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  • Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman
  • Mark Ott
Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba. By Andrew Feldman. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019. pp. 512. $29.99.

So many Hemingway biographies, so little time. In 1969, Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: A Life Story, was hailed as the “definitive” biography, and in the ensuing half century, the accuracy of that word continues to fuel debate [End Page 131] amongst scholars. Baker’s hefty tome set an extraordinarily high standard for future scholars, and his 101 pages of double-columned notes, richly detailed and fascinating in their own right, left bread crumbs for scholars working today. While one might find Baker’s style straightforward and comfortably prosaic, he put forth a factually accurate chronology of Hemingway’s life.

In 1986, when Michael Reynolds’ Young Hemingway was published it was hailed as a “literary biography,” as it avoided psychoanalysis, but provided rich context and drew from an even wider range of sources than what was available to Baker. Scott Donaldson wrote in praise: “Discoveries are valuable, but the discoverer who understands how best to use his find is rare indeed.”1 Reynolds’s subsequent four volumes stand as the seminal achievement in Hemingway biography, yet Kenneth Lynn, Jeffrey Meyers, James Mellow followed closely in his footsteps, and the biographies keep coming. Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat (2011),Verna Kale’s Ernest Hemingway (2016) and Mary Dearborn’s Hemingway: A Biography (2017) built on the work of previous scholars, and, it is clear that each generation must write its own Hemingway, regardless of the work that has already been done.

But what, in Hemingway studies, is a noteworthy discovery? Or an “untold story” in need of telling? Released in 2019 to high expectations, Andrew Feldman’s title, Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba, perhaps promises more than he can deliver, as the question is: How much is “untold”? Feldman was, in his words, given “unprecedented access” to newly available sources as “the first North American permitted to study in residence at the Finca Vigía Museum and Research Center,” where he found the “untold and remarkable story of Hemingway in Cuba”(xii).

Yet Hemingway scholars already have Norberto Fuentes’s Hemingway in Cuba (1984), Valerie Hemingway’s Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingway’s (2005), and Rene Villarreal’s Hemingway’s Cuban Son: Reflections on the Writer by his Longtime Majordomo (2009), as well as Larry Grimes and Bickford Sylvester’s Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works (2014), along with a fleet of glossy coffee table books with sun-soaked photos of the Finca, El Floridita, and shiny vintage Packards booming down dusty Havana highways.

Feldman begins his biography in 1928 when Ernest and Pauline passed through Havana on their way to Key West, then summarizes the years 1899–1932 in chapter two. That trick—putting 33 years in one chapter—is the essence of the challenge Feldman faces as he tries to weave together Hemingway—the life story—with Cuban history, and it’s a formidable challenge. Feldman’s thesis [End Page 132] is that because previous scholars were unable to consult Cuban sources, they had incorrectly concluded that he “lived in Cuba in isolation, as an expatriate American writer who did not associate with the Cuban people”(xii). That thesis targets the misinformed general reader that needs to be corrected, rather than the scholarly community, already aware of Hemingway’s social dynamic in Cuba.

Within the scope of his thesis, Feldman succeeds admirably. He explores the story of how Hemingway intermittently engaged with an evolving Cuba in the midst of a revolution, and if the reader came to the text with little knowledge of Hemingway’s life and work, or Cuban history, they would be richly rewarded. Feldman’s bibliography provides ample evidence of his more than ten years of research and reading. Trained as a literary historian, the Sorbonne-educated Feldman has taught at Tulane and the University of Maryland; he has consulted a broad range of secondary sources, some of which he embraces with perhaps too much enthusiasm and too little skepticism, as scholars...

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