Hemingway's Life Research Articles

Critical companion to Ernest Hemingway: a literary reference to his life and work

Critical Companion to is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of this great American writer. This book contains all the text of the acclaimed Ernest Hemingway A to Z, reorganized into a student-friendly format. Material new to this edition includes critical commentary of all Hemingway's novels and major short stories; further reading lists; an expanded biography; and new illustrations. This volume features entries on all of Hemingway's major and minor works, places and events related to his works, major figures in his life, and more. Appendixes include a complete list of Hemingway's works; a chronology; a genealogy; a unique map for readers of Islands in the Stream; a list of film, stage, and radio adaptations; and a bibliography of secondary sources. Coverage includes: an expanded biography of Hemingway; entries on all of Hemingway's works, major and minor; detailed synopses and critical commentary on his major novels, non-fiction works, and short stories; descriptions of major characters; discussions of important people in Hemingway's life; analyses of the culture, times, and places in which Hemingway lived and wrote; and, helpful bibliographies and a chronology of Hemingway's life.

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Kelli A. Larson University of St. Thomas [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway's life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: Kalarson1@stthomas.edu.] Essays and Books Bailey, Mark. "Ernest Hemingway: Mojito." Hemingway and Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2006. 38–39. [Volume covers the drinking habits and exploits of forty-three American writers, along with excerpts about drinking from their works. Chapter on EH includes a recipe for the Mojito and a brief passage from "The Three-Day Blow." Illustrated by EH's grandson, Edward.] Beegel, Susan F. "A Guide to the Marine Life in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea." Resources for American Literary Study 30 (2005): 236–315. [Extensive reference to the marine life, both plants and animals, found within the novel. Opens with overviews of EH's interest in marine science and experience as a deep-sea fisherman. Entries are arranged alphabetically, drawing upon EH's personal library and other sources contemporary with OMATS's composition "to recapture the flavor of Hemingway's understanding." In addition to presenting natural histories for all of the species mentioned in the novel, including the lions on the [End Page 148] beach, Beegel also details relevant contemporary events, issues, and attitudes surrounding particular species, e.g. sharks and the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Beegel's clarification and identification of species reveals EH's extensive knowledge of Gulf Stream marine life and lays the foundation for future interpretative studies in this area.] ———. "Bulletin Board." The Hemingway Review 26.2 (Spring 2007): 151-152. Bethea, Arthur F. "Raymond Carver's Inheritance from Ernest Hemingway's Literary Technique." The Hemingway Review 26.2 (Spring 2007): 89–104. Bloom, Harold. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. [Reprint of 1987 edition.] Booth, Philip. "Hemingway's 'The Killers' and Heroic Fatalism: From Page to Screen (Thrice)." Literature Film Quarterly 35.1 (2007): 404–411. [Film study tracing the theme of heroic fatalism (dignified acceptance of one's destiny) found within the three screen adaptations of EH's story. Opens with a brief publication history and a recap of the real life events that inspired the story before examining each of the three films: Siodmak's 1946 film noir version, Tarkovsky's 1956 black-and-white short, and Siegel's 1964 made-for-television version. Compares and contrasts the three and briefly analyzes how each diverges from EH's original text.] Callaghan, Morley. That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2006. [Reprint of 1963 edition.] Cheatham, George. "The World War i Battle of Mons and Hemingway's In Our Time Chapter III." The Hemingway Review 26.2 (Spring 2007): 44–57. Dempsey, George T. "Justice for Ernest Hemingway." Antioch Review 65.2 (Spring 2007): 239–255. [Assesses "the true state" of EH's output in his final two decades, suggesting that the writer's artistic genius culminated with The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938) and FWBT (1940). Laments the publication of nearly all of EH's later texts, including ARIT, OMATS, and TAFL. Calls for the scholarly re-editing of all of EH's posthumous works, similar to that of UK, "so that those of us who care can see the terrible reality of this master struggling to regain his mastery of his...

Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide

Much has been written about Ernest Hemingway, including discussion of his well-documented mood disorder, alcoholism, and suicide. However, a thorough biopsychosocial approach capable of integrating the various threads of the author's complex psychiatric picture has yet to be applied. Application of such a psychiatric view to the case of Ernest Hemingway in an effort toward better understanding of the author's experience with illness and the tragic outcome is the aim of this investigation. Thus, Hemingway's life is examined through a review and discussion of biographies, psychiatric literature, personal correspondence, photography, and medical records. Significant evidence exists to support the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable borderline and narcissistic personality traits. Late in life, Hemingway also developed symptoms of psychosis likely related to his underlying affective illness and superimposed alcoholism and traumatic brain injury. Hemingway utilized a variety of defense mechanisms, including self–medication with alcohol, a lifestyle of aggressive, risk–taking sportsmanship, and writing, in order to cope with the suffering caused by the complex comorbidity of his interrelated psychiatric disorders. Ultimately, Hemingway's defense mechanisms failed, overwhelmed by the burden of his complex comorbid illness, resulting in his suicide. However, despite suffering from multiple psychiatric disorders, Hemingway was able to live a vibrant life until the age of 61 and within that time contribute immortal works of fiction to the literary canon.

Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn (review)

Reviewed by Kaimei Zheng University of Massachusetts Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn. By Peter Moreira. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. 244 pp. $26.95. With more than five major Hemingway biographies in print, including Michael Reynolds's monumental work, Hemingway's life is more than an open book to the world. Therefore it's easy to dismiss any attempt to add to that life, let alone another book about Hemingway's three-month trip to China with Martha Gellhorn in 1941. Yet, when I thumbed through Moreira's book with its rich detail and copious references, both its depth and its style and tone drew my attention immediately. Moreira has obviously mined a significant chapter in Hemingway's life that all previous biographers have failed to probe. Hemingway on the China Front is neither a trip report nor a honeymoon journal; Moreira has extended Hemingway's biography significantly. Most of Hemingway's previous biographers used readily available resources such as Martha Gellhorn's book, Travels with Myself and Another, and Hemingway's PM articles collected in By-Line. Moreira, by contrast, sat in the New York Public Library and dug into Gellhorn's Collier's articles from the trip, which give a very different impression than the memories she recorded in Travels with Myself and Another thirty-seven years later. Over the course of ten years, Moreira went from library to library, box to box, from Asia to Europe, digging, weaving, and piecing together the puzzle. Meanwhile, the 2003 publication of Caroline Moorhead's biography of Martha Gellhorn opened another treasure box of information about Hemingway and Gellhorn's life together, including Gellhorn's miserable experience during their China trip and her correspondence about it. Moreira also dug into Hemingway's letters about the trip to Ralph Ingersoll, Maxwell Perkins, and other friends. A journalist by training who lived in Hong Kong for four years, Moreira has first-hand experience in the exact environment where Hemingway and Gellhorn spent a month fifty years earlier. Following Gellhorn's details, Moreira recreates the sensations and the images of the British Colony at the time—the smells, the light, the streets, the hotel itself—he even interviews [End Page 115] the hotel doorman from the period when Hemingway and Gellhorn stayed there. In China itself, Moreira recognizes the place where Hemingway stayed in Chengdu as the same place where Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, would live seventeen years later. Moreira not only paints a telling portrait of each person that Hemingway and Gellhorn met during the trip—whether British, Chinese, or American—but also includes a short biography that often leads to another significant figure or event in Sino-American history, wwii history, and/or Chinese modern history. Moreira's delightful, often provocative style carries the reader through the adventure of being in wartime China, and the action in the book is continuous. With his keen eye for details, Moreira takes readers with the Hemingways on a plane ride with a skilled American pilot over Japanese lines and on an unimaginably rough trip on the North River towards the front line. Moreira is the first one to read between the lines of Gellhorn's three publications about the trip, and he provides a telling judgment on her various revisions over time: the Collier's stories (1941), The Face of War (1959), and Travels with Myself and Another (1978). Working with Gellhorn's life and correspondence, Moreira analyzes the psychological path she traveled during those thirty-seven years. This is not only a book about a moment in Hemingway and Gellhorn's life together, it is also a book detailing Chinese history at the time. Moreira unravels several tangled aspects, including the Roosevelt administration's policy towards China during early wwii (particularly the roles of Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau), the history of Chinese Communism and the anti-Communist policy of Chiang Kai-Shek, together...

Hemingway's Lost Friend: Norton S. Baskin

The friendship of Ernest Hemingway and Norton S. Baskin has until now escaped notice. Baskin once owned the posh Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, and later managed the Dolphin Restaurant and Bar at the famed tourist attraction Marineland. Hemingway and Baskin became friends after first meeting in 1940, and on a number of occasions Hemingway visited with Baskin on his way north. Baskin described one such visit in a letter, dated 24 September 1947, to his wife, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who also knew and admired Hemingway. The letter displays the respect Baskin felt for Hemingway and provides some valuable information about Hemingway's life in Cuba during this period.

Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism Jamie Ebersole Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. By Richard Fantina, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 206 pp. $65.00. For nearly three decades, scholars have been busy rethinking how masculinity operates in Hemingway's life and work, replacing the celebrated macho persona with a Hemingway motivated by various psychosexual desires. Yet, as Richard Fantina argues in his important new book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism, "[a]lthough many critics now readily dismiss the old Hemingway myth of machismo, few seem prepared to acknowledge the masochism that prevails in much of his work" (1). Fantina's book aims to redress this critical oversight, making the case that masochism is a central feature of Hemingway's major works. He uses the term masochism in its specific sexual sense, meaning the desire of a man "to submit himself sexually to, and to suffer pain and/or humiliation administered by, a woman whom he has elevated into a position of superiority and dominance" (6). As his book's title suggests, Fantina argues that this dynamic of the dominant woman and passive male often exists alongside the characters' machismo. As he puts it quite directly at one point, "Hemingway's men dominate in the world. His women often dominate in the bedroom" (77). In building his case, Fantina draws on a number of theorists of masochism, including Freud, Leo Bersani, Kaja Silverman, and most crucially Gilles Deleuze, whose 1967 book Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty reconsiders the novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in order to question the popular concept of sadomasochism. Contrary to many Freudian theories, which see masochism as a perversion complementary to sadism, Deleuze argues that masochism is a distinct phenomenon and a legitimate expression of masculinity. Whereas the sadist wreaks sexual violence on an unwilling victim, the masochist educates a sympathetic partner to be the cold and cruel woman he desires. By submitting to the woman and participating in ritualized scenes of humiliation and suspense, Deleuze suggests, the masochist opens up the possibility for a subversion of patriarchal law and a rebirth as a new man. Fantina locates a similar masochistic dynamic in Hemingway's work, arguing that although one doesn't find the whip-wielding dominatrix of Sacher-Masoch's novels, Hemingway's male characters continually submit to dominant women, and thus push the boundaries [End Page 143] of acceptable masculine behavior. Following Deleuze, then, Fantina expresses his desire to move beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, stating that his "purpose in these pages is not to offer another psychoanalytical interpretation but rather to discuss Hemingway's work in the tradition of literary masochism and the critical responses to it," a tradition that includes writers as different as Swinburne, Wilde, Lawrence, and Joyce (2). In this context of literary masochism, Fantina reconsiders a number of Hemingway's novels and stories. The early chapters of the book examine Hemingway's works in relation to various theories of masochism, highlighting how specific elements of masochism—including fetishism, humiliation, pain, suspense, and the contract—function in Hemingway's novels and stories. Subsequent chapters then extend these analyses, explaining in more detail how masochism works in many of the novels and considering related topics, such as the relationship between sodomy and homophobia in several novels and the role of masochism in the colonialism of the later work. What emerges from these analyses is the sense that Hemingway and his male characters are constantly negotiating between cultural codes of masculinity and their secret masochistic desires. For instance, Fantina argues that masochism plays a central role in The Sun Also Rises, with Jake as the passive, wounded war veteran and Brett as the dominant woman. Fantina persuasively shows that the novel shares many similarities with Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, particularly in the way it continually humiliates the masochist by providing a rival for the woman's affection. In Venus in Furs, Wanda often tells Severin about her attraction to other men and instructs him to arrange her meeting with his primary rival, the Greek. Similarly, in The Sun Also Rises, Brett tells Jake about her love of Romero, insisting that Jake introduce them. In this instance and in other moments of...

