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  • Ernest Hemingway: A New Life by James M. Hutchisson
  • Matthew Stewart
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A New Life. By James M. Hutchisson. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2016.

After a spate of big-time Hemingway biographies appeared in the 1980s and early 90s, that mini-industry went dormant. Hemingway scholarship, of course, has since continued, with the multi-volume scholarly edition of his letters being perhaps the most notable recent publication event. Nor did commercially oriented publication on this twentieth-century icon dry up. Books, good, bad and indifferent continue to be sold, but they tend to be on specialized topics such as Hemingway's relationship with his wives, his boat, his firearms, his Nazi-hunting in the Caribbean, and his kunstler roman years in Paris.

Professor Hutchisson's is the first general, full-life biography to appear in a generation. It is a worthy effort, and a welcome one. With some 250 pages of text and another 35 of scholarly apparatus, it is, in the first place, inviting and manageable for readers who are not devoted Hemingway specialists. The volume is handsomely published with 23 useful though unexceptional photographs included. It is a work of mature judgment and rigorous scholarship, lucidly, often elegantly written.

While the author does not devote a large percentage of his text to criticism of the fiction, it is nonetheless fair to call the volume a "life and art" biography. Each of Hemingway's books and many of his most important shorter pieces (especially his short stories) are described and analyzed, sometimes in fresh ways. For example, Hutchisson's considers Across the River and into the Trees, which is usually reckoned to be Hemingway's worst novel, at some length. He does not try to redeem the book through overpraise, but he does analyze it in a fresh and unjaundiced manner, contrasting it interestingly with For Whom the Bell Tolls, taking into account Hemingway's attempts at stylistic innovation, before concluding that the book deserves a more sympathetic assessment than it has received. It is more of a worthy failure than an embarrassment or disgrace.

Such judiciousness is frequently evident. The uglier sides of Hemingway have been well-documented, and some biographers have seemingly been overcome by the negative, as if their books come most alive when they are tearing down the great man. We have long known that Hemingway was a man unable to maintain friendships with his peers, a man incapable of sustaining a marriage, a hypercompetitive boaster, a man too prone to surround himself with inferiors and open admirers, a man, to borrow John Dos Passos's phrase, "who hated his own mother."

Hutchisson's typical response to these aspects of Hemingway's character is to say, "yes, but . . ."or "yes, and . . ." It seemed, for example, a settled matter that from his thirties onward Hemingway had disowned his mother and seized any opportunity to badmouth her. While openly acknowledging the fraught nature of their relationship, Hutchisson also points out that Hemingway understood her as an independent-minded woman born ahead of her time rather than the overbearing and self-centered character that comes through in other biographies. Hemingway, Hutchisson informs us, generously supported both her [End Page 229] and her live-in companion Ruth Arnold (the two were widely thought to have a lesbian relationship) until their deaths.

Likewise with Hemingway's competitive streak, which could turn him mean and petty and which sometimes came out in sophomoric utterances. But Hutchisson wisely notes that the competitive streak was intertwined with the ambition, the devotion, the work habits, and the stamina that allowed Hemingway to become the writer who changed the mid-century fictional landscape. Hutchisson brings balance, then, to his portrait, but he brings something more. The Hemingway who emerges from this shorter-than-usual biography is a fuller, more sagely and humanely appraised figure than the Hemingway who appears in many a longer work. [End Page 230]

Matthew Stewart
Boston University
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