to wonder not so much that he wrote anything of merit (Mr. Meyers thinks he did not, after For Whom the Bell Tolls), but that he was able to write at all. He suffered numerous serious accidents and was subject to serious and debilitating illnesses, including alcoholism. (His son Jack says his father drank a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life.) There is a three-page appendix cataloging major accidents and illnesses, including five concussions; a skull fracture; bullet and shrapnel wounds; hepatitis; hypertension; diabetes; malaria; torn muscles; pulled ligaments; pneumonia; erysipelas; amoebic dysentery; blood poisoning; cracked spinal disks; ruptured liver, right kidney and spleen; nephritis; anemia; arteriosclerosis; skin cancer; hemochromatosis; and first-degree burns. Once he shot himself through the leg trying to shoot a shark. At the time of his admission to the Mayo Clinic he suffered from “depression and mental collapse.”
One grows weary of and ultimately saddened by the public Hemingway. But the private life of the man was no more edifying. The reader is battered with one display after another of mean-spiritedness and spite, of vulgar and shabby behavior. (After his break with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway wrote a scurrilous poem about her, which he liked to read aloud in company.) He carried on adulterous liaisons and, in his fifties, had embarrassing infatuations with girls not yet out of their teens. At one time or another he quarreled and broke with nearly all his friends, with members of his family, his former wives (with the exception of Hadley; he was still writing love letters to her years after they had divorced) and his sons and their wives. He fought bitterly with each of his sons; one, Gregory, he said he’d like to see hang. In his will he left an estate of $1.4 million, and disinherited the sons.
It is almost with a sense of relief that one reaches that awful morning of July 2, 1961, when Hemingway, recently released for the second time from the Mayo Clinic (against his wife’s wishes; she felt he had “conned” his doctors), locates the key to the locked gun cabinet. By now everyone has suffered enough.
There’s little in this book that Carlos Baker, in his 1969 biography, didn’t say better. And Mr. Baker, despite his blind spots, was far more sympathetic to the work and, finally, more understanding of the man. It may well be that another full-scale biography needs to be written to augment Mr. Baker’s and Mr. Meyers’s work, but I don’t think so. At least I for one am going to pass on reading it.
The only possible antidote for how you feel about Hemingway after finishing this book is to go back at once and reread the fiction itself. How clear, serene and solid the best work still seems; it’s as if there were a physical communion taking place among the fingers turning the page, the eyes taking in the words, the brain imaginatively recreating what the words stand for and, as Hemingway put it, “making it a part of your own experience.” Hemingway did his work, and he’ll last. Any biographer who gives him less than this, granting the chaos of his public and personal life, might just as well write the biography of an anonymous grocer or a woolly mammoth. Hemingway, the writer—he’s still the hero of the story, however
it unfolds.
Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years by Peter Griffin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; and Hemingway: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
NOTES
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
AOU All of Us: The Collected Poems, ed. William L. Stull (London: The Harvill Press, 1996; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
F1 Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, first edition (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983)
F2 Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, second expanded edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; London: The Harvill Press, 1994)
RC Raymond Carver
WICF Where I’m Calling From, memorial reprint edition, with a foreword by RC (1988; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998; London: The Harvill Press, 1998)
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
KINDLING
Text based on manuscripts found in Raymond Carver’s home in Port Angeles, Washington. Published in slightly different form in Esquire [New York] 132, no. 1 (July 1999): 72–77.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE?
Text based on a single hand-corrected typescript found among the Raymond Carver papers in the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University Library. Published in Guardian [London] 24 June 2000, 14–20.