Great Editing: A Beginner's Luck

Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott, published by the University of Texas Press in 1972, launched me on what would become an extended career as a literary biographer. It did not occur to me at that time (and only rarely later) that I could make a living by writing such books. If reasonably well done, they usually found publishers, but few of them brought in substantial earnings. So my principal occupation remained that of a university professor, with biography relegated to the status of a passionately pursued avocation. I was lucky to land at William and Mary, which was undergoing a transformation from a sleepy southern college to one of the nation's best small universities. In the English department I taught bright and eager students about the very figures who would become my subjects. Most of these authors fell within the scope of the survey course in twentieth-century American literature. To go deeper into their work I initiated seminars in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in what I called Gnomic American Poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost), and in writing nonfiction. In all of these courses I learned along with the students.

"What was that about?" I would ask my classes, and "how was it done?" Upon the third or fourth reading of a novel and fifteenth or twentieth immersion in a poem, I (we) sometimes came upon answers to those questions. As a biographer I resisted the New Critics' obliteration of the author, yet at the same time embraced their insistence upon "close reading," a doctrine brilliantly advocated in I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism. If you looked at a literary work often and carefully enough, one word at a time, a light might go on.

One such illuminating experience led to my second biographical work, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977). We'd been examining Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in class, and I was struck, this time through the book, by the many detailed financial transactions Jake Barnes describes and reflects upon. In an essay I argue that the morality of the novel is shaped around a financial metaphor: in brief that easy money is bad for people, and you had to earn your pleasure. That got me thinking about Hemingway's attitudes on various issues. Why not do a book that took up a number of such topics? Hemingway and Money, Love, Friendship, Sport, War, Death, Politics, Religion, Fame, and so on. From these fragments I might stitch together a collage depicting the kind of man and writer Hemingway was.

So much for the idea, but what of the process? I was still an amateur who knew little about the making of biographies. It happened that Charles Norman, an accomplished veteran in the field who'd written biographies of E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, came to William and Mary to present a talk on his work. He emphasized that as a preliminary step the biographer is obliged to read everything. As Mark Schorer remarked, "the first thing that a biographer must be is a drudge." I took that as gospel and set out to read everything Hemingway wrote, from published fiction through journalistic essays to personal letters, and everything others had written about him as well. This took about four years, though it could have been accomplished in half the time were it not for teaching duties.

Most of the research was done at Princeton, where Carlos Baker had assembled vast stores of information for his Ernest Hemingway: A Life (1969), the first and still indispensable biography. There were also trips to New York, Boston, New Haven, Charlottesville, and Austin, Texas, where the Lone Star university placed a gatekeeper with a holstered .38 at the entrance to its manuscript collection. Grants from William and Mary and the American Philosophical Society helped finance these excursions. In the course of these research trips, I established a procedure that would become routine. I assembled thousands of 8½ by 11 sheets, labeled by category at the top, one sheet at a time and never anything on the reverse. At some stage during...