Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context ed. by James Nagel (review)

Studies in American Fiction117 critical biography of London— "a study of his inner life, primarily as it is revealed in his art" (p. xviii) —previous studies having leaned either toward the biographical or toward the critical, as Earle Labor's excellent Jack London (New York: Twayne, 1974). It is a sensitive and discerning book that London readers and critics should know. University of OttawaJacqueline Tavernier-Courbin Nagel, James, ed. Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 246 pp. Cloth: $27.50. One might expect that the three opening reminiscences in a collection of essays on Ernest Hemingway (one each by Hemingway's son Patrick, Charles Scribner, Jr., and playwright Tom Stoppard) would be the book's principal feature. They are not. Make no mistake, these three essays are every bit as interesting as one might expect. What happens, however, is that many of the subsequent essays are of such high quality that they surpass in interest even the three worthy pieces that open the volume. All told, there are an even dozen essays, all originals that appear nowhere else in print. The genesis of this collection was the 1982 conference sponsored by Northeastern University in cooperation with the Hemingway Society and the John F. Kennedy Library. The volume's editor, James Nagel, a significant Hemingway scholar in his own right and current president of the Hemingway Society, provides an intelligent introduction that groups the papers into four sections: "Personal Comments and Reminiscences," "The Craft of Composition," "Interpretations Biographical and Critical," and "Relationships with Other Writers." The major articles are provided by intelligent and sensitive critics and scholars. When an essay can be substantial, substantive, and suggestive at one and the same time, that essay will be superb. Paul Smith's "The Tenth Indian and the Thing Left Out" is such an essay. A carefully researched study of the manuscript versions of "Ten Indians," it blends perfectly the textual and biographical approaches to Hemingway's work. It shows how the writer worked as he moved from draft to draft to finished tale; however, it is not merely the best thing written on "Ten Indians" (which it is) but also serves as a model scholars may follow to approach various stories, by Hemingway or other writers. On the other hand, if the two writers mentioned in the title of Adeline R. Tintner's "Ernest and Henry: Hemingway's Lover's Quarrel with James" seem an unlikely couple, it is because they are. The reader of this essay by a widely recognized authority on Henry James may feel that the seams have been stretched in putting on the coat, and it may not do good service to him whom it fits, for it hardly seems to fit Hemingway. More interesting and entertaining is Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin's "Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound," a brief yet fresh look at a more likely unlikely relationship. Demonstrating a careful examination of letters and manuscript revisions, Robert W. Lewis, "The Making of Death in the Afternoon," offers a study of the work Carlos Baker proposes as indispensable to a serious consideration of the developmental aspects of Hemingway's fiction. Drawing upon Hemingway family letters, Max Westbrook, "Grace under Pressure: Hemingway and the Summer of 1920," examines a central episode in the writer's youth and attempts a judicious characterization of the author's mother, seeing Grace Hemingway as "a liberated woman born too soon." It may appear to some readers that the exculpation of the mater familias merely moves the villain's cloak from her shoulders to those of his father. It will come as no surprise that combining a strong mother 118Reviews and a weak father may, in some cases, add up to a troubled child. No matter what Westbrook says, and he is fair and objective, the pictures that emerge of Clarence, oí Grace, and of their relationship are not happy ones. Westbrook is certainly right that they "were two fine human beings," yet they were probably two fine human beings who should not have married each other. The same might be said of many marriages (Eugene O'Neill's parents, for example). Then again, these parents provided the crucible...