“Going All to Pieces”: A Farewell to Arms as Trauma Narrative

Bullet wounds do not cause severe bleeding unless they happen to injure some large trunk or smash one of the larger bones. Wounds caused by fragments of shells or bombs tear larger holes in the skin and lacerate the muscles and are, therefore, more often the cause of serious bleeding. --Injuries and Diseases of War (15) In the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the narrator and main character, Frederic Henry, describes the protracted labor of his partner, Catherine Barkley. When the attending physician recommends a cesarian section, Frederic anxiously inquires about the dangers associated with the procedure. Assuring him that the risks should not exceed those associated with an ordinary delivery, the doctor responds to Frederic's question regarding the potential aftereffects of the operation: are none. There is only the (321). Although this reply suggests that remains will be of no lingering concern, A Farewell to Arms nonetheless testifies to the persistence of wounds, both visible and invisible. Frederic's particular narration of the events and experiences that mark his wartime years must be understood in such terms, for his entire narrative--no ordinary delivery--inscribes a continued struggle with the debilitating aftereffects associated with shell shock. He suffers from the compulsion to remember and retell his traumatic past from the standpoint of a survivor both unable and perhaps unwilling to put that very past into words; the novel stands as a record of his narrative collision with the violence of trauma. (1) Frederic's troubled recollections find expression in apparently embodied and disembodied ways: as pain that registers at the level of the body, breaking apart the perceived unity of the physical self in the presence of terrific bodily suffering; and as trauma that registers at the level of consciousness, breaking down time, language, and the perceived unity of the subjective self in the face of incomprehensible violence. However, in staging an ongoing dialogue between inside and outside, A Farewell to Arms also challenges us to reconsider the mind/body dualism that keeps the wounds of the body from the wounds of the mind. For Frederic's narration--of his body, his memory, his wounds--destabilizes such distinctions in an effort to hold together a broken past that remains, in the present, a nexus of uncertainty and contestation. In accord with Tim Armstrong's emphasis on the interpenetration of machine and human in the modernist period, and with his identification of the thinking (3) involved in the repair and augmentation of bodies in the face of radical disruption in warfare, Frederic'ss narration enacts a kind of prosthetic thinking: he repairs and augments his past as a countermeasure for the pain and trauma that plague him still. (2) Looking back on events, reconstructing his memories, Frederic reveals a desire for a whole and perfect retelling of the past; his narration functions as a prosthesis meant to stave off a sense of the self as a disarticulated scar. His embodied subjectivity, like the wounds he suffers to represent, calls out for prosthetic completion. But as Elaine Scarry notes, what is in the body is remembered (112), and Frederic's narrative prosthesis cannot hold the wound closed. His traumatic memories bleed into and disrupt his present; his narration operates both as scar and wound, as tissue stitched together and lacerated apart. Though his prosthetic version of events insists on the potential for a separate peace (243), Frederic's telling of his past instead goes all to pieces (322) in the enduring presence of pain and trauma too well remembered to be left behind. For years, analysts of the novel understood that Hemingway himself was doing the remembering--the author recalling his Great War experiences through his cipher, Frederic Henry. (3) While it seems to me simply impossible to imagine anyone's being wounded in war and not having it affect his or her writing of a novel about war memories and characters who are wounded, I am not principally interested in either the text or the trauma of Hemingway's life but rather in the text of his narrator's trauma. …

The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates

Hemingway biographers and critics have proposed a wide variety of conflicting dates, ranging from 1946 to 1958, for composition of the sprawling manuscript that makes up The Garden of Eden . After reviewing what is known about the various identifiable sections of The Garden of Eden , this essay proposes that the central section of the novel—Folder 8 (Chapter 13) through Folder 28 (Chapter 35)—was composed between 20 May and 11 September 1957. The essay treats a series of marginal dates in Hemingway's handwriting (months and days given without the year) discovered in the body of the manuscript, and overlays these dates year by year on events in Hemingway's life from 1946 to 1958.

