Ernest Hemingway A biography

Mary V. Dearborn

Sound recording - 2017

A full biography of Ernest Hemingway draws on a wide range of previously untapped material and offers particular insight into the private demons that both inspired and tormented him.

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
Prince Frederick, MD : HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Mary V. Dearborn (-)
Edition
Unabridged
Item Description
Title from container.
Physical Description
24 audio discs (29 hr., 45 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781681685205
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

Much has happened in Hemingway studies in the five decades since Carlos Baker published his pioneering biography Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (CH, Sep'69). Publication of volumes of Hemingway's correspondence and that of his family and friends, plus the posthumous publication in 1986 of his novel The Garden of Eden, show an author whose life and work were much more complex than that of a stereotypical hard-drinking newspaperman, war veteran, reporter, and world-class authority on bull fighting, deep-sea fishing, and big-game hunting. A prolific and experienced biographer, Dearborn reflects--in this long, heavily endnoted volume--on this updated Hemingway, who now attracts a readership not traditionally his. Hemingway probed gender roles and the intricacies of his dysfunctional birth family, which ultimately produced five suicides, those of his father, two siblings, and a granddaughter in addition to his own. Dearborn makes clear that Hemingway, at least from the time he returned from WW I, was a charismatic, temperamental person who was easily offended and held lifelong grudges. This volume provides abundant information about all of Hemingway's writing, but it is primarily a study of the man's life and how it intertwined with his times and writing. Summing Up: Essential. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, professional writers, general readers. --Stephen Miller, Texas A&M University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES, by Dan Egan. (Norton, $27.95.)Although climate change, population growth and invasive species are destabilizing the Great Lakes' wobbly ecosystem, Egan splices together history, science, reporting and personal experience into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative. THE GIFT: (Or, Techniques of the Body), by Barbara Browning. (Coffee House/Emily Books, paper, $15.95.) This smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy novel concerns an artist and professor of performance studies (like the author) engaged in a continuing art project that bears an uncertain resemblance to her life. MISS BURMA, by Charmaine Craig. (Grove, $26.) A character based on Craig's Jewish grandfather marries a woman who belongs to a non-Burmese ethnic minority, the Karen, in a novel that reimagines their extraordinary lives. Their mixed-race daughter becomes the "Miss Burma" of the title. Themes of identity, longing and trust are addressed over nearly 40 years of Burmese history. THE ALLURE OF BATTLE: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, by Cathal J. Nolan. (Oxford University, $34.95.) A historian argues that focusing on battles is the wrong way to understand wars, because attrition is what almost always wins. This thoughtprovoking book suggests a new approach to military history. ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn. (Knopf, $35.) A perceptive and tough-minded biographer, Dearborn is immune to the Hemingway legend, and concentrates instead on what formed him as a man and a writer. She skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material. MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS, by Vaddey Ratner. (Touchstone, $26.) This tenaciously melodic novel explores art and war as an orphaned Cambodian refugee travels from her new home in Minneapolis to the Buddhist temple where her father was raised by monks, hoping against hope that he is still alive. The author discerns the poetic even in brutal landscapes and histories. WHERE THE LINE IS DRAWN: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel- Palestine, by Raja Shehadeh. (New Press, $25.95.) In deeply honest and intense essays, Shehadeh, a civil rights lawyer who now lives in Ramallah, describes his psychological and physical crossings into Israel. THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER, by Beth Underdown. (Ballantine, $28.) An English witchhunter caused more than a hundred women to be hanged in the 1640s. In this ominous, claustrophobic novel, Underdown imagines his pregnant, widowed sister, who sees the malignant forces at work but is powerless to resist. FEN: Stories, by Daisy Johnson. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) The stories in Johnson's debut collection explore the shape-shifting world of the Fens, flat, once flooded lands in the east of England. