Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes Hilary K. Justice Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life. By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes. Pegasus Books, 2019. 224 pp. Hardcover $27.95. Anyone who has ever used A Moveable Feast as a guide-book to Paris (for journeys either real or imagined) will recognize the impulse behind Cristen Hemingway Jaynes's Ernest's Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway's Life: to follow in her great-grandfather's literal footsteps to see the places he lived, worked, and traveled, the places that inspired his work. Part biography, part literary travel guide, with occasional, fleeting wisps of personal memoir, Jaynes's book offers readers a more complete list of specific locations that figure in Hemingway's life and writing than can be found in any but the most detailed biographies. Ernest Hemingway poses three central challenges to any would-be biographer in any medium. One, obviously, is the breadth and scope of his lived life and the vastness of available archives; preparing any sort of Hemingway biography is daunting before one even embarks. Another more subtle but no less daunting challenge lurks in the intricate connections between the writer's life and his works, which are all in some way crafted and thus, as he says of memory, "never true" (DIA 100), (but never really false, either). And then there is a thorny, practical problem: how to resolve tensions between multiple competing chronologies (private life and professional oeuvre), doing justice to both without completely confusing one's audience. Hemingway's life and works tantalizingly suggest a nearly perfect overall pattern in which he writes the experiences of his previous location in his next location. But the best-laid organizational plan this pattern suggests tangles horribly and almost instantly as soon as one remembers that A Farewell to Arms comes after The Sun Also Rises (never mind the even greater tangle posed by the posthumous works which await one toward the end). Biographers almost universally choose to privilege traditional chronology, subordinating his works to his life, but when dealing with a subject whose writing is why there is a market for biographies at all, every biographer feels very keenly the path not taken. Hemingway's passionate relationship with Place offers a way to tame the challenges his writing poses to straightforward chronology, thereby minimizing (or hoping to minimize) the sacrifices that every project of such scope inevitably requires. In Ernest's Way, Jaynes pushes this opportunity to its logical end, subordinating chronology entirely to place. Beginning with "In the [End Page 143] Woods I: Oak Park, Michigan, and Chicago" and ending in "In the Woods II: Ketchum and Sun Valley," chapters present the itinerary promised by their titles. (Jaynes mentions Hemingway's travels to Africa and Asia only briefly; neither region receives full chapter treatment.) Within each chapter, Jaynes provides a chronological narrative of Hemingway's life in (as often, visits to) many of the places that were important to him as person, writer, or both, sometimes covering decades in a very few pages. Readers fascinated by, for instance, Hemingway's nearly life-long love affair with Spain will welcome Jaynes's having taken on the tremendous task of sifting biography, fiction, letters, and sometimes family anecdotes into a single, neatly compressed chapter. As one progresses through Ernest's Way from "Woods I: Oak Park, Chicago, and Michigan" through "Milan and Veneto," "Toronto," and "Paris," Jaynes leads one to expect that the book will proceed in the order of Hemingway's first experiences with each place. However, Jaynes diverges from this pattern almost as soon as it is established. Readers already familiar with Hemingway's biography will probably wonder why the "Madrid" chapter (which treats Spain as a whole) follows "Bimini" rather than preceding "Cayo Hueso" (the Key West chapter). And even given the necessarily montaged internal chapter structures (in which Hemingway can divorce and remarry three times in the white space between adjacent paragraphs), the effect of finishing one chapter that ends with Martha Gellhorn and, one page-turn later, finding oneself in 1923, en route to Spain with Hadley, can be...