Ernest Hemingway by Verna Kale (review)

Approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of James R. Mellow's Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, we are entering a new age of Hemingway biography. Mellow's was the last stand-alone volume in that revisionary wave of 1980s' biographies that included sometimes controversial takes on Hemingway's life by Scott Donaldson (1978), Jeffrey Meyers (1982), Bernice Kert (1984), Peter A. Griffin (1985), and Kenneth Lynn (1985). By the time the late Michael S. Reynolds completed the final entry in his multivolume series in 1999—some thirteen years after his first installment—the well on new insights felt as if it had run dry. No matter that the Ernest Hemingway of the 1980s and 1990s was a thoroughly different creature than the Papa of Carlos Baker's 1969 authorized life: such was the sweeping interest in the topics that many of these biographies emphasized (androgyny and sexual gender-bending, most obviously) that the clichéd vision of Hemingway the He-Man that had deflated the writer's reputation in the 1970s seemed downright archaic. Even as the liminal boundaries between masculinity and femininity as a topic of analysis gave way around the turn of the millennium to approaches based on environmentalism, queer studies, and postcolonialism, Hemingway as a personality remained far more complex and elusive in scholarship than the pop-culture cartoon could ever admit. Given this transformation, would we really need a next wave of biography? What deeper layers could possibly be peeled away for us to discover yet another Undiscovered Hemingway?

And yet here we are, poised between last year's Hemingway: A New Life by James M. Hutchisson (Penn State University Press) and Mary V. Dearborn's Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, which by the time this review appears in print will have just hit bookshelves from Knopf. We have also benefitted from biographies of various satellites who circled Hemingway's star, such as Ruth A. Hawkins's Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage (2012), which illuminated the least appreciated of Papa's connubial quartet, Pauline. And while books such as Lesley M. M. Blume's Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises and Terry Mort's Hemingway at War: Ernest Hemingway's Adventures as a World War II Correspondent (both 2016) are not strictly biographies, they, too, inevitably deal with personality and chronology and contribute to our appreciation of the man's dimensionality. That is not to mention meditations on biography writing itself such as Donaldson's The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), which uses Hemingway as one of many test cases for reminding us of the constructs of the genre and the practical problems of pouring a life out on a page.

Amid this pack of new biographies Verna Kale's Ernest Hemingway is perhaps too easy to overlook. At 224 pages it weighs in at only two-thirds of the size of Hutchisson's 300+-page volume and almost one-fourth of the length of Dearbon's 750-page tome. Moreover, the book's handy 5"x7" dimensions as opposed to a standard 7"x9" trim (Hutchisson's biography is an oversized 7"x11") makes it clear that that the page count would even out to around 180 in a more conventional format. Kale's biography is also part of a series called "Critical Lives" from the British publisher Reaktion Books whose other entries spotlight figures as diverse as Antonin Artaud, Octavio Paz, and Alfred Jarry.

One suspects the main struggle this book may face in garnering the critical appreciation it deserves boils down to this tired bugbear of size. No matter that we live in an age of speed and celerity of consumption—the old prejudices against the short story that Edgar Allan Poe tried to demolish way back in 1842 remain operative in our estimations of biography. Brevity seems slight compared with sheer heft and girth. Can a life as colorful as Hemingway's really fit into 200 pages without losing portions of the story? Does a shorter...