Editor's Note

SAFARI¦ SPECIAL SECTION · EDITOR'S NOTE JANE KENDALL MASON WAS AN INTIMATE FRIEND of Pauline and Ernest Hemingwayduringthe 1930s, and some speculate that she and Ernest were lovers.Atall blondewhose exquisite oval face,like Margot Macomber's, appeared in advertisements for "a beauty product that she had never used," Jane was married to wealthy Yale clubman Grant Mason during the years when she was closest to Hemingway. Presiding over a Havana establishment that included a nanny for her adopted children, as well as ahouseman, cook, butler, gardener, and chauffeur, Jane Mason was also an active and daring sportswomanwho relished deep-sea fishingin the GulfStream andbiggame hunting in Africa. Gifted and unstable, as well as irresistible to men, she spoke three languages, ran an art gallery, possessed a menagerie of animals ranging from honey bears to flamingos, dabbled in literature, divorced and remarried several times, flirted with suicide, and was in and out of Doctor's Hospital in New York for psychological problems that seem to have closely resembled Hemingway's own struggles with mood disorder. Many scholars accept Jane Mason as the model for the Margot Macomber in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and indeed Hemingway presented her with inscribed galley proofs and handwritten drafts of the story, an act that was perhaps a tribute to his muse. One of the most controversial characters in the Hemingway canon, Margot has been labelled by an older generation of male critics as the archetypal "bitch goddess," a reading that privileges the perspective of the story's white hunter, Robert Wilson, who views Margot as cruel, hard, and predatory. Many younger feminist critics have accepted such readings at face value and used them to assail Hemingway for sexism, as though Wilson spoke for Hemingway himself. More recently, however, critics of both sexes, led by Nina Baym, have begun to question readings that treat Margot as a "bitch" and the brutally TMh HFMiNCWAY review, vol. 2i, no. 2. SrRiNG 2002. Copyright © 2002 The Hrnest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 12 · THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW masculinist Wilson as a "code hero" whom the weakly Francis ought to emulate in aspiring to "manhood." They suggest that we listen more attentively to Margot's own voice and attempt to inscribe her values on the story along with those of the male characters. Such readings greatly complicate the story's sexual politics and demonstrate how both Macombers, husband and wife, are fatally entrapped by gendered expectations. All ofwhich is whywe are especially delighted to be able to publish here, for the first time, Jane Mason's newly discovered play, Safari. Thanks to the generosity ofher son Antony Mason and her granddaughter,Alane Salierno Mason, we can now explore "Margot's" own view of adultery, sexual politics , gender roles, fundamental values, and the hunt for happiness on the African savannah. A three-act play about the love intrigues of rich Americans hunting in Africa, apparently written not long after "The Short Happy Life," Safari paints a detailed picture of a social safari in the 1930s. The play not only includes thinly disguised Hemingway acquaintances such as Mason herself, her lover Richard Cooper, white hunter Philip Percival, Bror von Blixen, and Isak Dinesen, but undeniably gives a voice to Hemingway's Margot. In the process, it teaches us a great deal about a significant and inspirational relationship for Ernest Hemingway, and enlarges our understanding of one of his most masterful stories and its historic context. We hope that Safari will encourage a fresh look at the talented women in Hemingway's life, and perhaps stimulate some important new readings of"The Short Happy Life." To open the dialogue, we are pleased to present Alane Salierno Mason's introduction to her grandmother's play and its background, as well as first perspectives on Safari by Bernice Kert, biographer and author of The Hemingway Women; Carol Hemingway, professor of Theater Arts and playwright; Lisa Tyler, Hemingway critic; and Robert W Trogdon, textual scholar. —Susan F. Beegel ...

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway

Introduction Chronologies-of Hemingway's Life and of the Times Hemingway in His Time Eye and Heart: Ernest Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist The Fashion of Machismo Re-Reading Hemingway and Gender Love, War, Wilderness, and Loss: The Great Themes in Hemingway The Inter-Textual Hemingway Lies, Damned Lies, and Hemingway Criticism: Bibliographical Commentary and Checklist Index

A Foul Mood, A Dirty Joke: Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

Carlos Barker was the first to sense that "Cat in the Rain" had a strong autobiographical flavor. Hemingway denied this, claiming the characters were based on an American couple he'd seen at a hotel. For years most commentators took him at his word. But with much of Hemingway's life now on record, and in such detail, Carlos Baker seems to have been right after all. In Rapallo, Italy, in the winter of 1923, Hemingway, stressed by a lack of money, his wife's pregnancy, and the stagnation of his career, compressed his situation with the metaphor of a dirty joke.

Hemingway and the Poets

Ernest Hemingway's ninety or so published poems attest to his lifelong flirtation with the muse, and his biography echoes with names, influences, and contretemps with a galaxy of poets from stars like Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, and Wallace Stevens to lesser lights like Evan Shipman and Ernest Walsh. Over the decades Hemingway's life, legend, and writing have also inspired responses from poets whose work offers a curious mix of contributions to the myth as well as an informal sub-genre of criticism. This essay reflects on such poems by writers as varied as Charles Bukowski, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, David Ray, Vicki Feaver, and Thomas Merton.