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* A woman writing with a half-century of perspective, Dearborn teases long-hidden secrets out of the life of a hypermasculine novelist who lived intensely in the moment. Dearborn follows a virile young Hemingway as he tests himself in war, toughens himself in manly sports, conquers vulnerable female hearts, and forges valuable friendships with influential editors and other rising literary artists (including Dos Passos, Pound, and Fitzgerald). With a sinewy prose style deployed in masterpieces such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, this charismatic writer opens a compelling modern perspective on a bleak and brutal world where tough-minded heroes live and die with steely courage. Yet even in this meteoric ascent, Dearborn discerns troubling signs of callous egotism and heedless mendacity. Failures of character finally do catch up to Papa Hemingway as friendships fail, athletic prowess wanes, emotional outlook sours, and romantic charms evaporate. The master of the taut line descends to the maudlin sentimentality of Across the River and into the Trees. Even Hemingway's mystique of masculinity dissolves, leaving the astonishing gender ambiguities of his posthumously published The Garden of Eden. The momentum of Dearborn's final chapters gives Hemingway's shotgun suicide the feel of tragic inevitability. A stunning humanization of an enigmatic titan.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Dearborn (Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim) revisits one of America's most popular writers with insight and finesse, in this rich, detailed biography of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Hemingway came to fame in 1920s Paris amid the fabled community of American expatriates that also included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. His sheer creative energy glowed as he wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in a little over six weeks. During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway became a widely read, syndicated correspondent. His well-publicized African safaris and big-game hunting culminated in the celebrated short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Hemingway fired the public imagination, Dearborn shows, becoming a personification and even a caricature of virility for his generation. In 1954, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite the achievements and celebrity, Hemingway led a troubled life complicated by alcohol and three failed marriages, increasingly spinning his wheels and losing his gifts. His 1961 suicide shocked the world. Dearborn speculates at length on what went wrong, attributing Hemingway's collapse to manic depression compounded by brain injuries. Her fluid narrative and careful research contribute to an impressive biography. Hemingway changed our language and the way we think, she asserts. Dearborn's account shines from beginning to end, helped by Hemingway's dramatic life and charismatic personality. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Borchardt Inc. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Dearborn (Mailer: A Biography) has written a thoroughly researched, richly detailed book debunking the Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) legend. She presents a complex portrait of the writer as a son, brother, husband, and father, whose genes shaped his own fate as well as those of his ancestors and descendants. Arguing that Hemingway suffered from manic depression, aggravated by alcohol abuse, and that his mental illness had an adverse effect on his relationships and his work, increasingly so after his 50th birthday, the author concludes that several head injuries also contributed to his instability. Reviewing Hemingway's medical records, she notes various physical ailments that plagued him as well, including high blood pressure, a fatty liver, and a slow libido. She explores the theme of sexual ambiguity in his works, especially The Garden of Eden. When describing Hemingway's final decade, -Dearborn's writing veers toward pathography, detailing his paranoia, temper tantrums, and spousal abuse. Dearborn is fair, however, acknowledging Hemingway's literary talent, charisma, kindness, and ability to act decisively in emergencies, such as his fourth wife Mary Welsh's ectopic pregnancy. -VERDICT An engrossing read, this revisionist biography should stimulate lively discussion among Hemingway -aficionados.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The rise and fall of the Nobel Prize-winning writer.Dearborn (Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, 2004, etc.), whose previous biographical subjects include Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, writers noted for their boastful machismo, distills a wealth of material for a richly detailed investigation of another writer intent on proving his vigor and manliness, on the page and off. The author writes that she has "no investment" in promoting the Hemingway legend but rather seeks to examine "what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer" by tracing his career as it unfolded. That aim results in a scrupulous chronology, from which the usual suspects emerge: Hemingway's wives; famous friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound; an ambitious mother, depressed father, and Hemingway's sons. Even without attempting to burnish the Hemingway legend, Dearborn underscores the charisma of the handsome, athletic man who, critic Edmund Wilson remarked, had an "ominous resemblance to Clark Gable." Nevertheless, she is clear about his shortcomings, especially his neediness and violent temper. "As long as people around him were worshipful and adoring," one friend noted, "why then they were great." If the adoration stopped, they were viciously cut off. This truculence began in childhood and intensified into paranoia as he aged. Also intensifying were Hemingway's manic episodes, followed by black depressions. Dearborn asserts that this syndrome worsened after a series of traumatic brain injuries and was exacerbated by excessive consumption of alcohol. Not surprisingly, he ended up with liver disease, and although his physicians insisted he give up drinking, he never did. Taking on the question of Hemingway's sexuality, Dearborn believes that his mother's practice of styling him and his sister as twins until her son was 6 had lifelong repercussions, including his erotic obsessions with haircuts and color on which Dearborn focuses repeatedly. A thorough, but familiar, portrait of a tormented artist. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Prologue     O ne evening in the mid-1990s I attended a panel on Ernest Hemingway and his work at New York's Mercantile Library. The Mercantile was known for lively programming arranged by itsthen director, Harold Augenbraum, and this evening was no exception. Hemingway had been somewhat under fire of late. A controversial 1987 biography by Kenneth Lynn had left Hemingway fans reeling with the rev- elation that Ernest had been dressed as a girl in his early years, which Lynn argued had shaped the author's psyche and sexuality. The previous year Hemingway's posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden, had revealed a writer seemingly obsessed with androg- yny, its hero and heroine cutting and dyeing their hair to become identi- cal, beyond gender--just as in the explicit sex scenes they move beyond traditionally male and female roles. At roughly the same time, Heming- way and his place in the Western literary tradition came under full-on attack, as readers, scholars, educators, and activists urgently questioned what "dead white males" like Hemingway had to say to us in a multicul- tural era that no longer accords them automatic priority. The so-called Hemingway code--a tough, stoic approach to life that seemingly substi- tutes physical courage and ideals of strength and skill for other forms of accomplishment--increasingly looked insular and tiresomely macho. That night at the Mercantile Library, these issues were roiling the waters. Should we still read Hemingway? Are his concerns still relevant? Was Hemingway gay? (The short answer is no.) Why could he not create a complicated female heroine? Does Hemingway have anything at all to say to people of different races and ethnicities? On the plus side, does his intense feeling for the natural world take on greater significance at a time of growing environmental consciousness? If we were to continue to read Hemingway, we needed to take note of how we read him, it seemed. The discussion after the panel was animated. The moderator called on a burly man with a peppery crew cut. I recognized him as a professor and critic who wrote about the literature of the 1920s, especially Hemingway's friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. "I just want to say one thing," he stood up and announced. "Hemingway made it possible for me to do what I do."   I thought about what he said for a long time afterward. He seemed to mean something very specific and personal--something to do with read- ing literature and writing about it as a vocation. He was not talking about teaching or making money. He was talking about whether writing was an acceptable occupation for a man, both on his terms and the world's. Hemingway, not only in his extraliterary pursuits as a marlin fisherman, a big game hunter, a boxer, and a bullfight aficionado but also in his capac- ity as an icon of American popular culture, was the very personification of virility-- and he was a writer. Any taint of femininity or aestheticism attached to writing had been wiped clean. I was reminded of a rather extraordinary statement made late in life by the writer Harold Loeb, the model for Robert Cohn in Hemingway's first full-length novel, The Sun Also Rises --the lover of Lady Brett Ashley who proves himself a wet blanket during the Pamplona bullfighting fiesta. It was hardly a flattering portrayal, but Loeb had not forgotten why he, like so many others, had been drawn to Hemingway when they both were young: "I admired his combination of toughness and sensitiveness. . . . I had long suspected that one reason for the scarcity of good writers in the United States was the popular impression--that artists were not quite virile. It was a good sign that men like Hemingway were taking up writing." As I went on to think and write about Hemingway myself in the period following this panel, I thought I understood the critic's remarks that eve- ning. But I couldn't account for the risky, emotional, and highly personal nature of his confession. What I couldn't understand was his passion . It seemed to me that something was being said here about being a man and a writer, and it made me feel excluded. There is no shortage of Ernest Hemingway biographies--one of them runs to five volumes. His first biographer, Carlos Baker, set the bar in 1969, and the efforts of most of those who followed have been impres- sively researched and, for the most part, insightful. There has not yet been a biography written by a woman. This doesn't necessarily mean that much; mainly, I find that I am interested in different aspects of Hemingway's life from the ones that drew his previous (male) biographers. I shrink from describing what aspects those are: I'd rather not encourage the notion that men and women see things in fundamentally different ways. By definition, studying Hemingway is about the rough