A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (review)

A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Linda Wagner-Martin, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 248. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

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 The collected essays, previously unpublished, provide cultural, biographical, and bibliographical detail, and persuasive historicist criticism of Hemingway's life and work.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.

The Guide pitches itself to nonacademic readers who have developed an interest in Hemingway. Editor Linda Wagner-Martin's introduction bills the book as augmenting the sizable body of Hemingway criticism by "placing Hemingway's work within reach of readers who may not be scholars," making him more accessible (8). On the one hand, this goal is to be achieved by furnishing background via biography--Michael Reynolds' "Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961: A Brief Biography"--and the "Illustrated Chronology," impressive enough in its dual narratives of Hemingway and the rest of the world. (The layout, Hemingway events on the left, political and artistic events on the right, is not consistently spatially synchronized, sometimes giving the impression of Hemingway racing ahead of history.) On the other hand, the Guide includes readings of Hemingway situating his work amidst turn-of-the-century naturalist movements (Susan F. Beegel's "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist"), burgeoning feminist movements (Jaimie Barlowe's "Hemingway's Gender Training"), not-so-acknowledged influences (Wagner-Martin's "The Intertextual Hemingway"), changing perceptions of gender and the role of the professional writer (Marilyn Elkins's "The Fashion of Machismo"), and a generalized historical backdrop (Frederic J. Svoboda's "The Great Themes in Hemingway: Love, War, Wilderness, and Loss"); these also supply bounteous historical information as food for thought. Kelli A. Larson's bibliographical essay supplements lists of sources adorning each contribution.

Appeals to nonacademic readers emerge throughout the Guide, which champions the Hemingway myth; Reynolds lauds Hemingway's "stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become a permanent part of our cultural inheritance" (15). "The Intertextual Hemingway," patiently explains literary appropriations to the uninitiate: "such echoes, such borrowings, do not breech ethical norms" (173). The Guide thus conjures up an audience of aficionados, perhaps the bearded tourists visiting Key West or showing up at Hemingway Society conferences. However, Beegel, Elkins, and Barlowe's essays, in the specificity of their approaches, their close-readings of relevant "non-literary" texts, and their deployment of theoretical vocabulary, are clearly responses to the current surge of new historicist/cultural studies approaches to Hemingway and modernist literature. The Guide may, in fact, be tentatively pitching contemporary academic approaches to general readers. The inconsistency, however, jars. I'm not trying to reinforce the assumption that only graduate students and professors--and perhaps only junior professors, at that--respond to critical trends, while nonacademic scholars carry on with liberal humanist literary appreciation. The difference between academic and civilian approaches to literature are visible everywhere, however, and emerge throughout the guide. Note Wagner-Martin's disclaimer of sorts regarding the historicist approach: "When readers can pick up a story or a novel and read it with understanding and empathy, regardless of the cultural context or the time in which it was written, the writing has some chance of lasting into another generation" (6). The volume thus vacillates between proposing and troubling the importance of a historical approach to Hemingway.

Undergraduates might seem logically appropriate as an audience for the Guide, which would be valuable as a background source on library reserve for survey courses or classes focused on Hemingway. The volume's arguments provide models...