Hemingway: The 1930s by Michael Reynolds (review)

TES, 31, 200 TES, 31, 200 line. But the poem will not fit this reading or, probably, any other which does not face up to its ideological inconsistencies. To her credit, Joyce acknowledges her difficulties,for example with the final lines of the poem in which the body of the animal is compared to a Chippendale chair leg, but she states, ratherweakly, that Moore 'feels compelled to withdraw from her furious critique' (p. IO7).One is tempted to followT. S. Eliot'sremarkin his introductionto the Selected Poems ( 935), 'It would be very difficult to say exactly what is the "subject matter" of "The Jerboa" ', ifonlybecause thisdoes recognizetheideologicalslipperinessof thepoem. Hannah Hoch had an agenda, but it is more difficultto argue the case for Moore. She does seem to have had an animal alertnessto technique, squirrellingit into her own aestheticstoreswith considerableagility.This storewas then frugallydeployed in the serviceof a moral sensibilitywhich requiredan excess of formalvirtuosityfor thefullrangeofitsexpression.IfJoyce's bookfailsto accountforMoore'seclecticism, it raisesissuesofideology and formthatareof continuinginterest. UNIVERSITY OF READING PAT RIGHELATO Hemingway. The I93os. By MICHAELREYNOLDS.New York and London: Norton. 1988. xx + 360 pp. fI9.95 (paperbound ?9.95). Hemingway: TheIg30s is the fourth volume of a five-volume biographical series on this most influentialand infamous of American writers.The previousvolumes: The Young Hemingway, Hemingway: TheParisYears, and Hemingway: TheAmerican Homecoming may initially seem to cover the most interesting territory in that they deal with Hemingway's relationshipswith hisparents,his firstmarriage,and his earlyliterary achievements. However, Michael Reynolds manages to convince the reader that the I930S was a crucial decade in the author's life; one in which Hemingway established the mythic persona of 'Papa' Hemingway through a series of intrepid adventuresin Africa,Cuba, and Civil-war-tornSpain. Beginning in Parisin I929, Reynolds picks up Hemingway's life as the writer is finishingA Farewell toArms.But Pariswas a city Hemingway had grown tired of; he had fallen out with many of the ex-patriateAmericanshe previouslyassociatedwith such as GertrudeStein and Scott Fitzgerald.In the thirties,the Hemingways spent much of their time in Key West, Floridaand Wyoming and had numerousvisitors to staywhom Hemingway entertainedin his own inimitablefashion. However, this circle of friendsbecame smalleras the decade progressed.Hemingway managed to offend and alienate those who were closest to him until he had even destroyed his friendship with his wife. Reynolds paints a portrait of a man who is profoundly insecurein many ways;one who continuallyteststhe loyaltyof those aroundhim to the point where they understandably become tired of his bullying and his competitivenessand abandon him. Several telling anecdotes reveal Hemingway to be a fiercely competitive man who not only mocked and scorned those who could not or would not compete but who cruelly taunted any 'losers'even when they were his close friends.Particularly fascinatingis the account of the Hemingways'safariin Africa.Although the tripwas supposed to be an all male affair,Hemingway could persuade only one of his male friends to come along, despite the fact that it would be an all-expenses-paid adventure. Thus it was only a party of three, Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and their neighbour from Key West, Charles Thompson, who set off for Nairobi in 1933. However, ratherthan pitting himself againstnature, Hemingway predictably encouraged a fierce competition with Charles Thompson, as his biographerpoints out: 'Unfortunately,the safarihasbecome a matterof measurements:Ernest'srhino line. But the poem will not fit this reading or, probably, any other which does not face up to its ideological inconsistencies. To her credit, Joyce acknowledges her difficulties,for example with the final lines of the poem in which the body of the animal is compared to a Chippendale chair leg, but she states, ratherweakly, that Moore 'feels compelled to withdraw from her furious critique' (p. IO7).One is tempted to followT. S. Eliot'sremarkin his introductionto the Selected Poems ( 935), 'It would be very difficult to say exactly what is the "subject matter" of "The Jerboa" ', ifonlybecause thisdoes recognizetheideologicalslipperinessof thepoem. Hannah Hoch had an agenda, but it is more difficultto argue the case for Moore. She does seem to have had an animal alertnessto technique, squirrellingit into her own aestheticstoreswith considerableagility.This storewas then frugallydeployed in the serviceof a moral sensibilitywhich requiredan excess of...

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (review)

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway should be a welcome addition to many readers' bookshelves. The collected essays, previously unpublished, provide cultural, biographical, and bibliographical detail, and persuasive historicist criticism of Hemingway's life and work. The wealth of information, making the guide potentially useful to scholars at practically any level, constitutes the volume's strength. However, the variety of approaches used to read the Hemingway text in its historical context becomes somewhat troubling; each essay seems to imagine its audience differently, creating a thorny question of who should be reading this book, and under what circumstances, an issue the volume doesn't seem to be able to resolve.

Main Reviews

Margolin, Victor, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitsky, Moholy‐Nagy 1917–1946Misler, Nicoletta, RAKhN ndash; The Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences ExperiementUglow, Jenny, Hogarth: A Life and a WorldHermann, Thomas, ‘Quite a Little About Painters’: Art and Artists in Hemingway's Life and WorkDeutsche R., Evictions: Art and Spatial PoliticsRobson, Euan, George Houston. Nature's LimnerSmith, Bill, Hornel: The Life and Work of Edward Atkinson HornelBois, Yves‐Alain, Krauss, Rosalind E., Formless: A User's GuideSimpson, Marc Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer SargentAdelson, W., Janis, D. Seldin, et al., Sargent AbroadFenwick, Simon and Smith, Greg, The Business of Watercolour: A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Watercolour SocietyStoichita, Victor I., A Short History of the ShadowPeress, Gilles, Telex IranParr, Martin, Last ResortSalgado, Sebastião, Workers: An Archaelogy of the Industrial AgeFaas, Horst and Page Tim (eds), RequiemMartin, Richard, Gianni VersaceBoynton, Lindsay, Gillow Furniture DesignsSpencer‐Churchill, Henrietta, Classic Georgian StyleCarbonel, Daniel, et al., Oro Plata: Embroidered Costumes of the BullfightMeier, Richard and Huxtable Ada Louise, Making Architecture – The Getty CenterHolod, Renata and Khan, Hassan‐Uddim, The Contemporary Mosque: Architects, Clients and Designs Since the 1950sDoubilet, Susan and Boles Daralice, American House Now – Contemporary Architectural DesignPrussin, Labelle, African Nomadic Architecture, Space, Place and Gender

Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris.