opposite, the cultural construc- tion of gender--how sex roles are determined by the forces around us rather than our genes. It is through figures like Hemingway that masculinity gets defined--even if that same cultural construction affects him in turn. Before turning to Hemingway, I wrote biographies of two major writers who also helped define American masculinity through both their lives and their fiction: Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Himself a (later) expatri- ate in Paris. Miller curiously never spoke of Hemingway, though Miller, like Hemingway, lived--from the outside, that is--a life that is the stuff of many a male fantasy. Mailer was a great admirer of both Miller and Hemingway; while he may have enjoyed Miller's work more, he consid- ered Hemingway easily "America's greatest living writer." Yet he seemed to recognize that somewhere along the way, Hemingway's work and life became one--that without Hemingway's image of a ruggedly physical man of action, the work would not be the same. Mailer asked us to acknowledge how "silly" A Farewell to Arms or Death in the Afternoon "would be if . . . written by a man who was five-four, wore glasses, spoke in a shrill voice, and was a physical coward." A valid point, perhaps, but how useful is this really? As I began to consider writing my own biography of Hemingway, I asked myself whether a woman could bring something to the subject that previous biographers had not. But perhaps the point was what I did not bring in tow. I have no investment in the Hemingway legend. No doubt I come to him with my own baggage, but I cannot see what the legend has to offer to a female reader. I am not interested in the issue of who said what about whose hair on whose chest, the occasion for some thrown punches between Hemingway and Max Eastman in the Scribner's offices in 1937. I think we should look away from what feeds into the legend and consider what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.   *    *    * I thought once that I might begin to understand Hemingway if I under- stood what it was like to know him when he was beginning his career in Paris in the 1920s, before we knew what we now know, before he was enveloped in the cloak of fame. I came up with a way to think about him that worked for me: I imagined a handsome young man who came out of nowhere and was dropped into Greenwich Village, perhaps, or, more likely these days, into Williamsburg or Bushwick or Red Hook, probably living over a very interesting shop or other workplace. This young man would be rangy and darkly handsome, his presence so arresting that heads would turn when he walked into a room. He would always have a sheaf of manuscripts in his inside coat pocket, which he would pull out in cafés and scribble on--but he would always spring up if you came over to his table, ever happy to see you, happy to make time for you. The word would be that he had a book out, printed on a little hand press in Brooklyn, and that a big New York publisher had picked it up and was soon to release it. He would have a whole new way of writing--stunningly simple, seemingly effortless. Of course there would be a book party--an enchanted evening, an occasion everyone would remember.   He would be madly in love with his wife too, a beautiful, serene-looking redhead who put you at ease instantly, whom you felt you could talk to about anything, who plainly adored her husband. As a couple they would glow. Everyone would be drawn to this young man--eager to be part of his energy field. He would be more curious than anyone you'd met. The life before him would seem to take on the outlines of a great adventure. It would be intoxicating to know him. Then, as part of my effort to under- stand my subject better, I picked this dazzling writer up and dropped him mentally into Montparnasse in the early 1920s, with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound for companions. Imagined this way, Hemingway's life took on the animation it must have if I were to see it clearly. The landscape he occupied gained color and dimension, and it seemed as if the world did not stop noticing him--even after his tragic death in 1961. He became, willy-nilly, a symbol of male potentiality, man as it seemed he always had been and was made to be. (The culture demanded no less; it was as if he filled a need that no one knew existed.) Ever since he first appeared, grinning devilishly and waving a crutch from his hospital ward during World War I, in an early newsreel shown on movie screens across the country, Hemingway captured the pub- lic imagination. Yet always, it seemed, a different Hemingway. The callow, lanky chronicler of the Lost Generation gave way to the mustachioed and virile Hemingway of the 1930s, as people read of his exploits in the bull- ring, on the deep seas, and in the African bush. He morphed yet again, into the politically engaged reporter of the Spanish Civil War, then into the intrepid, fighting journalist of World War II, and finally into "Papa," the bearded, white-haired living legend of the postwar Cuban years. He published a string of novels and stories that made readers see the world, because of him, as a different place, more vibrant, more alive, more ele- mental, and at the same time more romantic. Yet something began to go wrong. The potential for this eventuality was there all along--it was in his genes, and in his childhood in the eccentric Hemingway household. Perhaps the times or the public asked too much of him. Maybe he shut out the critical voices he needed to hear to produce his best work. At some point in the unfolding of his brilliant career, a tragedy began to take shape.   