The Young Hemingway by Michael Reynolds (review)

REVIEWS Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 291 pp. Cloth: $19.95. The Young Hemingway is the first volume of what Michael Reynolds has called his "literary biography" of Ernest Hemingway. The term implicitly promises that he will not sensationalize or psychologize or otherwise deviate from his primary purpose, setting down what it was that went into the making of the artist. Provenance is everything, then, and since he is luckily burdened with a sense of history, Reynolds' literary biography shies off in the direction of socio-cultural background and prevailing climate of opinion. Nowhere else can we learn so much about where Ernest Hemingway came from. The book is full of revelations born of deep digging, not only in Boston's Kennedy Library but in Oak Park, Austin, St. Louis, and other rarely visited sites. Read enough copies of Oak Leaves over the years, and you can come to comprehend a place where Reverend William E. Barton, brother to nurse Clara and father of BBDO's Bruce Barton, delivered himself weekly of high-sounding post-Victorian sentiments from the pulpit, with the Hemingways among the other stalwarts in the congregation. When the Titanic went down the Reverend Barton summoned up a Sunday prayer that the men on board might have met "death like gentlemen unafraid, standing in two manly rows beside an open gangway, with women passing down to the boats between them" (pp. 10—11). Further afield the reigning hero was Teddy Roosevelt, whose doctrine of the strenuous life Hemingway carried with him long after he had outgrown the T. R. safari costume he wore as a boy. In 1915 the adolescent Hemingway set down "a promise to himself" (pp. 29—30) inspired by the example of Roosevelt and his own father, a family doctor with an unsatisfied wanderlust and a strong interest in the natural world: "I desire to do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers Africa, central south America or the country around and north of Hudson Bay. ... I have no desire absolutely to be a millionaire or a rich man but I do intend to do something toward the scientific interests of the world." This document tells us a great deal about the idealism of the youth in Oak Park. And it is to Reynolds' credit not only that he found it among the Hemingway papers at the Kennedy Library, but that he knew how to place it in context. Discoveries are valuable, but the discoverer who understands how best to use his finds is rare indeed. At times, to be sure, the book's determination to provide context seems almost compulsive. Do we need to know that Jack Johnson was arrested for a Mann Act violation in the summer of 1920, when Ernest broke off with his parents? But too much context is preferable to too little, and on the most crucial subject of all—the dynamics of the Hemingway family—Reynolds reveals far more than any previous biographer. His sources are the letters between Ernest's parents, and between parents and children. They uncover a complicated, even a tortured, family history that has until now been shrouded behind the gauze of gentility. Dr. Hemingway held a tight rein on his offspring, hence the stingy allowances, the attempted prohibition against dancing, and even the refusal to allow the fourteen-year-old Ernest his own library card, since he wanted to be sure what his son was reading. When the children rebelled, and his sisters did so in advance of Ernest, the doctor took it hard. Such setbacks "exacerbated his persistent depression, a malady that eventually led to his suicide. But the point Reynolds makes clear is that Dr. Hemingway's mind began to unravel while Ernest was still around to see it happen. 120Reviews For the first time, too, Reynolds has located one source of the ongoing dispute between Hemingway's parents, a young woman named Ruth Arnold who loved Grace Hall Hemingway like a daughter, who lived with the family in Oak Park until Dr. Hemingway sent her away, and who also stayed with Mrs. Hemingway at Walloon Lake whenever Dr. Hemingway remained in Oak...