When the first installment of Peter Griffin's biography of Hemingway appeared in 1985, won widespread acclaim, especially among writers. The late Raymond Carver, in The New York Times Book Review, called wonderful and intimate and said 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. Ward Just called Along With Youth of the most purely attractive biographies I have ever read. Tom Stoppard chose as one of his Books of the Year. And James Dickey declared that Griffin's involvement with his subject is so complete and so creative that the reader cannot help murmuring with approval and enlightenment at page after page. Along With Youth brought Hemingway from childhood to his marriage in 1921 to Hadley Richardson. Now, in Less Than a Treason, Peter Griffin vividly recaptures Ernest's early Paris years, when he met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, tnd F. Scott Fitzgerald, and published his first important collection of stories, In Our Time, as well as his finest novel, The Sun Also Rises. As in the first volume, Griffin provides here an intimately detailed rendering of Hemingway's life. The book is replete with physical detail--the sights and sounds of working-class Paris, skiing in the Austrian Alps, the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Griffin presents Hemingway's friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound (he thought both were lazy, but respected them for their talent and influence), his dislike of writers John Dos Passos and Ford Maddox Ford and his less-than-favorable opinion of Maxwell Perkins (he felt Perkins was more interested in business than literature). For Hemingway's personal life, there is his infatuation with Lady Duff Twysden, his affair with Pauline Pheiffer, and the failure of his first marriage. Throughout this book, Griffin shows how Hemingway incorporated much of his life into his fiction, where the central character is Ernest himself, working out the crises that plagued him at the time. Griffin does all this with a seamless style, weaving unpublished material (including hours of Hadley's reminiscences recorded shortly before her death) into an intriguing narrative of a great writer's life.

Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist , and: The Young Hemingway (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist, and: The Young Hemingway Pinsker Sanford Gregory S. Sojka . Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist. New York: Lang, 1986. 180 pp. $32.50. Michael Reynolds . The Young Hemingway. New York: Blackwell, 1986. 291 pp. $19.95. The critical winds from New Haven notwithstanding, we continue to be interested in a writer's life, in his art, and in the slippery connections between the two. Hemingway is an excellent case in point. No doubt he too will be deconstructed, his "texts" reduced to what their various signifiers signify; until then, however, we can rejoice that scholars like Sojka and Reynolds prefer the Heminway Collection (at Boston's John F. Kennedy Library) to Diacritics. But that said, let me hasten to point out that, like Orwell's animals, some scholars are more "equal," more telling, than others. As Sojka would have it, previous scholars have done their homework on the roles that bullfighting, hunting, and wartime combat play in Hemingway's formative experience; what we need now is a book-length study that concentrates on fishing as "an important exercise in ordering and reinforcing an entire philosophy and style of life." Not surprisingly, Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist is precisely that book. Drawing from Hemingway's articles about fishing, his letters, and his manuscripts—and especially from Philip Young's "code hero" thesis—Sojka dutifully trolls his way through the canon: "Big Two-Hearted River," The Old Man and the Sea, Islands in the Stream. Unfortunately, most of the "bigger," more important fish manage to slip away unhooked. We are told, for example, that "During his life, Ernest Hemingway constantly participated in some type of competitive activity" or that "when the going gets tough in The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn starts moaning." Sophomores are likely to find this breathtaking in ways that scholars and stylists alike are not. And no doubt the former will appreciate the generous space allotted to plot summary more than those already familiar with Nick Adams or Santiago. In large measure Sojka's study is an exercise in putting consensus views between hard covers. Consider, for example, the following passage, one that represents both the texture and the depth of critical discussion in The Angler as Artist: Hemingway's own maxim, il faut (d'abord) durer, becomes Nick's necessary philosophy. For Nick must participate in activities whose procedures and effects can fill the void of his insufficient moral and philosophical inheritance. Time and time again, Nick falls back upon fishing, whose ordered, ritualistic procedures provide a sporting code with sufficient ethical basis to create a satisfying life; or, when that goal seems too ambitious, fishing at least affords a temporary respite from traumatic memories that could lead to self-pity and mental breakdown. After Philip Young, after Carlos Baker, after the countless other scholar-critics who have made mighty contributions to the best that has been thought and said about Hemingway, what authentically fresh ground—much less "forgiveness"—is left for the likes of Sojka? One answer that comes to mind is a book like Michael Reynolds' The Young Hemingway. Reassessments of Hemingway's life tend to focus either on the bombast and self-parody that dominated his last years or on efforts to account for the lean, hard brilliance of his early work. Reynolds' study concentrates on the [End Page 614] latter, but with important differences. Rather than merely retracing Baker's strictly biographical steps, Reynolds yokes new information with fresh questions. He is especially good on the sociocultural world of prewar Oak Park and on the formative books and magazines that shaped the young Hemingway every bit as much as fishing and hunting did. In large measure, this is a world Hemingway did not write about. As Reynolds shrewdly observes: When Hemingway invented Nick Adams, he did not give him the vested choir or the cello lessons. Nick never went to church, never listened to his grandfather's war stories, never had an older sister. Nick's parents—the Doctor and the Doctor's wife—never black up for a minstrel show or take Nick to the opera. In Hemingway's fiction, Oak Park remains...