Ernest seemed to find it difficult to give and receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, perhaps most tragically, to tell the truth, even to himself. By the end of World War II, and while still in his forties, he had done himself out of many of the rewards of the good life: he had three failed marriages behind him, had few good friends, was not writing well, and had sur- rounded himself with flunkies and sycophants. He was burdened by serious physical injuries, including several concussions--which we would today call traumatic brain injuries, whose scope and variety are only beginning to be understood. The dangers of retrospective diagnosis duly acknowledged, it seems probable that Hemingway also suffered from mental illness that included mania and depression so severe it became at times psychotic. The son of a doctor, Hemingway was drinking too much and taking varying cocktails of prescribed pills, and he refused to follow his doctors' orders. His habits of mind, the limitations of the psychopharmacology of his day, and the desire to avoid embarrassing himself as a public figure made it impossible for him to get the help he needed. His later fiction indicated a persistent confusion about gender identity or, to put it more positively and progressively, an openness to fluidity in gender boundaries. Worse, by the 1950s his talent was befuddling him. Even at his peak, sentimentality and a garrulous streak sometimes crept into his writing. He began to run repeatedly into dead ends with ambitious projects like The Garden of Eden and so published very little: even the most acclaimed works, like The Old Man and the Sea , lacked the ambition and passion of his earlier work. Things got worse, and his world shrank to the grounds of the Finca Vigía in Cuba, the property that became his own private fiefdom. Then, after it became virtually impossible to remain in Castro's Cuba, he took refuge in a big concrete house in Idaho. Soon, no longer able to get the enormous pleasure he had once taken from life, no longer believing in his ability to write, he took his own life. What happened to Hemingway was a tragedy for him; a tragedy for his family, who had to endure it and were often damaged in the process; and a tragedy for us. It does no good to read (or write) his biography anew if we simply shine up the legend and find more ways to admire it--or if we reflexively debunk a literary legacy that has proved durably fascinating and inspiring for nearly a century. We need to understand what happened, in part because what was lost is incalculable. Hemingway was without ques- tion one of the greatest American prose writers. He changed the way we think, what we look for in literature, how we choose to lead our lives. He changed our language. He changed how we see Paris, the American West, Spain, Africa, Key West, Cuba, northern Michigan. Even his place of birth, Oak Park--though he very rarely wrote about it, this suburb, equidistant from Chicago and the wilderness of the Des Plaines River, was part of what made Hemingway, and we will always see it differently for his presence. If we are to understand all of this, it is important that we look at how it unfolded, how his unique gift came into full flower, how he came undone, even if the spectacle is one from which we might prefer to look away. It is painful to contemplate how Hemingway ceased engaging with a world he made new for us, so that even following the corrida circuit in the last years of his life became a nightmarish palimpsest of what it had been when he was young. Because he died so young, we have been left to imagine what Heming- way, if he had regained his full powers and denied the suicidal impulse, would have made of, say, the domestic upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S., the revolutions that swept the so-called Third World, feminism, environmentalism, Watergate, Reagan. The New Journalism. His beloved Spain after Franco. Harry, the narrator in one of Hemingway's most powerful stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," is himself a writer who reviews his life and his career and who, while slowly dying, recognizes his failed mission. "There was so much to write," Harry thinks. "He had seen the world change. . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it, but now he never would." Hemingway acknowledged that he, like Harry, had at times been derelict in his "duty" as a writer--perhaps an impossible standard. Indeed, it's hard to argue that a writer "failed" when he revealed to us so much about war and violence, nature, relations between men and women, trauma, the creative life. There's something else. As the heated discussion that mid-1990s eve- ning in the Mercantile Library began to deflate and cool, someone got the attention of the moderator and stood up to add something. Echoing the professor who had said earlier that Hemingway made it possible for him to do what he did, this person said, "I just want to say that Hemingway made it possible for me to be who I am." And sat down. It was difficult to deter- mine the speaker's gender, only that it appeared to have recently changed. In the years to come, I would learn, in my study of Hemingway's life, what she or he meant. Excerpted from Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.