Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life (review)

Linda Wagner-Martin's Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life is part of Palgrave Macmillan's "Literary Lives" series, a collection that currently totals 53 volumes dedicated to the "most admired and influential English-language authors." The introduction to the A-to-Y catalogue (Matthew Arnold to W.B. Yeats) claims that the series provides "stimulating accounts" of the writers' working lives, eschewing "traditional biography" for outlines of "the professional, publishing, and social contexts which shaped their writing."

One does not approach the book, then, expecting a comprehensive biography of Hemingway's life, nor does Wagner-Martin make pretenses to that end. She instead seems to recognize the limitations of the undertaking—how to pare down one of the most well-documented lives in American literature to a volume of 201 pages (which includes extensive notes, bibliography, and index). Wagner-Martin confronts the task by focusing the biography on what she calls an irony of Hemingway's life—that the male protagonists so often seen as his fictional embodiment are "stable personas," while the man himself is a "shape shifter," proud of his ability to adapt to surroundings, social sets, and spouses. Even more specifically, she aims "to emphasize the fluidity of the author's self as it developed through his relationships with the women" in his life, from his mother to his lovers to his four wives. Admittedly, Wagner-Martin invests more time on the first half of Hemingway's life than on the second, when his chameleonic talents waned and his private life was marked by depression and erratic behavior. Less than a third of the text, consequently, covers the last twenty-five years of Hemingway's life.

While many biographers highlight the influence of Hemingway's mother on his lifelong insecurities,Wagner-Martin, in her exploration of the writer's youth and family, stresses the role of his father, as much as that of his mother, in Hemingway's bitterness toward his Oak Park life. Both parents, who were strict and demanding of their children, saw any rebellion, however slight, as a rejection of their finely honed values. As Wagner-Martin explains, "As Ernest began making more and more of his own choices, which often were not the choices his parents would have made, both Clarence and Grace found his behavior inexplicable—and threatening" (7). That fact, and Hemingway's protracted aimlessness after his World War i wounding, led to his mother's request (with Clarence's full support) that her son leave their Michigan cottage until he stopped his "lazy loafing and pleasure seeking." This perceived rejection by his mother, in tandem with his romantic rejection by Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky a year earlier, provide one of Wagner-Martin's central theses—that these two incidents colored all of Hemingway's subsequent relationships with women and buttressed his commitment to the mastery of writing.

Well-researched, the biography relies heavily on those that have come before it, particularly on Baker's A Life Story, memoirs by members of the Hemingway family, and dozens of highly regarded articles. Because of the emphasis on his relationships with women, Wagner-Martin often taps into Bernice Kert's work. The smattering of psychoanalytic criticism offered throughout the biography also is used effectively to elaborate Wagner-Martin's points and elucidate the potential motivations of a complex individual. In Hemingway's marriages to Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer, Wagner-Martin underscores his emotional and financial dependencies—both traits he denied with his hyper-masculine prose and public posturing. From wives Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, Hemingway sought total devotion to compensate for his increasing anxiety. From Adriana Ivancich and Valerie Danby-Smith, he seemed only to need inspiration. The short biography makes much of Jane Mason, with whom Wagner-Martin (taking cues from Kert) speculates Hemingway had an affair—a romance to which biographers such as Baker and Reynolds have given little credence.

Always Wagner-Martin returns to Hemingway's writing; interspersed with biographical details are explanations about...