Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis (review)

Scholars fortunate enough to have visited the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston understand what a treasure trove of material awaits discovery there. Not simply a repository for manuscript drafts and discards and correspondence—as valuable as those are for the simple reason that most of them remain unpublished—the collection also includes photo album upon photo album of images that few have ever flipped through, much less catalogued or requested permission to reproduce in a biography or critical study. Along with a large variety of keepsakes and ephemera, these goodies are hardly the typical flotsam and jetsam that your average pack rat accumulates over time. (It goes without saying that nary a description of the collection exists that does not describe Hemingway as a "notorious" pack rat). Rather, these objects, whether a scrap of paper, a ticket stub, or an expired passport, lend a material immanence to Hemingway's life nearly six decades after his death.

Yet not every Hemingway aficionado can make his or her way to Columbia Point. In recent years, the collection has scanned bits and pieces for online access, most notably five volumes of Grace Hall Hemingway's scrapbooks on Ernest covering 1899-1917. Unless one is only interested in the writer's childhood and adolescence, though, the scrapbooks are fun but prefatory. They can only begin to challenge the visual stereotypes that stamp the culture's limited sense of Hemingway's iconicity, whether his beefy brio, that late-stage white Papa beard, or the omnipresent wine bottle. Most of these signifiers come from a handful of widely reprinted photos, from the 1924 image of the emerging author with his hands stuffed in his pockets outside the Paris apartment at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to Yousuf Karsh's famous 1957 close-up portrait of the literary lion in a turtleneck sweater thick as a Bundt pan around his throat. There is so much more to the man to discover, though.

The omnipresence of photos like these are one reason that Michael Katakis's handsomely designed Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life is such a game-changer. Hemingway scholars know Mr. Katakis as the formidable gate-keeper to estate permissions; what they may not know is he is also a talented writer, editor, and historian in his own right, with books on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Native American photography, and expatriation to his credit. As a curatorial guide to the collection, he offers in this coffee-table book an arresting tour of cornerstone Hemingway moments that feels both fresh and visually intoxicating, punctuated with thoughtful commentary from Hemingway Letters Project director Sandra Spanier, Carol Hemingway, former Kennedy Library director Tom Putnam, as well as "text panels" by Declan Kiely and a preface and afterword respectively from Patrick and Seán Hemingway.

Thankfully, Katakis eschews a strictly chronological organization, which can feel stultifying in its familiarity to those who study the biographical arc. Instead, he divides the book into thematic sections ("Beginnings," "Key West, Cuba, and Spain," "Artifacts from a Life," and "Endings") that collectively create the appearance of that crucial modernist device, the collage-like juxtaposition. This strategy—dare I call it cubistic?—emphasizes the contrasts in Hemingway's life and recreates the experience of scouring photo- and scrapbooks, where the randomness at any moment can transport us into the thickness of an associative memory. The verso to the table of contents, for example, features a Spanish Civil War-era Hemingway, looking slightly frazzled and unkempt with the tail of his necktie straying from his sport coat, staring warily off-center of the camera aperture (viii). Set against this photo (which also serves as the book cover) is a small reproduction of the writer's 1944 World War II noncombatant identity card. Even with a thinner hairline and a white beard, ursine but clearly combed, Hemingway appears healthier if not younger in this latter photo, if only because he...