Ernest Hemingway: The Search for Courage , and: Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years , and: Hemingway: A Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: The Search for Courage, and: Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years, and: Hemingway: A Biography Robert P. Weeks Keith Ferrell . Ernest Hemingway: The Search for Courage. New York: Evans, 1984. 236 pp. $10.95. Peter Griffin . Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. 268 pp. $17.95. Jeffrey Meyers . Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper. 644 pp. $27.50. It is inevitable and fitting that any biography of Hemingway be compared to Carlos Baker's Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). And it is especially helpful to measure each of these three biographies of Hemingway by Baker's. The Baker biography stands apart and above because of both its strengths and its conspicuous weaknesses. The latter consist largely of "impertinent material," to use a term by Eliot that Leon Edel finds helpful. Eliot wrote that "curiosity about the private life may be of three kinds: the useful, the harmless, and the impertinent." "When the subject is a man of letters," Eliot considers material useful only "if the study throws light upon his published work." In the past thirty years most biography of modern novelists has been stuffed with material that Eliot fastidiously calls "vulgarly impertinent." Several of the best biographers have acknowledged as much by offering drastically scaled down versions of their inflated originals. And often, for example in the case of Joseph Blotner's stringently downsized Faulkner and Edel's cut-down edition of his massive two-volume biography of James, the shorter version has been welcomed as a distinct improvement. The three biographies reviewed here neatly illustrate Eliot's three categories: one consists largely of useful material; another of a combination of the useful and the harmless, and the third, although it contains much that is useful, is fluffed up far too much with material that is either harmless or impertinent. Ernest Hemingway: The Search for Courage by Keith Ferrell consists largely of useful material, yet it is by far the weakest of the three biographies. The hitch is that it is useful material that appeared nearly twenty years ago in Baker's biography. This embarrassing fact is nowhere openly acknowledged, but it is everywhere apparent. It is apparent chiefly because it is a short book that appropriately limits itself to the large events of the main periods of Hemingway's life. And it is all familiar because one of the lasting achievements of Baker's biography is that it defined these events and periods. It doesn't help matters that this familiar material is presented in a plodding style. The title, incidentally, misleads; the book does not organize Hemingway's life story around a search for courage. Because of its lack of originality, second-rate style, and misleading title, Ernest Hemingway: The Search for Courage does not repay scholarly attention. Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years by Peter Griffin focuses narrowly on Hemingway's courtship and marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. In doing so, it makes much more skillful and fruitful use of the only recently available letters of Hadley to Hemingway than does Bernice Kelt's much larger The Hemingway Women. On the other hand, Griffin does not come up to Michael S. Reynolds' thorough and insightful analysis of the adolescent Hemingway's relationship to his parents. We finish Along with Youth with more questions about young Hemingway than answers: his relationship with his parents is full of sudden, unexplained shifts; his treatment of Hadley—judging from her letters to him—was often incredibly [End Page 265] cruel, particularly when one considers that he was to marry her in a few months. Moreover, she was the first person who took a deep interest in his writing and even formulated one of the first principles of his narrative aesthetic. He writes Hadley of current love affairs and sexual encounters in a spiteful, insensitive way, yet we never know why. This material is made additionally unclear by the fact that there are only two extant courtship letters from Hemingway to her, in contrast to the more than two thousand pages of letters Hadley wrote to Hemingway during their nine-month courtship. Hence, much of what...

Hemingway (review)

Reviewed by: Hemingway Valerie Meyers Fernanda Pivano . Hemingway. Milano: Rusconi, 1985. 232 pp. Lire 20,000. Fernanda Pivano, a distinguished Italian critic, journalist, and translator of modern American literature, has produced an introduction to Hemingway's life for Italian readers. Her interpretation is based on her meetings with Hemingway in 1948-49, 1954, and 1956. The narrative, divided into highly condensed chapters, is not chronological. She relies heavily on printed sources and thus repeats some myths and makes a few errors. The Hemingway she knew had film star status in Italy. Pivano notes the quantity of his luggage; the lavishness of his hospitality in grand hotels, where he loved to preside over large tables of friends and hangers-on; the scale and pace of his travels on ocean liners, on trains, and in the big black Buick that appears in one of the excellent photographs taken by Pivano's husband, Ettore Sottsass. They met for the first time in October, 1948, when Hemingway invited Fernanda to visit him in Cortina during his first trip to Italy since 1923. He had heard that she had been arrested in a Nazi raid on the Einaudi publishers in Torino after a contract for her translation of A Farewell To Arms was found. (The book was banned by Mussolini because of its depiction of the Italian retreat from Caporetto.) Hemingway greeted her warmly; he valued her work, wrote to her often about her translations, and took an interest in her career. She translated A Farewell to Arms, to replace previous pirated versions, as well as Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Young, warm-hearted, and intellectual, Fernanda esteemed him as a writer and found him sympathetic as a man. Hemingway boasted of his Indian blood and demonstrated how he could walk silently; but when he showed her a photograph of his Indian grandmother in a book called Fighting Indians of the West and subsequently chose another grandmother [End Page 735] from the same book, she enjoyed the joke. Pivano conveys a lively sense of his physical presence: his shyness and vulnerability under the confident mask; his tendency to talk almost in a whisper, as if communicating secret information; his capacity to invest ordinary activity with wonder. She stresses the magnetism of the man in his prime and registers the decline in his physical and mental health after the plane crashes of 1954. Pivano notes the contradictions in Hemingway: his obsessiveness about money and his extreme generosity; his resentment of and sense of obligation to journalists. She describes how he spoke his own mixture of European languages. (It is doubtful that Hemingway spoke any foreign language well but made up for his lack of grammar with force of personality.) Pivano is interesting on Hemingway's life in Italy. She wisely discounts Cecchin's absurd theory that he was in love with a Torinese nurse in 1918, though she believes the unlikely story that he was baptized a Catholic while wounded. She observed the progress and repercussions of his infatuation with Adriana Ivancich and makes it clear that Hemingway cut a sorry figure. He allowed a knowing and flirtatious girl to hurt his marriage and himself and was doubly humiliated when the novel she had inspired, Across the River and into the Trees, was attacked by the critics. Adriana's La Torre Bianca (1980) describes how Hemingway vented his misery and frustration on Mary and maintains that the unconsummated affair irreparably damaged Adriana's own life (she committed suicide in 1982). Mary emerges as the stoic heroine of Hemingway's last years, though Pivano illuminates the psychological cost of their life together. She notes how, after Hemingway's amusing notes to friends had been read, Mary collected them and said she had to take care of his boys—conserving everything he wrote for its potential cash value. This habit explains Hemingway's brutal accusation, which Mary records without explanation in How It Was, that she is a "scavenger." Pivano admires the skillful way in which Mary ignores Hemingway tiptoeing into the kitchen to feed prime bits of fish to a circle of cats. These authentic observations reveal the...

