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HEMINGWAY AND COMPANY Jacqueline Tavernier-C ourbin Michael Reynolds. The Young Hemingway. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1986.291 pp. Bernice Kert. The Hemingway Women: Those Who Loved Him,the Wives, and Others. New York: Norton, I986. 555pp. Illus. AnthonyBurgess. Ernest Hemingway and his World. NewYork: Scribner's, 1985. 128pp. Illus. WilhamWhite, ed. Ernest Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto. New York: Scribner's, 1985. xxxix 478 pp. ErnestHemingway. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scnbner's, 1986. 247 pp. Michael Reynolds's The Young Hemingway is an outstanding book, easily read, and extremely well-researched. Reynolds uses almost exclusively primary sources (published and unpublished correspondence and manuscripts, medical examiner's files, probated wills, etc.), does not take facts or others' statements for granted, and, as a result, has written a refreshing and informative book that dispels rather than furthers hackneyed and often inaccurate myths about the Hemingway legend. In fact, some of the questions that had more or less consciously arisen for a Hemingway scholar such as I from a reading of Hemingway 's letters, whether published or unpublished, and of the letters of his family, findtheir answers in The Young Hemingway. Among the many interesting points made by the book, I found particularly enlightening the information concerning theheredity predisposition to suicide in the Hemingway family, the redefinition of the Hemingway family's inter-relationships, the revelation of Hemingway's passive-aggressive relationships with women, his use of sickness to gain attention , and the final dispelling of the myth concerning Hemingway's poverty in Paris during his first marriage. In this biography, which covers Hemingway's early life until December 1921, when Hemingway and Hadley boarded the S.S. Leopoldina en route to France, Reynolds illuminates through the use of flashbacks andflashforwards Hemingway's first twenty-one years in an amusing and affectionate way. 384 Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin Hemingway's suicide was, of course, obscured for many years by a varietyof smoke-screens, including his widow's refusal to acknowledge his death asa suicide. It was interpreted in a variety of ways, and in particular as the logical outcome of Hemingway's somewhat immature view of life and self, as an act prompted by a moment of insanity (or perhaps utter sanity), or as an attemptat killing the only game left within his range. Reynolds, however, shows us ina convincing manner that Hemingway was suffering from many of the same psychological ills his father had, and that a predisposition to suicide was definitely a family trait shared in particular by his sister Ursula, his brother Leicester, and perhaps his other sister Marcelline. It is indeed fascinating to realize that Clarence Hemingway's self-pitying, paranoid and exacting letters to his family werethe product of long-standing psychological disorders, and that Ernest suffered from all of his father's complaints: erratic high blood pressure, insomnia, paranoia, severe depression. Like his father,he kept meticulous lists. Like his father, he saved every totem that touched his hand.Like his father, he wrote letters with fanatic intensity. While courting Hadley Richardson, he wrote to her every day, sometimes twice a day, for almost a year. When he didnot receive his daily reply, he was despondent. Like his father, he worried aboutmoney when he had no worries. Like his father, he frequently behaved erratically, withrapid mood shifts and sometimes vicious responses. Under stress, real or imagined, theidea of su1cide recurred insidiously. Like his father, he was caught in a biological trapnot entirely of his own making. (86-87) Hemingway's fear of acknowledging that mental problems are hereditary andthat he might well have inherited his father's would indeed, as Reynolds suggests, partly account for his determination to blame his mother for his father's suicide. Finding a scapegoat would provide reassurance, at least superficially. Reynolds documents what a cursory reading of the family letters cannot help but suggest: that Grace Hemingway was not the bitch Hemingway portrayed, and that his father was by no means the saint he wanted to see in him. In fact, itis difficult not to feel more genuine respect for Grace than for Clarence. She wasthe stronger personality of the two, and if Ernest inherited many of his father's characteristics, he seems...

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