With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba , and: Hemingway in Cuba (review)

Reviewed by: With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, and: Hemingway in Cuba Jeffrey Meyers Arnold Samuelson . With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. New York: Random, 1984. 181 pp. $15.95. Norberto Fuentes . Hemingway in Cuba. Translated by Consuelo Corwin. Secaucus: Stuart, 1984. 454 pp. $22.50. Drawn by Hemingway's personal charisma and public fame, the young Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked from Minnesota to Key West in April, 1934, to sit at the feet of the master. Hemingway liked to have a kid brother, sidekick, and disciple in his entourage and hired Samuelson as cabin boy on his new fishing boat. Hemingway described him as "a tall, very serious young man with very big feet and hands and a porcupine haircut," emphasized his clumsiness, nervousness, "incurable tendency toward sea-sickness and peasant reluctance to take orders." Samuelson, supposedly a skilled violinist, was nicknamed Maestro; but when Hemingway heard him play the instrument, he shortened his name to Mice. Because Samuelson was not "worth a damn at anything else," Hemingway thought he might have a future as an author. He immortalized him in a fine essay on the techniques of writing, "Monologue to the Maestro," published in Esquire in October, 1935. Samuelson led an individualistic though insignificant life; he died in 1981 and left this memoir of his year with Hemingway. Despite Hemingway's expert tuition and generous encouragement, Samuelson did not learn much about writing: "It was a very marvelous life, I thought, when you can make a business of living for the pleasure there is to be got out of it, and I was having a fine time." Samuelson idolized the omniscient and omnipotent Hemingway. He described Hemingway's ability to get on well with ordinary men and emphasized "how many people E. H. made happy when they were near him." But Samuelson's superficial, trivial, and frequently inaccurate account is mainly concerned with the massacre of marlin: the most boring aspect of Hemingway's life. His book could have been written by someone who never knew Hemingway, adds nothing to the present state of knowledge, and ranks with Kip Farrington's Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell as the least informative memoir of the writer. Hemingway's wife Pauline, his son Jack, his brother Leicester, and his friends Archibald MacLeish, Sidney Franklin, and Bra Saunders (who has the clap) make cameo appearances, but none of them says anything significant. Observing his hero from below deck, Samuelson naively maintains there was no tension in the small household (which had six servants). In fact, the Hemingways had left their two young sons during the eight-month safari in Africa that had ended in April, 1934; Pauline was not giving the children enough attention; Gregory was suffering under the regimen of his emotionally warped nursemaid; and Hemingway was having an affair in Havana with the wild and beautiful Jane Mason. The Cuban journalist Norberto Fuentes, who continues the story of Hemingway's life in Cuba, has produced the weirdest book ever written about him. Though "edited by Larry Alson," this work has no structure or logic and discusses Louis Cohn's 1931 bibliography after Hemingway's suicide. It is merely a random and repetitive string of odd facts and trifling anecdotes (there are two pages on how the Finca Vigía was dusted by Hemingway's servants); it cannibalizes earlier books and recounts the familiar story of his two decades in [End Page 406] Havana. Many obscure Cubans—cockfighters, cooks, and barmen—crawled out of the woodwork, claimed to know Hemingway, and offered dubious information about him, but Fuentes' two principal informants were the Spanish doctor José Luis Herrera and the ancient mate of the Pilar, Gregorio Fuentes (no relation to the author). Fuentes records a dialogue that typifies the quality of Gregorio's recollections: "Hemingway asked his captain [sic]. 'What can that be, Gregorio? What could have happened?' Gregorio answered that they had to get to him first, and then find out what had happened." Apart from a few brief and grossly misleading references, Fuentes says virtually nothing about Hemingway's closest (anti-Castro) Cuban friends: Mayito Menocal, Elicio Arguelles, and Thorwald Sanchez, or about Jane...